Encountering a Stranger on the Road
What I didn't tell you.
SOMETHING HAPPENED TO me the day I spent remembering my friend Milton.
Milton died March 5, 2007. To celebrate the anniversary of his death earlier this month I revisited a few of our haunts. The next day I shared with you an essay about him.
But I left out one strange and marvelous thing.
The Preserve
The morning of March 5 I headed toward Milton’s hometown of Fitzgerald, Georgia. My first stop was a nature preserve that the town named for him in 2009. The preserve is a one-mile grassy hiking trail around an urban lake. I think Milton would have loved the place mainly because birds seemed to flock there. Ducks were congregating in large numbers on the water, and were I a better birder I would’ve been able to identify them. Making the loop, I saw great blue heron, great egret, catbird, mockingbird, yellow-rumped warbler, great-crested flycatcher. Carolina jessamine was flowering, and the red maples reddened the woods.
The Grave
After that I drove to Milton’s grave, which is in a family plot on his farm. I turned off a county highway and onto the dirt road that led to the farm, and ahead I saw someone on the road. I hoped it might be Milton’s son or grandson or great-grandson, checking on crops. It was not. When I got to the person, they had popped back into their beat-up and dusty vehicle. I passed them slowly. I waved.
I did not linger at Milton’s grave. On my way out, I passed the same person. They were out of their vehicle again, looking at something in the road.
Again as I approached they hurried to their vehicle and began to roll past me.
The Stranger
I braked and lowered my window, making a motion for the person to stop. I could see it was a woman with a weathered face, the look of a smoker, probably in her sixties.
“Hello!” I said. “What are you looking at?” This of course was none of my business. A random woman could look at anything she wanted on a deserted public road in Irwin County. But she obviously knew something I didn’t know.
“Rocks,” she said.
“Are you a geologist?”
“No, I just like rocks.”
I glanced at the field. South Georgia fields have almost no rocks. They are sandy loam. Only one kind of rock can reliably be found on the surface of these fields, and that’s ferrous oxide—rain rock. “What kind of rock?” I asked.
“I look for white ones,” she said. “I just found one with a fossil in it.”
“What?”
The woman opened her car door and held her hand toward me. I took a rock from her. She indicated a darker spot on it. “That’s the fossil,” she said.
When I saw that fossil, an ancient world opened up inside me.
I looked at the woman. She had a no-nonsense, almost manly, look to her. She was wearing military pants with a holster for her mobile phone. She wore boots.
I looked around us. Bare fields, newly plowed, stretched away on all sides, with only a dirt road running through them. Milton had farmed all these acres. To the west a path led to a dammed pond. While Milton was alive I visited that dam dozens, maybe hundreds, of times. Milton’s first love was the natural world, and he spent his life studying wild things.
The Memory
Suddenly I could feel his presence—it was heavy, almost a burden, on my back. I felt his curiosity. I felt his love. I felt him wanting to be there with us.
“You found this here?” I asked the woman, holding up the rock.
“I just found it,” she said. Then she showed me other rocks she had collected in her rambles around South Georgia, pulling them off her dashboard and off the seat and from the floorboard.
“Did you know Milton?” I asked. “He farmed around here.”
“No,” she said.
“Do you know his family?”
“No,” she said.
“What brings you out this way?” I asked.
She said she had a friend lived farther on down that road, and sometimes she visited her.
I never asked the woman’s name. I don’t know where she lives. I didn’t get her tag number. All I know is that when I was going to honor my old naturalist friend, on the anniversary of his death, a stranger in a white jeep haunted the edges of his fields.
The Tip
“I’ll tell you something you should see,” she said. “It’s a wall. Really it’s clay but it’s hard as rock. You should take a photo of that. The ants that live there bring up little piles of dirt, and the dirt they bring up is all colors. It’s pretty.”
“Where is it?” I asked.
She told me a road a couple of miles back, and I thanked her and said I’d go take a look. I had no deadlines. I was rambling. I was trying to find joy and mystery and love.
“You can have the fossil,” she said.
“I can’t take your fossil,” I said.
“I find lots of them.”
The Sandstone
But I didn’t take it. I drove to the road where she told me the wall of sedimentary rock—or hardened clay—would be. I didn't find it. As I was leaving, I saw the weathered stranger coming down the road in her old white car. She told me to follow her and she’d show me. She held a vape in her hand. She took a big puff from it and rolled off in a white cloud.
She parked at a clay wall and got out. Right away she noticed a large and unusual wasp floundering in the grass. “Look at that,” she said. I realized then her special power—an uncanny ability to notice anything extraordinary, even if small.
God, I admire that.
That was it. I took some pictures and left. But I’ve kept thinking of the woman, out solo on a dirt road looking for rocks with her extraordinary eyes and finding old old worlds in them.
From the Mailbag
Occasionally folks send me photos of what’s happening in their lives. This week Bill Prince, retired Spanish professor at Furman University, wrote to say, “The redbuds are in bloom here. There are hundreds of them in the woods where we walk daily.” He sent this photograph.
Little Free Libraries
Earlier this month I mailed copies of my book Wild Card Quilt to Little Free Librarians who wanted a copy, and the books are arriving. I wanted to share a couple of photos. Peer inside and you can see the book!
Women’s History Trail Sculpture
Mary Catherine Polanski of Franklin, North Carolina let me know that a new public sculpture, Sowing the Seeds of the Future, will be unveiled and celebrated on Saturday, March 23. She wrote:
At a writer's program at the house of Brent and Angela Faye Martin years back, I showed you a passage in Wild Card Quilt where you nailed it about public art in a town (page 282). I've gone back to it many times along the lengthy path of this project (started in 2017). Wesley Wofford, sculptor, created this monumental piece.
Second, you'll smile to learn that the Lazy Hiker Brewing here in Franklin is making a special brew for our celebration. Graham Norris, brewer, was able to use locally grown Keener corn. Gary Carter, whom you've met, was kind enough to share his stash. The "seeds" are important symbols in the sculpture, and we are so pleased.
Come if you can.
Notes: Wesley Wofford created the traveling Harriet Tubman sculpture. Keener Corn is a chapter in The Seed Underground.
Last Photo
Delightful story! I’m left imagining the woman as a dweller between worlds, sent by your friend to show you a secret.
It’s late, my eyes are so, so tired but you pulled me along with this stranger & I’m so thankful. These are the kind of folks I like to run up with, “on the fringes”. Bless you & your open heart. ❤️