An Unusual Place

At Animal Charity Evaluators, we have a monthly "water cooler" meeting. We all get together on Skype and talk for an hour about non-work topics. It's a team-building exercise that supposedly helps teams that only work together remotely.

This month, the topic was "a favorite place", and each team member talked about some wonderful place that they had been to. Some spoke of gorgeous landscapes, others of meeting wild animals up close, and still others of self-built structures in the middle of nowhere.

When it was my turn, I decided to speak about a half remembered memory from when I was young. I had only just started to drive on my own, and, being the adventurous sort, I tended to go wherever fancy took me. Often I would go down a dirt road just to see what was at the end, or take a few wrong turns on purpose to see if I could get myself lost.

On this particular occasion, I was driving along a state highway in Alabama, just north of Saraland, where I grew up. The highway had double lanes going in each direction and the sides were covered with dense forests. Traffic along the road was continuously 55mph or higher.

As I drove along at the pace of traffic, I noticed a small clearing on the side of the road. It was almost invisible, and was gone in a moment, so I nearly missed seeing it. I certainly missed any opportunity of stopping at it; there's no way you could know it was there unless you knew in advance where you were going. So I turned around at the next exit, retraced my route and slowed, pulling over at the clearing.

The clearing was literally just big enough for my car to park. Any less of a clearing would mean I'd need to park on the shoulder of the road. The forest surrounded this area just like it did any other, but there was a trace of a path leading away from the road here, into the woods. It was unmistakenly a path, even though it was overgrown with young trees, vines, and brush of all sorts. The woods on either side looked untouched for decades, but the path before me appeared like it had once been cut down completely, and had only overgrown since then.

I went back to my car to gather my walking stick, which I kept with me just for adventurous situations such as this. I used it as a blunt machete, hacking my way through the brush, following the trail as best I could.

Eventually, I reached a clearing. The ground was set in concrete, so no brush could overgrow the area. A pedastal, also of concrete, stood in the center, and atop it lied a statue. It was about the size of my torso, and it depicted a naive american in a sad repose. I can't recall what the statue was made of, but it was clearly quite worn.

The pedastal that held it had a plaque with a date of 1950 or so. It said that the statue above it was placed on this spot a hundred years earlier, in 1850, to commemorate the a tribe that had been forced from this place during the trail of tears. To the side was a picnic table, also made of concrete. None of this looked as though anyone had seen it in decades. There were no other visible paths leading away from the clearing.

This memory is from nearly twenty years ago. At the time, I had no camera. No mobile phone. No GPS. I wonder if the local government is still aware of it. Clearly, they made an effort to create a clearing for it in the 1950s, presumably around the same time that this state highway was constructed. But it looked almost as though since then it had been left untouched.

The next time I return to Alabama, I would like to revisit this statue, mostly because I tried to find a photo to accompany this blog post and was unable to find a reference to this monument on the internet. Perhaps when I do, I can upload a photo to the wikipedia page of whatever tribe it commemorated.