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Back when i was young,well,younger anyway,i remember going swimming in the uchee creek,back then,before they made a sand pit out it,it was a nice place to take the kids (us) and a picnick lunch and spend the afternoon,there was fried chicken and mama's big ole cat head biscuits and of course the creek.Me and my buddies of that long ago time also liked to go camping on the shady banks of that old creek too,we would take our hooks and some string,no need to buy fish bait because we could always scrap off the top layer of last falls dry leaves and catch big old night crawlers,well thats what we called them anyway and no need to take a tent either,we just slept on the warm sand around our camp fire,it was safer then,for children,or was it that we in our innocence,or ignorance,just thought that nothing bad could happen to us down there on that creek?I liked to lie awake after my buddies had all gone to sleep and listen to the hoot owls hoot late when the moon could be seen shining through those big trees,or listen to the wind as it sighed all mournful like in those same big pines,those were simpler times but they are times that i will never forget.
I went camping alone,once,and i remember that the full moon rose over those woods so bright that i could see my shadow on the ground and the owls were really talking that night and they sounded so lonely and forboding,like some one had died,i guess it was my innocence they were lamenting because that was the year i turned seventeen and left home to join the army,it was 1957,the vietnam war was just getting started and i had not a clue as to what was to follow as i hitchedhiked up to Atlanta to enlist and was off to see the world,i cant tell you how many nights i sat and wished that i was back in those old friendly woods of my childhood while away in foreign lands,but,whoever said the words that "you can never go home again"sure knew what they were talking about.For when i returned,the old swimming hole was all gone,most of my friends were all gone,swallowed up by that bottomles pit we call adulthood,gone to make thier lives some where else or just simply gone.Nothing was the same as i rememberd it,things seemed smaller and cheaper,everything but the owls,the owls had not changed thier song,and every time i hear them sing,i am reminded of my childhood days down on the uchee creek and my heart weeps for innocence lost,never to be regained.
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