Once upon a time, when I was young and had small children to feed, my husband, Joe, lost his job. For the next 3 months we put food on the table by picking up aluminum cans and selling them. Aluminum cans back then paid more by the pound than they do now.

For 3 months we lived on that and then he found a job. For the next few months, while we recovered from the downtime, I took my two children with me and picked up more aluminum. Along with the cans, I discovered that a lot of clean aluminum could be recovered from trash dumps. Pots and pans, window frames, old siding, even burnt wiring from trailer fires. We lived in a remote part of a remote county and there were lots and lots of such dump sites. People are shameless.



At one location I finished gleaning the aluminum and got into the car to leave. In the process of making a Y turn, my front tires got bogged down. Repeated attempts to back away from it only sunk the front end in deeper and deeper. I got out to examine the situation and discovered that I had gotten the front end into the periphery of a sand bog. It had enough growth around it to be modestly camouflaged, but it was plainly visible as I stood there looking at it. It was roundish and maybe 20 feet across. My front wheels were up to the hubs. My back wheels were still on more or less firm ground. The length of my car was maybe half of the total width of the bog.

Might I add, nowadays even homeless people can have cell phones. Back then it was not so. Back then when you were out in the woods alone, you were just out in the woods alone.

Well, the way I had it calculated, me and my two children were stuck in the woods at the edge of the bog. Being stuck out in the middle of it would not be substantially different. So I got in the car, put it in low gear and took off into the bog. We did some truly wild fishtailing. The children looked at me, to see what I thought of this, so they would know what to think of it. I smiled at them and chuckled. Oh what a ride, hee hee.

Maybe 2 minutes … LONG minutes … and the front end bumped up on the solid ground on the other side. The rear end followed shortly. Then off we went, looking for another dump.


more stories, plus biscuit and fudge recipes and photos of wood carvings on my website
Cromwell Long
http://backwaterart.tripod.com

• Location: the Georgia piney woods
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