It was in 1970, if my memory serves me correctly, that my Uncle Don bought a farm about twenty miles east of Montgomery in Shorter, Alabama. Shorter was a rather loosely defined community that stretched for miles along old US 80. I suppose that if you lived between Waugh and Tuskegee, you probably said that you were from Shorter.
Not long after the Watkins renovated and moved into the ancient farm house, I began to hear my cousins refer to “the county hole”. They told us about an old, abandoned bridge that kids jumped off of and swam below. The mental picture that this produced was not attractive to me but they insisted that it was great fun.
So, one day we finally agreed to join our cousins. We picked them up at the farm since Dwight was the only one old enough to drive that first summer. We turned from the really old stretch of Hwy. 80 to the slightly more modern version of the highway and then up Macon Co. 40 for a couple of miles.
“Turn right down there across the bridge”, Alan directed us. We turned off of the paved road back at an acute angle and drove maybe fifty yards to a gravel area where several large trees provided a nice, shaded parking spot. Before us lay a stretch of creek about fifteen yards wide. The bank on the west side, where we parked was five or six feet above the creek while the opposite bank was a soapstone shelf that sloped gently up from the water. The north end of the swimming hole was where the old bridge crossed. The remnants of a dirt road were still intact, but the approach had been washed out and the bridge could only be accessed on foot.
The bridge consisted of two steel trusses that sloped up at each end and then leveled off about six feet high. Angle iron ran laterally between the bottom members to support wooden planks. It must have dated to the early part of the twentieth century when the primary travel would have been by horse drawn wagon or Model T. The bridge was about eight or ten feet above the water but by climbing up on the flat top member of the truss we could dive in from a height of fifteen feet or so. There were no guard rails, so you could run from one side of the bridge to the other and leap out into space.
Now, about the “hole”. It was an anomaly. The area upstream of the bridge was dark and foreboding as it emerged from thick woods. No one was even tempted to jump from that side of the bridge or swim up there. The hole was maybe twenty five yards long to where the creek bed sloped gently up to about knee deep. A little ways downstream it turned and ran under the bridge on the paved road and headed off to join the Tallapoosa River.
The swimming hole that lay between these boundaries was nearly perfect. You could dive from either bank without scraping or hitting anything. The main pool was about eight to ten feet deep and on an average summer day you could see two to three feet through the greenish water.
We spent many happy hours at this obscure little spot. Most times it would be just us, the Leary and Watkins brothers but sometimes there would be other kids or a family there. We often picked up Mark Williams and occasionally we brought Danny Dean. I believe that Gordon Brush joined us a time or two. The Johnson boys came once or twice, but they thought the water was too cold. Steve Vernon came too, when he visited and I don’t know who all else.
Most of the time we drove the faded green Volkswagen, but others we took the old ’63 GMC pickup. As our VW Bug slid to a stop in the gravel, we would jump out and hobble across the rough gravel in our bare feet. Keith was likely to go straight to the bridge and do a flip off of the top of the truss. The rest of us would either dive from the bank or the bridge. The mild shock of the cool water was so refreshing on a blazing summer day! It also had a pleasant smell as I surfaced and caught my breath.
Within a few minutes we would convene our favorite game: tag. This game could not be duplicated in a regular pool or lake. The hole was custom made for it. The object was like any game of tag with a twist. A person was not “it” unless they were tagged while they were above the surface. So, you would submerge and try to evade pursuit through the murky water. If that failed, you would try to wriggle free and take off at top speed. If you out-swam your pursuer you could escape up the bank, whereby whomever was “it” would begin a slow count. “One……two……three” and so forth to twenty. If the person who was being chased was not back in the water at that point, they were considered tagged and became “it”. This allowed ample time to climb the bank and gain an advantage by diving over or away from someone treading water and counting. Of course, “it” could continue the chase onto land if he chose. The slow count made it possible to reach the bridge and have an excellent platform from which to jump or dive. The transition came, as often as not by grasping your prey under water and holding on until they surfaced. Of course, there was always the option to change targets and catch someone else.
We played this silly game by the hour and the hot summer air rang with laughs and cut downs, challenges and friendly ridicule. There were also contests to see who could dive the farthest off of the bridge, who could make the tallest splash and so forth. Cannon balls, preacher’s seats, jack knives and flips were all a part of the fun.
I remember one day when we arrived and there was a small group that included a couple of girls already there. Keith decided to wow them with a back flip off of the bridge top rail. He over-rotated and smacked the water flat on his back. It must have hurt like crazy but he had no choice but to grin and say that he was fine. Served him right!
Often we would go to the shallow end and have jousting matches with contestants riding the shoulders of their team mates. I was always a “horse” in this game since no one could carry me!
There was an old country store about a mile up the road and we would go up there and buy a coke and a candy bar. The cokes were still available in the green glass bottles in those days. Sooo good! Several times we would bring a watermelon and float it in the creek to cool it down a little.
As the day waned, we would head home with the windows down and those wonderful top forty hits of the seventies blaring on the am radio. “Baby, baby don’t get hooked on me”, “Hey, have you seen the most beautiful girl in the world?”,”Summer Breeze”, “Garden Party”, “Put the lime in the coconut”, “Rocket Man” and many other songs take me back there even now.
After Alan and I got old enough to drive, we would sometimes race our Volkswagens down the dirt roads that ran through the immense cotton fields. I just didn’t have the nerve to keep up with him. While he was saying to himself, “I bet I can make this turn doing forty!”, I was saying, “If you don’t slow down, you’re gonna get killed”!
We whiled away many a lazy afternoon back then. The only worries were horse flies, broken glass or an occasional thunderstorm. The hole is long gone, now. A gravel pit was dug along the creek and a locked gate blocks what’s left. Now, the memories are committed to the gray or balding heads of grandfathers who were once carefree teens for whom this lazy stream held a special charm.
Hal Leary