Coal Country Shack

“We got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout...” That was January 15, 1978. I turned 30 eight days later and Carla baked me a cake in our funky antique stove. She was 21 and I whisked her off to a remote shack in the woods near the huge metropolis that is Chauncey, Ohio. Population: no more than a handful of stragglers, left over from when coal money was mainlining into the veins of the local economy. Thirty years prior, the Mill field mine disaster had forced the shutdown of the Sunday Creek Coal Company and put a period at the end of the death sentence for coal mining in that area. Our shack had been built on stilts in a three day frenzy of alcohol and hallucinogenics, or so I'm told. No pluming, no problem. I like outhouses better anyway. You know, sitting among the trees, bird calls and fresh breezes while adding to the pile below, lightly dusting each new contribution with lye... powdered sugar on an inverted chocolate cone. Carla screamed from there one fine Spring day when it seems that a snake had managed to slither up to the top of the pile and get within ass striking range. Good thing she looked down before she sat down. I quickly went into waste removal mode, no problem. All in all, it was a great year. She did typing at home for The University of Ohio, I went to grad school to study Interpersonal Communications. Mostly though, I studied Carla, and the THC content of various strains of Columbia ganja that I got from my brother. Our dirt driveway was deeply rutted from the tire chains that were standard equipment in the winter. Most cars couldn't make it. Almost no visitors was fine with me, but when the Jehovah Witnesses made it all the way up to our house, their car lumbering and shaking with age and the demanding load of four, very large ladies, they were welcome. As the first Witness put her heavy leg out, planting a too tight shoe and badly swollen ankle on the ground, I went inside to roll them a doobie, just to be hospitable.