Fear

Imagine a dark, narrow, tree-lined road in Northern Georgia. It's 4 a.m. and rain is beating on the windshield faster than the wipers can brush it away. Roar, swish, roar, swish. I'm half asleep and half not. The sudden sound of my mother's voice startles me. "This doesn't look right. What did that last road sign say?" she said more to herself than to me. I was 13 that summer of 1957, and although accustomed to the annual two-day road trip to visit relatives in the South, I couldn't always be counted on to navigate.1

We had stopped the night before in the first place we saw outside of the mountains. It was a modest, independent motel with metal lawn chairs in front of each door and a diner on one end, the kind that would soon fade from the landscape and be replaced by a Holiday Inn Express or Super 8. We awoke before dawn in the morning because we couldn't sleep and were anxious to reach our destination. We were pleasantly surprised to find that the diner was open all night. As we ate breakfast, dishes clattered and other early risers chatted with us under the bright fluorescent lights about where we were from and where we were going. Maybe that's why the rainy pre-dawn is so dark and frightening now.2

With a sickening slapping sound the road, which is no longer paved, turns to mud under our tires. In the same instant, blinding headlights loom large and bright from behind. The car passes us and then stops suddenly across the road, blocking the way ahead. Two men emerge and slowly walk toward our car. We check the doors to confirm that they are locked, but we do not feel safer. By now I can see the tobacco-stained teeth of one of the men in the glaring headlights. 3

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Before I can speak, my mother shifts the car into reverse and turns our long Buick around on the narrow, dark road. "Pray we don't get stuck in this red Georgia clay", she whispers. In a matter of seconds we are speeding back to the highway we should have turned onto in the first place. As we pass the road signs at the highway intersection, it appears one of the signs has been tampered with. Had these men deliberately changed the signs to trap their prey? I never knew the answer, and we never spoke of that morning again. 5