Lightning in the Bottleneck

Bottleneck Holler held the Bottleneck creekbed, fed by branches cascading in crevices from coldwater springs inside the Cumberland Mountains. 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 one of the many "events" was signaled by an early purr of soon-coming floodwaters that would wash away what progress we might have made by the settler families in the deadly cove. Above the below rained down unionized waterdrops that washed the babies away as the purr rose to the sound of a thousand freight trains pulling ten thousand empty coal hoppers.