Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/528216
S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 9 0 A t the back of the 30-acre pond, a labyrinth of dirt roads splintered from the main drag and headed in different directions. We had options, all of them good. We could call the dogs forward to climb the gentle rise of a hillside rimmed with pearl millet and edged with century-old oaks and pines. If we recast the dogs to the left, we'd work a field of broomstraw and millet that meandered past an old tobacco barn. A turn to the right would pass by the lowlands created by the pond's outflow. Switch cane lined both sides of the stream, and their knife-shaped, green-and-white leaves pulsed with every gust of wind, no matter how slight. Bill Webb reminisced while we tried to figure out which way to go. "From the early 1900s through the 1970s my daddy leased parts of the farm to a number of sharecroppers," Bill told me. "This particular section was leased by a man named Roosevelt. He'd grow cotton or tobacco, depending on what fetched the best price at market, and in some years he even grew peaches. See that chimney on top of the hill? Well, one summer night a fire sparked and burned the whole house to the ground. Everyone from the homesteads raced down here to the pond, and they filled and hauled buckets of water. They put out the fire, but the house and its contents were lost. About a week after the house burned down, Roosevelt left the farm. All that's left is the foundation and the chimney, and it's been that way ever since." Bill Webb grew up here, and he not only knows every square inch of the land, but he also has a story to tell about it. "I learned to drive when I was ten," he said. "I couldn't reach the clutch and gas pedals of the pickups, but I could reach 'em in my mama's Corvair. It was a three-speed stick, and I took full advantage of that car. I had no business taking it into some places I did because the Corvair didn't have much clearance. Still, I'd run it through the dirt roads to whichever part of the farm folks were working. There are a lot of stories about that car that I'd best not mention, but it was a great thing for a farm boy." If you're patient, directions sometimes just become Rowdy, the author's seven-year-old English setter, points a covey in a thick stand of millet. chip laughton