Sewanee Review

My first night as cub reporter and they send me to a four-hour County Sewage Hearing. I call that hazing. You try distilling lively prose from Wastewater Issues.

To be safe, I'd worn my best blue thrift-shop blazer. But when I afterwards approached Falls, NC's mayor, he clammed up. I'd asked one question but he heard: I lacked a brogue of sufficient Dixie humidity. He sensed a newbie would have no info worth swapping. I knew nothing yet of hog prices, storm damage costs, proof the Presbyterian pastor kept an open tab at Discount Adult Art. Having been assigned a town of 6,000, I found its every citizen obsessed with one thing only: the other 5,999.

And after five years' reporting here? I talk slower, think faster, scratch anywhere. The blazer? Long since replaced with denim work clothes. People here now know my name because I know theirs. And today, with regret, I leave Falls . . .

This must be my last Herald Traveler column. Our editor has spent years slashing my discursive if clarion copy. He's presently vacationing at Myrtle Beach. Mel has finally agreed to let me "go [End Page 183] long, however many farewell pages." He left one urgent Post-it: If need be, cut the issue's "Want Ads." But "Recent Arrests" and the Hardee's ads are sacred, okay?

I've been summoned to Richmond's big-league paper from this noble farm team. Let me thank you, reader, for your patience in watching a boy from Akron come to consciousness in plain, stark civic view. You have been patient as my accent lost its harder corners. Consonants seem Midwestern fencing now. The South is all nougat vowel.

This much I have learned from our small town: whatever story the Herald sent me out to cover was never the one locals tried telling me instead.

Today's column finally gives the people what they want. This is the tale Falls has pleaded for these five years: our secret "miracle" too long ignored. My last seven weeks have been taken up with the sad facts of the Mahon family drowning. If the reader is tired of this tragic act, imagine how Falls' feature writer feels. In brief, the Mahons, farmers long established in our county, inherited a motorboat. It arrived at night, and the father and mother and five children decided to take said craft for a test spin in their farm's biggest irrigation pond. The eldest son had brought his pistol. He intended to fire off a traditional New Year's Eve round overhead. Somehow the gun discharged into the bottom of the fiberglass boat. No one was hurt, but bullets shattered the boat's underside. This would have meant nothing if any of the Mahons could swim. Shortly after the pistol fired, the motor stalled, and, out that far on water after midnight, the thing slowly sank. Since the nearest neighbors live three miles away, no shouts were heard. Come morning, only a boat trailer hinted what had happened. The Mahon drowning seemed the last tale I would tell here. Then the one printed below took me—after the dredging misery of the Mahon deaths—to heights unguessed. [End Page 184]

This morning I and my cat (named "InkJet," enemy of sparrows, five years' chunkier) head north, leaving behind the story I feel proudest of. It proved my hardest interview to land but will be the easiest to remember.