| Pee Dee Living In The 1960s by Joe Pruitt |
| You will just have to forgive me for not remembering everyone’s names or even street names. I have been living out of Rockingham since 1967, and even to remember some of my high school classmates I need to look at the yearbooks, which are a few thousand miles away from me right now. My youngest recollection of trying to go into the woods below Five Points was of me trying to follow my older brothers Milton and Bill, and probably my cousin Lanny McCaskill, and who knows whom else, down into the woods at the end of Blewitt Ave. They outran me, probably on purpose because I was so small. All I could do was stand at the edge of those big old trees and scream, in anger, for them to wait for me. No matter how much I cried and threatened them with telling Mama, they wouldn’t come back for me. Not much later in life, I made up for missing that first trip into the woods. Ronald Wallace and I, and other friends at times, seemed to always end up down in the cool depths of those woods, making the best memories of our lives. I feel sorry for kids that don’t have a forest to go experiment in, staying out of serious trouble, and learning the give and takes of life necessary to grow up productively, not destructively. My friends and I probably should have spent even more time in the woods, because we did get into our share of trouble. Blewitt Ave. runs straight and level until it runs out of pavement. Then it starts a pretty good decline for about 75 yards until the last maybe 100 feet, where it has a more severe drop down an old wagon trail. The creek in most places was only a few inches deep, increasing in pools in many places to maybe 18 inches deep. The trail crosses the creek and both sides of the creek has smooth worn entrances. Maybe another 100 feet past the creek, is an old wagon road that intersects the one from Blewitt Ave. This second wagon trail runs from almost Five Points down to the other end of the creek. I think the one end of the trail close to Five Points intersects with the dirt road just past the welding and scrap metal yard. Part of the reason I call these old wagon trails is that they look like it. The other reason is that I know Mr. Brown still owned the house at the end of Blewitt Ave. He owned an old wagon and a couple of mules or horses. He kept the livestock in a stable he built right next to the trail at the edge of the cliff to the creek. I don’t remember if Mr. Brown owned a car, but he gave many of us kids transportation on Blewitt Ave. when we jumped up on the back of his wagon and hitched a ride. I think Mr. Brown made his living growing produce in his farm at the end of Blewitt Ave., and plowing other peoples acreage for them. He plowed my Grandma Pruitt’s plot the one year she tried to maintain a garden beside her house. She had the know-how and all to be a success at it, but it was just too much work for her at her age. The trail that ran through the creek continued up into the pines and hardwoods for quite a ways. I remember only going up that way to gather scuppernong grapes, plums and blackberries. There were plenty up that way, if you could stand the chigger bites later. There also were the sandspurs, cactus and the thorns. We must have developed leather feet early, because in the summer we did all our carousing in bare feet, cutoff pants, and no t- shirts. The trail that ran toward Pee Dee was parallel to the creek, and we spent most of our time exploring on the creek and that trail. Running fast can get you where you want to go quicker, but in the woods there are hazards. I remember one day Ronald and I were pick’em up and put’em down at a pretty good clip down a trail above the creek. We were headed in a direction running parallel to the creek, down toward where the new Hwy. 220 is now. He had gotten a pretty good lead ahead of me and I was stretching to catch up. Suddenly out of the bottom of my vision I saw what you don’t want to see when you are barefooted and moving too fast to stop, a black snake directly where I am going to step. Needless to say I took the next two steps in the air, uttering loud noises that brought Ronald back. We walked back carefully looking for the culprit, but he probably had been as scared by the encounter as I had been, and had left the scene. This black snake was harmless, I guess, but some of the other ones we met were not so harmless. Not far from this place was the fishing pond that was fed by the creek. I can’t recall the name of it right now, but I think people actually paid to go there and fish. The main entrance to it, I believe, was on the old Pee Dee road that ran from the main gate of the Martha Baum plant, and angled off to the left just after the Pee Dee Church below John’s Pool Hall. Anyway, Ronald and I were down close to the backside of the pond one day, walking beside the creek. It is a low-lying area there, with more water, and more critters to attract snakes. Young kids sometimes don’t pay full attention to where they are putting their feet, even when walking slowly, because their minds tend to be excited by other things of the moment. I didn’t say they were important things, just one of the million things a kid can think of. I was talking about something to Ronald and I believe we were looking into the water for some forgotten critter. When I turned to walk away to the right, my right foot in the air, I saw the biggest, old granddaddy, king of the pond, water moccasin that I have ever seen, less than a foot from where my foot was headed. Things got real exciting there for a few seconds, but my foot didn’t go where I had planned to put it, that is for sure. It took us that few seconds to get the brain to recognize that some one had already found this water moccasin and taken its ill manners away. Thank goodness, because water moccasins have no fear of humans. They have been known to come out of trees into boats with people and to climb into boats from the water. The next part of the story should emphasize this point. About six of us kids were seining (spelled right?) the creek with a net one beautiful sunshiny day. With this net we expected to catch some minnows from this same creek, to then use the minnows on our hooks to catch a bigger fish (never happen in that creek, but kids our age didn’t know or care). About four of us were in the creek, two on one side of the net and two on the other side. We could actually see the minnows in the water, but we weren’t having much luck catching them. There was a lot of noise, hooting and hollering among us and well-intended instructions on how to best catch minnows. I remember to this day the scenario, four boys in the water up to our knees, our backs to the bank where the other boys were. Suddenly the boys on the bank start yelling something louder than usual. What they were yelling suddenly sank into our busy minds when the word MOCCASIN was heard. Four boys in the water starting looking to see where death was coming from, and we found it in the water behind us, coming straight at us. Needless to say, the seine net was left behind, and four boys did their best to part the shallow sea or walk on water on the way out of the creek, in four different directions. When we were safe, the boys on the bank told us that the moccasin had come from behind them, passed between them, dropped down off the bank into the water, and headed straight toward the four in the water. Some who watched it all the way across the creek (some of us were too busy to watch it for a short while) said it dived under the surface right where we had been seining, but it never surfaced. Being young boys, we got our courage back up, probably with a lot of double dares, and did try to find the moccasin and ask its intentions. Thank goodness, we never found it. |
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