Rock and Roll on Gum Springs Road

It is nearly impossible to imagine a world without all the technology and electronic gizmos that surround us today.  What if they were all gone, even television and telephones?  What would you possibly do for entertainment?  The James kids found plenty to entertain themselves.  Some of them say that is what the family farm was all about.  Grandpa and Grandma knew that the farm was not big enough to provide food and income for the large family.  They also knew that it would provide plenty of hard work to keep all those children out of trouble.  Well, most of the time anyway.

When these kids went for a road,trip it meant walking down the road.  One of the most common and eventful road trips was down to Parthenon.  They walked down to Parthenon at least once a week to attend church.  Some of the boys have said they didn’t care that much about going to church, but it was about the only entertainment around.   They walked, ran, and played all the way down to town and all the way home, throwing rocks, talking and laughing as they went.  Sometimes, a rock was just too big to throw.  So, they would give it a roll.

Uncle Lex describes rock rolling as finding a large round rock on top of a hill or ridge and sending it down the hill.  He and his brothers, Lytle and Gerald, would pry and dig around on a large rock until it was dislodged.  Then, with just a little persuasion, gravity and inertia would take over and away she went; crashing trees, brush and anything else between the rolling boulder and the bottom of the hill.

Gum Springs Road is the main thoroughfare to Parthenon.  But, in those days, all of the hills were covered with trails and smaller pathways.  So, when one took off down to Parthenon, he might not just go down the big main road.  One path is out “the Narrows” (pronounced more like narras).  It is a nearly flat road out a long extremely narrow ridge.  It is a much easier walk until the last quarter-mile.  Then, you descend almost vertically into the Parthenon area.  It requires a billy goat or a James boy to make it up or down that near cliff- like slope.

One Sunday afternoon, Lex, Gerald and Lytle were playing along the Narrows on the way back from Parthenon when somebody spotted a huge rock and said, “Let’s roll that sucker!”  “You gotta be kiddin’, that thing must weigh a ton!” “Awh come on you big babies, we can do it!”  It was huge, maybe three or four foot across and eight to fourteen inches thick.  It would take a lot of work and it did probably weigh four or five hundred pounds. But, if they could get it up on its edge and pointed down hill?  Wow, look out below!  For the next half- hour or so, they clawed, pried, and dug around the monster rock until finally it stood upright on the edge of the ridge ready to make rock rolling history.

The boys stood back and admired their work for a minute and then with all the strength they could muster they sent the mighty destroyer down the mountain.   Small trees were swatted to the ground by the rolling thunder.  Limbs cracked and snapped as the massive stone picked up speed.  Soon it was out of sight but still in hearing range.  “Man, I never dreamed it would go that far!”  “Wow. It’s still a goin.’”  “You think it’s ever gonna stop?”  “What’s down there?”  “The road.” …………“The road?”………… “THE ROAD!!!”  “Good Lord! What if someone is on the road?”  They could still hear timber crashing in the distance but somehow it was not as funny as it had been just seconds ago.  “Hey boys, it’s not just the road.  I think we are right above Ole man Casey’s place.”   Sure enough, they had started the boulder down from directly above Mr. Casey’s house.  Finally, they could no longer hear it.  One looked at the others and ask, “Do you think she stopped or has she gone so far down the mountain that we just cain’t hear it anymore?”  “I don’t know about that, but one thing I do know is that we better skedaddle.”  And they did.

As usual, they could not stay away and returned to the scene of the crime to survey the damages.  It looked as though a two to three foot wide tornado had come straight down the hill over a quarter of a mile to the grader ditch.  When the rock hit that ditch it went airborne and landed right in the middle of Gum Springs Road.  It then skidded across Casey’s small yard and right up to the back door of the house.  They tell me old man Casey used that slab as the back step for as long as he lived there. 

Fortunately, no one was hurt and Mr. Casey got a new back step. They were just that close to rolling a rock through the old man’s house.  Some days you are lucky to be a James and others you are just James lucky!

And that's the way I heard it on the mountain,
Tony Peoples