Good Friday Ramblin'

It's always nice to have Good Friday off. I didn't have Good Friday off. However, in their magnitudimous generosity, the company let us out at 2:00 p.m. this afternoon. This was fine, since I had to come to Martinsville for my regular Mum maintenance visit, and a trio of new geocaches lurked in the Fairy Stone Park/Bassett area. Thus, I set my sights on some afternoon geocaching. So did a massive storm system and a number of tornadoes. I missed out on the tornadoes, but not the storms. After work, I drove up from Greensboro, all in relatively clear weather. Five miles out of Fairy Stone, the bottom dropped out.

As it turned out, the cache at Fairy Stone was little more than a park & grab—a traditional woodland hide a couple of hundred feet up the trail from the parking area. So I parked, grabbed, and got a little wet. Then I headed back into Bassett to wait out the rain. The wait was not a long one. I had just enough time to log my Fairy Stone find, and then things cleared up for a while. I made quick grabs at the next two, one of which was along the Smith River, now cloaked in an eerie fog. The fog pleased me.

Mum and I had a nice dinner at The Third Bay, and then I did a passel of the usual necessary errands. After entertaining myself with a couple of episodes of The Brady Bunch—shades of my childhood Friday nights—I went out on a late-night ramble through the old neighborhood. Pleasantly cool and breezy, if a bit muggy. Encountered a couple of late-night muggles on my ramble, at least one of which struck me as a little suspicious, but after a while, he went on his business, whatever that happened to be.

All in all, a damn nice bit of Good Friday ramblin'. Peace be with you.

Mist creeping over the Smith River in Bassett

Old relic near the Smith River boat put-in

Spooky Sticks and Crazy Bitches

Several years ago, up in Martinsville, I placed a geocache called "Sticks" (GC1WNG9), inspired by Karl Edward Wagner's horror story of that title. The story has been one my favorite works of dark fiction since the day I read it, many decades past, and it seemed only fitting that one of my caches should pay tribute to it. The other day, an out-of-town cacher notified me he was particularly keen on hunting this one in a couple of weeks, and since I haven't revisited the hide in several years, I figured it was high time to give it a look-see and perform any necessary maintenance.

The cache itself was in pristine condition. Some of the stick figures I had placed had fallen into disrepair, so I spent several hours making new ones and hanging them at strategic locations in the woods. Yeah, it was kind of creepy out there — absolutely dead quiet, for the most part. Scarcely a breath of breeze, and virtually no sounds of wildlife — except for a few buzzing, marauding insects that made the work uncomfortable. In the end, though, I escaped with my life and my sanity. Most of it, anyway.

Thanks to a new cache hidden by my friend Ed "Kuykenew" Kuykendall, I did discover a relatively new trail along the Smith River in the Bassett area, just north of Martinsville. It's the Lauren Mountain Preserve, and what a gorgeous trail it proved to be. At the moment, there's only the one cache there, but I saw several spots that are screaming for one, including a couple that could present interesting terrain challenges. I foresee placing a new hide or two out that way. Be warned.

Leaving Bassett, I experienced an interesting and inexplicable case of road rage on the part of some crazy bitch, whom I shall, for convenience's sake, hereby call "Crazy Bitch." From a side road, I turned onto Riverside Drive, and the driver of a car approaching from the left apparently didn't like me doing so — the fact she was a tenth of a mile down the highway notwithstanding. She threw the car into overdrive, raced down the road to overtake me, and proceeded to remain on my bumper for the next few miles. If she wanted to go around me, she had more than ample opportunity, so it was clear Crazy Bitch was intent on pursuit. Since there are numerous ways to get where I was going, I took the most circuitous route possible, most often at excruciatingly slow speed, and, after quite a few miles, fatigue must have set in, for she finally went on about her merry little way. I went and had an enjoyable lunch.

So, Crazy Bitch, if you have by chance found me here, let me just say, you are one crazy bitch, and you might want to check your crazy bitch ass in a place where they have nice sedatives. And just by way of a little advice, you might wish to consider that not everyone is as good-natured as I, and the next person you fuck with might check you in somewhere you really don't want to be.

Just a little something to consider from your friendly neighborhood horror writer.

Not much sense of scale in the photo, but that is one big-ass water tower across the Smith River
from the Lauren Mountain Preserve Trail.

Big ol' concrete slab from some ancient structure out in the middle of the river.

Smith River Adventures

Brugger and I headed up to Martinsville last night to visit Mum and spend some time kicking around the place today. I needed to do maintenance on a few of my geocaches, so I did that early in the morning, and then the two of us headed down to the mushroom trail along the Smith River, back behind Mulberry Road, where several of my caches lurk, waiting patiently to ignore unsuspecting passersby. A bit chilly and breezy out there, but not unpleasant for a hike.

The pic at left shows an old dude at my cache called "One Guess" (GC1QG05)... meaning you have one guess where to find the thing (and, oh, what a giveaway). I've had to replace that sucker a couple of times previously (apparently a hawk took a liking to the hide's location), so I was glad to find it in good condition today.

When I was a lad in junior high school, my friend Charles Lewis lived in a neighborhood that, by road, was fairly distant, but if you took the proper shortcut, it was just over the river and through the woods. From the end of his road, we knew there was a trail along the Smith River, which reputedly went out to Forest Park Country Club, about four miles away. One fine Saturday we decided to try out this trail on our bikes—pioneer spirit and all that, don't you know. Anyway, there's some rugged terrain out there, and I recall we struggled up and down a lot of hills, over creeks, through briers, all through this territory into which neither of us had ever ventured. Nowadays, there are a number of factories along the river and some houses not too far from the trail; back then, there weren't quite as many of either, and it seemed the remotest, most isolated place I'd ever gone. I remember emerging from the woods into a big meadow, which at first I jubilantly took to be one of the fairways at our destination. Nope. A little discouraged but certainly unwilling to go back the way we had come, we pressed on. It seemed like forever later that we finally saw a house up on the hillside to our left, away from the river.

Okay, we figured. There's a road up there, and since I knew all the roads in the neighborhood, it seemed the simplest solution to get back into familiar territory. We started up the hill into the yard.

"Halt!"

A mean, gruff voice. A dude accompanied by a not-so-weenie dog, obviously displeased to see a pair of bedraggled young teenagers attempting to cut through his yard.

"We just want to get up to the road," we said.

"Not through my yard, you don't."

"Can you tell us what road that is?"

The burly dude looked at us and laughed. "Y'all are lost, aren't you. Well, good luck."

And that was that. No way we were getting past an asshole and his dog. So we returned to the trail and pedaled on. Finally, days and days later, it seemed, we began to see familiar signs of civilization, and...at long last...the golf course at Forest Park. (In reality, we'd been less than a half mile away when the mean old bastard shooed us off.)

In later years, a big field along the river back there, which locals called Belmont, became the site of some pretty wild parties. I attended several in my college and post-college days. Can't say as I rightly remember anything about them, though.

Over the years, I felt a certain haunting nostalgia to revisit that old trail along the river, so probably a decade or so ago, I took it to heart to go back. There's some fine hiking there, to be sure, with numerous parallel and intersecting utility trails—clearly frequented by folks on motorcycles and four-wheelers, but in all the times I've been out there in recent years, I've never seen another living soul. Today, Brugger and I ventured farther along the river than I'd gone before, and it was certainly an interesting enough trek. Lots of signs of very old industry there...dating back God knows how long. Possibly since before I was born. Old pipes along a steep hillside completely enveloped by exposed tree roots. Electrical boxes that must have existed before electricity was discovered. Definitely some fun places to hide new caches—particularly of the more, er, challenging sort favored by many NC Triangle geocachers—so I expect I will be making a return trip in the not-too-distant future. It's a place of joy worth spreading.

Click the pics to enlarge.

View of the Smith River from near the old Redd Level Plant

The mushroom trail leading toward the legendary land of Belmont

Do not cross this woman.

View of the dilapidated Redd Level Plant near the Smith River

Old retention pond near the Redd Level Plant