Editor’s note: This is part 2 in a series.
Another world hides along lesser-traveled roads. Do yourself a favor. Look for it.
I motored into Tignall to find the Jackson Crossroads Amethyst Mine.
In the post office the lady in charge answered my question with “I’m not from around here.”
Across the street I spotted a one-legged old timer in an electric scooter. “That fellow will know where the mine is.”
Wearing camouflage and smoking a cancer stick, he sounded as if a rasp had grated his vocal chords after which he gargled a slurry of moonshine and gravel.
“Take a left at the light. Go to the end and turn.”
Turn? Turn where?
This fellow’s not long for this world I thought.
8 miles later I turned left when I should have turned right. I spent the next hour looking for the mine.
A lady in a convenience store set me straight, being local and not from Delhi, India.
I found my way and set out on a red clay dirt road marred by potholes, gullies, ridges, and wallows. I should have been in a Jeep.
I passed a granite marker high upon an embankment, but just ahead the granddaddy of mudholes lay before me like an orange lake.
I turned around and stopped at the old granite marker to salvage something from my dirt road defeat.
Climbing the steep embankment I surveyed the marker. Words were inscribed on the front of the tall and narrow stone marker.
WIFE
SARAH COTTEN
C. 1742 — 1814
These words were inscribed across the marker’s beveled top.
HOMESTEAD OF
HENRY HILL
1730 — 1804
I imagined the log home that might’ve stood where woods reigned. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, woods to woods.
As I descended the embankment, rain-slickened leaves sent my feet flying, and I landed flat on my back. “Ooooomph.”
The wind left me as the camera and tripod went one way, I the other.
No one but birds and the ghosts of Sarah and John witnessed my fall. I felt as old as Methuselah.
On my meandering, aimless way back the roads presented another gift, Friendship Baptist Church.
I passed it, turned around, and drove onto its grassed-over lane past the church’s tombstone-like marker –1831.
When you step onto sacred ground, you feel it.
No one needed to tell me the church was dormant. I fell in love with this bleached out old woman of a church.
Upon a knoll she sat, regal in her antiquity, on piers of mud-colored bricks. Locked double doors like worn mahogany looked out upon the graveyard.
High above the doors remnants of a massive hornet’s nest clung to the right side eave.
Then I saw it.
A sarcophagus with one side fallen away.