Lightning in the Bottleneck

Bottleneck Holler held the Bottleneck creekbed, fed by branches cascading in crevices from coldwater springs inside the Cumberland Mountains rising and falling in East Tennessee. No one dared live in the Bottleneck proper, which consisted of two tapered mountains that formed a killer squeeze, or bottleneck, which formed one of the deadliest places in the woods where we played when we was boys. Legends, (plural), held that the many "episodes" were signaled by an early purr of soon-coming floodwaters that would wash away what progress might have been made by the Scotty settler families in the deadly cove in the earlier days, washing away the pristine laurel line creek bed, right down to the red clay in the Bottlneck, just like the event at Paint Creek in Greene County near Viking Mountain. From above it rained down heavy, unionized waterdrops as big as globs that washed the babies away as the purr rose to the sound of a thousand freight trains pulling ten thousand empty coal hoppers, drowning out their mommes' muffled howling until they, too, went silent.