CKD and the Tornado
Saturday after leaving Tallahassee, we drove north on US 319 all the way here, wherever we are. Halfway along, we drove through Ocilla, Georgia. Ocilla might seem an odd name, but it's a variation of Osceola. Ocilla has a draw and an emotional claim on me even though I've only been there twice, driving through, the last time in 1950 on a family trip to and from Washington, DC.
About 1920, a couple of years after my father's brother Alfred was drowned in the wreck of the Annie & Jennie in the storm outside the Old Pass of St. Andrews Bay on January 7, 1918, my Weller grandparents Mom and Pop packed up the family and left the St. Andrews Bay house where I now live. The pain of losing Alfred was more than they could bear, and they finally threw in the towel and moved away from the coast. Like many people, they found, though, that one cannot escape from life as it is, anymore than, as Psalm 139 says, one can escape from God; and within ten years they were back in St. Andrews to stay.
Anyway, one evening in 1920 two cars, a Hudson touring car and a Model-T Ford, drove away from the house on Beach Drive (then called Bayview), and headed north through the woods (there were no marked highways) with Mom's chicken cages strapped to the fenders and running boards of both cars, driving until they arrived in Ocilla, Georgia. There, for several formative years, my father grew up a bit, helping Pop, who was the local Ford dealer. Going to the railway depot, unloading the stacks of CKD for "completely knocked down" Model T Fords from the railway box car, assembling them there at the depot, cranking them up and driving them the few blocks to the Ford garage. That was Ocilla, Georgia life for my father in the early 1920s, as he told it to me.
Anything about cars would come to mind of course. But the other things that comes to mind watching this week's aggressive thunderstorms is the tornado. My father remembered the day in Ocilla in the 1920s when they looked out the schoolroom window and watched a tornado reaching down from a heavy thundercloud to the fields and roaring along the horizon between Ocilla and Fitzgerald. I asked him if he could hear it. He said yes, it was close enough that he could hear it and it roared like a freight train. That has come to mind several times during this phase of my Summer of Silent Retreats as I look out across the field in front of me here somewhere north of Ocilla, Georgia, at the low, heavy clouds on the horizon.
TomW
About 1920, a couple of years after my father's brother Alfred was drowned in the wreck of the Annie & Jennie in the storm outside the Old Pass of St. Andrews Bay on January 7, 1918, my Weller grandparents Mom and Pop packed up the family and left the St. Andrews Bay house where I now live. The pain of losing Alfred was more than they could bear, and they finally threw in the towel and moved away from the coast. Like many people, they found, though, that one cannot escape from life as it is, anymore than, as Psalm 139 says, one can escape from God; and within ten years they were back in St. Andrews to stay.
Anyway, one evening in 1920 two cars, a Hudson touring car and a Model-T Ford, drove away from the house on Beach Drive (then called Bayview), and headed north through the woods (there were no marked highways) with Mom's chicken cages strapped to the fenders and running boards of both cars, driving until they arrived in Ocilla, Georgia. There, for several formative years, my father grew up a bit, helping Pop, who was the local Ford dealer. Going to the railway depot, unloading the stacks of CKD for "completely knocked down" Model T Fords from the railway box car, assembling them there at the depot, cranking them up and driving them the few blocks to the Ford garage. That was Ocilla, Georgia life for my father in the early 1920s, as he told it to me.
Anything about cars would come to mind of course. But the other things that comes to mind watching this week's aggressive thunderstorms is the tornado. My father remembered the day in Ocilla in the 1920s when they looked out the schoolroom window and watched a tornado reaching down from a heavy thundercloud to the fields and roaring along the horizon between Ocilla and Fitzgerald. I asked him if he could hear it. He said yes, it was close enough that he could hear it and it roared like a freight train. That has come to mind several times during this phase of my Summer of Silent Retreats as I look out across the field in front of me here somewhere north of Ocilla, Georgia, at the low, heavy clouds on the horizon.
TomW