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Five Ways Down Stringer’s Ridge
- University of Georgia Press
- Chapter
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287 f r o m t h e j u i c e f i v e w a y s d o w n s t r i n g e r ’ s r i d g e The evergreen seasonal ridge of the past has no real name. Stringer’s is two hills over and famous but this other with so many sides and differences is not so we used the wrong name. One way down was the west but I never have tried that. They were scared when I slipped toward the edge on the loose stones and they should have been. pine cliffs with railroad track at the bottom and a long view across half the Tennessee and Williams Island and the other half waist high into Elder Mountain They were too young for that look anyhow so I started back another way cut into the west end is a cove gulley full of vines • • • 288 f r o m t h e j u i c e one bankside’s shining mudface free of leaves waits for the backswing if you didn’t jump at the very last thinking something I was that pendulum of earth-time climbing up the ridge into the late air high above the corn rows and the diesel going home on the steep west bluff earth-knowing for a year before I set out leading children myself thirteen singlefile up the easy middle path that was lined off for a horse trail with little logs and cleaned-up branches the east is a holy room owls standing on the wet limbs with no leaves anywhere just a thin roof of pine boughs and trailing vines on the floor: black trunks stand around like elders and keep you from scaring the owls a footfall in the odd light. • • • [100.26.1.130] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:35 GMT) 289 f r o m t h e j u i c e The fourth way slips between the Christmas trees along red washed-out places on the south side where briars grow that no one can run through no matter how scared and a last way down off behind some locked greenhouses I can never sneak into now: too old to be curious about how it is to go a different way, but here I am still trying not to find a way down Stringer’s Ridge with all my children though they begin to whine trying some way to take all the paths and then not be down to love in all directions and show the secret places to five more bands of children: the bus horns and the cars are signaling like hawks and crows: we can hear them through the leaves warning us • • • 290 f r o m t h e j u i c e to pick one way and be down off Stringer’s Ridge. Link hands little no-names with your scruffy leader. This hill is a vague green trance that I prolong. Walk out and away from the ivy house. Mark the place of no return here, say we are late but not ashamed. Bunched together down there like a posse you can tell they are worried but now they see us walking out through the ivy we are all crying why are we crying afraid we wouldn’t get down afraid we won’t go back hurt that we seem to be lost. ...