"Forest Lake Road" should be called "Black Pond Road" because the "lake" after which it is named is not a lake; it is a moderately big pond with the blackest water you've ever seen. You turn off highway 98, cross the railroad tracks, pass a car repair shop, and next to it is the black pond.
Keep going on Forest Lake Road, and it winds up and up to the highest point around, known to locals as "the hill." From the summit you get a Blue Ridge Mountain kind of vista, far views of the hazy blue tree horizon. The soil is mostly sand. I asked a geologist how did this hill come to be and he said in prehistoric times, great deluges of water probably from melting glaciers up north, formed this hill and deposited sand in its wake.
Right at the top of this hill is where the Forest Service is logging out trees--hundreds of acres of trees. Logging is a destructive, brutal, nasty, loud, awful business. The pines are cut; the other trees are just in the way, so machinery gouges them, slams into them, runs over them heedlessly.
It just kills me to see like I did today a beautiful poplar tree with five feet of its bark peeled back off its trunk. Its leaves fluttered gracefully in the breeze; but that tree is dead as a doornail. No tree can survive that much damage. That tree has had birds nest in it, and hawks sit in its topmost branches, and squirrels running through it, but no more.
Off to the left of the road I turned the car around, and found myself in a black graveyard. Forest Lake Road and its environs are where the black people live. Two oak trees grow in the middle of this graveyard; it is unfenced, and surrounded by woods. A wooden bench rest against one of the trees. Without the logging noises, it would have been silent here, just the wind through the trees and birdsong now and then. Silent, lonely, even.
I turned off the car and looked around. Most of the black graves had headstones, with a concrete slab over the grave.
White graves don't have the concrete slab on top.
I asked a black lady about it; she said Oh, it's just a black custom.
I had heard a long time ago a slab on top of the grave kept the haints (ghosts) from escaping. When those d*mn loggers are gone I'm gonna come back one day and listen to the silence and write some poetry--after I respectfully ask permission from the inhabitants interred there if it's okay if I visit for a while.
susil