When I was a freshman at Lambuth College, they would conduct an interim program each January. During that month, you would only take one class, but it met every day, usually for 3 hours. The topics were varied, usually based on the professor’s interests outside of their normal studies. I remember people taking classes where they played games every day and others where they learned about fly fishing. I took a class on Sherlock Holmes taught by music professor Dr. Don Huneycutt. This class was typical of the ones offered during the interim program in that it didn’t take very much time in the day to attend the class and prepare. So Lambuth would become a party school every January during interim. Most of the classes met in the morning so extracurricular activities started early in the afternoon. This also gave us an opportunity to go to some of the away basketball games that were a little bit further away from campus than normal. My friend Kevin invited me on a road trip to the University of North Alabama in Florence. Our friend Michelle also went on this trip.
UNA as about 2.5 hours away from Lambuth but this would be no issue for us. Kevin would be our driver for the trip, and we would be going in his Chevette. During our first semester, I had gone on several rides with Kevin driving. He was not shy about testing the limits of his car, many times taking it off road in places like the middle of campus. There was a hill in front of our dorm that he was fond of jumping. Needless to say, I had no problem sitting in the back seat for this trip.
We had been on the road for at least an hour when we saw the guy in the middle of the road waving his cap like he was trying to stop us. The opening of the hat was up like he was trying to take donations and Kevin wasn’t in a charitable mood so he didn’t stop. He also didn’t slow down much so when we topped the hill and saw the log truck that had lost it load, he didn’t have much time to stop. He slammed on his brakes and the Chevette luckily stopped literally inches from a pile of logs. The logs were scattered all over the road and there was no way around them. A guy in a truck who was from around there told us we could follow him to find our way around. So we started following this stranger down unknown roads. We didn’t have a map and the was long before GPS. We didn’t get too concerned until our leader turned down a gravel road. We became more concerned when he turned off the gravel road onto a dirt road. Disturbing images from the movie Deliverance played in our heads as it got darker outside. This detour seemed to take forever but we finally got back to a paved road and then the highway. We were diverted long enough that we were late to the basketball game.
The three of us were the only Lambuth students at the game other than players, cheerleaders and others traveling with the team. The arena at UNA was large but we managed to find a group of Lambuth faculty and staff sitting in some seats relatively high up. This group included Billy P. and Blanche Exum, whom I’ve talked about in other posts. They were amused with me when a I started booing at a call that went against Lambuth. I was a lone voice that seemed to be coming from the rafters of the building. Even the officials looked up and started laughing.
After the game, we returned to school with no issues. The log truck was cleared so we were able to come straight home without any detours.