Entry 3: Coitus Herpetologicus

July 29, 1970  

 

Dear Hippy Chick,

     Today I heard a little gasp as you were swimming toward the rock at the center of Cat Eye. Your two followers never caught on, but I'm happy that you now know about the copperhead who suns out there. I've no doubt your henchmen would smash the snake and her three bulges. You just swam downstream to the next boulder below the hole. Predictably and thankfully, the guys followed.

     If I could show myself I would have warned you that I've seen the snakes coiled around each other in the fissure of your new slab. It's not just the stench of the stream that made one of your minions hold his nose when he climbed up there. I've dropped a few fingerlings into that crack when my willow branch seine snagged one too small to fry - you know, share and share alike!

     I don't dare show myself to your lackeys because of the shape I'm in after a month out here. At Lexington High School I always kept my dark beard and body fleece trimmed, but now I'm reverting to the woolly state of my maternal ancestors. The men in her tribe traditionally luxuriated in lush coats, and I apparently got those genes instead of my father's African-American ones. 

     Your two attendants would undoubtedly freak out at my shaggy state, and I can't afford to blow this cover. After graduation it was either enroll at VMI where my father teaches or enter the lottery draft for the Vietnam War. When my birth date was picked from that rolling glass sphere containing three-hundred and sixty-six stenciled blue balls I was ready to hitchhike north on 81 all the way to Canada. My mother heard me trying to sneak out the basement door after midnight and whispered that the old Sargent had headed off that route by warning the state police to be on the lookout. 

     So I instead walked west on Route 60, ducking behind a gravestone at Ebenezer until the headlights from the only car going that way had passed. Chances were that a driver out of Lexington would recognize a kid from that college town. After five miles I took the westbound ramp onto I 64 and stuck out my thumb, stopping only briefly at a rock cairn on the crest of North Mountain to look back at the glow of my home town beyond the scattered lights of Kerr's Creek. Mom and I both knew I might not see home again until the Vietnam War was over, and there was no end in sight under President Richard Nixon.  

     Trudging down the hill into the Cowpasture valley I heard the groan of a tractor-trailer cresting the ridge behind me. Soon I was in the passenger seat beside a grizzled trucker heading down to eastern Kentucky with a load out of Perth Amboy. His Mack rig crawled up first Pott's Mountain and then Peter's Mountain before cruising down into Crows where the interstate turned back into old Route 60. 

      I got off the truck at the first town in West Virginia, White Sulphur Springs, and that's how I came to be in this beautiful Blue Hole where I'm having the distinct pleasure of seeing you every few weeks.

                                                                    Until next Sunday,

                                                                    Dogface