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I want to walk the trails again
  While still in diapers I once slipped away from Mother. When she found me I was sitting at the rear of a mare, yanking on her long tail. The horse must have known I was just an ignorant human kid. Mother may have made me a little wiser by spanking me back to the house. My earliest trail led from house to barn. Both are gone today. By the time I left home trails and wagon roads were well trodden by my feet. My brothers and I had farm chores and in time learned to plow and harrow. We often followed trails to fishing holes in the valley trout streams and hunted squirrels around the foothills leading up to the high wooded peaks sheltering Germany Valley. My dad, Neal Justus, was away in WW II when Durell, my mother, with her children walked the old Indian trail across the ridges to visit Grandpa Dock and "Nanny" Effie Dickerson. As the oldest son I helped Mother with the younger brothers and led the way through field trails past Ike Justus's country store and into the forest-clad ridges that led over and down to US 76 on Timpson. From the highest ridge we could see Lake Burton shining in the sunlight. We then climbed the steep, winding road up and over Davis Gap and down to Bridge Creek Road near Liberty  Baptist Church. Near the church we reached the rustic but comfortable home of our dear grandparents. Later I walked that trail alone, feeling proud and adventuresome. Uncle Denver Dickerson - three years my senior - and I left Grandpa's home with back packs bearing old blankets, rolled tarp, a frying pan, coffee pot, a little food and our fishing rods. We walked over Davis Gap and west along US 76 to near Lake Burton Bridge. There we turned off on a dirt road leading to the Steer Lots on Lake Burton. White steer bones lay on the bottom of a cove. Here where we camped and fished so many times - and Grandpa once ran his portable sawmill - we spent three days fishing and camping all by ourselves. It was early spring and Denver showed how to haul in bass with live spring lizards. I followed Dad from the saddle between Wolffork and Germany Valleys - where Ggg-grandparents Will  am and Sarah Troutman Justice settled around 1830 - through the forest around Billy Mountain to Blue Ridge Gap. Dad said a wagon road once connected the two points. On the divide we were near where Great-grandparents Lorn and Hinda (or Linda) Dickerson once lived. Family roots ran deep in Germany Valley, Persimmon Community and Wolffork. The way we went to Blue Ridge Gap was first trod by Cherokees, whose blood also ran in my veins. After I left Rabun County, Ga. for the wide world I followed many trails - in Ohio, Mississippi, Korea, Alabama, Texas, Colorado, Iowa, California, Luzon Island (PI), South Carolina, and Illinois. Some rugged and spectacular trails I walked were in Colorado, where for four years I fished, hunted, camped and hiked. Then no trail was too steep, no river gorge too deep, or mountain too high. After that I hiked a few trails in Vietnam. More recently I trod many trails in Wyoming, in the Wind River headwaters, up on Union Pass and around Double Cabins north of Dubois in the Absaroka Mountains. A memorable, but painful walk was climbing out of the Wiggins Fork gorge after fishing for trout. My back, painful from a pulled muscle, kept me at a slow shuffle. I made it out by easing up an elk and deer crossing to a narrow trail under the rim rocks that paralleled the river back to our camp. The animals certainly knew a more level and smoother way. Another path led across Wiggin Fork and over pine-clad ridges to "Cutthroat Creek," as we called it, an active, frothy stream full of cutthroat trout. As I topped a bald knob to look down on the creek, two elk leaped from beds among low willow bushes on the creek and dodged into the timber. Beyond the creek, through a gap in the range I walked through sagebrush in a natural meadow where marmots whistled and ducked into holes, while overhead hawks circled and keened their wild cries. Atop the divide I saw beyond it a vast bowl between high mountains. This wide meadow was full of cattle growing fat on summer range. Far beyond I saw the snow-capped Wind River Range. Today I stroll with Alex and Kelley Pointer, my grandchildren, to seek adventures. They come to know - to really see - flowers and trees, water and birds, fish, bugs and animals that inhabit the land with us. They see with new eyes the flowers that bloom, the fluttering butterflies, and darting dragonflies. With them, I want to walk the trail again.  
   
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