Knights of the Night

I am stuffed and running slow from eating too many boiled peanuts. They were fresh, good, and came from a roadside stand with a big black pot out front. Just steaming and stewing to a soggy perfection. And now it’s me who is feeling rather soggy.

The bridge across Lake Blackshear, Georgia is about a1/2 mile across. I hug the roadside and pray the logging trucks down run me off the bridge. As the trucks intersect my run, I grab my hat with my sweaty fingers and squint. I am not sure exactly what I am going to do if they get too close. Jump off the bridge? Off into the deep dark waters where fat alligators and black water snakes nest?

I make it across the bridge and then turn into the park. I feel the sweat just pouring down my body. My arms slide against my exposed stomach and my eyes burn from the salt. Even though I am only a mile out, I know without even looking that my face is the color of a tomato with blue veins bulging out.

I laugh as I turn into the park, feeling as if I am some sort of ecologist explaining the food web in the swamp. It starts with the Cypress trees with Spanish moss dripped on them like a child drips sand on a sandcastle. They are the castle for all the bugs. The screaming, buzzing, biting locus, mosquitoes, and hoards of gnats. And the bugs are eaten by the frogs, fish and birds. And the alligators, raccoons, and cougars prey on them. And...

I stop and wonder where the deer come in. And what about the armadillos. Ahh, the armadillos. One of my favorites. A knight in shining armor. Such a funny little creature with ahead like a little dog, beady eyes like a snake, and a shell like a compressed turtle. But these noisy knights of the night are by far much quicker than I could ever run.

A plane disrupts my ecological explanation with a low fly-by. I wonder which crop they are dusting? Pecans, peanuts, lumber, cotton or watermelon. We are after all, just minutes from Plains Georgia, the birth place of Jimmy Carter. And just minutes from the watermelon capital of the US. And just minutes from...

Just minutes from nowhere. Yes, Nowhere, Georgia, I am sure I saw the signs... it's the place with all the red clay, a few old southern style white houses with surrounding ghetto brick houses where the plantation workers live.

Later that night I continue my ecological explanation. It’s 11:30 at night and we are on a boat, out floating along the lake. We hear the bullfrogs singing and I think I see a bat in the light from the stars.“You know what kind of frogs those are?” I ask my sister Lisa. She’s two years older than me and we were pals when we were kids.

My version: she taught me everything, even though I doubt she would ever confess to that.“Tree, I think. Or Bull. Could be either. Suckers are singing, just singing.”

I shut my eyes and think about time. If time were not a sequence or a series of events that go in a specific order, well then we could be anywhere in our lives. I listen to her voice and think back to when were kids, out on Girl Scout outings with the motto, “It’s fun to be green.” Or when we were in our twenties, out at college parties together after running college cross country races. Together. Or when she came to Paris or Seattle for her yearly visits.

I hear her sucking on a cigarette and the glow of the cigarette seems to blend in with the stars.“Hey,” she points, “Did you see that one? That shooting star? Why that’s the biggest one I have ever seen!”

“I must have missed it.” I reply.

“Well it was big. I gotta make a wish. Well I know what it will be.” she says.

I lay back on the boat and look up to the stars. I start to wonder what it will be. She’s found her man and they are getting married next year so it won’t be that. Kids or houses or good fortune I suppose. Enough money to pay the bills. Enough vacation time to enjoy herself. I wonder.

And then the armadillo pops into my head again,as if I am now going to continue on my ecological survey of the swamps in South Central Georgia. I think of his label as the knight in shining armor. And then I whisper out into the deep dark blackness, I am sorry little fellow, but you’ve been replaced I think. Your days are over. She’s got her knight and now she just needs her castle to live in it with her. A castle that is more than Spanish moss dripped over cypress trees. And then I pause. It’s the prince, the prince who lives in the castle. I peer out into the night wonder where the prince of darkness lives.

She sucks on her cigarette again. “Hey you wanna head back now?”

“Yeah, we could go eat some more boiled peanuts.” I say, still holding my stomach from the run I did this morning. Just a few more mushy, salty peanuts.