One of the pleasures of living near downtown is the variety of options the walker has just outside his or her front door, i.e. The Riverwalk and/or soccer park, MUW campus, Friendship Cemetery. And so it was Tuesday afternoon I set out in the general direction of the river.
On this day, catty-corner to the old Marble Works building on South Fourth Street, Linda Harris was stringing up Christmas lights in her front yard.
Linda’s son, Monta (pronounced “Montay”), a boxer, used to have a speed bag in the back and it wasn’t uncommon to pass by and hear the rat-a-tat-tat of his leather bag. Monta now lives out Highway 69 and still teaches boxing, his mother said.
On South Second Street at the railroad tracks ornithologist Paul Mack, binoculars around his neck, was headed home after making his daily birding circuit of Friendship Cemetery.
Mack said he’d identified more than 30 species in the cemetery. “Not bad for this time of year.”
After visiting with Paul, I turned west toward the trestle. There are other trestles in our area, but “the trestle” is the railroad crossing just below Carrier Lodge.
Billy Hairston beautifully evokes this setting in a piece he wrote for “Catfish Alley” magazine about his explorations with James, a boyhood friend who lived here beside the river.
“We knew the fields and forests, the swamps and sloughs, the gravel bars. We crossed the railroad trestle with no more concern than if it had been a city sidewalk. We sat on the middle pier and shot bottles and sticks with our .22s while trains rumbled by above us. …
“James and me, and the River, we were a ‘one-of-a-kind,’ a unique confluence in time and space. We won’t be back.”
I’d been thinking about another “one-of-a-kind” country boy, who died last week, one who had a childhood similar to the one Billy describes.
By the time he was 6, according to his obituary in the New York Times, Chuck Yeager was roaming the hills of his native West Virginia shooting rabbits and squirrels for his family’s dinner table.
Yeager, who died at 97, was the first pilot to break the sound barrier, a deed celebrated in the movie of Tom Wolfe’s book “The Right Stuff.” Yeager, as it happens, was a hero several times over.
Straight out of high school, he enlisted in the Air Force where he was made a mechanic. Despite having thrown up on his first flight in an airplane, Yeager applied to become a pilot. As he later wrote, because he noticed the pilots were the ones with the pretty girls and clean hands.
As time would show, his savant-like sense of the capabilities of the machine he was flying and his coolness under pressure eminently qualified him for the job.
Yeager shipped out to England in 1943 and not long after was shot down over France. With the help of the French resistance, a wounded Yeager assisting a fellow aviator, also wounded, hiked over the Pyrenees into neutral Spain.
Ordinarily, downed pilots were not allowed back into combat, but Yeager persisted, all the way up the chain of command to Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower.
On Oct. 12, 1944, Yeager, leading three fighter squadrons over Bremen, Germany, shot down five German planes becoming an ace in one day. A month later he shot down four planes in one day.
Later in life, Yeager bristled at questions about “having the right stuff,” the implication being his ability was something he was born with.
“All I know,” Yeager said, “is I worked my tail off learning how to fly and worked hard at it all the way. If there is such a thing as the right stuff in piloting, then it is experience. The secret to my success was that somehow I always managed to live to fly another day.”
Ten minutes after leaving Paul, I was standing on Billy’s trestle above the middle pier. The surface of the river was smooth as a mirror, its current barely perceptible in the water below. To the east, the reddish-gold light of the waning sun imprinted the shadow of the old graffiti-covered bridge onto the wall of trees clinging to the bank.
A faint breeze, seemingly without direction, whispered through the leaves of the white-barked sycamores.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
You can help your community
Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 37 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.