Dances With the Death Angel

from Gray's Sporting Journal - May 2023 Spring Turkey Edition

by Cowboy Publishing Group

Bittersweet

A minuet in three parts

By Roger Pinckney

THE Seaboard Airline Railway ran from New York to Miami, the route of the famed Orange Blossom Special, the crack express train that inspired the noted bluegrass tune of the same name.

IHey looky yonder, coming down that railroad track, It’s that Orange Blossom Special, bringing my baby back!

But to local black folks going the other way to see their relations in D.C., Philly or Harlem, it was e Chicken Bone Express. Denied access to the dining car, they packed extravagant picnic lunches and by the time they got o way up in Yankeeland, all they had left was chicken bones. And there’s no song about that, but I knew an old farmer who named his prized bull Seaboard, “Cause when he work, he blow so!” and that will have to su ce for now. When I asked my pappy why they named a railroad after an airplane, he said “Son, the tracks were so smooooth, it was just like riding on air.”

Well maybe. e route from Savannah to Charleston ran though the sleepy little crossroads town of Lobeco, S.C., so named for the LongBellamy Company, which packed string beans, cukes and winter greens for the Northern markets. From Lobeco, it bypassed even sleepier Dale, then crossed Wimbee Creek to Big and Little Williman Islands, 14 miles across the sad and ruined old rice elds till you saw the next road and the rst RFD mailbox. If you walked those tracks, you could get into wild country inaccessible by any other means.

I’d park my old Chevy at the county boat landing on Wimbee Creek just a little after lunch, shoulder my favorite ri e, in those days a well-worn Marlin lever gun in .38-55, cross the trestle and strike out north, deer carcasses along the tracks, buzzardpicked remains, some gnawed down to little more than pitiful rags of skin and sinew. I reckoned if a deer was dumb enough to cross before a thundering Seaboard Airline locomotive, one would surely be dumb enough to try and cross before a man-child with a beat-up Marlin rife, but alas, none did.

I never worried about ending up like those deer. A 1909 Seaboard ad showed a woman next to a map of the mainline with a plumb bob, “Straight as a plumb-line” it bragged, so straight you could see an oncoming locomotive headlamp a dozen miles away. If you had your back to the train, the rails would warn you, popping and pinging beneath your feet.

Nuther thing about walking the tracks: Two ties are too long for a single step and one is too short, so I walked atop a rail instead. I had good strong ankles in those days and the Marlin held horizontally was like high-wire artist’s balance bar. But coming home one night, I slipped, turned an ankle and went sprawling and rolling.

A split second, nay, a nano-second later, before I had even hit the ragged railroad ballast stones, an unlighted hand car whizzed by at speed. Sixty years later, I can still see surprise, astonishment and horror on the faces of the crew as they realized they had nearly killed a man. e State Ports Authority had—and still has—a monopoly on port development and operations. Based in Charleston, they would brook no competition from Port Royal or elsewhere. After enduring years of pestering politicians, they decided to put the matter to rest. ey o ered to pay for the bridge, so long as it was built to their speci cations. Predictably, the speci cations were for a bridge too low for a ship to ever get through. e highway department jumped on it and they named the bridge for Edward Burton Rodgers, the state senator who brokered the deal.

I have often wondered if they still see mine.

Oh, Death Angel! You snatched at me but missed!

Try again. She did.

IITHE two-lane Edward Burton Rodgers Bridge ran three miles across the Broad River, from Jericho to Low Bottom and cut 30 miles o the trip to Savannah. Port Royal Sound and its Broad River tributary was hailed as the best natural harbor on the East Coast and was the scene of many skirmishes between competing Colonial powers as well as an all-day slug-fest between the Yankee navy and out-gunned Confederate defenders. Pirates, rum-runners and reefer smugglers loved it too, but Charleston got the port instead.

But I digress.

Besides opening up the Savannah honky-tonks to a bunch of aspiring young honky-tonkers, where they’d draw you a brew if you were tall enough to slide your quarter across the bar, that bridge made for some damn ne shing. ere were hog cobia in May, whiting most anytime, king sh if you were lucky, but the best was beneath the draw turntable in mid-summer when the spade sh were on the bite.

Over the wrecks and reefs o shore a spade sh would run an easy dozen pounds, but here they were about the size of a big crappie and striped like a sheepshead, but not so sneaky when they hit. e current out there ran like a millrace so you had only about an hour either side of the tide-change, high tide or low, didn’t matter. Nothing fancy, just rig up a two-drop bottom rig with a teardrop sinker that wouldn’t get hung on all the oysters and barnacles. Launch your boat from the landing on the Jericho side, motor out and tie up to the wooden fenders that kept barges and shrimp boats o the concrete piling, climb up a convenient ladder, bait up with dead shrimp, drop your rig alongside the piling of your choice. Wasn’t nothing to bring home more than you cared to butcher. Catching sh the way I was, I never had any problem nding help. at particular sultry July afternoon, it was a kid from my high school English class. We were tearing’em up when your typical summer squall came a’ rumbling down the river. Nothing special, mind you, just your average thunder-bumper, but it packed more punch than the Hiroshima bomb. If you don’t believe it ask Mr. Google, truthful mostly. Long as you’re at it, ask him about what happens when you get struck by lightning. ere’s an old sherman’s rhyme from my boyhood: Wind from the West, sh bite the best, Wind from the East, sh bite the least, Wind from the South, shut the shes’ mouth. Can’t think of anything that rhymes with lightning, except frightening. Bolts fell thick to the left and right, so close there was no thunder, just a sizzle and a crack as they hit the water and I am here to testify, they were barroom beer sign neon blue, as broad as a mule’s ass and twisted like Manilla rope. We huddled beneath the steel span, dry for the rst 10 minutes, but then the wind got behind the sheeted rain and too soon we were as wet as the concrete upon which we sat. After a particularly impressive display, I lost my grit and bolted for the boat, my shing buddy hot on my heels. He grabbed the line, pulled the boat close to the fender and I started down the ladder. ere was a brass navigation light there, big as a toilet bowl, red on one side, green on the other. I had a hold of it and my feet were on the steel ladder when lightning nally struck the bridge.Great Gawd A’Mighty! ere was the little white spot way out in middledistance, no bigger than an aspirin tablet, but it came at me at blistering speed. Suddenly it was big as a vanilla Moon Pie, then a beach towel and nally a double bedsheet and it made a noise exactly like your vacuum cleaner when it makes a snatch at a piece of Kleenex. I felt myself falling. I heard myself scream.

Everything from hemorrhoids to cosmic visions. I avoided the former, but the latter liked to wore me out.

I woke up on my back in the boat, kicking like a run-over dog. My buddy scrambled down behind me, loosed the line and the old Evinrude started on the rst pull. I ran it back to the landing standing up, spray and wind in my hair, cursing the storm like old King Lear, “Rage ye winds, blow and crack your cheeks!”

Shakespeare?

I knew right then I might be in big trouble.

I peed blood for a week, I forgot my momma’s and pappy’s birthdays. I would have forgotten my own middle name, but I did not have one to forget. But all the poems I had to memorize in high school— and promptly forgot—came rushing back, Byron, Shelley, Keats, the whole stinkin’ lot of ’em and I remember them yet, even Chaucer in the original Middle English, often at the most inappropriate moments.

I try and make excuses to my buddies. “I’m sorry, boys, I ain’t been right since I got struck by lightning.”

To which they invariably reply, “Don’t give us that crap, Pinckney! You were never right to begin with.”

IIIIT was a Britten-Norman Islander, a 10-passenger, slab-sided, twin-engine puddlejumper, idling on the gravel strip at Puerto Jimenez, Costa Rica. I’d shed the Paci c side three days, snapper on the rocks, marlin, sails and mahi in deep water and now it was time to go home. I inquired about hiring a car. Maybe I could take some sh. I had 40 pounds of lets, mahi mostly. But there were some hellacious mountains in the way.

“Hey Juan, quantas horas a San Jose?”

Nothing in the ird World is measured by miles or kilometers but by time. You’d wonder why your britches weren’t measured by 38 seconds by 34.