An adventure! A road trip! The 1970s…before the days of the GPS, cell phones, free long distance, or the internet… Picture a mom, a dad, and a kid — embarking on a 9-hour drive to find friends that had packed up seven kids in an old school bus and moved from California to the southeast, sending only their new mailing address, “route 2” in their new city, a small town in the mountains of Tennessee. A spur-of-the-moment adventure. A happy reunion. How hard could it be?
So nine long hours later, having driven overnight. we arrived in the downtown area of a hilly metropolis boasting 16,000 people. Our friends had moved fairly recently so were not listed in any phone book (and might not have had a phone yet, as I recall). What we knew: they lived on route 2 in a rural area and had arrived in a school bus which they were likely still living in. So, armed with that information, we stormed the post office to ask where route 2 might be. After giving their name and the other pieces of information, the gentleman at the post office provided an address and a rough hand-drawn map of the route (which turned out to be about 50 miles long), and off we went. After winding through the hills for what seemed like hours, we finally discovered a mailbox emblazoned with the street address numbers. Nice little suburban ranch house. No lumbering school bus parked in the driveway. We knocked on the door. It was not them.
Back to the post office we went. Wearily, we sought out the gentleman who had provided directions and explained our plight. We showed him the envelope with the return address of our friends (name and route 2), and he began to laugh. “Oh”, he exclaimed, “you meant Donkin, Dee-oh-in-kay-eye-in. I thought you meant Duncan, Dee-yew-in-see-ay-in!” But, alas, no address was available, so he sent us back out to traverse rural route 2 in hopes of coming upon the mailman who would surely know where to find our friends.
After unsuccessfully coming upon the mail truck, we eventually pulled into a general store for some refreshments and any possible information. Lovely little road stop, complete with a pot-bellied stove (radiating wonderful heat as it was New Year’s weekend and quite chilly) and a few farmers sitting in rocking chairs chatting about the news of the day. When we asked the proprietor if the mail truck had passed yet, he said that it had not. When we asked for an approximate time, he responded that it would depend on how many magazines were in the mail that day as the postman sometimes took breaks to catch up on his reading. So we decided to wait at the general store in hopes of catching the postman.
In the meantime, the proprietor (taking advantage of the opportunity to help solve a mystery), got on the phone and began contacting folks on route 2. “Hello. This is Harold Dawes, down at the store. I was wonderin’ if y’all had a family by the name of Donkin up by y’all.” No luck, though.
But eventually the mailman arrived, walked in to drop off the mail, and offered to have us follow his truck to be led to our destination. At long last, in the middle of nowhere (no houses visible), he pulled over and showed us a mail box by a fence that opened to a long country lane down a hill through a pasture and some trees. The sign on the fence proclaimed “Happy Holler”, and the postman assured we could go through the fence (being sure to re-fasten the gate so the cows wouldn’t get out) and go down the lane to find the Donkins. Off we went, down a mile and a quarter dirt drive, through the pasture, through the trees, through a stream (had to ford it), and up a small hill to some outbuildings and a large log cabin with sheep, chickens, and familiar kids in the yard. Success!!
The visit was great. A joyous reunion. Accommodations were modest but comfortable…fireplace heat, gas lights (just in case the electricity didn’t work), indoor plumbing (thank goodness, as I live in dread of outhouses), and a glorious featherbed that kept us toasty warm after the fire died down overnight. It was a bit scary, however, to have our friends tell us (just after the children went outdoors to play, of course) about the fact that the area abounded with black snakes, king snakes, coral snakes, and cottonmouth (water moccasins). Yay. They neglected to mention the abundance of spider types, and that’s just as well.
This was my first adventure to Happy Holler. But not the last. More about Happy Holler to come….