October 2, 2008
Introduction to “July 24”
This month marks the sixty-third birthday of my late father, Tommy. He died ten years ago at the age of 53, in November 1998, from chronic alcoholism. Only months before dying “unexpectedly”, this Vietnam Veteran would reveal in writing, for the first time, to my family, including his eighty-three-year-old mother and older brother, an unbelievable secret from his exposure to war, in 1968. His confession came as a complete shock and devastated, both, my mother and me. Having long viewed his life as a puzzle to be solved, I never had enough pieces to figure out this complex Jigsaw. This thirty-year-old secret was a bombshell, to say the least. It would serve as a giant and central piece in his adult life, which all other subsequent events and relationships would be colored by. This experience would definitely explain how his life turned out so tragically and the painful impact it would have on our small family.
The following narrative is one of two written stories that he left behind. My mother and I chose to reveal their existence to family and friends upon his death. For over a solid year, we gave out copies of both stories upon request from family and friends, acquaintances and even complete strangers. Sharing his recorded life served as much needed therapy for the pain and suffering that we had long felt, yet we didn’t know exactly why. We refused to let his secret to become ours for even one day. In April 2000, on the eve of the 25th Anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, his story was published in its entirety in the Sunday edition of the (Mobile, AL) Press-Register, my hometown newspaper. Over the past ten years, I have continued to share his stories with hundreds of individuals and do so once more with this group.
Tommy was just one veteran who came home from Vietnam with all ten of his fingers and toes. His troubles weren’t physical in nature. While problems abound around the house, he kept his tracks back to Southeast Asia well covered and camouflaged. I was well aware that he served in the U.S. Marine Corps and went to Vietnam. As a child, I use to play with his metal dog tags. I studied a photo album of him training with the U.K.’s Royal Marines in the Libyan Desert and pictures of him standing on the top deck of a merchant ship. I routinely pulled off the bookcase his yearbook from boot camp at Parris Island, SC each time searching out his handsome portrait dressed in “Blues”. As a student in high school, I broke out his olive green cotton fatigues and wore them around the house. He never uttered one word about anything. Vietnam as a topic of conversation was never once mentioned in our house and his silence should have tipped us off. It never did.
My impression of his deployment to Vietnam was nothing more than a weekly trip to the grocery store for milk and bread. I couldn’t have been more wrong. He was sober for a period time, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t cough up this source of so much guilt, shame and self-destruction. He wasn’t the only humiliated veteran who returned home from the war and suffered in silent violence nor were we the only family that would unknowingly be fighting a losing battle with our soldier and his tormenting Devil.
The current soldiers, serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their families will no doubt have similar issues to face and to resolve. I hope all those in uniform will have the courage to talk and make peace now rather than wait for a lifetime to pass before getting right with their Maker and taking their last breath. My family paid a high price for my father’s service in Vietnam and the many decisions he made afterwards, but he paid the ultimate price with his life.
He was smart in his own right, maybe even a genius. He was well-spoken, making friends easily. He repeatedly received invitations to go fishing, hunting, to play rounds of golf at private clubs including once at the famed Pebble Beach and annual offers to attend the Kentucky Derby with a new friend who served as a director to the J. Graham Brown Foundation in Louisville, KY, which owned part of Churchill Downs. All of these offers came from those well above his social standing.
He could tell a story with the best of them. I always enjoyed hearing him recount fishing and hunting excursions as a young boy in the bayous and fields of north Louisiana. Unable to write my one and only term paper to graduate from high school, I asked him to. A bankrupted homebuilder and lost in life, he reluctantly agreed. His reward for his work was getting the highest grade in my English Literature class, not bad for someone who failed out of college twice, once before life in the U.S. Marine Corps and once more after being honorably discharged.
At the time of his death and funeral, his brother, Jimmy from Louisiana, mentioned to me that his former college classmate at Louisiana Tech University, Stan Tiner, was the managing editor of the Mobile Press-Register. Eager to get his story told, I made an appointment to meet and to share the two stories with Mr. Tiner. Stan also served in the Marine Corps and he too fought in Vietnam. He was skeptically receptive to our meeting and to my father’s story. He was well versed in this subject having read many tales from the soldiers of ‘Nam.
After I quick introduction, I passed my copy of the story across his old wooden desk. Stan leaned back into his chair and began reading. He stopped only once, midway through the essay, to make a comment on something my father wrote about covering his dreadful C-rations with Tabasco sauce before chowing down. Upon completion, Stan’s one and only comment about my father’s story was this, “It isn’t [Ernest] Hemingway.”
I wasn’t expecting any comment of that esteem, but I thought somewhere in his negative critique was a generous compliment. I left our meeting feeling proud and maybe vindicated having watched the life of the man that I loved and called “Dad” never taste one bit of so-called “success.” In his death, the feedback from others has been overwhelmingly kind. I will leave it up to you to draw your own conclusions.
Today, I credit my father with any gifts that I may be enjoying as a writer, which have given me a great sense of purpose. It’s been said that there is a genetic link in writing between fathers and sons. I decided to share his story so you could better understand mine. Our past, our history explains our present – as individuals, as families and as a nation. It’s not knowledge that’s gives one power, but insight.
His late-in-life revelation has forever changed how I see him, as my father and as a human being, war and myself. He purged a deadly tumor that decades of drinking could no longer suppress. I have no doubts that he wanted to take this story of great shame with him to the grave and he almost accomplished his goal. How fortunate our family was to learn what caused him so much agony and finally brought to an end ours. Many tears have been shed over his life and this story to fill up a bathtub.
Enjoy,
Ted
P.S. It is my intention to share his second and final story with this audience in November.
Note: The following story was published posthumously in its entirety, in April 2000, on the Eve of the 25th Anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War appearing in the Mobile Press Register.
July 24, 1998
July 24
By
Tommy Burnett
The following is true. It happened thirty years, three months, and four days ago. This is an account of an event that has affected my life. It is about living with shame and guilt, about a man of fifty-two, searching for a peaceful place in the valley, on the other side of the mountain. It is neither about justification nor an excuse. This is about redemption.
I have never told this to another human being.
On April 20, 1968, I killed four innocent people, maybe five. Two were children, their mother, and an old man. If the severely injured young girl survived, she has lived without a leg. I will never know their names.
I have spent my lifetime trying to hide from the memory of that morning. Guarding this secret has been expensive; I have treated it as a valued possession, and allowed it to dictate the path in life that I have stumbled down. It has cost me my family. I have lost every meaningful relationship that I have ever had, or wanted, because I have refused to allow myself relief from this torment. Guilt and Shame have replaced my friends, and today are my constant companions.
On April 19, 1968, I was twenty-two years old. I was aboard a marine helicopter flying to a remote and unnamed place north of the City of Hue, near the banks of the Perfume River. In fifteen days, I would be leaving Vietnam and returning home, to be honorably discharged, and within three weeks, I would be back in school. In the previous seven months, I never had the occasion to fire my weapon at the enemy nor been in a situation where my life, and the lives of others, would depend on my reaction under fire. That night was to be my first test. Regrettably, it would be the first of my many failings.
Fate had been kind to me during my time in the Marine Corps. I always had easy and interesting jobs and had the opportunity to see much of the world. My job in Vietnam was that of a courier of classified information. I was a special delivery mailman, transporting the secrets of military leaders in high places to combatants in the field. I had a special pass that allowed priority access to any aircraft going anywhere and had flown nearly every place imaginable in the five northern provinces of South Vietnam. Because of restrictions involved with delivering classified information, I had orders to never stay in the field overnight. Usually, if flying aboard a chopper, the pilot would wait on the ground until my materials were delivered and signed for before resuming flight. On April 19, 1968, an unkind fate would keep me at a remote and unnamed place, north of the City of Hue, near the banks of the Perfume River.
I joined the Marine Corps on a dare and bet. My father, unhappy with my performance in college and life in general, was the inspiration. While watching Huntley and Brinkley on the NBC evening news on July 25, 1965, a piece about marines in Vietnam had just aired, he turned to me with irritation and anger in his voice and said, "I'll bet you a thousand bucks that you don't have the guts to join the marines. I dare you to do it." The next morning I enlisted for three years.
My reasons for enlisting were never political or about fighting communists. I joined for noble, gallant, romantic, and unrealistic notions. This was to be an adventure, the opportunity to prove myself a man. The Marine Corps had always been about honor and loyalty, about toughness.
When the radioman informed me that the helicopter would not be returning for me until the following morning, I remember feeling excited. I was finally going to get to spend a night in the bush with the enemy. The dispatch that I had delivered to the company commander contained intelligence reports of a North Vietnam Army unit that was believed to be in the immediate area. It was the same NVA unit that had been responsible for the wholesale slaughter of nearly a thousand South Vietnamese civilians in Hue during the Tet offensive. As I ate a can of boned chicken, laced with Tabasco sauce from the "C" rations that I always carried, the executive officer was briefing the platoon leaders about the latest intelligence report. Various patrols were to be deployed after dark and the remainder of the company would standby on high alert.
Within the small compound there were thirty or forty Vietnamese refugees that were there for protection from the NVA, and they were situated in bunkers near the center of the encampment. A staff sergeant directed me to a bunker not too far from the refugees, gave me five magazines of ammunition and five hand grenades. I had thrown one live hand grenade in my life in infantry training at Camp Lejune.
The compound was a maze of trenches and sand-bag bunkers, holes in red clay. Razor-wire ringed the perimeter. M-60 machine guns sat atop sand bags. Weary-eyed and unwashed young men, sitting in small groups smoking cigarettes, were engaged in conversation about one topic, going home. I had visited hundreds of places like this, always leaving before darkness, never understanding the feeling of desolation and loneliness that arrived with the night.
A light rain began falling with the approaching darkness and I wrapped in my olive drab poncho. As I sat alone in the bunker, I remember my thoughts like it was yesterday. Fifteen more days, fifteen more days, I cursed the helicopter pilot for not returning for me. The thought of dying in a muddy red hole, near the banks of the Perfume River, surrounded by strangers and strange people, never entered my mind.
A young marine joined me for a brief visit shortly after dark. He was a Private First Class, I believe his name was Ralph, from College Park, Georgia, and he liked to talk, a lot. He had been in Vietnam for three weeks, had a girl friend back home, liked to work on old cars, and he wrote his momma and daddy every day. He was eighteen years old and would not live to see the next sunrise.
I lost many friends in Vietnam: Jerry Caldwell, Peter Moskos, Jeff Blackwell, and others, names that I cannot, or will not, recall. I had seen death -- Viet Cong, NVA, civilians, and too many Americans. I had flown with the dead on airplanes and on helicopters. The vision of metal caskets, strapped together eight at a time, being loaded with a forklift on C-141's at DaNang will never escape me. Except when it stared me in the face, I did not think about death.
I have known fear and it has many faces. It was hearing your father drive into the garage after he had been drinking, knowing that he had learned of a failing grade in Algebra. It is standing alone in a room full of strangers at a cocktail party. It is the telephone ringing in the middle of the night, your teenage son not yet home. It is the deputy, knocking on the door with the summons from the IRS for a bill that you cannot pay. It is a momentary slip, a tip, a revelation that someone may uncover your secret. Fear is all of the above, and much more. I have lived with these fears. For thirty years I have tried to describe the fear of April 20, 1968. Never have I been successful.
The attack came after midnight. The first barrage of mortar rounds landed outside of the perimeter of the compound. The second salvo landed behind me, squarely in the middle of the Vietnamese refugees. I can still hear the screams of the injured and dying, of children crying, and of the sounds of chaos and confusion. In a lull in the incoming, we rushed to the aid of the victims, moving the living and less severely wounded to other bunkers. The staff sergeant who gave me the hand grenades directed me to another bunker closer to the perimeter. A woman, her three children, and an old man were relocated to a bunker to my right.
One of the patrols that had been sent out after dark was ambushed and the sounds of rifle fire could be heard in the distance. I could hear radio chatter but could not understand what was being said. I remember feeling totally calm, almost as if what was happening around me was a dream. I wrongly assumed that the attack was over.
Sometime later, a round landed directly in front of me, no fragments touched me but I was covered in mud, temporarily blinded by the blast. Another series of rounds were falling all around me and small arms fire began pouring in from outside of the razor-wire. To my right, in the trench where the Vietnamese were huddled, I could hear the cries of the young children. Their screams were terrifying. I cannot imagine the thoughts of a child in that situation. The explosions were so close and so loud that I can still hear the ringing in my ears.
A bunker to my left sustained a direct hit. Other marines were trying to help the wounded survivors. I returned fire in the direction of the muzzle flashes and, in a matter of only a few minutes, the barrel on my M-16 was so hot that I burned my hands trying to reload the magazines with fresh ammunition. Mortar rounds and bullets were literally flying everywhere around me. The North Vietnamese were moving closer to our perimeter and I knew that we were on the verge of being over-run. I heard someone yell for a hand grenade to be thrown to the wire. I could not see the wire but, because nobody responded, I pulled the pin and threw it as far as I could.
This attack stopped almost as fast as it started. For whatever reason, the NVA pulled back.
The pause was awful. Fear, with stark realizations of our situation began creeping in. The horror of a battlefield cannot be described in human words. I have read many accounts of fear produced in the heat of battle; none have ever given justice to the reality.
Fear has smells, of human excrement, urine, vomit and spent gun powder. It is the sounds of small children hyperventilating between screams of terror, of young boys crying and praying to God for His help, of a ringing in my ears that I have heard for thirty years. Fear tastes like stale stomach acid, laced with Tabasco sauce, as it crawls up your throat toward your dry mouth. It is white-hot. It is looking into eyes that are helpless, hopeless, and empty. Fear does not understand honor and loyalty, or toughness.
The wounded were taken to a make-shift first aid station near the command post, dead marines were dragged to an abandoned bunker and the refugees were left where they died. With my poncho, I covered the blood-soaked body of an eighteen year old from College Park, Georgia, who would never write another letter to his momma and daddy.
The final attack started about an hour before daylight. Mortar rounds again preceded the small arms fire. Within a matter of moments, the NVA were so close that you could hear them yelling at us and each other. It was clear that their plan was to try to breach our perimeter. Reinforcements from other areas in the compound had joined those of us who remained in the bunkers. I was alone in my mud-filled hole and between the mortar blast, all I could hear was those poor children crying and the incessant ringing in my ears. The first NVA soldier that I saw was crawling on his stomach, almost to the wire. I threw two grenades in his direction and never saw him again.
Expecting to see other enemy soldiers at any moment, I placed another grenade in my muddy and wet palm. I heard someone off to my right yell for a grenade to be thrown to the wire. I pulled the pin. As I tried to throw it in the direction of the perimeter, it slipped out of my hand, off to my right, toward the trench where young children were crying. Three seconds later, my life was changed forever.
My guiding and moral compass has always been my mother. Her motto of: "always do the right thing, when you are wrong or have done wrong, stand up like a man and admit it," were more than just words to me. Her axiom had been instilled in me as a child and was a part of the fabric of my very being. I can thank the Baptists for introducing me to the feelings of guilt and shame. I should have paid more attention to the sermons on forgiveness.
To this very day, I cannot recall how we broke contact with the NVA. I am sure that I had reached a point of total mental and emotional shutdown. I vividly remember sitting in a wet and muddy hole, my face covered in mud, sweat, and tears streaming down my face. I remember the silence. I remember praying to God to let me hear the cries of some children sitting in a hole next to me, knowing that there would be none. I remembered my mother's words, "always do the right thing."
I did not have the courage to look. A navy medical corpsman would be the first to find the bodies of the four dead and to administer first aid to the little girl who had lost her leg. She was removed from the bunker and rushed to the first aid station, in shock because of the loss of so much blood. I do not know if she lived or died. I have spent a lifetime trying to forget the sight of the bodies of four innocent people, laying motionless in a muddy red hole, in a remote and unnamed place, near the banks of the Perfume River.
Less than two weeks later, I would find myself flying to California for my honorable discharge, carrying with me, concealed from my conscious sight, an emotional stowaway that has become to heavy to bear. My first battleground had been in Vietnam; I had suffered no loss of limb or blood. My final fight, the one with the most casualties, would be fought over the next thirty years. The wounds would be real and ugly; Purple Hearts would not be awarded, only broken ones.
What happened in the early morning hours of April 20, 1968 was an accident. I can accept that. I never had any intentions of harming anyone, except those trying to take my life. What I cannot excuse is the stark fact that four or five humans lost their lives that day and I am responsible. The innocent people no longer exist, they are gone forever. I can rationalize that my hands were wet and muddy, that the circumstances were horrible, that I was afraid. No amount of justification will give those people the opportunity to ever draw another breath.
That morning I did not do the right thing. Instead of accepting the responsibility for my actions, I did and said nothing. I took the easy way out. I allowed those around me to believe that an incoming mortar round had found the bunker and that their deaths were the result of hostile fire. My guilt and shame stems not only from the fact that I killed innocent people but that I did not have the courage and honor to admit my mistake.
I have spent my life punishing myself, and those closest to me, for what happened that morning. My punishment has been severe. I have felt unworthy of any the rewards of a rich and full life. I have expected failure as part of my penalty. I had sworn to never harm another person but I have spent thirty years destroying the lives of those that I care for.
I dedicated years to a life of recovery in AA wanting to deal with my demons of drink, always silently understanding that I could never tell another human being the exact nature of my wrongs. I could be honest with myself, but lacked the courage to tell another. With age, the self-loathing and self-hatred that I feel are manifested in my negativity and burst of anger that I do not understand. Depression is the cousin of my companions Shame and Guilt. I have locked myself away for weeks at a time, crippled with feelings so dark that I cannot bear to think about them.
It is time to move on.
Copyright © 2007, 2010 All Rights Reserved. “July 24” by Tommy Burnett
Thursday, November 29, 2007
The Camp
November 2, 2008
Introduction to “The Camp”
“The Camp” was first written in the spring of 1995 while my father was working as a project manager for a Louisiana-based construction company on a construction project in Warner Robins, Georgia (GA). His firm was a subcontractor in the construction of a new Frito-Lay® plant. During his downtime while at the job site and possibly in his apartment he penned the following story. I have always described it to others as being about the rise and fall of our beloved fishing and duck hunting camp and the fall of my father’s life.
I first laid eyes on this early draft on a weekend visit that April. At the time, I was a college student who was only weeks away from graduating with my B.S. in Forestry from Auburn University, which is located in the rural college town of Auburn, Alabama (AL). Having not seen him in well over a year, we made plans for me to make the nearly four-hour drive over to stay with him.
Years earlier, he had been unable to find any work in his profession in Mobile, AL while separated from my mother. Out of money and feeling pretty dejected, he reluctantly moved back “home” to live with his mother and to hopefully begin a fresh start in Shreveport, LA. While his body made the four hundred and sixty mile one-way trip, his heart and soul never left the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay. He got the job through his brother, a local attorney, who happened to know the construction company’s owner, both, were members in some civic organization.
On a Friday afternoon, I made the drive from Auburn to Warner Robbins first heading south to Columbus, GA for forty-five minutes before turning east and traversing down many back roads winding through some of the most uninteresting farm country that I have ever seen over the next two hours. We agreed to meet at the red clay job site where I found several construction trailers clumped together upon arrival and a towering structure that was coming to life off to my right.
The plant’s concrete walls stood some three stories tall and the roof was already in place. The inside of the building was still bare bones with only the “primed” sheetrocked walls subdividing a large production area, which would soon to be producing the company’s latest and most top-secret potato chip, in the rear of the building while the front offices faced the street. After my brief tour, we walked back to his trailer.
As we entered his office, he sat down behind his desk while I found a seat on the desk’s front side. Almost immediately, my dad mentioned having written something as he simultaneously slid a typed document across the tabletop straight at me to read. This visit was already emotionally charged for me and I suspect that was the case for him, as well. After all, I was “a chip off the old block” and we had never been apart for this length of time before. For me, there was always a gravitational pull when coming around him that temporary filled some void inside me.
We always seemed to share more interests than either one of us shared with his wife and my mother. We were more like brothers, pals than father and son. He was the older irresponsible one that was always getting into trouble while I learned to blend into the woodwork, both, at home and at school. I don’t recall ever getting a stern lecture from him over my performance after a football or basketball game, while fishing, hunting or playing rounds of golf with him. My troubles with him came primary from my struggles with school, my teachers and the notes they would send home with me, which produced at least one spanking, in the fourth grade, and some years later a near fistfight.
The circumstances that sent him packing and moving back to north Louisiana could have set off a powder keg of tears for both of us. Neither one of us wanted his life, his career nor our family to become so fractured. I don’t recall if the story had a title or if it was added years later. I picked up the narrative and began reading it.
After digesting only the first few sentences and realizing what I was reading the story began to produce a flood of memories and emotions inside of me causing my eyes to quickly begin watering up. I was consciously fighting back the tears as I read on and he sat back in his chair in silence. The camp was built in 1986. At the time, my father was a general contractor whose shaky company built residential homes, commercial buildings including metal.
He longed for a fishing camp or some escape up in the cypress swamps of the Mobile River Delta. As a child, I remember taking many fishing trips and boat rides on the delta’s meandering rivers and creeks always launching our small boat from Dead Lake Marina enjoying the sunny day and sustaining ourselves on an ice chest filled with Shasta® soft drinks in their many flavors, several cans of Vienna® sausages and a box of Saltine® crackers. Sounds tasty, doesn’t it? I liked drinking the grape sodas, black cherry, cola or whatever I could grab from out of the cooler while he always preferred to drink only Crème sodas.
The Mobile River Delta consists of approximately 20,323 acres of water just north of Mobile Bay. Second only in size to the Mississippi River Delta, the Mobile Delta is an environmental showplace that is 30 miles long and 12 miles wide. It covers more than 200,000 acres of swamps, river bottomlands and marshes. Congress named the Mobile Delta a National Natural Landmark in 1974; fewer than 600 sites have received this same honor. It is formed by the confluence of the Alabama and the Tombigbee Rivers. The Mobile River Delta is a complex network of tidally influenced rivers, creeks, bays, lakes, wetlands, and bayous. The Mobile Delta functions as a sponge, filtering impurities from 20% of the nation's fresh water.2
It is home to all sorts of wildlife including Bald eagles, ospreys, owls, herons, brown pelicans, Wood ducks and Mallards, Black bears, Bobcats, whitetail deer, the American alligator, snakes – water moccasins, turtles and a primitive, air-breathing fish called a gar. The lower delta with its shallow bays is an estuary producing a bounty of seafood including Flounder, brown shrimp and blue crabs. The delta supplies the food chain of larger fish, shore birds and humans living in and around Mobile Bay before flowing out into the Gulf of Mexico passing Alabama’s barrier islands along the way.2
Between trolling over fishing holes and running up and down the rivers we would occasionally pass by old camps sitting high above the river’s banks. At the invitation of one friend and our CPA, Marshall Burden, my dad spent many days, nights and weekends at Marshall’s camp while hunting fowl in the winter, fishing in the spring and fall, playing cards, drinking beer and sipping on whiskey at night. I remember paying many friendly visits with my father to Mr. Burden’s camp before heading back to the boat launch.
His place was a palace in the eyes of the boys, but not fit for the ladies. It was hardly fit for rats. Going to the restroom always required cranking an old red cast-iron hand pump to fill the commode’s exposed tank with river water in order to flush. The ceiling inside the sleeping quarters had pink installation sagging and in some places falling down onto a top bunk. In a few areas of the room it served as an obstacle to be dodged while passing from the front of the camp to the backside where the kitchen was located. The kitchen windows looked out over a thick hardwood forest with green palmetto bushes mushrooming up from the wet forest floor. Every camp had a boat dock and Marshall ever so patriotic had a flagpole at the end of his where he proudly flew an American flag.
Each morning, in this silent swamp, Marshall would play “The Star Spangle Banner” over his loud speaker while sitting on his deck in his boxer shorts, wearing a white undershirt and drinking a cup of coffee. My father loved to tell the story of how Marshall, either out of irritation or simply as a prank, prematurely kicked off an early morning bass fishing tournament with an exploding bottle rocket. Some boats were already huddled out in the river and cocked while others were still filing out of the mouth of Dead Lake. His early start sent boats speeding off while leaving others confused and out of place. Once tournament officials figured out what happened they cruised over to his camp and asked him to never do that again.
The camps of the Mobile Delta are few and far between on the rivers, which creates an instant camaraderie among the owners, be they business owners, lawyers or blue collar city workers, all make an effort to get to know their neighbors and look out for each other’s property. To anyone who spends any amount of time “lost” in the delta for a single day or for the weekend it can lead to an instant romance, a love affair for this remote, quiet and Godly sanctuary. To visit, to roam where Native Americans once lived off the land and paddled the rivers and creeks in curved out cypress trunks for millenniums is truly inspiring and humbling. I am sure that my father’s experiences as a frequent visitor made him all the more hungry for an invitation to join an existing camp or to one day build his own.
Some of these wood-framed, rustic habitats, built in 1950’s, have been passed down from the first generation to the next and in one case that I know of one of them was recently passed down once more – to an old classmate, his siblings and to the grandchildren of the other original members. We hoped that our camp would enjoy a similar fate, but it did not happen. Our camp and many others were lost to Washington politics and to federal mitigation from the destruction of protected wetlands in the construction of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway during the 1970’s and early 80’s. Unbeknownst to my father and to the other members, not owning the marshy land beneath our camp would force us to one day surrender the keys to the front door when the feds came a calling with cash in hand and a law to carry out. In January 1991, some five years after sinking the first pilings we were forced to gather up our stuff and to move out. Everyone arrived at the camp with an empty boat ready to load it up except for my father. He was the only principal to be a “no show.” Once more, his inaction during an uncomfortable, but critical situation proved “par for the course.”
The opportunity to build the camp came about only when dad hired, Mike Jones, a college student majoring in building science at Auburn. They met through Mike’s father. My dad’s company had recently built an office complex on a barge for Scott Paper Company where Mike, Sr. was a district manager. This new asset allowed Scott’s Timberlands Division to float an office based at their Mobile, AL paper mill up the Alabama River System to their vast land holdings to oversee timber operations while remaining in direct communications with their land-based offices and the Mobile mill.
My father ever so generous and never one to say no brought Mike, Jr. on board. Mike as it turns out would the first and last company intern. He worked the summer of ‘85 and in the following fall quarter. Prior to heading back to Auburn, Mike and my father while possibly fishing in the delta made several scouting trips for the perfect site to build a camp. At the time, Mike, Sr.’s Timberlands Division oversaw the company land in question. Camps were few and far between many were old with relatively few new ones in existence. Some camps in the delta owned outright the land beneath them while most leased the land from Scott.
There was great pressure on Scott to lease out these campsites. Long after getting the go-ahead to build and by the time of near completion of our camp, my father learned that Scott had already passed a rule against leasing out any more land. We were the first to build a camp in many years and the second to last one before losing our rights to use it. We were forced to sell our camp to the federal government where it was then passed off to a state conservation agency before being abandoned and falling into disrepair after being gutted by looters.
In 1997, my father left Shreveport, LA and returned to the Eastern Shore to live out what would be his final years. After receiving “July 24, 1998” in the mail, I made arrangements to drive down from Atlanta, GA, the following August weekend to speak with him for the first time in over a year and a half. It was an emotional visit and turned out to be my last chance to make peace with him and myself. Irritated and disappointed with his drunken conduct over dinner one night, I let him have a lifetime of suppressed thoughts on our ride back to his apartment. As I drove off that would be the last time that I would ever see him alive. I am grateful for the brief time that we spent together.
In November 1998, he was to drive up to Atlanta, GA for a family gathering over Thanksgiving. He never made the trip and was found dead, over the weekend, in his apartment by police. On Sunday, I got an early morning confirmation when my mother called. I reluctantly answered the phone on her second attempt. I drove home to prepare for his funeral on the following day. For many years, I was always concerned about his welfare while he was alive and drinking. Now, I had the burden of how best to give him a final and respectable farewell. How do you eulogize the town drunk who died penniless? That was the $64,000 question.
After arriving at my mother’s house, she showed me my father’s latest version of “The Camp.” It turns out that they had been in communications in the recent weeks and that he had reworked the story’s ending before mailing her another copy. I sat down on the couch and read the story once again. I was moved to tears at both its beauty and the new reality. We both agreed that eulogizing him with his own words felt right and rang true to our spirit rather than simply asking an out-of-touch friend of his to speak on behalf of our family. Reading the story came with an inherent risk. We didn’t know how our extended family and friends would receive it, but there didn’t seem to be any other safe options.
We asked a family friend to lead this rather basic service in the chapel of a local funeral home. He was also given the task of reading “The Camp.” Within some thirty minutes, the service was over. I was eager to know what the reaction was from his old friends. I was the first family member to exit the front pew and walk to the back of the chapel. As I was heading for the lobby a mutual friend of, both, my father and me intercepted me. Sara, who was some fifteen years my father’s senior, had known him during his sober days in the 1980’s and followed his long struggle afterwards.
Her words were bittersweet and confirmed what my mother and I had long sensed. Sara stated point blank, in her raspy voice, “Ted, your daddy missed his calling and can I have a copy of that story?” Her declaration warmed my heart, but made me want to cry. I quickly reflected on my own dysfunctional career and hoped that I wouldn’t be the next man in our family to miss the mark. The response among family and friends was much the same. There were immediate and feverish requests for copies of the story and suggestions that we get it published echoed within the funeral home.
What could have ended on a sad and somber note as we all piled back into our car for the ride home turned out to be another uplifting and rewarding experience. When word of its existence hit the streets requests poured in for over a year. The risk of publicly sharing our pain and his suffering through “The Camp” and “July 24” has been greatly rewarded. Sharing the stories has brought us much relief. His sad death has given us a chance to reclaim our freedom and to move on with our lives. It finally brought to an end our family’s decade long suffering.
Our family isn’t alone. I have heard way too many similar tales from others. This country is in a lot of emotional and spiritual pain. We’ve denied it for centuries and we are paying for it, daily. The present financial crisis is a further confirmation of our insanity. What we’re doing as a nation, as an empire no longer works. It has collapsed. We don’t need change; we need a revolution. With such rotten guts, what’s the cure?
Tell your story; validate your life and live authentically. In the end, that’s all anyone of us really has.
Enjoy,
Ted
See attachment: The Camp
November 1998
The Camp
By
Tommy Burnett
It's gone now.
The last time I saw it, it was a tattered skeleton, roof blown away, rafters weathered gray and exposed to the hot, humid, south Alabama summertime. Windows were broken, the front door swinging in the gentle afternoon breeze. The dock, now rotted, only the front deck was still intact. It had endured hurricanes, floods, divorces, personal failures, and lost friendships. Now, it stood lonely, abandoned, broken, nearly naked, and without dignity.
It broke my heart to see it.
Considered by everyone with any knowledge of the delta to be one of the finest camps around; almost majestically it stood eight feet above the soggy swampland on the banks of Big Briar Creek, between the Mobile River to the west and the Tensaw to the east. Interstate-65 was north and the causeway and Interstate-10 south. Only way to get there was by boat. On a map, it was just about the geographical center of the delta.
On my map, it is still in the center of my soul.
Grown men and their sons had built it. Pat Sims appropriately called it our "fort." Southern boys have always built forts; it was the first for some, the last for others. The camp, like the forts of our youth, was built on dreams, imagination, hard work, and virtually no money. None of us were carpenters. We owned an assortment of hammers, saws, and tools but we were not carpenters. We were all chiefs. We all enjoyed being in charge, telling each other what to do. We were planners, organizers, managers, lawyers. We debated and argued for hours about the best way to do things, often doing very little. Work parties were generally followed by some reflective beer drinking. On a couple of occasions, the reflective beer drinking preceded the work outings and production on those days was limited to picking up the empty beer cans before returning home.
It took a year of weekend labor to build. The logistics of hauling pilings, lumber, and metal roofing in our small skiffs was both a nightmare and dangerous. Boats were nearly sunk and swamped on more than one occasion. We carried our boys and our dogs. We fell off of the roof, off of the dock, and out of ours boats. Our boys handed us boards, helped with nailing, and learned the art of skillful southern cussing. The dogs were a pain in the ass.
The finished product was pure delta luxury. The camp had one large open room, a closed bathroom with toilet, lavatory, and shower stall, a kitchen with a gas range, sink, and cabinets, a fireplace and pot-bellied coal stove. The furnishings were bunks for ten, tables, sofas, and plenty of rocking chairs. Electricity was a generator, water had to be hauled from home. Photographs of past hunting and fishing trips adorned the walls. An American flag was always flying from the deck railing when anyone was in residence. Every fort had to have a flag.
A large tree stood on the west side of the deck that served as both shade and annual nesting for a family of wood ducks. Raccoons, egrets, and a thousand bullfrogs were our neighbors. The area surrounding the camp was not suitable for man. It was jungle. The thick lush foliage made wandering around afoot impossible. Hostile critters, snakes and alligators, were so numerous that we worried when our dogs ventured off. It was a zillion miles from civilization, thirty minutes when you reached the hard road.
The Mobile-Tensaw River delta is one of the splendors of south Alabama. Approximately fifty-five miles long and eight to twelve miles wide, it is an estuary that twenty percent of the fresh water in America flows through. It is a maze of rivers, streams, and creeks that all eventually empty into Mobile Bay. Wildlife abounds in the form of deer, black bear, beaver, osprey, bald eagles, and hundreds of species of water fowl. The brackish water is teeming with black bass, bluegill, speckled trout and redfish.
The lower part of the delta is marsh with open bays with names like Polecat, Chuckfee, and Bay John and are bordered by tall marsh grasses with very few trees. Further north, our camp was located in the swampland that harbored the majestic cypress and countless varieties of lowland vegetation. The wildflowers are beyond imagination in the fall; beautiful purples, oranges, and rust. Springtime lilies and lily pads are so thick that you can walk on them. The creeks and streams, many with unofficial and colloquial names like Short Paddle, Houseboat, and Two-Dip, meander quietly, softly, and slowly, along with the ebb and flow of tidal forces and gravity. To the unappreciative, it is just a swamp.
To me, it will always be heaven.
Camps, like forts are never finished. There were always things to do, special projects to build, one more gizmo that would make life easier. By December 1986, with the fireplace and stove installed, we concluded that it was time for our grand opening. On a Friday, with duck season to open the next day, we organized for our first night. Some of us left work early to make final preparations and others waited until our boys were out of school.
I will never forget the look on our boys’ faces when they walked into the camp that night. It was Santa Claus, the first surprise birthday party, pure and raw emotional excitement. All were wide-eyed and clearly pleased. Our sons had made honest contributions to the building and we purposely made each one a part of the camp. Unconsciously, we all thought that the camp would be passed from one generation to the next.
There were ten of us there the first night, a couple of dogs, and more gear, guns, shotguns shells, sleeping bags, and crap than you have ever seen. Cabinets were stocked with enough food for weeks, "emergency" provisions in case we were ever stranded. In front of a roaring fire, we each took turns bragging about how nice the camp had turned out and recounted tales of our trials and tribulations in the course of construction. Whiskey was drunk, cigars were smoked, light lies and laughter filled the room.
After a feast fit for king, we each staked out our bunks and claimed our individual spaces that would remain the same for years. We loaded the fireplace, turned out the Coleman lanterns, and climbed into our sleeping bags for our first night in the delta. We were all twelve years old, far too excited for restful sleep. Dogs scratched and licked, jokes were cracked, some snored, some farted. We all giggled. It was your first night at summer camp.
I can not recall a harsh word ever spoken at the camp. With the assortment of personalities of members, it is amazing how well we all got along. The extended members of our families, our dogs, could not tolerate one another. Mine, a male Chesapeake Retriever named Bach was, indeed, a handsome creature. Ramsay Stuart's male Black Labrador, Knight, looked like a field trial winner. In truth, neither was good for anything except so-so companionship. I do not recall either dog ever retrieving anything more than a stick thrown from the dock. Knight was probably the best decoy retriever in the delta but he could never quite get a handle on picking up real ducks. Bach's claim to fame was getting lost for a month, causing more grief and aggravation than I am willing to admit, before finally finding his way home. A fort needed dogs. We had two. They hated each other.
Visitors were always welcomed. One of my favorites was Albert "Torch" Hollingsworth. He loved to hunt and fish and he always brought with him enough irreverence and devilment to keep things lively for a few days. Our boys and their friends enjoyed his company, too, and respectfully addressed him as "Mr. Torch." Late one night, after the adults had retired to sleeping bags, Torch was holding court with my son and several of his friends over a final few hands of poker. Torch, after a hard day of hunting and drinking, mostly drinking, was clearly on the same level as the twelve year old boys at the table. He was rambling on with his standard tall tales about various matters of absolutely no consequence when, after a pause in the conversation, I heard one of the youngsters innocently yet seriously ask him, "Mr. Torch, did anyone ever tell you that you are full of shit?" I can still hear the howling from the direction of the sleeping bags.
We laughed a lot at the camp, mostly at each other.
My Dad visited the camp in our first spring. We spent two nights and three days enjoying the riches and splendors of the delta. We caught a few bass but I think he really enjoyed exploring and the sight-seeing. Slow boat rides, drifting in the current, listening to the birds and gurgling of the water, was good for your soul. I could see a peacefulness and tranquility in his deep blues eyes that made him a stranger to me. We were at ease; didn't talk much, communicated a lot. It was his last fishing trip.
He was an intense man. I often described him as a "no bullshit kind of guy." He was a product of the Great Depression and it affected his every action. He was cautious, deliberate, conservative, and deep down I believe that he always retained the fears of his youth. I never remember him ever referring to growing up except to talk about working. Maybe he never really got to just be a boy. Don't think that he ever had a fort.
He gave me my first Pleuger Supreme and was in his presence when I landed my first largemouth. As a child he took me on many fishing trips but I do not remember those experiences as being a lot of fun. It was serious business, more like work. I never remember laughing, or as Ted and I would sometimes do, mimic and make fun of one another, never feelings of closeness or oneness. Fishing, for me, was rarely about catching fish. My dad had a purpose for everything he ever did.
I didn't. I never felt his approval or acceptance. I loved him and I know that he loved me. I will never understand why we could not look at each other and say it.
Our wives had tolerated our weekend absences from home during the construction of the camp, but when it was finished, you could feel a certain irritability creeping in as they watched us pack our bags on Fridays for another two days of just the guys. The problem was that we all talked too much. They found out that we were having fun without them and, naturally, it was more than they could bear. Finally, they all ganged up on us and, reluctantly, we agreed to sponsor an afternoon outing with the wives.
The camp was not a condo at the beach. Curtains did not match. The tablecloth and the carpet clashed. Flushing the toilet was a trip to the dock to fill a five gallon bucket. These girls were Junior Leaguers.
Our first coed trip was on New Years Day.
Our standard launching point, Hurricane Landing, was the first taste of what the delta was about for some of these ladies. Hurricane was ninety percent beer joint and ten percent fishing camp. The sign above the cash register said it all: "Beer is not just for breakfast anymore." One of the regulars, once described as "the fat fellow, the one with more tattoos than teeth," was not untypical of many of our new friends and fellow delta-dwellers. It was amusing to watch our wives reactions as our comrades hailed us by our first names as we launched our boats.
The family outings were fun. We were pleased that our wives accepted and approved of our fort as a worthwhile endeavor. In hindsight, we should have utilized it more for that purpose.
With the passage of time, the camp was being used with less frequency. Our boys were growing up. Girls, sports, and other activities were more important that spending weekends in the delta. Others had obligations, both personal and professional, that prevented regular attendance. Instead of weekends filled with lively conservation, laughter, and the rancor and banter of the early years, the mood at the camp was changing.
There was a pending divorce, a business failure that destroyed a long and serious friendship as well as other personal tragedies. I was the only person to go to the camp regularly. I spent many weekends there alone, contemplating my future and, silently, secretly, reluctantly, facing the demons of my past. I was afraid that the camp and me had seen our best days.
My last duck hunt was a solitary one. The delta was never more beautiful. It was a clear crisp winter morning, the cypress trees, still dressed in their finest fall colors were incredible, brilliant shades of tans and browns. The sky and water were as clear and blue as I have ever seen. It was not a good "duck" day; none were flying. It did not matter. That morning I had a feeling that I was sitting in church, alone. It was God's real church, the one He created and crafted with His own hands.
Later that morning, as I raised my shotgun toward the two approaching wood ducks that had ventured too close, it suddenly occurred to me: "Why are you doing this?" I quickly pulled the gun away from my shoulder and watched as those two beautiful birds gracefully and gently landed among the decoys. In my life, I had already killed too many of God's innocents.
It was a spiritual moment, with very special and private meanings, one that I treasure.
Near the end, the days of friendship, fellowship, and good times were long gone. I neither fished nor hunted but I would go there every time that I had the opportunity. The camp, like me, and most of my relationships, had fallen into a state of severe deterioration. The camp, like the forts of my youth, had become my special hiding place.
Being alone in a desolate and remote place can be a peaceful and tranquil experience. It can also be emotionally terrifying. I was never afraid of the dark, the desolation, isolation, or loneliness. I was afraid of everything else.
My world had crashed. I was too confused, too full of rage and resentment, of self-pity, to try to sort out how to pick up the pieces. I had deserted my family, physically and emotionally. I started drinking again after years of recovery in A.A. The deep dark secrets of my past were haunting me like a bad nightmare that would not go away. Guilt and Shame were my only companions. Too lost and blinded in my own pain, I could not pick up the tools that I knew were available to repair the damage.
Both for me, and the camp.
The last time I saw it, it was a tattered skeleton, roof blown away, rafters weathered gray and exposed to the hot humid south Alabama summertime. Windows were broken, the front door swinging in the gentle afternoon breeze. The dock, now rotted, only the front deck was still intact. It had endured hurricanes, floods, divorces, personal failures, and lost friendships. Now, it stood lonely, abandoned, broken, nearly naked, and without dignity.
It reminded me of an old and long-lost friend, someone that I once knew very well.
I am available for speaking, consulting and political advising. My other essays can be viewed at my blog @ http://www.toxicnation.blogspot.com/. All essays are available in a MS Word format upon request. I can be contacted by email: tebjr1@yahoo.com.
Copyright © 1998, 2010. All Rights Reserved. “The Camp” by Tommy Burnett
References – Introduction to “The Camp”:
Alabama Wildlife Federation
http://www.alabamawildlife.org/stewardship/mobile_delta_purchase/wildlife.asp
Dauphin Island Sea Lab
http://www.disl.org/
Outdoor Alabama: Fish and Fishing in the Mobile Delta:
http://www.outdooralabama.com/Fishing/freshwater/where/rivers/delta/
Introduction to “The Camp”
“The Camp” was first written in the spring of 1995 while my father was working as a project manager for a Louisiana-based construction company on a construction project in Warner Robins, Georgia (GA). His firm was a subcontractor in the construction of a new Frito-Lay® plant. During his downtime while at the job site and possibly in his apartment he penned the following story. I have always described it to others as being about the rise and fall of our beloved fishing and duck hunting camp and the fall of my father’s life.
I first laid eyes on this early draft on a weekend visit that April. At the time, I was a college student who was only weeks away from graduating with my B.S. in Forestry from Auburn University, which is located in the rural college town of Auburn, Alabama (AL). Having not seen him in well over a year, we made plans for me to make the nearly four-hour drive over to stay with him.
Years earlier, he had been unable to find any work in his profession in Mobile, AL while separated from my mother. Out of money and feeling pretty dejected, he reluctantly moved back “home” to live with his mother and to hopefully begin a fresh start in Shreveport, LA. While his body made the four hundred and sixty mile one-way trip, his heart and soul never left the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay. He got the job through his brother, a local attorney, who happened to know the construction company’s owner, both, were members in some civic organization.
On a Friday afternoon, I made the drive from Auburn to Warner Robbins first heading south to Columbus, GA for forty-five minutes before turning east and traversing down many back roads winding through some of the most uninteresting farm country that I have ever seen over the next two hours. We agreed to meet at the red clay job site where I found several construction trailers clumped together upon arrival and a towering structure that was coming to life off to my right.
The plant’s concrete walls stood some three stories tall and the roof was already in place. The inside of the building was still bare bones with only the “primed” sheetrocked walls subdividing a large production area, which would soon to be producing the company’s latest and most top-secret potato chip, in the rear of the building while the front offices faced the street. After my brief tour, we walked back to his trailer.
As we entered his office, he sat down behind his desk while I found a seat on the desk’s front side. Almost immediately, my dad mentioned having written something as he simultaneously slid a typed document across the tabletop straight at me to read. This visit was already emotionally charged for me and I suspect that was the case for him, as well. After all, I was “a chip off the old block” and we had never been apart for this length of time before. For me, there was always a gravitational pull when coming around him that temporary filled some void inside me.
We always seemed to share more interests than either one of us shared with his wife and my mother. We were more like brothers, pals than father and son. He was the older irresponsible one that was always getting into trouble while I learned to blend into the woodwork, both, at home and at school. I don’t recall ever getting a stern lecture from him over my performance after a football or basketball game, while fishing, hunting or playing rounds of golf with him. My troubles with him came primary from my struggles with school, my teachers and the notes they would send home with me, which produced at least one spanking, in the fourth grade, and some years later a near fistfight.
The circumstances that sent him packing and moving back to north Louisiana could have set off a powder keg of tears for both of us. Neither one of us wanted his life, his career nor our family to become so fractured. I don’t recall if the story had a title or if it was added years later. I picked up the narrative and began reading it.
After digesting only the first few sentences and realizing what I was reading the story began to produce a flood of memories and emotions inside of me causing my eyes to quickly begin watering up. I was consciously fighting back the tears as I read on and he sat back in his chair in silence. The camp was built in 1986. At the time, my father was a general contractor whose shaky company built residential homes, commercial buildings including metal.
He longed for a fishing camp or some escape up in the cypress swamps of the Mobile River Delta. As a child, I remember taking many fishing trips and boat rides on the delta’s meandering rivers and creeks always launching our small boat from Dead Lake Marina enjoying the sunny day and sustaining ourselves on an ice chest filled with Shasta® soft drinks in their many flavors, several cans of Vienna® sausages and a box of Saltine® crackers. Sounds tasty, doesn’t it? I liked drinking the grape sodas, black cherry, cola or whatever I could grab from out of the cooler while he always preferred to drink only Crème sodas.
The Mobile River Delta consists of approximately 20,323 acres of water just north of Mobile Bay. Second only in size to the Mississippi River Delta, the Mobile Delta is an environmental showplace that is 30 miles long and 12 miles wide. It covers more than 200,000 acres of swamps, river bottomlands and marshes. Congress named the Mobile Delta a National Natural Landmark in 1974; fewer than 600 sites have received this same honor. It is formed by the confluence of the Alabama and the Tombigbee Rivers. The Mobile River Delta is a complex network of tidally influenced rivers, creeks, bays, lakes, wetlands, and bayous. The Mobile Delta functions as a sponge, filtering impurities from 20% of the nation's fresh water.2
It is home to all sorts of wildlife including Bald eagles, ospreys, owls, herons, brown pelicans, Wood ducks and Mallards, Black bears, Bobcats, whitetail deer, the American alligator, snakes – water moccasins, turtles and a primitive, air-breathing fish called a gar. The lower delta with its shallow bays is an estuary producing a bounty of seafood including Flounder, brown shrimp and blue crabs. The delta supplies the food chain of larger fish, shore birds and humans living in and around Mobile Bay before flowing out into the Gulf of Mexico passing Alabama’s barrier islands along the way.2
Between trolling over fishing holes and running up and down the rivers we would occasionally pass by old camps sitting high above the river’s banks. At the invitation of one friend and our CPA, Marshall Burden, my dad spent many days, nights and weekends at Marshall’s camp while hunting fowl in the winter, fishing in the spring and fall, playing cards, drinking beer and sipping on whiskey at night. I remember paying many friendly visits with my father to Mr. Burden’s camp before heading back to the boat launch.
His place was a palace in the eyes of the boys, but not fit for the ladies. It was hardly fit for rats. Going to the restroom always required cranking an old red cast-iron hand pump to fill the commode’s exposed tank with river water in order to flush. The ceiling inside the sleeping quarters had pink installation sagging and in some places falling down onto a top bunk. In a few areas of the room it served as an obstacle to be dodged while passing from the front of the camp to the backside where the kitchen was located. The kitchen windows looked out over a thick hardwood forest with green palmetto bushes mushrooming up from the wet forest floor. Every camp had a boat dock and Marshall ever so patriotic had a flagpole at the end of his where he proudly flew an American flag.
Each morning, in this silent swamp, Marshall would play “The Star Spangle Banner” over his loud speaker while sitting on his deck in his boxer shorts, wearing a white undershirt and drinking a cup of coffee. My father loved to tell the story of how Marshall, either out of irritation or simply as a prank, prematurely kicked off an early morning bass fishing tournament with an exploding bottle rocket. Some boats were already huddled out in the river and cocked while others were still filing out of the mouth of Dead Lake. His early start sent boats speeding off while leaving others confused and out of place. Once tournament officials figured out what happened they cruised over to his camp and asked him to never do that again.
The camps of the Mobile Delta are few and far between on the rivers, which creates an instant camaraderie among the owners, be they business owners, lawyers or blue collar city workers, all make an effort to get to know their neighbors and look out for each other’s property. To anyone who spends any amount of time “lost” in the delta for a single day or for the weekend it can lead to an instant romance, a love affair for this remote, quiet and Godly sanctuary. To visit, to roam where Native Americans once lived off the land and paddled the rivers and creeks in curved out cypress trunks for millenniums is truly inspiring and humbling. I am sure that my father’s experiences as a frequent visitor made him all the more hungry for an invitation to join an existing camp or to one day build his own.
Some of these wood-framed, rustic habitats, built in 1950’s, have been passed down from the first generation to the next and in one case that I know of one of them was recently passed down once more – to an old classmate, his siblings and to the grandchildren of the other original members. We hoped that our camp would enjoy a similar fate, but it did not happen. Our camp and many others were lost to Washington politics and to federal mitigation from the destruction of protected wetlands in the construction of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway during the 1970’s and early 80’s. Unbeknownst to my father and to the other members, not owning the marshy land beneath our camp would force us to one day surrender the keys to the front door when the feds came a calling with cash in hand and a law to carry out. In January 1991, some five years after sinking the first pilings we were forced to gather up our stuff and to move out. Everyone arrived at the camp with an empty boat ready to load it up except for my father. He was the only principal to be a “no show.” Once more, his inaction during an uncomfortable, but critical situation proved “par for the course.”
The opportunity to build the camp came about only when dad hired, Mike Jones, a college student majoring in building science at Auburn. They met through Mike’s father. My dad’s company had recently built an office complex on a barge for Scott Paper Company where Mike, Sr. was a district manager. This new asset allowed Scott’s Timberlands Division to float an office based at their Mobile, AL paper mill up the Alabama River System to their vast land holdings to oversee timber operations while remaining in direct communications with their land-based offices and the Mobile mill.
My father ever so generous and never one to say no brought Mike, Jr. on board. Mike as it turns out would the first and last company intern. He worked the summer of ‘85 and in the following fall quarter. Prior to heading back to Auburn, Mike and my father while possibly fishing in the delta made several scouting trips for the perfect site to build a camp. At the time, Mike, Sr.’s Timberlands Division oversaw the company land in question. Camps were few and far between many were old with relatively few new ones in existence. Some camps in the delta owned outright the land beneath them while most leased the land from Scott.
There was great pressure on Scott to lease out these campsites. Long after getting the go-ahead to build and by the time of near completion of our camp, my father learned that Scott had already passed a rule against leasing out any more land. We were the first to build a camp in many years and the second to last one before losing our rights to use it. We were forced to sell our camp to the federal government where it was then passed off to a state conservation agency before being abandoned and falling into disrepair after being gutted by looters.
In 1997, my father left Shreveport, LA and returned to the Eastern Shore to live out what would be his final years. After receiving “July 24, 1998” in the mail, I made arrangements to drive down from Atlanta, GA, the following August weekend to speak with him for the first time in over a year and a half. It was an emotional visit and turned out to be my last chance to make peace with him and myself. Irritated and disappointed with his drunken conduct over dinner one night, I let him have a lifetime of suppressed thoughts on our ride back to his apartment. As I drove off that would be the last time that I would ever see him alive. I am grateful for the brief time that we spent together.
In November 1998, he was to drive up to Atlanta, GA for a family gathering over Thanksgiving. He never made the trip and was found dead, over the weekend, in his apartment by police. On Sunday, I got an early morning confirmation when my mother called. I reluctantly answered the phone on her second attempt. I drove home to prepare for his funeral on the following day. For many years, I was always concerned about his welfare while he was alive and drinking. Now, I had the burden of how best to give him a final and respectable farewell. How do you eulogize the town drunk who died penniless? That was the $64,000 question.
After arriving at my mother’s house, she showed me my father’s latest version of “The Camp.” It turns out that they had been in communications in the recent weeks and that he had reworked the story’s ending before mailing her another copy. I sat down on the couch and read the story once again. I was moved to tears at both its beauty and the new reality. We both agreed that eulogizing him with his own words felt right and rang true to our spirit rather than simply asking an out-of-touch friend of his to speak on behalf of our family. Reading the story came with an inherent risk. We didn’t know how our extended family and friends would receive it, but there didn’t seem to be any other safe options.
We asked a family friend to lead this rather basic service in the chapel of a local funeral home. He was also given the task of reading “The Camp.” Within some thirty minutes, the service was over. I was eager to know what the reaction was from his old friends. I was the first family member to exit the front pew and walk to the back of the chapel. As I was heading for the lobby a mutual friend of, both, my father and me intercepted me. Sara, who was some fifteen years my father’s senior, had known him during his sober days in the 1980’s and followed his long struggle afterwards.
Her words were bittersweet and confirmed what my mother and I had long sensed. Sara stated point blank, in her raspy voice, “Ted, your daddy missed his calling and can I have a copy of that story?” Her declaration warmed my heart, but made me want to cry. I quickly reflected on my own dysfunctional career and hoped that I wouldn’t be the next man in our family to miss the mark. The response among family and friends was much the same. There were immediate and feverish requests for copies of the story and suggestions that we get it published echoed within the funeral home.
What could have ended on a sad and somber note as we all piled back into our car for the ride home turned out to be another uplifting and rewarding experience. When word of its existence hit the streets requests poured in for over a year. The risk of publicly sharing our pain and his suffering through “The Camp” and “July 24” has been greatly rewarded. Sharing the stories has brought us much relief. His sad death has given us a chance to reclaim our freedom and to move on with our lives. It finally brought to an end our family’s decade long suffering.
Our family isn’t alone. I have heard way too many similar tales from others. This country is in a lot of emotional and spiritual pain. We’ve denied it for centuries and we are paying for it, daily. The present financial crisis is a further confirmation of our insanity. What we’re doing as a nation, as an empire no longer works. It has collapsed. We don’t need change; we need a revolution. With such rotten guts, what’s the cure?
Tell your story; validate your life and live authentically. In the end, that’s all anyone of us really has.
Enjoy,
Ted
See attachment: The Camp
November 1998
The Camp
By
Tommy Burnett
It's gone now.
The last time I saw it, it was a tattered skeleton, roof blown away, rafters weathered gray and exposed to the hot, humid, south Alabama summertime. Windows were broken, the front door swinging in the gentle afternoon breeze. The dock, now rotted, only the front deck was still intact. It had endured hurricanes, floods, divorces, personal failures, and lost friendships. Now, it stood lonely, abandoned, broken, nearly naked, and without dignity.
It broke my heart to see it.
Considered by everyone with any knowledge of the delta to be one of the finest camps around; almost majestically it stood eight feet above the soggy swampland on the banks of Big Briar Creek, between the Mobile River to the west and the Tensaw to the east. Interstate-65 was north and the causeway and Interstate-10 south. Only way to get there was by boat. On a map, it was just about the geographical center of the delta.
On my map, it is still in the center of my soul.
Grown men and their sons had built it. Pat Sims appropriately called it our "fort." Southern boys have always built forts; it was the first for some, the last for others. The camp, like the forts of our youth, was built on dreams, imagination, hard work, and virtually no money. None of us were carpenters. We owned an assortment of hammers, saws, and tools but we were not carpenters. We were all chiefs. We all enjoyed being in charge, telling each other what to do. We were planners, organizers, managers, lawyers. We debated and argued for hours about the best way to do things, often doing very little. Work parties were generally followed by some reflective beer drinking. On a couple of occasions, the reflective beer drinking preceded the work outings and production on those days was limited to picking up the empty beer cans before returning home.
It took a year of weekend labor to build. The logistics of hauling pilings, lumber, and metal roofing in our small skiffs was both a nightmare and dangerous. Boats were nearly sunk and swamped on more than one occasion. We carried our boys and our dogs. We fell off of the roof, off of the dock, and out of ours boats. Our boys handed us boards, helped with nailing, and learned the art of skillful southern cussing. The dogs were a pain in the ass.
The finished product was pure delta luxury. The camp had one large open room, a closed bathroom with toilet, lavatory, and shower stall, a kitchen with a gas range, sink, and cabinets, a fireplace and pot-bellied coal stove. The furnishings were bunks for ten, tables, sofas, and plenty of rocking chairs. Electricity was a generator, water had to be hauled from home. Photographs of past hunting and fishing trips adorned the walls. An American flag was always flying from the deck railing when anyone was in residence. Every fort had to have a flag.
A large tree stood on the west side of the deck that served as both shade and annual nesting for a family of wood ducks. Raccoons, egrets, and a thousand bullfrogs were our neighbors. The area surrounding the camp was not suitable for man. It was jungle. The thick lush foliage made wandering around afoot impossible. Hostile critters, snakes and alligators, were so numerous that we worried when our dogs ventured off. It was a zillion miles from civilization, thirty minutes when you reached the hard road.
The Mobile-Tensaw River delta is one of the splendors of south Alabama. Approximately fifty-five miles long and eight to twelve miles wide, it is an estuary that twenty percent of the fresh water in America flows through. It is a maze of rivers, streams, and creeks that all eventually empty into Mobile Bay. Wildlife abounds in the form of deer, black bear, beaver, osprey, bald eagles, and hundreds of species of water fowl. The brackish water is teeming with black bass, bluegill, speckled trout and redfish.
The lower part of the delta is marsh with open bays with names like Polecat, Chuckfee, and Bay John and are bordered by tall marsh grasses with very few trees. Further north, our camp was located in the swampland that harbored the majestic cypress and countless varieties of lowland vegetation. The wildflowers are beyond imagination in the fall; beautiful purples, oranges, and rust. Springtime lilies and lily pads are so thick that you can walk on them. The creeks and streams, many with unofficial and colloquial names like Short Paddle, Houseboat, and Two-Dip, meander quietly, softly, and slowly, along with the ebb and flow of tidal forces and gravity. To the unappreciative, it is just a swamp.
To me, it will always be heaven.
Camps, like forts are never finished. There were always things to do, special projects to build, one more gizmo that would make life easier. By December 1986, with the fireplace and stove installed, we concluded that it was time for our grand opening. On a Friday, with duck season to open the next day, we organized for our first night. Some of us left work early to make final preparations and others waited until our boys were out of school.
I will never forget the look on our boys’ faces when they walked into the camp that night. It was Santa Claus, the first surprise birthday party, pure and raw emotional excitement. All were wide-eyed and clearly pleased. Our sons had made honest contributions to the building and we purposely made each one a part of the camp. Unconsciously, we all thought that the camp would be passed from one generation to the next.
There were ten of us there the first night, a couple of dogs, and more gear, guns, shotguns shells, sleeping bags, and crap than you have ever seen. Cabinets were stocked with enough food for weeks, "emergency" provisions in case we were ever stranded. In front of a roaring fire, we each took turns bragging about how nice the camp had turned out and recounted tales of our trials and tribulations in the course of construction. Whiskey was drunk, cigars were smoked, light lies and laughter filled the room.
After a feast fit for king, we each staked out our bunks and claimed our individual spaces that would remain the same for years. We loaded the fireplace, turned out the Coleman lanterns, and climbed into our sleeping bags for our first night in the delta. We were all twelve years old, far too excited for restful sleep. Dogs scratched and licked, jokes were cracked, some snored, some farted. We all giggled. It was your first night at summer camp.
I can not recall a harsh word ever spoken at the camp. With the assortment of personalities of members, it is amazing how well we all got along. The extended members of our families, our dogs, could not tolerate one another. Mine, a male Chesapeake Retriever named Bach was, indeed, a handsome creature. Ramsay Stuart's male Black Labrador, Knight, looked like a field trial winner. In truth, neither was good for anything except so-so companionship. I do not recall either dog ever retrieving anything more than a stick thrown from the dock. Knight was probably the best decoy retriever in the delta but he could never quite get a handle on picking up real ducks. Bach's claim to fame was getting lost for a month, causing more grief and aggravation than I am willing to admit, before finally finding his way home. A fort needed dogs. We had two. They hated each other.
Visitors were always welcomed. One of my favorites was Albert "Torch" Hollingsworth. He loved to hunt and fish and he always brought with him enough irreverence and devilment to keep things lively for a few days. Our boys and their friends enjoyed his company, too, and respectfully addressed him as "Mr. Torch." Late one night, after the adults had retired to sleeping bags, Torch was holding court with my son and several of his friends over a final few hands of poker. Torch, after a hard day of hunting and drinking, mostly drinking, was clearly on the same level as the twelve year old boys at the table. He was rambling on with his standard tall tales about various matters of absolutely no consequence when, after a pause in the conversation, I heard one of the youngsters innocently yet seriously ask him, "Mr. Torch, did anyone ever tell you that you are full of shit?" I can still hear the howling from the direction of the sleeping bags.
We laughed a lot at the camp, mostly at each other.
My Dad visited the camp in our first spring. We spent two nights and three days enjoying the riches and splendors of the delta. We caught a few bass but I think he really enjoyed exploring and the sight-seeing. Slow boat rides, drifting in the current, listening to the birds and gurgling of the water, was good for your soul. I could see a peacefulness and tranquility in his deep blues eyes that made him a stranger to me. We were at ease; didn't talk much, communicated a lot. It was his last fishing trip.
He was an intense man. I often described him as a "no bullshit kind of guy." He was a product of the Great Depression and it affected his every action. He was cautious, deliberate, conservative, and deep down I believe that he always retained the fears of his youth. I never remember him ever referring to growing up except to talk about working. Maybe he never really got to just be a boy. Don't think that he ever had a fort.
He gave me my first Pleuger Supreme and was in his presence when I landed my first largemouth. As a child he took me on many fishing trips but I do not remember those experiences as being a lot of fun. It was serious business, more like work. I never remember laughing, or as Ted and I would sometimes do, mimic and make fun of one another, never feelings of closeness or oneness. Fishing, for me, was rarely about catching fish. My dad had a purpose for everything he ever did.
I didn't. I never felt his approval or acceptance. I loved him and I know that he loved me. I will never understand why we could not look at each other and say it.
Our wives had tolerated our weekend absences from home during the construction of the camp, but when it was finished, you could feel a certain irritability creeping in as they watched us pack our bags on Fridays for another two days of just the guys. The problem was that we all talked too much. They found out that we were having fun without them and, naturally, it was more than they could bear. Finally, they all ganged up on us and, reluctantly, we agreed to sponsor an afternoon outing with the wives.
The camp was not a condo at the beach. Curtains did not match. The tablecloth and the carpet clashed. Flushing the toilet was a trip to the dock to fill a five gallon bucket. These girls were Junior Leaguers.
Our first coed trip was on New Years Day.
Our standard launching point, Hurricane Landing, was the first taste of what the delta was about for some of these ladies. Hurricane was ninety percent beer joint and ten percent fishing camp. The sign above the cash register said it all: "Beer is not just for breakfast anymore." One of the regulars, once described as "the fat fellow, the one with more tattoos than teeth," was not untypical of many of our new friends and fellow delta-dwellers. It was amusing to watch our wives reactions as our comrades hailed us by our first names as we launched our boats.
The family outings were fun. We were pleased that our wives accepted and approved of our fort as a worthwhile endeavor. In hindsight, we should have utilized it more for that purpose.
With the passage of time, the camp was being used with less frequency. Our boys were growing up. Girls, sports, and other activities were more important that spending weekends in the delta. Others had obligations, both personal and professional, that prevented regular attendance. Instead of weekends filled with lively conservation, laughter, and the rancor and banter of the early years, the mood at the camp was changing.
There was a pending divorce, a business failure that destroyed a long and serious friendship as well as other personal tragedies. I was the only person to go to the camp regularly. I spent many weekends there alone, contemplating my future and, silently, secretly, reluctantly, facing the demons of my past. I was afraid that the camp and me had seen our best days.
My last duck hunt was a solitary one. The delta was never more beautiful. It was a clear crisp winter morning, the cypress trees, still dressed in their finest fall colors were incredible, brilliant shades of tans and browns. The sky and water were as clear and blue as I have ever seen. It was not a good "duck" day; none were flying. It did not matter. That morning I had a feeling that I was sitting in church, alone. It was God's real church, the one He created and crafted with His own hands.
Later that morning, as I raised my shotgun toward the two approaching wood ducks that had ventured too close, it suddenly occurred to me: "Why are you doing this?" I quickly pulled the gun away from my shoulder and watched as those two beautiful birds gracefully and gently landed among the decoys. In my life, I had already killed too many of God's innocents.
It was a spiritual moment, with very special and private meanings, one that I treasure.
Near the end, the days of friendship, fellowship, and good times were long gone. I neither fished nor hunted but I would go there every time that I had the opportunity. The camp, like me, and most of my relationships, had fallen into a state of severe deterioration. The camp, like the forts of my youth, had become my special hiding place.
Being alone in a desolate and remote place can be a peaceful and tranquil experience. It can also be emotionally terrifying. I was never afraid of the dark, the desolation, isolation, or loneliness. I was afraid of everything else.
My world had crashed. I was too confused, too full of rage and resentment, of self-pity, to try to sort out how to pick up the pieces. I had deserted my family, physically and emotionally. I started drinking again after years of recovery in A.A. The deep dark secrets of my past were haunting me like a bad nightmare that would not go away. Guilt and Shame were my only companions. Too lost and blinded in my own pain, I could not pick up the tools that I knew were available to repair the damage.
Both for me, and the camp.
The last time I saw it, it was a tattered skeleton, roof blown away, rafters weathered gray and exposed to the hot humid south Alabama summertime. Windows were broken, the front door swinging in the gentle afternoon breeze. The dock, now rotted, only the front deck was still intact. It had endured hurricanes, floods, divorces, personal failures, and lost friendships. Now, it stood lonely, abandoned, broken, nearly naked, and without dignity.
It reminded me of an old and long-lost friend, someone that I once knew very well.
I am available for speaking, consulting and political advising. My other essays can be viewed at my blog @ http://www.toxicnation.blogspot.com/. All essays are available in a MS Word format upon request. I can be contacted by email: tebjr1@yahoo.com.
Copyright © 1998, 2010. All Rights Reserved. “The Camp” by Tommy Burnett
References – Introduction to “The Camp”:
Alabama Wildlife Federation
http://www.alabamawildlife.org/stewardship/mobile_delta_purchase/wildlife.asp
Dauphin Island Sea Lab
http://www.disl.org/
Outdoor Alabama: Fish and Fishing in the Mobile Delta:
http://www.outdooralabama.com/Fishing/freshwater/where/rivers/delta/
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