Riegelwood, NC (Part 3 of ??)

I have one memory of the place that sticks with me. Literally. And that would be sand spurs. Most people only encounter them at the beach, but I guess we were close enough to the coast that they wandered on out our way, found things to their liking and stayed.

Dead off in the middle of town, that whopping, 2 block long town remember, was our shopping area. The shopping area was one small, strip mall type place. There was a 76 Station, and moving left to right, Waccamaw State Bank, Western Auto, Post Office, Beauty shop, Barber Shop, Creekmore's Rexall Drugs, a mom and pop style grocery whose name escapes me, and an Esso (then eventually, Exxon) station. That, my friends was town. It closed down Saturday afternoon and opened again on Monday. Too bad that doesn't really have anything to do with my story. I guess I was trying to give you a scale of the smallness of my enviorns.

Across the highway was the community center, and dead opposite the 76 station (the one with the map on the Coke machine), was a football field. I don't really recall it being used for football, though. Mostly we used it for pick up softball games, kite flying, bottle rocket launching, and games of Smear The Queer (aka, Kill The Man With The Ball).

You could take a path from my house up to the community center, where we frequently used the tennis and basketball courts, watched Little League games, or, in the summer, went to the pool.

Little League games were cool. Everybody showed up on game nights. And if that sounds kinda boring to you then go live in a rural NC papermill town for a little while and see if Little League games, like terrapins trying to cross the highway, don't move up a couple of notches on your Excite-o-Meter, too. So, if you could get custody a fouled ball you could trade it in at the concession stand for a coke, which everybody did. Guess we never felt we needed the baseball.

And we speculated endlessly on the umpire, a guy called "Cooter". Cooter being a slang term for them big old turtles that lived in our lake and in the swamp. Folks ate them guys. The story went that Cooter was a hermit like guy that lived in the swamp. No one was sure where, exactly. Just "in the swamp". And he trapped and ate cooters a lot. And he only left the swamp to come out and referee Little League games. Yeah, it don't really hold much water now, but back in the day we believed every word of it.

Ooops, off track again. Sometimes as we headed to the community center we'd decide to go to the 76 station for a coke. The community center's machine only sold those 6 1/2 oz bottles for the longest time. We didn't really see them as being a good value. So as we got alongside the football field we'd hang a quick left and go tear-assing (as you are learning, our main form of locomotion back then was tear-assing) across it, down into the drainage ditch and back up the other side, across the highway and in to the station. Well...that was the plan. Unfortunately, afflicted with the short attention span of redneck youth, our plan nearly always went astray, and nearly always in the same way.

We'd be up about full tilt and just about to head down the ditch when we would get a shooting pain in whichever foot was in contact with the planet earth at that particular moment. In the time it took for us to process where the pain was coming from, which was of course, the patch of sand spurs that grew EVERY year in the SAME spot, our other foot would have come down squarely inside the patch too, and was now bleating out in pain and displeasure also. Now, with both feet full of sand spurs, it would still take just a second to bring our hurtling bodies to a full stop, in which time the first foot would have landed in the patch a second time. All you can really say is, "DAMN!" Sad thing is, this would happen several times throughout the summer.

Now I know that you know the worst part of this sad, sad story. Yep, it's Moe. Moe-mentum. When you finally came to a stop momentum had carried you all the way out smack dab into the middle of the sand spur patch. So you would have to pull out all the spurs from one foot, take a big step forward with it and place it back down in the patch for a fresh batch of spurs, clear the other foot of spurs, take another big step, fill other foot with spurs again, and keep repeating this process as necessary to extract yourself. You would then vow to remember for the rest of you life that the patch is there, and then, a few weeks later, repeat the whole boneheaded affair again. Whoever you were with would never laugh at you, however. Mainly 'cause they were stuck right there beside you, pulling out spurs and cussing up a storm, too.

Last point about the patch. It kinda sucked that you had to hop on one foot while you cleared the other foot, becuse that just drove the spurs in deeper. But what the heck were you gonna do....sit down to do it?

Then we'd get our "coke", which was always a Mountian Dew (the old bottles, with Appalachian Intellectual's feuding hillbilly brethren on them), CAREFULLY cross back over to the football field, and continue on our merry way.

To be continued................

Typology, out
Travelin' Ed