As a youngster, I remember the cross-county trips my family would take from the northern Davidson County community of Midway down to a special spot on tthe red banks of High Rock Lake. From our place, we could look directly across the lake toward Rowan County and just barely see cars and trucks crossing the Bringle Ferry Bridge at Tamarac Marina.
I was a gazer of sorts. In the years before I was able to drive, I would frequently get lost staring into the large side mirrors on the 1972 Ford truck. I would stare for minutes on end at the white line painted on the edge of Highway 8 as it whizzed by at 55 miles per hour, watching it fluidly move back and forth. Eventually there would be an intersection and the line would veer off quickly and follow another road, leaving me with empty gray asphalt to stare at. Soon as we cleared the intersection, I could see another new line heading our way, and it would join us as we continued our trip.
This activity would end shortly. Let’s face it, how long can a kid stare at a white line.
Almost every trip involved a “road game” of either counting Volkswagen Beetle automobiles or scanning the passing billboards for the letter “J” or “Q” as we rushed on our way through the alphabet.
The highways between Gumtree Road and Marvin Hedrick Road were speckled with landmarks that became like channel markers pointing the way to the weekend. Those familiar sights reaffirmed to me that we were still on course. There was an old brick two-story house with large white columns on a hill near Lexington not far off the road that I would always look for as we traveled. Every time we passed by, in my childlike imagination, I wondered if someone was looking out the window and would be commenting, “There goes that brown truck again.” The house also became a the point of no return of sorts. Unless we forgot something major, we were not coming back home until my father had to report back to work.
As we traveled, we would begin to see the signs that a lake was nearby. It seemed that every other house would have a boat on a trailer parked somewhere in the yard. I vaguely remember someone trying to change the standard Volkswagen-counting game into the boat-counting game. But it was short-lived as there were just too many boats out there, and we spent way too much time trying to figure out who saw which boat first.
As we would get closer to the lake, you would also begin to see the occasional orange horse collar life jacket, styrofoam cooler or ball cap laying on the edge of the road that evidently blew out of the back of a truck or a boat being trailered home. If undamaged, many of these items would be picked up pretty quickly.
Not far after passing Southmont, we would make a turn off the two-lane N.C. Highway 8, and I would follow the white line around the curves until we reached our turn at Marvin Hedrick Road. The white line ended there, and eventually the asphalt would give way to dirt. As we followed along the narrowing dirt road, you could see the water reflecting through the trees below us off to the left. The water and the sky were so bright it gave the fleeting feeling that we were on the edge of a great cliff. Soon my father would turn the truck into the driveway at Lot 27 and we would park on the scattered gravel and pine needles. The whole trip down probably only lasted 50 minutes, but it seemed longer and was time well spent.
In the 1980s, the new four-lane U.S. Highway 52 coming south out of Winston-Salem was opened, and our route to the lake was altered. It was new, exciting and cut a fair amount of time off the trip. The familiar two-story house with the columns on the hill near Lexington could still be seen, but the new road and right-of-way took all the ground up to the building itself. At some point, that landmark vanished completely.
Over the years and decades to follow, the shockingly inexpensive multi-year lease on Lot 27 came to an end, and to no one’s surprise, the property was scheduled to be redeveloped. The tiny one-room cabin that my grandfather and father purchased in 1965 for $1,000 was removed a few years later.
Currently there are some fairly large, beautiful two-story homes occupying the area where the cabin once stood. Ironically, these large two-story homes have become the new landmarks that link me back to my childhood and youthful memories spent with my family on the lake. They are actually pretty easy to spot while crossing the Bringle Ferry Bridge, and I frequently point them out to people I ride with. Unless I am looking for a J, Q, or a Z.