In almost every sense, Fairfield County presents a study in contrasts. Sometimes maddening, occasionally jarring, often hilarious contrasts. I decided to walk Tucker and Gracie in Fairfield on Friday, just a few hours after having walked them in downtown Chester. The easiest (and probably most sensible) plan would have involved going to Winnsboro, but that would have seemed like a bit of a duplication of what we’d done earlier in the day. No, with no advance planning or even rudimentary knowledge of the lay of the land, I decided we’d just drive “out in the country” somewhere for our stroll. All seven of our previous walks had been in or very near cities, so I figured a rural setting would provide a refreshing change of pace. I left Chester, headed towards Carlisle but hung a left onto 215. The first few miles of that road are rough, even by South Carolina standards. It was like driving a stagecoach with square wheels through Deadman’s Pothole Gorge or something. It did eventually smooth out (again, by our state’s not-especially-high road standards). My personal feelings about Fairfield are where the aforementioned contrasts begin. As a Chester High graduate and fan, I have a fairly deep hatred for Fairfield Central, our rival, nemesis and frequent tormentor. I hate losing to anybody in anything, but it stings a little bit more when it’s the Griffins doling out the whoopin’. The next day, I would see Fairfield Central beat Chester in a 7-on-7 contest and I seethed just a little. I seethed over pretend, two-hand-touch football that does not count on the record. But that is fun, healthy, sports rival-driven hate. I can’t help but have some love for the county since part of my family lineage has its roots there. Fairfield County was the birthplace and childhood home of my maternal grandmother. She lived and worked on a family farm there along with her 10 or so siblings. I met most of them, aside from the one great uncle who died at a young age and the other who my grandma just didn’t speak of much. In the one conversation I ever had with her about him, she relayed that he moved to California to be a movie actor. That wasn’t the problem so much (my sister did the same thing), but disdain dripped from grandma’s every word as she talked about how he drank, may have “taken the dope,” gambled and chased women. So very unlike all his brothers and sisters and parents…another contrast, come to think of it. Grandma’s old home church (Cool Branch Baptist) was in Fairfield County and the path we were traveling would take us right by it. She attended a different church once she moved to Chester, but I still remember going to a homecoming service or two at Cool Branch and eating covered dishes and fried chicken lovingly prepared by the women of the church. I don’t have a lot of memories of the place, but there is still an attachment there since my great grandparents (William and Elizabeth Dean Dickerson) are buried in the Cool Branch cemetery. I was very nearly named William and I have vague memories of going to visit Elizabeth at a retirement home when I was very young. I stopped just long enough to snap a few pics and in doing so another contrast presented itself. Off to the side of the old-timey church building…a church building that has the boxy shape of an old Southern Chapel, a church building that hosted a 175th homecoming recently, is an external elevator. It looks a little out of place, but if it helps elderly or infirmed people get into the building, I’m glad it’s there. There is a long stretch where you don’t see much other than churches. Most of them are older, nearly all of them are beautiful, older structures and many sit in picturesque fashion at the end of long, dirt driveways behind a landscape dotted with pine trees. If you think about it, it’s funny then that after passing a dozen or so houses of Christian worship, the next area you enter is Salem Crossroads. Take the two words in that name individually and you get a place famous for water torturing ladies who practiced witchin’ and the place where Robert Johnson traded his soul to the devil for the ability to play the blues. I always thought that was a pretty one-sided deal. At least make a winner-takes-all contest of it like Johnny did in “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” I have a tiny bit of history with Salem Crossroads. At one point, my dad had a side job of distributing South Carolina made cigarettes to retailers (I think they were called Horry’s Best of Conway Gold or some such as that). One was a gas station just adjacent the crossroads. It’s either closed now or I didn’t see it, but I made a delivery for him there once. The lights and menthols were big sellers as I recall. I’d been driving for a while by this time and had not really seen anywhere to walk the dogs. Tucker and Gracie were sitting in my backseat content, quiet and soaking in the scenery, but I knew they were getting the point of needing to use the bathroom and stretch their legs. As I kept driving, though, I didn’t see sidewalks or parks or paths that would make for good recreational walking. This is the downside to my “flying by the seat of my britches” philosophy. All I could do at this point was drive and hope I’d find something eventually. There were more sights to see that seemed to butt heads with convention and neighboring properties. In the community of Blair is a small funeral home right on the side of the road. I found it a tad odd that there was a big palmetto tree right beside the front door. To me, a palmetto tree is kind of jaunty…it says “beach” and “fun” and “party” and other things that don’t have much to do with the deceased. A little further up, I saw a gorgeous, stately home. I’ve already detailed to you my struggles where describing architecture is concerned, but my assumption is that I was looking at an antebellum mansion. On the lot to its immediate right was a singlewide trailer whose porch area was fighting a losing battle against weeds and kudzu. So, a large, lovely home with an exquisitely manicured lawn whose next door neighbor has a trailer overrun with unclipped growth…the differences present within a few feet of one another were stark and hard to overlook. For the most part, though, there was a lot of pretty countryside for us to soak in and unpaved side roads…countryside and unpaved side roads that didn’t offer a place to walk until we arrived in Monticello. The community shares its name with the expansive lake that sits in it. This would be perfect, I thought. Surely there would be some park, some pathway or some lakeside land I could walk my dogs in. I passed a boat ramp, but shortly thereafter saw a family recreational area that features playground equipment, a ballpark with a view of the lake and some waterfront property designated for picnics, fishing and other fun stuff. I circled down near the water and saw some folks sunning themselves, some kids playing and a guy with a line in the water. Why, it’s the kind of place a fellow with two adorable dogs would fit right into…or he would if he was allowed to walk his dogs there. There was a big sign posted which listed a number of “don’ts” on it. I’m sure detonating explosives, swimming out too far and taking off your pants were on the list and so was anything involving pets. It seems a tad contradictory to call a place a “family” anything and not allow four-legged members of families to join in the fun. I promise Tucker and Gracie wouldn’t be wilder or cause any more trouble than some of the kids that run around there. There was a nature trail that ran off the side of that park and alongside the lake and I thought that might have possibilities until I saw a sign noting that NOPE…no animals allowed. “Well this sucks,” I surmised. I turned around to head back to the boat ramp area and noticed as I did that just beyond the recreational area there was some sidewalk. I filed that tidbit away in case I needed it later and I did, because pets weren’t allowed at the boat ramp area either. Hopefully no one noticed that I hurried Tucker and Gracie out there to use the bathroom before buckling them back in. Despite the numerous signs telling me pets were not allowed, I pulled back into the recreational park, parked near the road and got the dogs out. We quietly and discreetly hustled up to that sidewalk and get our walk in before anyone noticed we were there. Frankly, the walk didn’t go well for a number of reasons. Gracie has a bad (and very dangerous) habit of wanting to run at every car that passes. I had to make sure I had a firm grip on her leash and I had to shorten it a bit to keep her on the sidewalk. To our right was a line of trees through which I could see the majestic and tranquil lake, but between us and it was a lot of trash. Beer cans, a Yoo Hoo can (which stood out a bit amongst all the Mich Ultras and Bud Lights) cups, empty cigarette packs, one tampon box, a giant truck tire and dozens of empty Styrofoam containers that likely contained fried fish or something from a nearby eatery littered the landscape. This problem isn’t unique to Fairfield at all, but it drives me nuts that people just fling stuff on the ground and leave it. It looks trashy (literally and figuratively), shows a lack of pride and respect and basically represents the litterer announcing to humanity “I’m a big, dumb, lazy jackass who can’t be bothered to find a trash can.” I wish people realized how terribly that much crap on the ground reflects on the area, or cared at all about anything. It ruined what should have been a nice setting. Ugly trash next to a pretty lake was the biggest and worst contrast of the day. On top of that, it was one of those uniquely miserable South Carolina days where the temperature was around 96 and the humidity was in the 70s. The dogs were panting pretty quickly, so I got their pic (well, Tucker’s because Gracie was again not being cooperative) in front of the Jenkinsville community sign (home to one of the all-time convoluted, sucking money pits in our state’s history, but not home to anyone kin to me oddly) and started to head back. It was just as well that I did because the next house had a chained-up pit bull and a not chained up German Shepherd that seemed fiercely protective of their property. We loaded up and went home. I would tell you things didn’t go as planned in Fairfield, but then, we hadn’t planned anything to start with.
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TravisI am Travis, the king 0f SC 1A Football Archives
November 2021
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