All I can remember is being on a pontoon boat. Not even sure who the pontoon boat belonged to. I assume it was someone daddy worked with, or it could have been a distant cousin. We were on Old Hickory Lake, which was strange. We were not Old Hickory kind of people. We had always been Percy Priest kind of people. Maybe if we had thought about it more, we would have gone for the northern lake rather than the eastern one.
Pontoon boats were not our thing either. We were canoe people. Rugged and back to the earth. Cheap too. Paddling an aluminum canoe on a Corps of Engineers reservoir sucks rocks, but that is what we did because that was who we were. Except for that night on the pontoon boat, which exists almost in a dream for me. The only piece of reality was Johnny Cash’s house.
Or to be more honest, Johnny Cash’s windows. We came around a bend in the lake and up there on the hill were a set of windows which had become golden in the setting sun. When someone pointed out the house, the windows were all I could make out. That was a lot of what it was. It’s the only thing I really remember from the boat ride. I never did get to go back to Old Hickory Lake.