Cards Against Posterity

As the sole survivor of my immediate family, I often find myself reflecting on the profound influence of certain people, places, and events from my youth. Since my younger brother passed away a few years ago, I am the sole keeper of the memories of my family's life and times. When Phred was alive, he and I frequently took pleasure in sharing our most meaningful recollections of our days together as kids, our reverence for our parents, and our perspectives on the zeitgeist of the 1960s and 1970s. Apart from old photographs and a few sketchy diaries that we kept, the only first-hand knowledge of the most meaningful and intimate moments in our family's history resides in my brain. Of course, that's just how it is with life—and its inevitable passing. Whatever tangible marks one might leave behind, the most personal, intimate parts of ourselves simply depart.

Thanks to my fondness for revisiting much of the music my parents enjoyed, I find myself wanting to articulate some of my most vivid impressions from the mid-to-late 1960s and 1970s, when Mom and Dad were in their thirties and forties, if just as a little reminder to myself. So, I'm going to indulge the whim and see where it takes me.

My folks tended to be social animals. They frequently gathered with various other couples, and for me, the most memorable of these was when they hosted their regular Bridge Club at our house. We are talking a classy affair. There were generally four to six couples in attendance, and everyone dressed in their finest apparel. Mom didn't drink, but Dad was known to enjoy a few spirits from time to time. For Bridge Club (and whatever other gatherings they hosted), Mom always brought out the fancy china and drinking glasses, which had silver bands around the tops, and Dad filled the crystal decanters with bourbon and scotch. As they got themselves ready for the big event, Dad liked to put some music on our big console stereo, usually something in the easy-listening department. For a spell, his favorite was Frank Sinatra's "Days of Wine and Roses" album, which featured his version of "Moon River," otherwise made famous by Andy Williams. To this day, whenever I hear that song, whoever performs it, I think of Mom and Dad prepping for a social event, whether it be at our house or somewhere else.

Even though these were strictly adult events, I always found myself captivated at those times by what I perceived as a special magic in the house. Even when I went off to college, Mom and Dad were still active in numerous social—and, more importantly—philanthropic gatherings. My parents, whether in public or in the privacy of our home, were what I can only call classy, exceptionally decent human beings. Of course, they had their faults, shortcomings, and blind spots, as we all do. But Mom and Dad held themselves to such high standards in thought, word, and deed that I despair of ever being able to truly emulate them. Now, this last bit strays from my original reflective intent, but you know, sometimes that happens, and since this is me essentially rambling...there it is.

 

When I inherited our old house after Mom died, I kept all the surviving trappings of those bygone days. Brugger and I now use those old glasses, the china, the decanters to preserve what we can of that "classy" aspect of my family's history.

 

I suspect that I'll be occasionally posting other such ramblings. Join me if you like, but if not, I quite understand.

 

Till next time! 

Mom & Dad, circa 1963

The Legend of Sam Lion

This remnant of one of the Hairston family’s old farming roads still lurks in the woods near my house.

I have posted links to this story before, but an editing project I’m currently working on brought it back to my mind. In Martinsville, VA, where I grew up, there’s a long, winding road in my neighborhood called Sam Lions Trail. As a youngster, I had no clue — or much curiosity — about the name’s origin. However, a local legend (with a couple of different permutations) explains the road name’s history. The most commonly told story goes as follows (condensed by yours truly from articles in The Martinsville Bulletin):

“The story of Sam Lion is a 175-year-old narrative of brutality and deadly revenge between a slave and his overseer. While several minor variations of the tale exist, the principal character has been immortalized in Martinsville by having a road — Sam Lions Trail — named after him.

“Sam Lions Trail is in the Forest Park neighborhood, an area of about 750 homes in the southeast part of the city. In the mid-1800s, this 1,050-acre tract belonged to the Hairstons, a prodigious family of farmers and slave owners who were headquartered at the Beaver Creek Plantation (now off Virginia Highway 108).

“The story goes that Sam Lion, the son of an African chieftain, was brought to this country, along with about 150 other slaves, and bought by one of the Hairstons. As the slaves started to walk from the auction stand, the hot, tired Prince slipped and almost fell. “Watch it there, Sam!” came the harsh voice of a red-headed overseer named Red Tupper. From then on, the Prince was known as Sam. Legend has it that the slave acquired his last name because he acted nobly and with the courage of a Lion.

“The Hairstons had divided their land into sections, and they sent Sam Lion and other slaves to clear one of the biggest tracts. Instead of climbing the long, high hills to get to work, Sam Lion cleared a path around them.

“Red Tupper was a cruel overseer, notorious for beating his slaves for little or no reason. One day he beat Sam Lion. Lion, knowing little English, responded, ”If you beat again, I kill.” Tupper merely laughed. But the next day, Sam Lion stopped to pick up a chain he had dropped, and Tupper hit him with a whip. Lion straightened up and roared, “Didn’t believe?” The slave then picked up his axe, swung it, and killed his overseer. Lion fled into the nearby woods, and for the next three years, he lived off the land, sheltering in caves and watching for signs of anyone searching for him.

“Eventually, some of the locals happened upon Sam Lion while he was sleeping in a cave. He was taken to jail, found guilty of murder, and hanged in the public square.”

Over the years, some have claimed to have seen the ghostly figure of Sam Lion roaming the woods in Martinsville’s Forest Park neighborhood. Me, I’ve never witnessed any such apparition... dammit... but as one who loves history (particularly local history), I find it both sobering and intriguing that the woods, creeks, and trails where I played as a kid — and still frequently haunt — provide the backdrop of this grim legend.

A hillside covered in clusters of huge boulders along what historians believe was the original trail cut by Sam Lion. I’ve always called it “Castle Rock.” Several years ago, I placed a geocache here, which bears that name.

Martinsville Memories at Oktoberfest

This Saturday — October 5 — is Martinsville's 40th Annual Oktoberfest, and if you're anywhere within a reasonable traveling distance, you really ought to attend. Authors Stephen & Samaire Provost, Ms. Brugger, and I will all be there, in good company with Stephen's new book, Martinsville Memories, for which I have written the foreword. I will likely also have a few copies of West Virginia: Lair of the Mothman, Michigan: The Dragon of Lake Superior, and possibly others on hand.

Martinsville's Oktoberfest is always great fun, with dozens and dozens of local merchants set up around the Uptown business district. There shall be vendors with food and spirits aplenty, presumably including funnel cakes, as they are an Oktoberfest staple. Funnel cakes are ambrosia. Funnel cakes are damn good. One might say funnel cakes are an essential component of proper southern living. Hooray for funnel cakes!

Stephen's Martinsville Memories is a meticulously researched pictorial history of my old hometown. For six decades, I've loved Martinsville, known its inner workings, explored it inside and out, and yet Stephen has dug up facts even I didn't know about. As the author writes, "Martinsville has thrived as the town with the nation’s most millionaires per capita and struggled through factory closures during the era of globalization. Packed with more than 300 images and chock full of details, this volume offers a nostalgic trek through time, with stops at drive-ins, old hotels and iconic storefronts along the way."

Also on Saturday, the Valleystar Credit Union 300 NASCAR race will be happening at Martinsville Speedway. How the race will impact Oktoberfest, I dunno, but you'd best believe Martinsville is going to be hopping this weekend. Please join us. We'll be on hand to autograph Martinsville Memories and any of our other books we have available. Look for us on Church Street near the intersection at Broad Street.

For good measure, if you're into geocaching, a veritable trove of geocaches await you in Uptown Martinsville, many that I have placed myself. And don't forget: Funnel cakes. Keep saying this to yourself, and think well on the joyful prospect of it. Funnel cakes. Funnel cakes. Funnel cakes....

Occoneechee Speedway, Yuggoth VI: The Twisted Grove, The Stoned Poet, and Others

A long stretch of the old speedway, now
overtaken by the forest

What a great day for finding old things... even including a Great Old One or two. It was a day for geocaching with a fun group of local folks: Debbie "Cupdaisy" Shoffner, Rob "Robgso" Isenhour, Robbin "Rtmlee" Lee, and Sarah "Sssharkie" Stevens. Our target was Hillsborough, just west of Durham, NC. It's a small, picturesque town with a surprising number of historic and unusual sites. In the past, I've passed through Hillsborough any number of times, and even found a few caches there, but it wasn't until today that I got to visit just about every corner of town, by way of our quest for caches.

The thing that drew us there in the first place was the old Occoneechee Speedway (later known as the Orange Speedway), a former NASCAR racetrack that operated from 1948 to 1968. It has since been completely overtaken over by pine, sycamore, and cedar forest, and the track itself, as well as the auxiliary roads, have been turned into hiking trails — over three miles of them, and we covered just about the lot of them. The original grandstands and several other structures still exist, almost ghostlike amid these beautiful woods. Several high-quality caches are hidden along the trail, and our group found the lot of them while enjoying the unusual scenery.

There's nothing odd happening here.
Move along.

Adjacent to the speedway — just across the Eno River — lies the sprawling Ayr Mount Plantation, which dates back to 1815. A beautiful nature trail winds around the estate, and on this trail, we found a nice cache-letterbox hybrid called Yuggoth VI: The Twisted Grove (GC22VYV), based, of course, on H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. The grove itself was, indeed, beautifully twisted, and even though we successfully ventured into it, as far as I know, none of us have been beset by anything Awful. Of course, the night is not yet over. Also at the plantation was a fun puzzle cache called The Stoned Poet (GCXYQV), which required solving a daunting puzzle to acquire coordinates to the hidden container. One of our party, whose name I won't mention (Sssharkie), came up with a novel method of actually locating the actual hide, which I'd best not reveal on pain of death (intuition and guesswork). I am rather ridiculously pleased to have played a part in turning up the hide itself. (Laugh, you.)

We also visited a graveyard where slaves from the Civil War era were buried; an old one-room schoolhouse (Hughes Academy); the outhouse of an old girl's school (Burwell School, 1837-1857); a sculpture of an ass named Jack; and a big old cedar tree that required climbing. I didn't fall out, so what a good day!

A fine day on the caching trail, and I have to give Hillsborough credit for being the most charming town I have visited in a long, long time.

Back to work tomorrow. Grrrr.

Creeple people hauling ass down the old Occoneechee Speedway

Ayr Mount Plantation House, built 1815

Rob the Younger doesn't know Jack.

Fresh Air

The inevitable portrait from the day's caching trip

The best thing one can say about the days getting longer and the weather warming up is that it's a bit easier to fit the geocaching into the schedule. At the office, Good Friday is one of those days during the year you can take a floating holiday, and so, being as the caching was calling me and all, I took it. Spent most of it over in Alamance County, hunting for a few hides around Graham and Burlington. There's a fairly expansive natural area in north Burlington called Oakdale Town & Country Park, which runs along the always gorgeous Haw River. Much of my time out there was spent on a couple of hides that I ultimately could not find, but I did not care; it was just a great day to be outdoors. I love finding old, forgotten, and unusual things out on the trail, and there were several out that way: what might have been part of an old set of weighing scales hanging from a tree; a busted-up toy racing car stuck on a metal post; a portion of brick column in a creek that came from who-knows-what old structure. Perhaps the most interesting was discovering a new, unused can of Febreze out in the middle of woods, not too far from a cache. I figure I can always use a little extra fresh air in the house, so I took it home with me.

Today, Ms. B. and I popped up to Martinsville to see Mum, detouring through Eden to go after a four-stage multi cache called "Murdered by State of NC," after the inscription on the gravestone of a convicted murderer who proclaimed his innocence up until he was executed by the state. His mother had the epitaph put on his stone to protest the ostensible murder of an innocent man. A fun hide in a neat location, at which one discovers quite a bit of local history as told by the stones at many of the grave sites.

And that is all. For now.

A very green portion of the trail along the Haw River, on the way to a cache aptly titled "Emerald"

This little racer must have hit this pole pretty danged hard.

I think this came from an old set of scales; if you know, please weigh in.

No telling what this portion of column came from; I saw no other remains nearby.

Restored cabin and well at Graham Municipal Park

Lost Places

One of the buildings at the old Dan River Mills facility, Danville, VA, now falling to ruin

There are many such locations in southern Virginia: once-thriving farms and factories, formerly affluent neighborhoods, opulent southern colonial mansions now fallen to ruin. A geocaching run through Danville and surrounding Pittsylvania County took me to quite a few of them today. Last night, I rode up to Martinsville and spent a very pleasant, very relaxing evening with Mum, reminiscing on our many good times over the years, particularly down in Georgia at her parents'. This morning, I headed over to Danville to hunt yet more caches that have popped up in the vicinity in the past month or so. I found a handful of entertaining hides, had a fabulous (and half-price) lunch at Tokyo Grill (which, for sushi, has become quite a favorite of mine — see some of my blogs about Danville), and then met my friend Audra and her son, Zachary, for a caching expedition through northern Pittsylvania County. After 80-degree weather yesterday, it was back to winter today, with cold, biting winds and occasional rain, but this deterred us none at all; fortunately, the rain tapered off and remained scarce for most of the afternoon.

Our hunt led us to a few truly forgotten, lost places that make one wonder just what might have transpired over the years. One of the sites we found had, at one time, apparently been a thriving neighborhood, with a scenic lake, a tennis court, and lord knows what other amenities; now it's an overgrown wilderness, home only to the local wildlife. The most intriguing of our stops was a once-expansive homestead, now completely overtaken by the forest. The main house is a collapsed ruin, the barn and outbuildings barely peeking out through dense barriers of trees. Inside one of the old structures, we came upon the decomposing head of an old doll nailed to the wall, which gave poor Audra a bit of a start — at least, that's what I gathered from her nervous, near-hysterical laughter upon her discovery of the thing. Our target was an old well, some fifty feet deep; a potentially treacherous place to hide a cache, yes, but we were smart — we let Zachary do the dirty work. (Audra wasn't too worried; if she lost him, she's still got another young 'un back home.)

An added bonus was stopping off to chat briefly with the owner of several of the coolest caches in Danville, Mr. Klaussinator his own self, as well as his daughter, who, in geocaching circles, goes by the name Sunpoppy. At the end of the day, we had added another ten or so caches to our respective totals; today was more about quality than quantity, and I'd say we certainly got it.

Till the next outing....

Audra (a.k.a. Homestyle) heading out to the tennis court of the dead

The old railroad bridge over the Dan River, now a part of the Riverwalk Trail

Geese double-parked on the Riverwalk; and they had the nerve to honk at me.

Old farmhouse overtaken by the woods. I'm pretty sure I heard unearthly voices whispering
horrible nothings somewhere in the darkness.

Looking down the old well. Yep, there's a cache in there.

Old dude in the front yard of the even older ruins

A much-needed rest stop. I said REST stop, not pit stop.

Yes, gracious. Young Zachary does have his ways of dealing with an unruly mum.

Servante of Darkness: History and Horror

A couple of weeks back, professor and author Anthony Servante posted an intriguing blog about literary horror through the ages, beginning with Shakespeare's "McBeth" and ending with my novelette, "The Children of Burma," which appears in my fiction collection Legends of the Night. The full article — which also reviews Banished by Billie Sue Mosiman, Skin Trade by Tonia Brown, Merkabah Rider by Ed Erdelac, and Where Darkness Dwells by Glen Krisch — analyzes each work both by contemporary standards and the context of the historical period in which it is set. About "The Children of Burma," Mr. Servante had these — and other — kind words to say:

"...We are immersed in 1942, not only in the middle of a war, but in the mind of an imperial soldier of said war, and we witness the horrors of the man, the army and ultimately the monster itself. Whereas other historical horror stories (many which I eliminated from this article) generalized the historical setting to merely tell a horror story, Stephen Mark Rainey establishes the structure writers of this genre should emulate or at least aspire to imitate...."

I encourage you to check out the full text of the blog here: History and Horror: From Natural to Supernatural

Also, visit Mr. Servante's interview with me (and several other authors) at Cybernocturnalism: Old School Authors Speak Up, originally posted in October 2012.

Black Friday Smith Mountain Lake Adventures

It's a pity Ms. B. and I never get out and about finding cool places to hike, picnic, hunt geocaches, drink margaritas, etc., etc. Oh, wait. I guess we sometimes do....

A ridiculously warm November day. Mid 70s in the higher elevations. It confuses a body. But it made for an excellent day for Kimberly and I to visit Smith Mountain Lake State Park, Virginia. There were a few caches a long the way, of course, which I snagged; then we hit the park and found a beautiful little cove where we had a our picnic lunch (leftover turkey from T-day). Then it was some serious hiking after a number of caches on the various trails. One of the hunts led us to the "Moody" wall, an ancient bulwark from the early 19th century that extends along one of the peninsulas. We also came upon some stone ruins (see the old man in the photo at left), the history of which we didn't discover but which certainly set the mind of a certain horror writer all a-buzzing. At the end of the day, we came out several caches richer, a hair smarter, and a little pooped.

Margarita time!

Back to Martinsville—or technically Collinsville—and El Ranchito Mexican Restaurant, where the night's special just happened to be monster margaritas. The drinks turned out to be bigger than our dinners, which were no tiny turkeys themselves. I gotta tell you, their chori pollo—with plenty of extra habanero sauce—is superb.

Afterward, we visited the bar at El Norteno Mexican restaurant just because the margarita spirit had come upon us. We each knocked back another just for good measure, and that was all she wrote for us. A fine Black Friday for us, thank you very much, and—praise ye ghods—the only Walmart we visited was to snag a cache.

One of the scenic coves at Smith Mountain Lake State Park

Brugger hanging out on the "Moody House" wall, a bulwark from the early 1800s

Little thirst-quencher at El Ranchito