I've got a buncha stories I only tell people who know me very well,
cause they're the only ones who would believe 'em;
I was just listening to a soundboard,
recorded by a taper friend in Sommerville West Virginia in '93--
and it reminded me of this:
(one of the maybe more believable ones)
In 1974 I had a job tending polo ponies in North Georgia;
my pay was living in an antebellum 20 room plantation house
(with the big columns at the front porch an all), fireplaces in every room emanating from 4 chimneys seated in the basement slave quarters, big original old barn across the dirt road
(slave graveyard over the hill from there),
a big lake in front with a dam and down at the bottom-back
a water turbine generating station (generator long-gone)
but I traced the serial number back to the manufacturer
thanks to the Whole Earth Catalog (they sent me copies of the original paperwork/bill of sale/shipping info to closest "big" town, which wasn't in Georgia) and a newer horse barn with 4 stalls behind the house attached to an original wooden structure I used for a chicken coop (might have been a smokehouse).
Anyway, on the hill behind the chicken coop I had a garden of Colombian plants from seeds right out of those bales of Gold/Red Colombian that was EVERYWHERE back then.
I was in the middle of the garden when I heard a distant rumbling that kept getting louder and louder 'till it was so loud I knew it had to Ragnarok or Armageddon or a tornado or a freight train;
and then the sun disappeared: it got dark;
and a B-25 flew over maybe 100 feet above my head
(maybe 50 feet from the top of the house),
and it wasn't flying horizontally,
it was hugging the hilltops/treetops...
...I sat down right there,
fired up a big one--
and contemplated, uh--
everything...
