White Stallions & Southeast Georgia Philosophers

After Arkansas I flew to Georgia for a magazine article I’m writing. I have never been to the rural parts of this pretty state of ours but I took a nice long drive with my photographer friend Terry Allen to a place called Pine Hill Plantation.

This is a view from the car window. I believe I was eating a sandwich at that moment. And I had just purchased Dr. Pepper Lip Smackers from the drug store. Have you ever tried Dr. Pepper Lip Smackers? It brought me back to 9th grade when my girlfriends and I collected just about every flavor. I’m not sure why but it seemed important to do that at the time.

So now I was driving through rural Georgia with a photographer eating a sandwich and applying Dr. Pepper Lip Smackers and having flashbacks to 9th grade. Maybe I’ll start collecting lip smackers again.

What do you think of my hunting outfit? I decided that all I needed was a six shooter on my hip. I was feeling very Indiana Jones.

This may also be the obvious time to tell you that these photos were taken with my phone. And I don’t have one of those phones that is good at taking photos so they are strange photos taken at strange moments, while dressed as Indiana Jones or atop a horse. And I feel like that captures the experience more effectively anyway. I left the real picture taking to the professionals.

And here I am as Indiana Jones galloping along on a white stallion. That is how I typically start Mondays… galloping through the woods. At least in my mind I do.

There was one other white stallion in the group of horses but it was less well behaved than mine was. If you’ve read my book Girl Hunter, you’ll recall that me and white horses have a tenuous history. So I went with the well-behaved white stallion.

Oh, and there were mules too!

This is my new friend Hilton and his two mules Ida and Ada. Hilton and I rode along together talking. He has been driving mules since he was 7 years ago and is a southeast Georgia philosopher. It is people like him that I want to sit with for hours with a tape recorder.

For lunch we dined outside. There was a fire where all of the guests warmed themselves.

And a lovely table with white linens.

This particular hunt was for couples, a way for husbands to include wives in the experience of the hunt. There were some lovely women there who hunted quail for the first time. To me in those moments, sitting next to Hilton, or atop my white stallion, it became ever more obvious that the power to make young people enjoy the outdoors lies with the mothers and wives.

I’ll be sure to let you know when the magazine article is finished so you can read about it all in more juicy detail.