I think most every kid - or every grownup who still remembers what it was like to be a kid - has one special place they remember out of their childhood, the one special place that they and their family used to go where they had nothing but a good time, and for me and my family that place is Pocahontas State Park just outside of Richmond, Virginia. I remember many, many trips to the park, and out of all those trips I don't have one single bad memory out of them - not one. My sister Cindy can't say that, but I'll get to that directly.
From the time I was around six or so until we moved to Highland Springs in 1966, sometimes on the weekend my family would take trips out to Pocahontas State Park. In the summertime my parents would tell us to put our bathing suits on under our church clothes, and every time they told us to do that the whole morning would take on a different meaning. Sure, we'd still go to church at St. Luke's and we'd still have fun - except for the part where we had to sit through Father Hendrick's sermon, which was torture for a six year old - but we couldn't wait for church to let out so we could head for the park and the lake.
As soon as the service was over we'd pile into the Ford Falcon station wagon and go, and once we got there we'd take off our church clothes and pull out the flip-flops, the inflatable rafts, the lunch baskets and the beach chairs, and we'd troop down the root-strewn dirt path that led to the lake, careful not to step out of our flip-flops along the way. My mother and father would always carry the ice chest down the path, each of them taking one side of the handle, and the rest of us would carry the remaining gear. Once down there we'd blow up the rafts, set up the beach chairs, and then it'd be a race to see which two of the three kids could lay their hands on the two inflatable rafts first. (I don't envy my parents having to referee that particular fight, lemme tell ya.)
Remember what I said about Cindy and a bad memory at the park? Well, it was on one of those summertime Sunday afternoon trips to the lake that she and I were running to get to somewhere in a hurry, and Cindy tripped. She fell face-first down into the sand, mouth wide open, and came up with a mouth full of sand. Not dirt, mind you, but sand - the public lakefront was sand, and Cindy got a mouthful of it. My mother grabbed her up and took her over to the bath house where the water fountain was and spent the better part of twenty minutes helping Cindy rinse the sand out of her mouth.
I bet she was crunching sand between her teeth for a week after that.
It was during this time period that I first encountered something that would stick with me the rest of my life, a certain kind of food that to this day I enjoy just as much as I did when I was a six year old kid sitting on an inflatable raft on the lakefront sand, eating the lunch that my mother had made specifically for the trip the day before. I introduced this Southern delicacy to my New Jersey-born and bred wife more than 37 years later, and now she loves it almost as much as I do.
And that Southern delicacy is cold fried chicken. If you've had it, you know what I'm talking about and no further explanation is necessary.
If you haven't had it, you should - tomorrow. Make the chicken tonight, put it in the refrigerator, and have it cold for lunch tomorrow. Then you'll understand.
One of the things that sticks out in my mind about those trips to the lake is the snack bar, specifically one of the songs that was playing over the public address system the first summer I remember us going there. I don't know if it was released that summer or not, but I do remember that I heard it playing all the time that first summer. The song was "Dang Me" by Roger Miller, and to this day if I hear that song I'm instantly transported back to the lakefront in Pocahontas State Park in the summer of 1963 or thereabouts. (And no, I don't hear that song much anymore.)
In the fall and spring when the lake was closed we'd go to the park in the afternoon and hike the nature trails. My sisters Dorothy and Cindy were both in the Girl Scouts, and one of them had a wicker open-topped backpack that they used with the Scouts. My parents would pack our lunch in this backpack and take it with us, and the girls would take turns carrying it around. I think I carried it once or twice, but I'm not sure about that. In any event my parents still have that wicker backpack, damned near 50 years later.
Anyhow, I remember hiking the trails in the fall, the air just chilly enough to be slightly crisp, just cool enough to where my father and I wore jackets and my mother and sisters wore sweaters. I remember on one trip my father wore his cowboy boots, work pants, a green suede leather jacket with knitted sleeves (that I later inherited and wore until my stomach and chest outgrew it) and a Stetson "Open Road" cowboy hat like LBJ wore. We took a camera with us that day, and somewhere in my father's vast collection of color slides from all of the trips we took is a picture of us standing next to a stream, with my father wearing that green jacket and Stetson hat.
And one of these days when the time is right, you can bet your ass that I'm gonna get me one of those hats, too. But not right now.
Once we moved out of Central Gardens and off of Beck Drive to New Avenue in Highland Springs the trips to the lake and the hiking trails stopped; I guess it was a combination of it being too far away and us kids growing up and developing our own separate interests. I first found the Boy Scouts and then the Civil Air Patrol to occupy my time, and my sisters both found their own interest.
But that doesn't change the fact that we did it, we had a ball, and I'll always have the memories of hot summer afternoons at the lake with Roger Miller singing in the background, and me sitting on an inflatable raft in my bathing suit, eating cold fried chicken and thinking that life just didn't get any better than that.
IHC
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