July 25, 2002 — Well, I don’t have the plague.

Not yellow fever, psychosis or leprosy, either.

How do I know this, you ask? Did I feel a case of the plague coming on and run off to the doctor?

“Hey, Doc. I think I’m coming down with some of that, uh, plague that’s going around. Got any Robitussin?”

No, nothing like that. It’s just that there are certain diseases — plague among them — that you must be tested for before moving to China. And I’m moving to China.

Seriously. Cross my heart. Pinky shake. Booga booga. This is for real.

My year-long gig as an English professor at Shanghai University starts Sept. 1. My flight leaves in 35 days.

Thirty-five days! I better write quickly. I’ve got a lot of packing to do.

My last day at The Times is Saturday. This is the last Sporting Life column I will write for a while.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Dan, you’re crazy. But, c’mon. Admit it. You’ve thought that before.

You’ve likely got two questions for me. Everybody else has.

1. Do you speak Chinese?

My answer is always a quick, “Yes.” But then I laugh and admit that I’m lying. Seems my future employers were interested in my grasp of my own language, not theirs.

Kind of.

2. Dan, are you a spy?

Well, duh. Obviously. Why else would I spend one-seventh of my life in the Chicken City. Poultry world, you have a new capital. Its name is Shanghai.

(Mental note: Try to keep fake talk of spying to a minimum before moving to communist country.)

Perhaps the most difficult question is also the most simple. Why?

“Why not?” is what I usually say to that. It’s purposefully vague and has a certain gung-ho-I’ll-try-anything-as-long-as-it’s-not-bull-riding-again spirit that fits perfectly with the concept of this column.

Truth is, I’m not sure why I’m moving to China. Truth is, if three months ago you had told me that I was going to be moving to China, I would have looked at you as if you were dying of the plague.

I wish I could cite some higher calling, some deep and burning desire to teach the people of the world the joys of the English language, or even a longstanding longing to learn about everything and anything non-Western.

Nope. I was just trying to figure out how I could get my summers off. Really.

This plan — both silly and shallow, I know — was hatched innocently in Honolulu in late May. I was there for my brother’s wedding, lying on the beach during the last day of my 10-day vacation. And I didn’t want to leave.

I daydreamed about Natalie Portman and more days off. I determined that Natalie Portman was probably unattainable, so I concentrated on the days off.

“That’s it!,” I thought, “I’ll become a teacher.”

(Now, teachers, please don’t get mad and send hate mail. I know that teaching is really a year-round job. I know that most teachers need to get a second job during the summer, anyway. I know that 35 days from now, I will likely be in way over my head. Please understand that this was just a daydream … and that I was likely still feeling the ill effects of a poorly-prepared batch of poi.)

I thought about going back to school. But then I stopped thinking about that, because I never much cared for going to school — the actual schoolwork part of it, anyway.

Then I remembered hearing that some teaching jobs abroad require nothing more than a bachelor’s degree and a willingness to travel. I was qualified.

I mentioned the daydream to my dad, a college professor. He mentioned that he had some connections in Shanghai. Ba-da-bing-ba-da-boom, I’m headed to China.

Of course, I’m now realizing, it’s not that simple. I need to sell off most of my possessions (if you’re interested in any furniture or appliances, drop me a line). And I need to get stuck with so many needles even Scott Weiland would cringe. Gotta stave off that nasty Japanese Encephalitis bug, you know.

But with every unexpected step in the moving process, with every goodbye that crosses my lips, I realize — more each day — that there is much I will miss about this town I’ve called home since the fall of 1998. (I was never able to refer to Gainesville as a “city.”)

I suppose I always figured I was just passing through, though. I kept the Pennsylvania plates on my car. But one year quickly turned into two … then three … now four.

Other than the town I grew up in, I’ve never lived anywhere longer than Gainesville. And it’s grown on me. I’m a small-town boy at heart. I like the fact that I can walk into a grocery store, a bar, a barbecue joint and be referred to by name.

So, naturally, I now choose to live in the most populous city in the world’s most populous country — where most people won’t be able to pronounce my name, let alone remember it.

This column was originally going to be a list of things I would miss about Gainesville, but the list got too long. And I got hungry.

I jotted down items like “seeing the mountains while driving north on Pearl Nix Parkway on a clear day.” But then it turned into a roll call of my favorite local foods (Monkey Barrel pizza, Hickory Pig barbecue, Los Rayos quesadillas, etc.). I had to break for lunch and get some Brunswick stew.

I did more than eat here, of course. I tried to do a little living, as well. Items not on my resume before I moved here: bull riding, lawnmower racing and handgrabbing for giant catfish in Mississippi, to name a few.

I found it fitting, in an odd way, that my swan song was a swan dive into a pit of mud at the Redneck Games. Quite a Southern sendoff.

So now it’s on to the next column, er, chapter of my life. It comes with subtitles, and I have no idea how it ends.

Just the way I like it.

(By the way, I’m off next summer. Anyone want to backpack to Tibet?)

I was standing in a crowded parking lot in East Dublin, Ga., which is east of Dublin, Ga., west of nowhere and, for the past seven years, home to the annual Redneck Games (imagine the Olympics for people in overalls). Events include the seed-spitting contest, the hubcap toss, redneck horseshoes (in reality, toilet seats), the armpit serenade, bobbing for pig’s feet and, my specialty, the mud-pit bellyflop.

I left my Toyota Corolla with Pennsylvania plates and trudged through the maze of American-made trucks. Sweat began to stain my T-shirt immediately.

It was 103 degrees. I felt like I was walking inside someone’s mouth, and that someone was getting ready to spit. I rubbed the back of my neck. I could feel it getting redder by the minute.

As I walked, a flat-bed truck drove by carting people like cattle. A handwritten sign on its side read “Redneck Limo.”

The Redneck Games started as a gag in 1996 when those other Olympics were held two hours north in Atlanta. Five-hundred people showed up for the first one. In 2001, the crowd was estimated at more than 15,000. And on July 6, despite the heat, even more people — some 20,000 or so — packed Buckeye Park along the banks of the Oconee River (the river is where most of the attendees eventually ended up).

“I guess they’re just a bunch of rednecks at heart. Everybody is,” said Lewis Blue, a lieutenant with the East Dublin Police Department, who has worked security at the games since their inception. “It’s just a lot of fun. We don’t have any trouble. We may have three arrests throughout the whole day.”

“So what exactly is a redneck?” I asked. I would repeat that question several times throughout the afternoon.

“It’s just somebody who likes to get out and have a beer or two in the sun by the river and just have a good time and relax,” Blue responded.

“So, are you a redneck?”

“No. No.” Blue paused, then added. “But there are plenty of them. Some admit it. Some don’t.”

Most on hand at Buckeye Park not only admitted it, they celebrated it. They proudly displayed their redneck pride to … well, all the other rednecks at the games. Confederate flags flew everywhere. Booths sold bumper stickers emblazoned with slogans like, “Never Apologize for Being White.” One woman, who had to be close to full-term in her pregnancy, painted “Future Redneck” on her bare belly.

“A redneck is a hard-working person,” said Randy (”everybody calls me ‘L-Bow the Gin-U-Wine Redneck’”) Tidwell. Over the years, the 41-year-old from East Dublin has been adopted as the Redneck Games’ official mascot.

“A redneck,” Tidwell continued, “is someone who don’t necessarily get any recognition. They do all the hard work that nobody wants to do. We work hard. We play hard. We die broke.”

Tidwell, who drives a wrecker for a living, kicked off the festivities by running in the official Redneck Games torch — propane, of course — and lighting the ceremonial barbecue pit. Later, he ran the torch down a hill to signify the start of the evening’s fireworks display.

“It’s a party atmosphere,” Tidwell said. “In a sense, it’s like one big family reunion.”

Tidwell wore nothing but a pair of overalls and a floppy fishing hat. No shirt. No shoes. He said it was the same outfit he wears every day.

By the middle of the afternoon, Tidwell’s neck and shoulders were glowing, some shade beyond red. He was scarlet. Rednecks, he told me, don’t believe in sunscreen.

“Too much like lotion,” Tidwell said. “Rednecks don’t like lotion.”

But they like fun and games. And they take the two seriously.

After winning the hubcap toss, 24-year-old Eric Outler of Vidalia, Ga., thanked God and the late Dale Earnhardt for his victory.

“It means a lot to me,” Outler said, looking at his trophy topped with a crushed Bud Light can. “It’s like winning the Daytona 500.”

Without a doubt, the events that attract the most attention are bobbing for pig’s feet and the mud-pit belly flop.

Ashley Richardson, a 19-year-old from Milledgeville, Ga., won the pig’s feet competition for the third year in a row. This year, he set a new world record: seven feet in 19 seconds. Afterward, he posed for photos with a pig’s foot in his mouth.

“You’ve got to push them to the bottom, and you’ve got to grab them,” he explained. “You’ve got to put a good grip on them. It’s going so fast, you don’t taste them. You don’t even have time to taste them.”

Back in 1999, MTV sent some of its “Real World” and “Road Rules” participants down to East Dublin for a Redneck Games throw-down. But many of the pseudo-stars threw up instead.

“The kids had to bob for the pig’s feet,” Blue remembered. “They would bob and get them and then run over in the corner and get sick. But they were a bunch of New York people. Not rednecks.”

Twenty-six-year-old Ron Johnson of East Dublin won his third straight bellyflop title this year, no doubt due to his home-mud-pit advantage. But by the time the last Budweiser had been drunk that day, nearly everyone had taken a dip in the dirty drink. It was cool in there.

It’s not lotion, but a nice thick coating of Georgia red clay blocks those harmful UV rays quite nicely.

Even the “Redneck Nanny” Barbara Braswyl — so named because the 47-year-old has (yikes!) 12 grandchildren — took the plunge, soiling her homemade American flag dress in the process. No worries, Braswyl makes a new dress for every Redneck Games.

“I’m going to do a John Deere one next year,” the Wrightsville, Ga., resident said.

First into the mud pit? Who else?

I gave my best Yankee, er, Rebel yell and let my flop fly. When I cleared the mud from my eyes, L-Bow gave me a thumbs-up. I had the official redneck seal of approval.

Five hours later, I was still picking mud from my pockets.

Ah, the sights and sounds of … wait a minute … Dawsonville?

Where were the ear-splitting engines, the checkered flags, the Bill Elliott Coke machines? After all, this is the birthplace of motorsports, not marsupials. Right?

Well, just down the road from Thunder Road — where during prohibition, moonshine runners out-raced police cars and paved the way for the NASCAR drivers of today — sits the Kangaroo Conservation Center, an unassuming 87-acre plot that just happens to house the largest collection of kangaroos outside of Australia.

No signs lead to the property. An 8-foot bamboo gate opens slowly when visitors buzz themselves in. Entry is granted by reservation only.

The center does very little advertising, and yet its tours are consistently booked. Word-of-mouth and unsolicited media coverage — of which there has been plenty recently — have provided the center with all the publicity it needs.

The New York Times, in fact, ran a feature on the center in late May.

“The phones have been ringing off the hook since then,” said soft-spoken Debbie Nelson, who, with husband Roger Nelson, opened the center in 1998. “I think people are just fascinated by kangaroos.”

And if it’s kangaroos people want, North Georgia, believe it or not, is the place to be.

Sherri Donovan, from Brooklyn, N.Y., read the New York Times piece and booked her family a flight that very night.

“Kangaroos are addicting,” Donovan said after an afternoon at the center. “The information you get, and the close-up contact with the kangaroos, I don’t think you can get it anywhere else.”

Roger Nelson would agree.

“In what we call our outback, you’ll see more kangaroos in the next hour than you would see if you took a trip to Australia,” he said proudly.

More than 200 kangaroos live at the center, and about 95 percent of them were born there. Other unusual creatures also call the center home. Like the tiny African dik-dik antelope, for example. Extend a finger, and the male will “mark” you with a brown tar-like substance secreted from a large gland underneath his eye.

The Nelsons opened their property to safari-like tours in 2000. Last year, more than 3,000 visitors passed through Dawsonville’s version of Down Under.

But the center is far more than just a marsupial amusement park. It is a working zoological breeding facility. Australia rarely allows its native animals to be shipped to foreign countries. The Nelsons have filled that niche.

The center has supplied kangaroos to zoos on four continents, including more than 100 zoos in the United States alone. Sometimes, zoos will send sick kangaroos to the Nelsons, who have shown a knack for nursing them back to health.

Throw in the tours, and it’s quite a bit to tackle. The Nelsons only have four full-time employees.

“It keeps us hopping,” Debbie said. She then looked down and smiled. The pun was unintended.

The center seems less a farm and more a family. All the animals there have names. Several kangaroos spent their first months of their lives in the Nelsons’ parlor, not a pouch.

“We get very attached to them,” Debbie admitted. “It’s sort of like raising a baby. They are very affectionate animals.”

We were sitting in the Nelsons’ office prior to the start of my tour when Roger stood up from his stool and said, “I’ll bring in Emily.”

Roger returned with what looked to be a plush doll nestled in his arms. Emily is an 8-month-old red kangaroo. Emily weighed less than a pound when her mother died. The Nelsons are her parents now.

Emily shook slightly when Roger brought her closer to me. It was the only way I could tell that she was real.

“They’re very shy animals,” Roger said. “Their first instinct is to hop away from danger. They’re not at all aggressive like some people perceive them to be.”

The Nelsons started raising exotic animals 20 years ago when they lived in Alpharetta. They began working with kangaroos four years later, and decided to focus on the animals of Australia when they moved their operation to Dawsonville in 1998.

That’s when the media started calling. Soon the Nelsons and their kangaroos were appearing on ABC’s “Good Morning America” and “Jack Hanna’s Animal Adventures.”

It’s been quite a ride for the Nelsons. Back in college, Debbie was an art history major. Roger has a degree in engineering.

“That’s what keeps life interesting,” Roger said. “You never know where you’re going to end up.”

You know, Roger, you’re right. I never thought I’d learn to throw a boomerang in the Bible Belt. Never thought I’d stare a 200-pound kangaroo in the eye there, either. But I did.

The tour begins with the boomerang and moves on to the blue-winged kookaburras. There are only five such birds in North America, we were told. All of them live at the Kangaroo Conservation Center.

The highlight of the tour is the hour-long trip through the North Georgia “outback.” With Springer Mountain — the southern terminus of the 2,168-mile Appalachian Trail — looming in the distance, 35 of us squeezed into a converted 1968 Army truck that rumbled through 40 undulating acres.

Kangaroos, mobs of them, were everywhere. There were red kangaroos and gray kangaroos, both the eastern and western variety. Some hopped on by and paid us no mind. But most stopped and stared.

Kangaroos are curious creatures. Always looking, always listening. Their ears move independently. Their eyes are big and black and stare right through you. It’s like they’re trying to figure you out.

Kangaroos look rather lopsided, really. Their hind legs are huge, with long, floppy feet like clown shoes. Their tales are thick and sturdy. Their front limbs, however, are short and stunted. They dangle downward, as if carrying a small purse.

The largest kangaroo we saw was 7.5 feet from the tip of his tail to the top of his head. He weighed 220 pounds. His name was Red.

He stared at me. And I stared back.

I couldn’t figure him out.

Another man takes the guy’s arm and sees that he’s wearing a bracelet, kind of like a medical I.D. tag. He flips it over and finds the image of a soccer ball.

“It’s all right,” the man announces to the growing crowd. “He just needs some football.”

Lately, I can relate. I’ve been leading a double-life: journalist by day, junkie by night. I’ve been a World Cup fan in America.

It’s been a lonely, nocturnal existence. Japan and South Korea are the tournament hosts this year. And while you are reading this story today, it is probably already tomorrow in Tokyo.

Game times in Georgia have been 2:30 a.m., 5 a.m. and 7:30 a.m. Not exactly prime time.

But I’ve tried to stay up, or wake up, for many of them. During daylight hours, I walk around like a zombie, my eyes glazed over like soccer balls.

I know there are others out there like me. Friends of mine in New York, and even Atlanta, tell me about late-night and early-morning trips to bars for World Cup watching. Throngs of fans have gathered to watch matches at Major League Soccer stadiums throughout the country. And despite their early-morning starts, the games are drawing a record amount of viewers on television.

But in Gainesville, I often feel like I’m going at this all alone. Bars close before game time. And if they didn’t, I doubt crowds would gather for the games, anyway. Gainesville is the Poultry Capital of the World. I’m not sure where the soccer capital is, but I have a feeling it’s a long way from here.

Tuesday in South Korea, millions and millions of soccer fans took to the streets to watch their countrymen play. I watch matches in my living room, joined only by a bottle of beer and a box of Golden Grahams. At halftime, I step onto my porch — and get serenaded by a chorus of crickets.

I thought about turning my house into an after-hours speak-easy for local soccer fans. But I couldn’t figure out how to advertise it without getting arrested. Maybe I’ll start a self-help group to help those afflicted deal with their World Cup addictions.

There are sure to be some withdrawal symptoms after Sunday morning’s championship match between Brazil and Germany.

It’s nice to know, though, that there are others who have it worse than me. Franklin McIntosh, director of the Lanier Soccer Association, has not missed a match. That means since May 31, he’s seen 62.

“To me, it’s something very special,” said McIntosh, 38, a former professional soccer player originally from football-friendly West Bromwich, England. “But I’m extremely tired right now. It only happens once every four years, so I like to experience it live.”

Often, McIntosh would watch the matches straight through the morning — from 2:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. — and then head off to work, not to return home again until after 10 p.m. Then it’s a quick nap before another night tuned in to ESPN.

“It just depends on how good the middle (5 a.m.) game is,” explained McIntosh. “If the middle game is a real good game, I will watch it. If it’s not, I will tape it and watch it later on in the evening. I’ll watch the 2:30 game, go take a quick nap, and get up for the 7:30 game.”

For most matches, McIntosh, like me, watched alone at home. But when England played, he headed down to the Rose & Crown pub in Buckhead.

“They stayed open extra late,” McIntosh said. “The atmosphere was just unreal. But it only happened for England.”

I have a confession to make. I’ve been a bad, bad American. Last Friday, I stayed up to watch the quarterfinal match between England and Brazil. After England was eliminated, I went to bed at 4:30 a.m. … and set my alarm to sound 2.5 hours later.

I needed to be up in time for the U.S.-Germany match at 7:30 a.m. This was a history-making match and there was no way I was going to miss it. The Americans hadn’t been in the final eight since 1930. They have never made it to a final four.

Now, one of the perks of my profession is that I rarely have to wake up to an alarm. A sports writer’s workday starts late, and ends much later. So sleeping in is not a problem.

Perhaps, then, my lack of practice in clock-programming explains why on Friday I set my alarm for 7 p.m. instead of 7 a.m. Perhaps it explains why I slept through the entire dadgum match.

The U.S. lost 1-0, but that didn’t ease my pain. Now I must wait — at least four more years — to watch the Americans play in the World Cup again.

Maybe in 2006 I won’t feel like such a loner. Maybe this year’s U.S. run has brought some more fans into the World Cup fold.

Last Friday, after I finally woke up, I was pleased to find soccer a topic of discussion on the basketball courts at the Family Life Center. That hadn’t happened before. It hasn’t happened since, either. And likely won’t for at least four more years.

But I’m still talking about the World Cup. I was talking about it Tuesday morning after I watched Germany defeat South Korea. I was talking about it Wednesday morning after I watched Brazil take down Turkey.

And now, I know at least one other person whom I can talk about it with. But even McIntosh is growing weary late in this late-night World Cup.

“I still had a good time watching the matches, but it just seemed more of a job to get up and watch the games,” McIntosh said. “I am so tired right now, it’s unbelievable. I don’t want the Cup to end, but at the same time, I’m ready for it to end.”

Just two more matches to go, Franklin.

I’ll be up for both of them. Right now, though, I need a nap.

June 20, 2002 — Forget about forethought — or any other type of thought, really — when you stick your hand in front of a 40-pound catfish, hoping that the monster mistakes your fingers for food. Thinking can only cause problems. It’s best to do such things with your brain on blank.

So, when I first reached my hand into a wooden box occupied by a big, bad blue catfish, the only thing weighing on my mind was the muddy water of the Big Black River — and the words of Mississippi handgrabber Ricky Liles.

“You’ve got to get your hand in the fish’s mouth,” he said. “Because that’s the onlyest way you’re going to catch him.”

The folks I met the following day along the banks of the Ross Barnett Reservoir spillway outside of Jackson, Miss., would beg to differ. They were fishing for catfish the regular way, with rods and reels.

I told them about handgrabbing, and that I had tried it. When they were done eyeing me as if I was an escapee from the Mississippi State Insane Asylum, they offered their opinions:

• “Man, I’m not sticking my hand up in nothing in no water,” Cortez Green, 33, said. “I don’t care if there’s tons of fish in there.”

• “That’s why they made these,” said Kevin Primus, 35, pointing to his pole.

• “I know the Big Black. Alligators. Snakes,” said Ruth Usry, 56, shaking her head. “There’s alligators all in the Big Black. And water moccasins.”

• “I know white people do it,” David Moore, 63, said. “Y’all aren’t scared of anything.”

Handgrabbing is not for everybody. It’s an activity practiced by men many believe to be either half drunk or half crazy. But it’s also an activity that has been around for hundreds of years.

In 1775, trader-historian James Adair first documented “a surprising method of fishing under the edges of rocks” performed by American Indians in the South. Today, the idea is still the same. Handgrabbers have just perfected the process a bit.

Wooden boxes, dozens of them, lie on the bottoms of the Big Black River and Ross Barnett Reservoir. A large number of these custom-made catfish cabins come courtesy of Liles, Keith Lane, Gerald Moore and Mike Willoughby — the guys from mississippihandgrabbing.com.

The boxes, often made of durable cypress wood, are the size of coffins. They are placed flat on the river and reservoir floors. An opening, big enough for a giant catfish to fit through, is cut into the end of the box that faces downstream.

During spawning season, male and female catfish seek the shelter of the boxes — in pairs, of course. Once the female lays the eggs, the male chases her off and guards the eggs viciously until his fingerlings are hatched … or until some redneck reaches in the box and puts a halt to the whole process.

Many states, in fact, have banned handgrabbing, saying it’s not a sporting way to catch fish.

“I think the ones who say that,” said Liles, 43, of Canton, Miss., “is the ones, really honestly, who don’t have the nerve to do it.”

Liles and his crew contend that they raise far more catfish than they catch, saying that they purposefully leave several of their boxes untouched each season.

I asked Ron Garavelli, Mississippi’s chief of fisheries, for his thoughts on the matter. He’s been on the job for 27 years, and handgrabbing has been legal for all of them.

“Let’s just say I don’t think the catfish population is hurting because of handgrabbing,” said Garavelli, whose response to my next question — Are you a handgrabber? — came rather quickly. “No,” he said. “I’m not the type of person that puts my hands in places that I can’t see.”

Not many people are. If any species is at risk of endangerment, Garavelli said, it is the handgrabber.

“It’s a dying art,” Garavelli said. “I don’t think there will be a whole bunch left after this generation. You don’t see many young handgrabbers out there.”

When 56-year-old Gerald Moore was a “young ‘un” in Smith County, Miss., he handgrabbed on the Leaf River.

“Back then, we didn’t know about no damn box,” Moore said. “We’d find an old cypress log underwater. We done it for the food.”

And still today, Moore and his cadre of catfish wranglers do it as much for the food as for the fun. But, Moore will tell you emphatically, they “ain’t after the damn blue cat.”

“We’re after the flathead,” said Moore, who estimates that each season his group catches more than 3,000 pounds of flatheads, yielding more than 1,000 pounds of meat. “Because, as far as we’re concerned, the flathead is the best fish you can put in a frying pan. We don’t even keep the blues.”

Blue cats are harder to skin, and often even harder to swallow. Unlike the flathead, which prefers its meals to be on the move, blue cats often dine on the dead … or anything else that floats in front of its mouth.

“Your blue cat has got probably twice stronger jaws than a flathead, kindly like an alligator,” Liles said. “When they bite down on something, they can hold that grip.”

So, when you are submerged in several feet of water and a blue cat swallows your entire hand, you don’t have long to meditate on your next move. You’d be surprised how expendable extremities become when your only other option is drowning.

In one such situation, Liles — who, by the way, can’t even swim — remembers sitting at the bottom of the river, running out of air. His right arm was stuck halfway inside a blue cat in a box.

In desperation, Liles placed his feet on either side of the box’s opening, and with one powerful push, forced his hand out of the fish’s mouth — through the vise-like jaw and thousands of tiny teeth. Imagine running your knuckles against a cheese grater.

“You’re going to lose some skin,” Liles said. “But, hey, you’ve got to breathe.”

In an early-morning haze three Saturdays ago, we traveled a lonely dirt road through cotton fields and backwoods to a steep and muddy put-in on the banks of the Big Black. We got in our johnboats and journeyed 10 miles upstream. Recent rains made the river rise. A white froth had settled on the surface, making the Big Black look like a giant root beer float.

Using Lane’s mental map as our guide, we made our way back downstream and checked the sunken boxes in our path. The 55-year-old Lane — handgrabbing for 30 years — would wade, sometimes neck deep, through the swift water, holding a silver pole like a scepter. When he’d arrive at a box, he’d stick his feet and the pole into the opening.

Sometimes the boxes were clean and empty, a sign that the catfish, in Moore’s words, had already “done spawned and gone.”

If a box is occupied, it’s often easy to tell. The catfish go crazy. They make their surroundings shake like a subway car.

“You can hear it underwater,” Liles said. “It sounds like thunder.”

At that point, the checker becomes the blocker and seals the opening with his feet until the grabber can get his gloves on.

Grabbing can be grueling. It is an often time-consuming task performed primarily underwater. And my companions were already short of breath from smoking cigarettes.

The grabber wedges his arm past the blocker’s legs and into the opening. (It’s best to stick your arm in up to the shoulder, so the fish trapped inside have no room to make a run for it.) Then, it’s a matter of poking around until you find something that feels like a fish head. Often, the fish head finds you.

Ideally, the fish bites down on your fingers and leaves your thumb alone. That way, you can grab on tightly to the cat’s lower lip. That’s when you’ve got him. Although, to be honest, it often felt like the fish had me.

It’s an odd feeling when a known predator puts its mouth on you. It’s a sensation that’s hard to put into sentences.

“Well, it’s … it’s, uh … well, I really don’t know how to describe it,” said Lane, of Waynesboro, Miss. “It’s just something biting you.”

If it’s a small fish — and in the world of handgrabbing, that means about 30 pounds or less — the grabber will pull it out of the box and come to the surface with the fish in a headlock.

For the big ones, the ones that would likely fight their way out of a simple wrestling hold, grabbers carry a brass spike attached to a long piece of rope. The spike goes through the fish’s lower lip and out its mouth. With the rope looped around the lip and wrapped around the grabber’s hand, escape is almost impossible.

“This is the golden rule,” warned nationally known outdoorsman and novice handgrabber Preston Pittman, who came along on our adventure to film footage for a new outdoors television show. “It’s a long walk home, if you let one get away.”

The first nine boxes we checked that morning furnished us with four flatheads, including the 53-pounder Willoughby pulled out on our first stop of the day. Box No. 10, I would soon find out, had my name on it.

“Just stick your arm in there and see if you can feel him,” Lane said.

I took the plunge, but the cupboard was bare. Mr. Catfish was holed up in the far end of the box. That’s when Lane’s pole came into play. A couple pokes, and the catfish had changed its position.

“He’s up there now, over my foot,” Lane shouted. “He’s over my right foot right now.”

I went under again and felt the fish’s head right away. It was kind of like coming across a ripe melon at the grocery store. At that moment, I was thankful that the water was so muddy. I had no desire to stare into the mouth of whatever was now attached to my arm.

I was in relatively shallow water, so I could bring my head up for air. “I’ve got it,” I gasped.

Liles stuck his hand down to feel the fish. He paused, and then announced to the group gravely, “It’s a blue.”

Willoughby looked concerned, which didn’t help me much: This blue was biting my hand.

“Don’t have him string it if it’s a blue,” Willoughby said. “Just let him come out with it.”

I went under again, prepared to do my best Sergeant Slaughter impression and put the damn blue cat in a “death grip” like Moore told me to.

“Are you sure it’s a blue?” Lane asked Liles. There was so much worry in his voice, I likely would have polluted the river had I not been underwater when he said it.

After a short underwater struggle, I shot out of the Big Black with a big blue in tow, my left arm wrapped tight around its repugnant mug.

Soon, I was laughing. And so was everyone else. I was accepted. I was part of the group. My rite of passage weighed 25 pounds and was still trying to eat my right hand.

“My man!” Willoughby exclaimed. “Got him a blue!”

Later on, another box had my name on it. It housed two flatheads, a male and a female who weren’t happy that I interrupted their party. The second, and larger one, bit me hard. I uttered some words that Pittman will have to edit out of his TV show.

Near the end of the afternoon, a man yelled to us from the only other boat we passed that day.

“How did y’all do?” he asked.

Moore remained poker-faced. We sat on coolers that contained 14 fish, a catch that weighed close to 350 pounds.

“Just some small ones,” Moore said. “Nothing big.”

As we drove off, Moore turned to me and cracked a sly smile. With the slime of a 30-pound flathead still glistening on my T-shirt, I smiled back.

I was finally in on the joke.

June 13, 2002 — Mike Willoughby emerged from the mud-brown Mississippi water as if he were part of a river baptism, as if the very spirit of the Holy Ghost had taken possession of his being.

But Willoughby didn’t come up from the Big Black River singing. He didn’t say, “Hallelujah.”

Instead, Willoughby grimaced and grunted. He appeared to be in pain.

“He come up and bit me and twisted off,” the 33-year-old paint contractor from Jackson, Miss., said before groaning again. “Felt like a good fish.”

Then, Willoughby took a deep breath and disappeared into the water again. He was trying to coax a giant flathead catfish into biting his hand.

After his third dunk into the drink, Willoughby spit water, gasped for air and warned us again that the fish was “a good ‘un.”

“Alright, I’m fixin’ to come out with him,” Willoughby announced before going under a final time.

I suppose I shouldn’t have reacted with so much shock when Willoughby struggled to the surface with a 53-pound creature in his arms. I mean, I had seen photos and read accounts of men fishing for colossal catfish using only their bare hands. But I always remained skeptical.

Even after Willoughby lugged his leviathan to the boat and placed its still spasmodic body into a cooler, part of me — the logical and rational part — questioned the validity of the whole venture. To the uninitiated onlooker, what goes on under the cover of muddy water is a mystery.

Perhaps it was a trick, I thought. Willoughby was the magician and the Big Black River was his big black hat.

But the monstrosity Willoughby removed from the river was far from cute and cuddly. It was slimy and prehistoric and ugly as sin. It looked like Edward G. Robinson … hit in the face with a shovel.

I stared, and the fish stared right back. Its wicked-looking whiskers wiggled with each dying breath.

This was most definitely real. And, I realized with mounting misgivings, I soon would be asked to stick my hand in the mouth of one of this catfish’s cousins.

For nearly three years, I have tried to pin down a story on the fishy type of fishing known as handgrabbing, noodling, grabbling, grappling, stumping, hogging or dogging, depending on what part of the country you’re in.

Two summers ago, a gentleman named Bubba said he’d help set up a handgrabbing trip for me on the Savannah River in eastern Georgia (which, like most states, considers fishing by hand illegal). But Bubba didn’t come through.

Last summer, I thought I’d be grabbing in southern Tennessee, but my contact wasn’t able to track down the grabbers along the river banks like he thought he’d be able to. And, he said, none of the grabbers had telephones.

I began to suspect handgrabbing was a myth, a colorful part of Southern folklore, the equivalent of snipe hunting — a well-orchestrated hoax designed to make me look like a fool.

But that was before a reader e-mailed me the link to mississippihandgrabbing.com, before I spoke to Gerald Moore on the telephone, before I drove 450 miles just so a giant catfish — or two, or three — could bite down on my hand.

“Oh, it’s for real. Trust me,” said Moore, 56, known around Jackson as “the master,” although he claims the nickname is more for his carpet-cleaning skills than his expertise as a handgrabber.

We were riding in Moore’s truck on a back road west of Jackson, towing his johnboat to a remote private put-in along the Big Black, a tributary of the Mississippi River. In the backseat sat Preston Pittman, a world-champion turkey caller from nearby Canton, who was tagging along to videotape footage for an outdoors television show he hopes to launch in 2003.

Moore turned to me and, with the booming bass of a barker for a carnival freak show, said, “What you’re going to see today will fascinate you.”

Moore, of Madison, owns a carpet cleaning business now, but at various points in his life has been a police officer, a moonshine runner, a Harley-Davidson rider and a country singer. When I met him, he wore faded overalls and a faded blue T-shirt.

The American flag bandana he tied around his head drew attention away from his bright white beard. Moore could easily win an Uncle Jesse Duke lookalike contest, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they still have that sort of thing in southern Mississippi.

When Moore showed up at my motel at 5:30 a.m. June 1, he told me he was up late the night before chasing after his three-legged dog. He caught him about a half-mile from the house.

Moore didn’t look or act like a man who owned a computer, let alone a Web site. But it’s at mississippihandgrabbing.com where you can buy “A Rare Breed … The Masters of Handgrabbing,” the video Moore made with friends Willoughby, Keith Lane and Ricky Liles.

Mississippi is the world’s leading producer of farm-raised catfish. And Moore believes the state is likely the world’s leading producer of handgrabbers, as well.

“Of course you have to bear in mind, we’re a bunch of rednecks here,” Moore said.

The weekend before I arrived, a crew from CNN came out to go handgrabbing with the self-proclaimed masters.

“We’ve had all kinds of national attention,” Moore said. “We’ve been on the NBC ‘Today Show.’ Turner South plays it about near every week. CNN? You can’t get no bigger than that.”

Folks are just plumb fascinated by handgrabbing which, by my count, is only legal in five states: Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Tennessee. But I doubt people in the other 46 states really care. Handgrabbing isn’t at the top of many to-do lists.

“It takes a special person to go in there and do it,” Moore said. “Not that I’m a bad Joe or anything like that, but you’ve got to have that certain …”

Moore finished his thought with a powerful grunt that, to me at least, made him sound very much like a bad Joe.

“You’re basically fishing today and your hand is bait,” Moore continued. “There ain’t no rod and reel. There ain’t no pole. It’s man against fish.”

Or water moccasin. Or snapping turtle. Or alligator. The Big Black River has them all. But usually, Moore assured me, handgrabbers only run into fish.

And the fish can be feisty. You would be, too, if someone tried to interrupt your mating season. In Mississippi, it is legal to grab catfish from May 1 to July 15, the weeks when flatheads, and the more ornery blue cats, head to hollowed-out logs — or, better yet, the cypress boxes placed throughout waterways by handgrabbers — to spawn, a process that lasts a couple of days.

That’s the time when grabbers like to shove their hands in muddy holes most people would never think of. And that’s the time when catfish are more than happy to bite, which is ultimately the goal of the grabber.

Moore and his crew wear nylon gloves, the ones used for filleting fish, but they often don’t stop the scrapes that leave scars. Catfish have thousands of tiny teeth that can rip off your hide like sandpaper.

“You catch one of them blue cats, and he can tear your (behind) up,” Willoughby said. “People think we’re crazy as hell.”

I dug my foot into the floorboard of Moore’s truck as we approached our put-in. I was thinking that those people might be right.

But Wendell Ko does not have gills. He cannot breath underwater. Although, at times it seems like he can.

Ko is a Hawaiian spearfisherman. He is also a freediver, which means when Ko plummets 100 feet into the Pacific to hunt a 100-pound fish, he does so with no scuba gear strapped to his back. The only oxygen tanks he travels with are his lungs.

“When you grow up with it, it just becomes natural,” said Ko, 41, of Pearl City, a suburb of Honolulu. “If I’m stressed out at home or work, I go in the water for a couple hours of diving. It just totally relaxes you. It’s a different world. It’s amazing what the ocean can do.”

I saw just what the ocean can do May 19. Ko and his 16-year-old son Justin let me tag along as they competed in the Chop Suey Meet, a spearfishing tournament put on by Alii Holo Kai, one of the top freediving clubs in Hawaii.

We met at Haleiwa Beach Park on the North Shore of Oahu at 7 a.m. After the divers were split into teams, the pairs headed off in cars and trucks in search of the piece of the Pacific that would yield the most fish.

We were told to be back by 1 p.m. for the weigh-in. The meet works on the honor system. Divers are expected to head into the ocean for their catch, not across the street to the painted sign labeled “Fresh Fish and Fillets.”

The Kos and I traveled west and ended up setting off from the sandy shoreline behind a YMCA camp close to the northwestern point of the island.

Wendell Ko knows all the hot spots. He’s been spearfishing the islands for 30 years. In middle school, he went without lunch for a month and used his meal money to purchase his first snorkel. His first spear gun was fashioned out of a cue stick.

Ko started spearfishing competitively in the 1980s and in 1999 he captained the Hawaiian team that won the U.S. national championship in Islamorada, Fla.

The fish caught in the Chop Suey Meet were sold in Honolulu the next day. The funds raised will help send this year’s Hawaiian spearfishing team to nationals in California.

Ko outfitted me with everything for my maiden voyage. Wetsuit and gloves. Snorkel, mask and fins. He even handed me a spear gun and showed me how to load and reload the shaft. That was a skill that ended up going largely unused.

No use holding a gun if you can’t hold your breath.

On our way to the water, we passed a sign that read, “No Swimming: Dangerous Current.” I was the only one who seemed to take notice.

Spearfishermen have other worries … worries with sharp teeth. Ko said that he encounters sharks on every other dive — they can smell the blood of recently speared fish from miles away.

Every other dive? I asked Ko whether he saw a shark his last time out. He had, but somehow that didn’t ease my concern.

“I’ve never seen the movie ‘Jaws.’ If I did, that would probably mess me up,” Ko said, adding that spear guns can come in handy when a shark is circling.

If a spearfisherman does die in the water, it’s usually not due to a shark. A phenomenon called “shallow water blackouts” can strike even the most experienced freedivers.

It often happens less than 15 feet from the surface. Expanding, oxygen-starved lungs literally suck oxygen from the diver’s blood. The result is unconsciousness, and typically death.

Ko came close during a competition in 1996. After several deep dives, he stayed under too long, trying to catch a particularly crafty fish.

“I came up and I was all tingly,” Ko said. “Everything turned black and white. I didn’t know which way was shore and which way was out. I literally had to talk to myself.”

We swam roughly 300 yards from shore, through the breaking waves to where the water was slightly less choppy. Because this was a competition designed for novices, we stayed in the shallows. The water was only 20 feet deep.

Out there, I could make it to the bottom OK. But by the time I did, my lungs were telling me that it was time to leave. But not Wendell and Justin.

No, they stayed down there and made themselves at home, for minutes at a time. I suppose the best way to catch a fish is to act like one.

Spearfishermen are truly underwater hunters, using coral boulders as cover, tracking their prey. Sometimes divers make grunting noises to call in fish. Most kills happen at close range.

“The guy who knows the fish better, will catch more fish,” said 58-year-old Alii Holo Kai member Dennis Okada, noting that many fishing “secrets” are kept within the ohana, or family.

“I feel it’s the most selective method of fishing there is. Because you see what you are getting. You are not catching something you don’t want to catch. You don’t go out and shoot everything in sight.”

Ko “selects” most of his fish at 60 feet or below. The deepest he has gone is 130 feet, the mere thought of which makes my eardrums bleed.

The first time you sink to 60 feet, Ko said, all the pressure feels like a simultaneous choke and Heimlich maneuver.

“But as you continue to dive those depths, your body gets used to it,” said Ko, who has speared several fish that weighed more than 100 pounds. “So you don’t feel the pressure any more. It’s amazing what the human body can do.”

I shot my spear gun once. And it was not a graceful attempt. It was a sloppy afterthought, a pull of the trigger on my way back up for a breath of air. The target was no fish in particular, just a school way out of range.

The sharp shaft, which is tethered to the rest of the gun, struck some coral and stuck there. At the surface, I tried to hold on, but the gun kept pulling me back under. I eventually had to let go. Justin went back down and got the gun for me.

Still, with two first place finishes, the Ko-Washburn team fared fairly well. We killed 10 fish between us. Wendell had five. Justin had five.

And I speared the rest.

Contact Wendell Ko by e-mail or visit www.freedivehawaii.com.

When you are given those directions, you know you are headed for a countrified corner of the world. And when you turn onto Holloway Road in Danielsville, you know you have arrived.

It’s a graveyard for anything with gears. Tractors, backhoes and school buses — in varying degrees of disrepair — line the path that leads to Holloway Hollow, a remote pitch of dirt and grass that houses one of Madison County’s biggest tickets the second Saturday of each month, April through October.

It’s an antique tractor pull. And it’s simple and straightforward. Folks driving old tractors try to pull a weighted sled as far as their engines will allow them.

“This is good, clean American fun,” said Gainesville resident Tim Akins, 38, who has taken his bright orange 1960 Allis-Chalmers tractor to Holloway for the past two years. “You can bring your wife and your kids. You ain’t got to worry about nothing.”

Akins paused for a puff on his Hava Tampa Jewel cigar and then added, “I don’t think this would be a terrorist target for anyone.”

The Stars and Stripes fly proud at Holloway Hollow. The Georgia flag does, too — and not that newfangled blue one, either. There haven’t been many complaints about the Confederate flag’s presence at the tractor pull.

If all the hauling makes you hungry, burgers and hot dogs are always on the grill. If you’re lucky, there might also be some homemade apple pie and ice cream.

The pulling starts at 5 p.m. sharp. But spectators start arriving long before then. People plop down their lawn chairs to save spots on the grassy slope which has been leveled out into three tiers to accommodate the crowd. Country music is piped through the public address system until the action begins.

“There will be more good ol’ boys gathered here than there are left in Hall County,” Akins said. Holloway Hollow is one place where the phrase “good ol’ boys” is actually taken as a compliment.

Broden Holloway used to farm the land that he turned into a tractor pull strip in 1990. The 69-year-old said, “It was just something I wanted to do.”

Holloway, owner of Holloway & Sons Tractor Company in Danielsville, estimates that he lost around $2,500 holding the tractor pulls last year. He doesn’t charge admission and only asks $5 per “hitch” from the drivers.

It’s not money he’s in it for. It’s the people.

“Everybody’s just good old country folk,” Holloway said. “And they’re enjoying themselves, it seems like.”

On May 11, Holloway wore faded denim overalls and a John Deere cap, two items that appeared to be part of the antique tractor pull uniform. He had a wooden paddle in his back pocket — an “educational tool” for his grandchildren, he said. The radio headset Holloway wore to communicate with his volunteer staff seemed out of place.

Holloway’s tractor pulls haven’t changed much over the past 12 years. And he doesn’t plan on them changing any time in the near future. Tractors still need to be more than 32 years old to participate. They can only be driven in first gear.

“Most tractor pulls, there’s a whole lot of hot-roddin’,” Holloway said. “But we don’t allow that here.”

Some of the antique tractors are so polished and shiny that they might be mistaken for new. Others feature what Akins likes to call their “original finish.” It’s all rust.

“It’s a tractor pull, not a tractor show,” clarified Akins, who owns an equipment and truck repair shop in Gainesville.

The pulling action itself is plodding. The tractors never move too fast. No fire shoots out of their exhaust pipes. If people are looking for speed, they can head on over to the go-kart track down the road.

No, the pull is all about power. Sometimes slow and steady does win the race.

“I guess it kind of grows on you,” spectator Suzy Seagraves, 25, of Commerce, said. “It’s relaxing to me.”

The weight on the sled electronically shifts forward during each pull, making progress progressively tougher. Every now and again, the front end of a tractor will rise up off the ground while the rear tires grind deeper into the strip of packed Georgia red clay. And every now and again the fans will clap.

What really brings the crowd to its feet, however, takes place during intermission. It’s the kids-only pedal tractor race, a mad dash on dirt to a finish line where everyone receives a trophy. The little tractors move a lot faster than the big ones.

The adults don’t pull for trophies or money. They get a plastic plaque if they place in their weight class. But really, these guys pull for pride.

“I come to win every one of them,” Akins said. “I don’t, but I have that in mind when I come.”

The tractor pulls in Danielsville never drag on too long. Everyone is usually packed up and gone by 10 p.m. Plenty of time to sleep and get up for church the next morning.

Broden Holloway wouldn’t have it any other way.

The car was yellow. It had a big blue “0″ emblazoned on its roof.

“Zero is as close as I could come to a bullseye,” Taaffe said with a smirk. “The new guy always has a bullseye.”

And then he placed the car in my hand. It was time for my introduction to the scaled-down world of slot car racing, where the cars are small … and the thrills are big.

“It’s frustrating at first, there’s no doubt about that,” warned Taaffe, proprietor of Bullet Raceway, which occupies the back section of the arcade at Bumper’s & Bogey’s on Jesse Jewell Parkway in Gainesville.

“You can get discouraged. Because it looks so easy.”

The regulars who race at Bullet Raceway every Friday and Saturday night do make slot car racing seem rather simple. Just press a button and watch your car go.

But there’s much more to slot car racing than that. It’s the turns that make it tricky. Slot cars, which buzz around the track so fast they become bright-colored blurs, don’t always stay in their slots.

I learned that early during my practice session. Take a turn wide open and you’re headed into the wall … or over it.

“You built me a pretty sturdy car,” I said to Taaffe, who apparently anticipated the torture I’d inflict on car No. 0. It happens to every beginner.

“It’s a tank,” Taaffe said with a knowing nod.

We were racing cars 1/24 the size of real cars. For those of you — like me — who have no idea how to visualize that ratio, we were racing cars about the size of an adult male hand. A motor is the size of a match box.

Taaffe’s road-style track, built in 1964, is full of twists and turns. It’s about 100 feet long and eight lanes — or slots — wide. Each lane is marked by a different color and has a corresponding control terminal along the straightaway.

Cars are powered electronically. Each “driver” has a controller that hooks into the track and operates a particular lane. Squeeze the trigger, and the car goes. Release it, and the car stands still.

Good racers find a rhythm, somewhere between reckless and reasonable. Great racers run awfully close to reckless, only without all the wrecks. Fast drivers at Bullet Raceway average less than four seconds per lap.

“If you watch the fingers, you can see the finesse,” Taaffe said.

Terry Kelly played his controller like it was a musical instrument. His finger squeezed the same song lap after lap. He kept the beat with his head, back and forth, following his car around the track.

Kelly was my coach. And I couldn’t have asked for a better one. He’s a reigning United Slot Racers Association national champion, a title he won in April at a race in Anderson, S.C. He’s also a regular at Bullet Raceway.

“Here, everybody will help you,” said Kelly, 48, of Alpharetta. “Until the race starts. And then you’re on your own.”

Luckily, Kelly remained my crew chief even after the green flag dropped.

Races are split into eight three-minute periods. Each driver runs one period on each lane. The driver with the most laps after the last period is the winner. A computer does the counting.

Beginner races take a little longer to complete. The clock stops with every crash, and there are several. Thankfully, the “corner marshals” — the drivers waiting for the next race — are there to quickly return the careening cars to their proper slots.

Then the public address announcer barks: “3-2-1, squeeze ‘em.”

The cars and minutes went by so quickly, though, it was rather easy for me to lose track of how many laps I was losing by. Trust me, it was a lot.

After each round, Kelly took my car back to his body shop (he has a large, portable wooden equipment box that travels with him) and made adjustments.

This is serious stuff for Kelly. His story is similar to that of several slot car racers. He got into it as a child, lost interest as a young adult, and rediscovered the hobby in middle age. But slot car racing is more passion than hobby for Kelly these days.

“It’s just like any other sport,” Kelly said. “I like the competition.”

Kelly constructs slot car parts at his home and sells them over the Internet and at Taaffe’s store. He has his own racing team (he wore a “Kelly Racing” T-shirt on Friday) and boasts a roster of racers from California, Michigan, Tennessee, South Carolina and Georgia. The Kelly Racing team won five national titles in April.

Kelly said he put nearly 400 hours of work into his car leading up to nationals. He won about $400 for his efforts.

“You don’t cover your costs,” Kelly said. “But you do make some money.”

Kelly, who often swaps out tires on his car based on changes in humidity, asked me if the car felt “loose” at one point during my race. I just shrugged.

Of course, Kelly is just an extreme. You can buy a car from Taaffe for as little as $45 and rent a controller for $2. Just like that, you are ready to race.

“We bought cars and just dove right in,” said Kevin Umstaedter, 46, of Gainesville, who started slot car racing with his two young sons almost a year ago. “It’s a great hobby for kids. And it’s a kick in the pants. It’s a heck of a lot of fun.”

Twelve-year-old Brandon Howorth, a sixth-grader at Chestatee Middle School, has his parents drop him off at Bullet Raceway every Friday night.

“I just like racing,” said Howorth, who stumbled upon the hobby six weeks ago and, by the way, soundly defeated the yellow car with a “bullseye” on its roof. “It’s fun coming here every Friday to race.”

You know Brandon, you’re right. Just watch out for the ol’ No. 0 car next time.

Perhaps Brady was a marionette, I thought. Perhaps someone, or something, was pulling at the strings from up above.

He made the unnatural appear natural. He made music with his feet. And then it was my turn.

“The good thing about clogging,” said Brady, 35, instructor at the Storm Dancers studio in Oakwood, “there’s no wrong step.”

Brady, obviously, hadn’t seen my steps yet.

Let’s get one thing straight. Clogging has nothing to do with wooden shoes or windmills. It’s a down-home dance, uniquely American.

But like most things born in Appalachia, clogging’s roots reach back across the Atlantic. A little Irish. A little Scottish. Throw in some English. Some German, too.

It was the 1700s, and all the different folk dances fused into one. Unchoreographed. Free-flowing. Much like the lives of the South’s early settlers.

“Clogging basically started as buck dancing,” Brady explained.

“Buck dancing?” I responded.

“Buck dancing is,” Brady began, “you go to a bar and see a bunch of guys that are, um, well lit. It has no structure to it. Just whatever they can stomp out.”

Clogging eventually found its way to the flatlands, where it met with other influences, Native American and African-American dance among them.

Clogging continues to evolve today.

“People are making up new steps all the time,” Brady said. “They take like half of an Irish step, half of a tap step and half of a Canadian step, put the three together and come up with something totally new.”

Several years ago, Brady himself helped invent a step during a particularly productive early morning at a bar in Pigeon Forge, Tenn.

It’s called a “double-double.” It sounds like a musical machine gun. And, I quickly realized, there was no way I was going to come close to accomplishing it.

Clogging draws its name from the Gaelic word for “time.” And the clog dancer, wearing shoes very similar to those worn in tap, is supposed to hit the floor on the downbeat.

I was just plain offbeat.

Brady and I were trying to boogie to the Doobie Brothers’ “Steamer Lane Breakdown,” and I stopped in mid-song. It just didn’t feel right.

“That’s one good thing about him,” Brady said to the growing crowd at the studio (the presence of which likely played a factor in my faulty footwork). “He knows when he’s not on beat.”

Brady hasn’t had that problem in some time. A Hall County native, Brady’s family moved to Arcade when he was a young boy. When Brady was 12, he attended a clogging class at the town hall. He hasn’t stopped stomping since.

“It was the thing to do,” Brady said — and for anyone who has ever driven through Arcade on the way to Athens, that statement is easy to believe. “It was the only thing you had to do in a little town.”

By the mid-1980s, Brady, who performed locally with a group known as the Foot Stompin’ Heel Clickers, was the best clogger in the world. Five years straight, he beat out 1,500 competitors to win the “Hee Haw” world championship at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tenn.

Now he spends his time teaching. At Storm Dancers, he has around 70 students from age 4 to 60. And they clog to anything from bluegrass to country to rock to hip-hop and pop.

“We do routines to all of it,” said Brady, a land surveyor when he’s not clogging. “When you start clogging to Britney Spears, that’s when all the little girls come running saying, ‘I want to dance like that.’”

Thirteen-year-old clogger Taylor Soucie, an eighth-grader at West Hall Middle, remembers catching her first glimpse of clogging at the age of 5.

“It was fast,” Soucie said. “I thought it was cool.”

Kristi Pirkle, 16, who like Soucie is on Brady’s performance squad, has been clogging for nearly two-thirds of her life.

“I don’t play sports,” the West Hall High junior said, “but I thought this was interesting. And it’s good exercise.”

Brady claims that 15 minutes of clogging is equal to seven miles of running. And if I had been able to last 15 minutes, I’d be able to tell you if he’s telling the truth. You’ll have to take Brady’s word on this one.

I started out strong. I ended up shaky. The more steps Brady taught me, the less I felt I learned.

“I’m thinking too much,” I said after realizing I had been sticking out my tongue in contemplation for the lesson’s duration.

“Yep,” Brady said. “You’ve got to relax and go with it. You can’t think about it a lot.”

I watched Brady’s top class practice. I watched them relax and release. With the most experienced cloggers, it’s as if the beat moves the body, not the other way around.

I liked it best when the music was off and the sound of shoes filled the room like a symphonic factory. Everyone was in step.

The worn wooden floor sagged with each collective stomp.

Repeat, again and again.

So that’s what I did. For one day, I was a Gainesville garbage collector. And, you know, it wasn’t as bad as you might think.

Sure, it smelled a bit, and I soiled a pair of slacks. But at the end of the day, I knew my body had been through a day’s work. Real work. Sweat work.

We white collar types tend to forget what that feels like.

“It’s a good, honest paycheck,” 50-year-old Frank Hood, a garbage collector for two decades, said to me as we sat in the lounge of the public works building on Alta Vista Road in the minutes leading up to the 7:30 a.m. start of our work day.

Hood reminded me to wear my gloves — it’s easy to get stuck by syringes or broken glass — and recommended that I carry along eye protection, too. He closed with a statement that took me by surprise: “It’s fun. It really is.”

Hood continued, “You meet a lot of different people out there. People who stay in a lot, they miss it all. When you’re out there, you know what’s going on.”

Want to learn a little about your neighborhood? Ask your garbage collectors. You can learn a lot about people by carrying their trash.

Just judging by the size — and the smell — of the load you can determine someone’s age, someone’s eating habits. Garbage men know when new babies arrive (dirty diapers are a dead giveaway) and when children head off to college (the load becomes a lot lighter).

Garbage men know when families move away and when others move in. And they take special notice of any new dogs in the neighborhood. You see, dogs don’t differentiate much between the people who pick up the trash and the people who deliver the mail. They don’t like either one.

Gainesville is a city that doesn’t appear to have been laid out in any particular pattern. Streets criss and cross at odd angles. A single road can be known by several different names.

But it all makes sense in the minds of the garbage men. They drive these streets every day.

It’s not just the streets, either. If you live in Gainesville, Richard Trammell, the driver of the truck that I worked on, likely knows where you hide your trash.

“I know where all the hot spots are,” Trammell, 45, said with a chuckle.

Gainesville residents aren’t asked to bring their trash to the curb. They aren’t even asked to bring it to the front of the house. Garbage collectors are expected to collect the garbage from wherever it is kept.

And that could be behind a big tree in the backyard or behind a fence next to the garage.

The level of service shocked Dick Young when he moved to Gainesville from Dekalb County last year. He made a point to say hello to Trammell and my truck’s other “toter” Darrell Carter when we pulled up next to his house.

“These guys are great,” Young, 67, said. “They are so helpful, too. I never heard them complain, and that’s unusual. I wouldn’t mind having to bring the trash up myself. I would do it if it came to that. But for them to go around back and pull it out, I think that’s terrific.”

It’s a nice service. I agree. But after eight hours of tramping up driveways and through backyards in search of trash, my aching legs had a different opinion.

The average Gainesville garbage collector — of whom there are 20, responsible for nearly 5,000 city residences — walks six miles a day.

“It’s just go, go, go,” Niles said. “It keeps 20 busy. It’s stop and go. It’s uphill and downhill. It’s hopping off the truck and hopping back on.”

Some guys don’t even make it through the first day. It’s too hard, too smelly, too messy. They radio back to the office and ask to be picked up by the side of the road.

“Even with a garbage toter, it takes a special kind of person that wants to do this work,” Niles said. “You would think anybody could do it, but it does take a special kind of person.”

Riding on the back of a garbage truck is strangely liberating. Lean back a bit and the wind hits you in your face. It makes you feel like you’re flying — and neutralizes some of the truck’s odor.

I also found pleasure in operating “the blade,” the mechanical door that sweeps the trash inside the truck. In a matter of minutes, an overflowing load vanishes. All that is left is a foul soup — milk, grease, blood and other liquids and juices whose expiration dates have come and gone. The vile brew drips down the blade and settles in a big black puddle.

Oh, and then there’s the smell. There’s always the smell.

Trammell, Carter and I eventually settled into a rhythm.

“We’ve got to go get it,” said Carter, 34, toting for a little more than a year. “No matter what, rain or snow, we got to go get it. It’s our job. That’s how we look at it. We work as a team to get this thing done.”

When Trammell would stop the truck, I’d look to his face in the side-view mirror. A nod meant it was my turn.

“Go to that white house,” Trammell said on one of our early stops. “It’s going to be around back. He’s got some white bags on his patio.”

Sure enough, Trammell was right. And the old man who keeps white bags of trash on his patio was smoking an early-morning cigarette on his screened-in back porch.

“You’re a new guy, ain’t you?” he said to me.

“Yep,” I responded. “It’s my first day.”

“Well, hang in there. You can retire in about 80 years.” The old man laughed.

True, the job of garbage collector is not one people usually plan for themselves. It just kind of happens.

Garbage toters in Gainesville start out at $7.69 an hour. But there’s room for advancement. Trammell has been doing it for 21 years, and he’s moved from the back of the truck to the driver’s seat.

“You would think that out of all the other jobs I had, that they would have been better for me than doing this here,” Trammell said. “It’s one of the worst jobs in the world, I guess, and I done stuck with it this long. It does have good benefits, though. That’s one thing that kept me here this long. And the hours are really good.”

We took our only break of the day at mid-morning. By that time, the gloves I wore were no longer white. We sat on the curb at a gas station and ate a snack. The break didn’t last long.

Streets and houses ran together as the day wore on. It all started to look the same to me.

Get garbage out of can. Put lid back on can. Carry garbage to truck and throw it in the back. Repeat, again and again.

Sometimes the monotony is broken. Perhaps you come upon a dead dog covered in maggots — yep, some people throw those out with the trash — or an appliance that is still in working condition.

Trammell remembers one time when a homeless man emerged from a Dumpster that was about to be emptied into the truck.

“We almost killed him,” Trammell said.

Garbage men are blue-collar magicians. They make things disappear. We often bag up our trash, put it outside and then forget about it. It goes away twice a week. We take it for granted.

“Sometimes a customer will tell me I’m doing a good job,” Carter said. “And I take that and say to myself, ‘It’s going to be all right.’”

I was worried that I might slow Trammell and Carter down, but we made good time. We finished our route and made it back to “the house” with minutes to spare.

“You’re garbage man material,” Carter said to me with a wide smile. “If you can hang for the day, you’re garbage man material.”

I took it as a compliment.

I learned of the sad news while reading the newspaper. I saw Nell’s name and face on the obituary page and threw down the paper in disbelief. Then I read further, and I threw down the paper in disgust.

I had missed Nell’s funeral. I had been playing basketball instead.

I felt awful. I felt guilty. So I started to write. That’s all I knew to do.

Nell and I didn’t have much in common when I moved here in the fall of 1998. She was in her 80s, a lifelong resident of Hall County. I was in my mid-20s, a transplant from up north.

But we were neighbors. And in certain parts of the country, that still means something.

It’s clear to me now that the neighborly relationship Nell and I shared was an important part of my existence here in Gainesville. It was a constant I could always count on. But I don’t think I ever expressed the importance of our friendship to Nell.

Nell, who was 84 when she died following a sudden illness, lived alone in a home on Hillcrest Avenue just a few feet from mine, but our paths didn’t cross as often you might think. Journalists and senior citizens don’t keep the same hours.

When we did see each other, we’d always stop to chat.

I’d emerge from my house at midday to retrieve the newspaper from my steps and Nell would be raking leaves or pulling weeds — she loved working in her yard, as much as her aged body would allow. Sometimes we’d go to our mailboxes at the same time.

Nell would always wave me over. Nell always wanted to talk.

“How’s your mom and them?” she would ask.

We talked about the weather a lot. Nell was always worried that a bad storm was going to knock a tall tree through the roof of her tiny home.

On the surface, our conversations never had much substance. Nell just seemed happy to talk about anything.

Nell said she felt safe with me living next door. And she kept a watchful eye over me, as well. She noticed when my car was gone for long periods of time, and would always call me upon my return.

She’d never leave a message, though. Nell didn’t care for answering machines.

Nell liked that I wrote for the newspaper. I interviewed her for a story I did during the ice storm in February 2000. Our street was without power for the better part of a week, and I found Nell wrapped in blankets in front of her gas-powered fireplace sipping coffee she had heated campfire-style in the flames.

The story appeared on the front page. Nell said I made her a celebrity over at the senior center.

Nell seemed to take comfort in the fact that she could see her neighbor’s photograph in the paper each week, even if sometimes she couldn’t remember what day my Sporting Life column appeared in The Times.

“I haven’t seen your picture in the paper the last couple Mondays,” Nell said to me last year.

“Nell, my column runs on Tuesdays,” I replied.

Nell thought about it. “Always has?”

“Yes.”

“Now you’re not going to tell me I’m getting old, are you?” she said with a laugh and a pat on my arm.

Yes, Nell was getting old. She liked to remind me of her age and her assorted maladies. But she was very proud that she lived on her own, that she still worked in her yard, that she still drove herself to church and the grocery store.

Every day, Nell walked up and down our street. Doctor’s orders.

I saw Nell walking last week. A surgical mask covered her face. I waved from my car. I’m pretty sure she saw me. I’m pretty sure that was the last time I saw her.

Nell rarely asked for help with anything. But when she did, I was happy to do what I could.

I remember last December, she asked me to carry her porcelain Christmas tree from her basement to her living room. She had made the tree several years ago and didn’t trust herself with it.

Even for a small gesture like that, Nell was most appreciative. Now, I am left thinking I could have done much more for Nell while she was here.

But Nell was always thankful for anything. She’d often tell me she didn’t know what she would do if I ever moved away. Now, I wonder what I am to do now that she is gone.

Nell’s car is still parked in front of her house. Her rake is still propped up against the side wall.

I walked outside to fetch my mail Thursday and glanced toward Nell’s house. Part of me expected her to emerge from her front door, too.

I waited. But it never happened.

This was the 1960s — not too long ago, really. Back then, Gainesville was more Wild West and less Atlanta. Back then, Gainesville was horse country.

And now, Hulsey sees the area experiencing a rebirth in all things equine.

“It’s really mushrooming again,” Hulsey, 49, of Gainesville, said. “It kind of brings people back to older days.”

The sport that brought Hulsey back to horses is team penning. He picked it up a little more than a year ago, and now he can’t get enough.

Team penning is similar in several ways to the horse sport of cutting. But penning is pushy. It’s more offense than defense.

And in penning, the cowboys — and cowgirls — make a heck of a lot more noise.

Here are the basics: A herd of 30 cattle, numbered “0″ through “9″ three times over, settles at one end of an arena. As a team of three people on horseback approaches the herd, the public address announcer calls out one of the numbers.

The three cattle wearing that number become the targets. The riders must separate them from the herd and get them into a small pen at the far end of the arena in less than 90 seconds. The fastest time wins.

“I’ve had just about every hobby there was in the history of the world,” Hulsey said. “And I’ve had more fun doing this than anything I’ve ever done. It’s a rush. It’s wide open. It’s fast.”

Well, it’s supposed to be fast. But two weeks ago, during my first penning lesson at Hulsey’s farm in White County, I was more slowpoke than cowpoke.

“You’re not from around here, are you?” asked Hulsey’s penning pal Devin White. The 20-year-old Gainesville High graduate, a horseshoer by trade, insisted he was referring to my accent and not my riding style. That, he tried to blame on the horses.

Hobo. Leo. Rusty. I rode them all that morning. Sometimes, the horses wouldn’t go the direction I thought I was directing them. Other times, they wouldn’t go much at all. Hulsey remarked that he had never seen Rusty so reluctant to run.

I knew what the problem was. And I’m fairly certain Hulsey and White knew it, too — they were just too nice to say it. The problem was the rider, not the ridee. But they still kept swapping out horses on me anyway.

No matter. Any horse can sense when a rider is tense.

And I had good reason to be. Penning is not intended for the novice rider. It involves sudden starts and stops and flat-out sprints. Even the most experienced riders can end up in a heap on the ground. That is part of the draw.

So are belt buckles.

Hulsey and White — along with a few other local residents, including Hulsey’s stepdaughter Crista Ragsdale — are regulars at the weekly team penning jackpot contests at Mike “Curly” Phillipsâ Cherokee Rose Arena in Carnesville.

It’s the only show for miles. Every Saturday, penners from across the Southeast — Florida, Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina and, of course, Georgia — come to ride at Curly’s.

“Curly’s is a place the pros come to practice,” White said. “It’s people that run the circuit. This is where you’re going to get to ride with the best around here in the Southeast. They all go to Curly’s.”

“We just want to win,” Hulsey added. “We’re paying $10,000 to win a $175 belt buckle.”

“But you won it,” White said with a satisfied smile. “You didn’t buy it.”

The “Spring Fling” belt buckle series at Curly’s is currently at its halfway point, and Hulsey and White are both running in the top-10 in the points standings.

I went and watched them a couple of weeks ago. I got there at about 6 p.m. and left at 11 p.m. The riders kept riding for several hours after that. There is money at stake, but not much. Each event pays out 60 percent to the winners. Entry fees max out at $15.

“They just love it,” said Curly, who plays the role of announcer, herder, plowman and janitor for these rodeos he’s been running for the past dozen years. “It’s probably the most fun you can have with your clothes on.”

It’s not too bad for the spectators, either. At Curly’s, the cattle are always “fresh” — meaning frisky — and successful runs are the exception rather than the rule.

You see, the riders have more than just the 90-second limit to deal with. There is a “foul line,” too, typically the halfway point of the arena. Teams are disqualified if they let cattle of the wrong number break from the herd and cross the foul line. Same result if cattle chased toward the pen somehow sneak their way back across the foul line.

That makes for some desperate dashes … and savage screams.

“Hey! Hey! Hey! Get back there, you darn cow!” the rider yells, body angled sharply forward, hands steering horse like a stock car.

It was chilly that night at Curly’s. Steam rose from the heads of hot horses. But some hot cocoa and a quesadilla from Judy Brown’s kitchen hit the spot. And riders know, cold doesn’t last long in Georgia.

“In the summer, God it’s dusty,” Hulsey said as he waited for his next run. “It’s hot and you’ll be out here until 2 o’clock in the morning. And then you’ve got to drive all the way back. And then you’ve got to get up and go to church.

“It’s rough. But it’s fun.”

And you can always use a new belt buckle, right?

Cherokee Rose Arena

Where: Carnesville

When: 6 p.m. Saturday

What: Year-round competition in team penning, sorting and one-on-one.

Entry fees: Range from $5-$15. Events pay out 60 percent to winners.

Contact: Mike “Curly” Phillips, (706) 335-7481

Directions: From Gainesville, take U.S. 129 south to I-85 north. Proceed 17 miles on I-85 to the Ga. 63/Martin Bridge Road exit, number 154. Turn right onto Martin Bridge for .2 miles and turn left onto Ga. 59. Travel 2.3 miles and turn right onto Bold Springs Road. After 5 miles, turn left onto an unnamed gravel road marked by a small “Cherokee Rose Arena” sign. Bear right at fork in road. Arena is on left.

The Atlanta Thrashers won only 19 of their first 76 games this season. That’s the worst record in the National Hockey League.

But the Zamboni drivers at Philips Arena can do no wrong. They are cheered every time they take the ice.

Perhaps this happens because Thrashers fans, like the followers of any franchise in its infancy, are in desperate need of something to get excited about. Or perhaps Americans just love anything with four wheels and a motor.

Either way, Matthew Krull isn’t complaining.

“I’m the kind of person, I need my 15 minutes of fame every once in a while,” said Krull, 28, of Crabapple, who has been one of the main Zamboni drivers at Philips since the Thrashers got their start in 1999. “I really get a thrill out of it.”

He’s not the only one. During Thrashers games at Philips, a lucky fan gets to ride shotgun for every Zamboni run around the rink. They wave to the crowd, pump their fists and give the Zamboni driver high-fives.

“Everybody wants a ride,” said 28-year-old Javits Britt, who hitchhiked to Atlanta from Ann Arbor, Mich., three years ago to become a Zamboni driver for the Thrashers. “Or they want tickets. Or they want a puck.”

But mostly people ask about the Zamboni … or whatever they choose to call it.

“So many of them butcher the name,” said Chuck Robinson, 43, of Jefferson, known officially around Philips as the assistant director of building operations. Unofficially, people call him “the ice guy.”

Stromboli. Zucchini. Cambodia. Robinson has heard people mangle the word Zamboni several ways in his 23 years working at ice rinks.

Whatever word they use, people seem mesmerized by the two massive machines that make rough ice glassy again between periods at a Thrashers game.

“We kind of feel like we’re putting on our own little show out there,” Robinson said.

But the performance is not without purpose.

“Fans don’t really understand how important the ice is,” Thrashers defenseman Brian Pothier said. “They just think that we go out there and ice is ice. But if you have a crew that takes care of the ice well, it’s really important to the team.

“Here, it’s great, especially for the southern climate. You would think that the humidity and the hot weather would kind of mess it up. But here, it’s just as good as any sheet of ice up north.”

Robinson is an Atlanta native who has spent most of his adult life making ice, a warm-weather guy who spends most of his days in the freezing cold. He manages an ice crew of 10, mostly part-timers. They include Zamboni drivers, snow shovelers and the people who make sure the holes that hold the goals don’t freeze over.

“Yeah, it’s a novel job,” Robinson said. “Certainly nobody else in the city does it. Not too many people in the state do it.”

Robinson paid his dues in community rinks in Atlanta, Orlando, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh before landing his current gig, ice guru for his hometown hockey club.

“You can’t go much higher than this, really,” Robinson said. “Maybe if you were the Zamboni driver for the Toronto Maple Leafs, that might be a little more prestigious.”

The NHL prefers the term “ice technician,” because ice guys do much more than drive a Zamboni, especially on game days.

“It’s an all-day job,” Robinson said. “It’s a 16-hour investment from start to finish.”

March 27, I tagged along with Robinson and his crew as they prepared Philips for the Thrashers’ 7:30 p.m. game against the Minnesota Wild. When I arrived at 4 p.m., Krull had already been on the job for nine hours.

The ice was filthy when he got there. It had been covered up for nine days. Philips is a multipurpose arena. In addition to the Thrashers, it’s home to the National Basketball Association’s Atlanta Hawks, Arena Football’s Georgia Force and several major music concerts.

Underneath it all, the ice remains. It’s only cover, some pieces of plywood.

So step one is scraping the ice surface free of everything that shouldn’t be there — gum, beer and half-eaten hot dogs included.

Sometimes just scraping doesn’t cut it. Robinson recalled a time when members of the rap-metal group Limp Bizkit spilled an entire bottle of something alcoholic that seeped deep within the hockey floor. A circular saw had to be used to remove the stained section of ice.

The ice, actually, is less than an inch thick for Thrashers games. The floor design is painted on top of two thin layers of ice and then encapsulated by more layers of ice, including the playing surface.

After clearing the floor of debris, Krull spent the rest of the morning rebuilding the ice with the Zamboni, which, by the way, got its name from the man who invented it. Frank Zamboni made his first self-propelled ice resurfacer in 1949. Prior to that, ice rinks relied on carts pulled by horses or tractors — and a lot of guys with shovels.

The Zamboni is much more than just an ice polisher. It shaves the ice and picks up the snow. It washes the ice and smoothes the surface. Then it spreads a layer of clean hot water — more than 160 degrees hot — over the ice.

The hotter the water, the clearer it freezes. And in about four minutes, about the amount of time the Zambonis are allotted between periods, the ice is hard enough to skate upon. That’s because of the concrete slab underneath, which features nine miles of pipes filled with chemicals that are constantly cooled to 17 degrees.

That makes for some cold working conditions. You feel it first in your feet (Robinson wears thermal socks to work), and then it spreads. It stays with you, too.

“You wake up and your bones are just cracking,” Krull said.

But cold is part of the job description when you’re working with frozen water. Robinson said his crew has a “passion for ice.” And that usually starts with a passion for hockey.

“It makes me feel more a part of the sport,” said Britt, whose favorite perk is his permanent front-row seat for the games. “If you’re a hockey fan, it doesn’t get any better than this.”

The goal of the Zamboni driver is to create the perfect sheet of ice, smooth and safe, every time. When dealing with a liquid and ever-changing atmospheric conditions, even indoors, that’s easier said than done.

“The reality of it is, ice is a tough situation to make perfect,” Robinson said. “If they would give us 15 or 20 minutes, we could get awful close. But who wants to sit through 15 or 20 minutes of Zamboni driving?”

Robinson might be surprised.

“The Zamboni is the best part,” said 13-year-old Thrashers fan Alex Shilling, of Alpharetta. “It’s cool how they’re so synchronized.”

It can be rather hypnotizing, I found. I watched the Zamboni work from several vantage points last week — the passenger seat, the front row, the upper deck — and I found pleasure in each one.

With each pass, rough becomes smooth, old becomes new. The Zamboni has a way of erasing the past. And in the Thrashers’ 4-2 loss to the Wild, there was plenty worth forgetting.

Seated in the press box, up near the roof, I watched the arena lights reflect in the Zamboni’s shiny wake before the second period began. And then I watched players come out and scratch it all up again.

That’s the part that makes Robinson smile.

“It’s great,” he said. “That’s what it’s there for.”

That’s not the case in Northeast Georgia. Even though lacrosse was played religiously here by the Cherokee, Creek and Oconee Indian tribes hundreds of years ago (the town of Ball Ground, in fact, was named for the sport), most local folks don’t know the difference between lacrosse and Lamaze.

But Riverside Military Academy hopes to change all of that. The private boarding school added lacrosse to its lineup of varsity sports this spring, becoming the first area school to do so. In fact, the closest school on the Eagles’ schedule is some 40 miles away.

Forty cadets — approximately 10 percent of RMA’s student body — tried out for the first lacrosse team in school history. Most of them had never picked up a lacrosse stick before.

“I had heard about it, but I had never seen it or anything,” Bart Mayers, a junior from Jacksonville, Fla., said. “I just thought it was some stupid guys just throwing a ball. I had no idea. Until you play, you really don’t know how cool a sport it is.”

Mayers admitted he’s still learning lacrosse, even though the Eagles’ season is now coming to an end. Still, he, like each of his teammates, is considered a resident expert at Riverside.

“A lot of the cadets are fascinated because they’ve never seen a sport like this,” Mayers said. “It’s really new to everybody. Everybody asks a lot of questions.”

Answering the questions isn’t always easy. I learned that when I was quizzing Riverside coach Joel Coleman prior to my participation in a practice last week.

Lacrosse can be hard to describe. When talking to me, Coleman likened lacrosse to football, baseball, soccer, hockey and basketball.

Finally, he said, “It’s really a combination of every game that I can think of. It’s not really a cross, it’s an amalgamation of a whole bunch of different things. It’s just a really fun sport. If you could pick out whatever you liked about any sport, that’s what lacrosse is.”

Lacrosse is played on a field close in size to the ones used for soccer. The strategy is similar to that of any sport played with one ball and two goals: Try to score more than your opponent.

What makes lacrosse unique is that the fundamentals, the basics of the game, are the most difficult skills to master. Learning how to pass and catch can take weeks, months even. Some people, even very gifted athletes, never get the hang of it.

Imagine playing hockey without knowing how to skate, or soccer without knowing how to kick.

“To kids who have never seen it before,” said Coleman, who grew up playing lacrosse in Maryland, “it’s like trying to teach them how to walk on Mars. We started practice on the 28th of January and most of them couldn’t even throw and catch. Now they look like they know what they’re doing — for the most part.”

Stick-work is the key to lacrosse. You pass, catch and scoop the ball using a long stick, called a crosse, that has a net pocket on one end. Only the goalies are allowed to use their hands.

It’s hard to get the depths down. Consider trying to catch a baseball with your glove stuck on the end of a broomstick.

“You’ll probably do better than I did my first day,” sophomore Falcon Layton, of Colorado said to me as we walked to the practice field. “I got hit by the ball.”

That can be painful. The lacrosse ball is a tad smaller than a baseball and made of solid rubber.

It’s not just the ball lacrosse players must worry about, either. Lacrosse is a very physical sport, with body checks and stick checks.

In fact, the word American Indians in the Southeast used to describe lacrosse translates into “little brother of war.”

Therefore, helmets, mouthpieces and shoulder pads are mandatory. Arm pads, rib pads and protective cups are highly recommended.

Coleman helped me don my body armor before the practice. I felt like an extra in that futuristic Backstreet Boys video from a few years back. I think it was for the song “Larger Than Life.” (Note: If you were born prior to 1980, just imagine a “Star Wars” stormtrooper.)

Coleman told me that the day’s practice was going to be an easy one. The team was scheduled to have its fifth match of the season the following day.

I’d hate to see Coleman’s idea of a hard practice. I was wasted after “warm-ups.”

Running with a helmet on is like carrying a sauna around on your shoulders. I’d say it got heavy, if it didn’t make me so lightheaded.

One running drill in particular put me over the edge. It’s called the “Indian run.” The team jogs single file. The person at the end of the line must sprint to the front. And so on, and so on.

I thought we were just going around our practice field … until we started going around the adjacent field, too. That’s fine, I thought … until we started running around the baseball field after that.

I figured we must have been headed to a far-off water fountain, or maybe a swimming pool. We weren’t.

“I think we got (a water break) yesterday,” said junior Don Taylor, of Hilton Head, S.C., “and I think that was the first time all season we had one. And that was because people were about to throw up.”

I figured journalists are out of Coleman’s jurisdiction. So I ducked out during the next part of practice and drank from a nearby hose.

All the running is not without reason, however. That’s what players do in a game.

“It came as a surprise,” said Malachi Dodge, a sophomore from Athens. “It was a lot faster paced than I thought it would be. In a game, it’s nonstop unless the ball goes out of bounds.”

The Eagles are 2-3 heading into spring break. Not too shabby for beginners.

They defeated South Cobb, another first-year team, 16-0. Sprayberry forfeited to Riverside last week.

“It’s surprising,” said Taylor, one of the few Riverside players with previous lacrosse experience. “Our team picked it up quick and we’ve been able to hang with a lot of the teams. We go into games thinking we’re a first-year team. But after a while, we realize that we’re as good as they are as long as we put the effort in.”

At the Academy, like any rookie squad, the lacrosse team is paying its dues. When I asked one of the cadets why we were practicing on a spotty field that had patches of gravel, he told me it was because they didn’t want to tear up their game field.

Meanwhile, the long-standing Riverside soccer team was practicing over on the lacrosse field, tearing it up.

“We’re earning our respect,” Taylor said, noting that attendance at their matches has increased dramatically since the start of the season. “Gradually, people are starting to pick it up. They’re like, ‘Oh, that looks fun. I’m going to play next year.’”

When I heard the story, it made my stomach sink. In the fall of 2000, Honey gave me a lesson in competitive Western horseback riding for a Sporting Life column. She introduced me to her horses: Hunker, the younger one she won a state championship on, and Godfather II, the aged one whose sagging back she learned to ride upon.

Readers fell in love with Honey. So did I. And I’m relieved to report that this story has a happy ending.

No one is really sure what spooked Hunker, the 13-year-old show horse Honey had ridden without incident for three years, back on Dec. 23. As Dodie said, “Who knows what horses see?”

For whatever reason, Hunker bolted. And Honey was helpless. The 81-pound fourth-grader dangled upside-down, her foot stuck in its stirrup, as the 1,400-pound horse that she loved so much raced frantically around the round pen at Three S Farms in East Hall. With each step that he took, Hunker whacked Honey in the head with his hind leg.

All Dodie could do was watch.

“I heard this little voice say, ‘Help me, Toad,’” Dodie remembered. “And I will hear those words ’til the day I die.”

Dodie and Honey are about as close as a grandmother and granddaughter can be. They have nicknames for each other: Dodie is Toad, Honey is Worm.

Eventually, Worm worked her foot free, and Hunker sent her flying. Honey landed in a heap, and Dodie — sprinting to her granddaughter’s side — feared the worst.

But Honey coughed, and Dodie raised her head. Blood poured from Honey’s mouth.

That didn’t stop her from talking, however. She told Dodie that she couldn’t breathe. She said her arm hurt.

Then Honey turned to her grandmother and asked, “Is Hunker OK?”

Dodie raced Honey to the emergency room. A CT scan came up negative. The diagnosis was a serious concussion, a deep tissue twist in her arm and a cut-up mouth.

But in the days that followed, Honey didn’t show signs of improvement. If anything, she was getting worse.

She stayed in the hospital for nine days. The first four were the worst. She vomited constantly and stared at the wall like a vegetable. The only thing she said was, “Don’t touch me.”

“When I was in the hospital,” Honey said, “I thought, ‘I hope I’m not going to be like this forever.’”

Honey’s parents were worried, and they called in a specialist. It’s a good thing they did. The specialist discovered that Honey had a cranial bleed, bleeding on the layer of the skull that attaches to the brain.

It’s an injury that can be serious. But in Honey’s case, thankfully, it looks like it was caught in time.

“The doctors told us in no uncertain terms that she was one whack away from being very seriously injured,” Honey’s mother Jordan Campbell said. “It scares me today when I think about it. It makes me sick, really.

“I have no doubt that God was looking out for her. That’s the only way I know how to explain it. I don’t know what else it could be.”

Honey lost 12 pounds in the hospital. She missed Christmas. She wasn’t able to ride the new dirt bike her parents had bought for her. She wasn’t able to ride her horses. She wasn’t able to do much of anything.

“I had to miss the first snow,” lamented Honey, now 10 and a student at Mount Vernon Elementary. “My brother got to play outside and I was really jealous.”

Hunker, meanwhile, refused to eat for several days after the accident. He knew that he had done something wrong.

“I wasn’t mad at him,” Honey said. “My mom was, though.”

Jordan, admittedly not much of a horse person to begin with, added, “I hate to say this, but if she never got on again it would suit me. But I would not do that to her.”

When Honey returned to school, she had trouble staying awake. She’d lay her head on her desk and sleep for hours.

The recovery process from such an injury involves a lot of waiting. And the waiting isn’t over yet. Honey still suffers from the occasional headache. She’s got knots on the side of her head. Her arm is still hard to the touch.

“I think most of it will go away in like a few years,” Honey said. “But I’m riding now.”

Yep, doctors cleared Honey to hop back on a horse three weeks ago — as long as she agrees to wear a helmet. She took her first ride March 5 … on Hunker.

“I was looking forward to it,” Honey said. “But when I first got on, I took a deep breath and went, ‘Here it goes.’ And I just started riding like I always did.”

Well, almost. She hadn’t worn a helmet before. She’ll never ride without one again.

“Anybody should wear a helmet, I think,” Honey said. “Because it could happen to anybody.”

NOTE: If you were wondering, good ol’ Godfather II turned 28 on March 1. Honey and Dodie sang “Happy Birthday” and gave him a full box of thin mint Girl Scout cookies.

“And we put the pearls on old Godfather,” Dodie said. “He always has to wear the birthday pearls.”

Believe it or not, I’ve never watched a full episode of “Star Trek.” I still haven’t seen the most recent “Star Wars” installment. And I have no interest in reading “The Lord of the Rings” — I saw the movie, and left the theater rather unimpressed.

But after my first geocaching experience last March — also the subject of a Sporting Life column — I went right out and plunked down $100 for my first Global Positioning System unit. A GPS is an electronic device that, based on latitude and longitude coordinates, pinpoints your exact location on Earth and allows you to seek out any other specific location.

I have hiked to 12 caches — think hidden treasure … of very little value — since finding that first one atop Ramrock Mountain on the Appalachian Trail near Suches one year ago.

And some of those caches have involved as much as 14 miles of hiking. Who are you calling a geek now?

Geocaching has led me to beautiful, odd and out-of-the-way spots throughout Georgia and beyond, places I likely never would have stumbled upon otherwise. Geocaching is like an online referral service for hikers: “Here, I really liked this area. Now you try to find it.”

Most caches are of the traditional variety, a Tupperware container or ammo box filled with an assortment of trinkets and a log book. There are also micro-caches, which can be as small as a film canister, and multi-caches, which can involve several stages.

Then there are what the more outdoors-oriented geocachers refer to as “drive-by caches.” These require very little effort to get to, and are primarily placed by those interested more in electronics than exercise. The real geeks, if you will.

“There are the geeky types that just do it in the city,” said Allen Lacy, 47, of Toccoa, who has found 113 caches and placed seven since September 2000. “But the ones I run across seem to be like me: a little of both. They are gadget freaks that like the outdoors.”

Geocaching has only existed since May 2000 — that’s when the U.S. government stopped intentionally degrading the GPS signals available to the public — but it has grown considerably since. When I last wrote about geocaching, there were just 33 caches hidden in Georgia. Now there are 268, and 13,870 active caches in 109 countries throughout the world.

“When I started, I had to drive all over the state just to find a geocache,” said 50-year-old Erik van Dyck, of Suwanee, perhaps the most active geocacher in Georgia, with a staggering 274 caches found since last February. “But now there are plenty of them.”

But as the number of geocachers out there increases, so does the number of obstacles that geocachers face. National parks have decided not to allow caches. State parks in Georgia don’t, either.

Persuading the Georgia Department of Natural Resources to rethink its geocaching ban is one of the primary reasons the Georgia Geocaching Association was formed. As Lacy said, GGA members want the DNR to know “that we’re not a bunch of idiots running out and digging holes.”

The GGA has nearly 100 members and meets monthly, usually in metro Atlanta. It is one of the first statewide geocaching organizations in the country.

But geocaching remains primarily an online community. Visitors to www.geocaching.com use handles like CacheNinja and GeorgiaGeoDude. They log their cache visits on the web site and sometimes discuss the hobby in chat rooms.

“You’ll find people that seem to spend more time on the forums discussing geocaching than they do actually doing it,” van Dyck said. “I guess I’m just the opposite. I enjoy looking for them. I enjoy even more putting them out. That’s really fun.”

Van Dyck started geocaching as a way to lose weight and get outdoors. Soon, the “hobby became an obsession.” Van Dyck is often the first person to find newly placed caches in Georgia.

“I go during business trips,” van Dyck said. “Rather than go to the happy hour buffet late in the afternoon, I go to geocaching.com and find out what caches might be in the area and get in my little rental car and go for it.”

I know one Georgia cache that van Dyck hasn’t found yet. It’s called Nacoochee’s Revenge and it’s the first cache on Yonah Mountain. I know this, because I put it there on Sunday — the day I graduated further into geocaching geekdom.

I challenge you to seek Nacoochee’s Revenge. Of course, van Dyck will likely beat you to it. “I can quit anytime I want,” van Dyck said with a chuckle. “I know I can.”

Geo What?

• Geocaching (pronounced geo-cashing) is a worldwide game for users of the Global Positioning System, or GPS. The game basically involves a GPS user hiding “treasure” — the cache and its contents — and publishing the exact coordinates on the Internet so other GPS users can go on a “treasure hunt” to find it. The rules? They are simple. If you take something from the cache, you must leave something in the cache.

• About GPS: The GPS is a satellite-based navigation network that allows users of GPS receivers to pinpoint their location on the planet (within around 20 feet) using latitude and longitude coordinates. The GPS consists of 24 2,000-pound satellites, situated more than 12,000 miles in space, that constantly orbit the Earth.

• In Georgia: At presstime, there were 268 caches hidden in Georgia and 36 within a 25-mile radius of Gainesville. The Georgia Geocachers Association has nearly 100 members and meets monthly. Visit the GGA online at: www.ggaonline.org.

• On the Web: www.geocaching.com

I spent the better part of last week covering the first three rounds of the state basketball tournament in Rome.

I am now on a first-name basis with the staffs of the Days Inn and Applebee’s there. I know well the roads that link the gymnasiums at Floyd College, Shorter College and The Forum.

I covered 11 games in five days in Rome. But that was just the beginning.

As I write this column, I am seated on press row, midcourt at the Macon Coliseum for the state final four — and the girls from Paideia are currently piled up before me celebrating their last-second win.

This is hoops heaven I’ve been living in these past several days. But even for the most diehard of basketball fanatics, such a schedule can be taxing. The body craves some fresh air and an atmosphere that doesn’t include parents screaming at referees.

So last Friday, before my slate of games tipped off, I left the Days Inn and headed 40 miles north to Walker County — a place in dire need of some positive publicity, thanks to a creepy crematorium that makes HBO’s “Six Feet Under” play like “Happy Days.”

My destination was the Keown Falls Scenic Area in the Chattahoochee National Forest, although I didn’t know it at the time.

My original goal was to hike the 6.3-mile Chickamauga Creek Trail. But I slept in too late for that thanks to some latenight helpings of the television vacuum known as “elimiDATE.” It just sucks you in, doesn’t it?

My second, and shorter, choice was the 3.1-mile Johns Mountain Trail, located in the same general vicinity. But the access road to that trail was blocked off by the U.S. Forest Service.

I was left with the Keown Falls Loop Trail, found just another mile down Pocket Road. It turned out to be not such a bad alternative, after all.

The Keown Falls Scenic Area, named after land surveyor Gordon Keown, is a 218-acre plot in the Ridge and Valley section of Georgia’s topography. It is the only scenic area in the western portion — or Armuchee Ranger District — of the Chattahoochee National Forest, which lies separate from the part of the forest most Northeast Georgians enjoy.

The centerpiece of the scenic area, not surprisingly, is Keown Falls, which is rather finicky as far as falls go. It only flows after wet weather. Luckily, I was met by a sign that read “WATERFALL IS FLOWING” at the trailhead.

The loop trail is short (1.7 miles) and rather easy, but perfect for hikers who have little time and little desire to show up for their first basketball game of the afternoon stinking of sweat.

The trail begins at the Keown Falls Recreation Area and, through a series of gradual switchbacks, climbs Johns Mountain roughly 500 feet in elevation to an observation deck overlooking the falls.

Johns Mountain Trail shares the observation deck and can be found just a few yards away.

The deck offers a nice view of the falls, which cascade over a moss-covered — and on this day, ice-covered — ledge and soak the red rock 60 feet below. Look to the left and you see Furnace Valley. Beyond that, Horn Mountain.

But the best view of the falls, I suggest, is from underneath. That’s right, the trail actually travels beneath and behind the wall of water. If the wind is right, the mist sprays your face as you make the approach.

I imagine, on a warmer day, it would be nice to stand on the rock and let the waterfall fall right on your head.

But temperatures barely left the 30s last Friday, and some of the long, sharp icicles that hung from the outcrop like temporary stalactites looked like they could cause a great deal of pain.

Instead, I sat for a while just a few feet away and listened. The only sound I could hear was water hitting rock.

The trail continues with a tall ridge of rock on the right until it comes upon a smaller waterfall, which during my visit was frozen instead of flowing.

The path then passes through a thick forest of tall trees — during winter, brown and leafless — and travels past tiny tributaries that eventually flow into Johns Creek.

Last week, the only color was provided by the blue sky, a few ferns and the moss that covered fallen trees.

I arrived back at my car refreshed, ready to return to the gym and confident that once the ragging of the refs returned, I could turn to the sound of Keown Falls, which was still flowing through my head.

They arrive early for a reason, I learned. There are lucky seats to be secured, lucky trinkets to arrange on the table. Bingo players are constantly trying to change the course of chance.

And each game, one or two of them do. There’s always a winner in bingo. That’s how the game sucks you in.

Olejnik didn’t have to call out many numbers for me to remember why as a child I used to spend so much time in the bingo tents at the Bloomsburg Fair back in Pennsylvania.

I used to plunk my quarter down and play, anxious to win something, anything. Perhaps some plastic mixing bowls or a set of steak knives. I rarely had any use for the prizes, but I always found winning to be wonderful.

The bingo cards at the fair were thick and worn on the edges. We used peanuts as markers.

Compared to bingo at the Gainesville Elks, that old set-up seems like, well, peanuts.

Cards are slick sheets of paper and used only once. Plastic bottles full of ink, known as “dobbers,” make the marks. Some players even tote their personal dobber collections around in hand-knit carrying cases.

Prizes given away every Sunday at the Elks made the steak knives of my youth seem rather silly.

Nine games pay out $1,100, $600 of which is for a single game known as the “jackpot.” The Elks, actually, would like to offer more prize money, but Georgia law won’t allow it.

“We can’t do near what the Indians can do up in North Carolina,” said Ron Harlan, former Elks exalted ruler and current chairman of the bingo committee. “That does cut into our business a bit. The real avid players will go up there.”

Still, the Elks take in around $1,500 from bingo each weekend. That’s enough to keep several charities happy.

And the stakes are high enough to keep a rather large crowd of regulars coming back each week.

Max and Marion Paton, who raise breeding chickens on their farm in Dawsonville, rarely miss a Sunday afternoon of bingo. Max is 82. Marion is 80. They’ll be married 59 years in April.

“Oh yeah, we have a lot of fun,” said Max, a World War II veteran. “We enjoy it. This is like entertainment.”

“And,” Marion offered, “they do as a whole have very nice people here.”

Added Max, “You don’t get a bunch of fibbers.”

The Patons always try to grab the table that straddles the barrier between the smoking and non-smoking rooms. They don’t care for the smoke — and there is plenty (you should smell my clothes) — but they also don’t like to be out of view of the Bingo King Autotronic 7600, either.

And the Bingo King Autotronic 7600 sits in the smoking room, because that’s where most of the bingo players sit. The two habits seem to go hand in hand.

The Bingo King Autotronic 7600 looks like something out of a 1960s sci-fi movie, like one of those handwriting analysis machines you find at local carnivals.

Through the machine’s window, you can watch the bingo balls toss about, and get sucked to the top one by one. Where the balls pop out, a video camera awaits. The current ball is broadcast to several televisions positioned throughout the bingo room.

Then Olejnik makes the call. “Next number. Under the ‘O.’ Sixty-four. That’s ‘O’ six-four.” The number lights up on the big board behind Olejnik and the Bingo King Autotronic 7600.

This is definitely not the Bloomsburg Fair.

But the game still plays the same. You still need your numbers to be called. You still need them to occupy the right combination of squares on your card.

They didn’t for Max. “I’ll be a son of a gun,” he said again and again. “They’re all in the wrong places.”

But they did for Marion. Olejnik called out “I 28″ and Marion called out “Bingo!” So did several others. They each won $16.70.

You can tell when a game of bingo is coming to a close. The crowd senses it. With each number called, anticipation grows. You feel your time is running out. There is a murmur. Then there is a winner.

“I get very excited when I win,” said Joyce Head, 55, of Murrayville. “It’s like a shot. I mean really, it’s like one. It is.”

Head “gave up smoking and took up bingo” several years ago. One can be as addictive as the other. On Saturday, Head headed up to Rock Hill, S.C., for some high stakes bingo. She didn’t win, but said she knows she will again soon. She likes to think of her bingo card as half full, not half empty.

“I go expecting to win,” Head said. “I mean you’ve got to be there. You can’t win sitting at home.”

How about sitting on a horseshoe? B.T. Hudgins does that.

“Anything to help out,” the Gainesville resident said. Hudgins and friend Jean Bachelor also carry around buckeyes in their pockets for luck.

Others will place troll dolls, four-leaf clovers or other knickknacks before them for good fortune. Elephant figurines are supposed to work, too … but only if the trunk is pointing up.

Some feel the only way to increase the chance of winning is to increase the number of bingo cards. I watched one lady play 39 at once. I had enough trouble with six.

Betty Ladewig, a 74-year-old from Murrayville, had 27 cards in front of her and nothing else. She doesn’t believe in good luck charms.

And she won one of the $600 prizes last week.

“I think it’s all dumb luck,” she said. “But I like to gamble.”

Perhaps I do, too, Betty. I’d think I got my 10 dollars’ worth of excitement on Sunday.

One time I was a “B 2″ and a “B 9″ from winning $100. I felt a rush overtake my body.

Then again, maybe it was just the cigarette smoke.

Turns out Earth is on the corner of Washington and Main.

You’ll find the moon there, too. Look toward the courthouse, and you’ll see the sun. It’s a stainless steel ball 27.5 inches in diameter.

Gainesville is home to one of the United States’ only walkable scale models of the solar system. It’s 1.8 miles from the sun to Pluto, which is tucked away in a far corner of Longwood Park. The rest of the planets dot a path that meanders through Rock Creek Park, Ivey Terrace Park and the Wilshire Trails system.

This universe was created in less than two years. The process began during the total eclipse of the sun — the real sun — in February 1998. Members of the North Georgia Astronomers club brought telescopes to the Gainesville Square for the occasion.

They let passers-by have a look, too. And they tried to answer their questions.

On a day when the sun and moon appeared to be identical in size, it was difficult for many to comprehend that a hollow sun would actually hold more than 64 million moons. You see, the astronomers tried to explain, the moon is only 245,000 miles away from the Earth, while the sun is 93 million miles away.

All those zeros led to some blank stares.

“We tried to figure out something we could do to try and make all of these numbers seem a little more real,” said Webb, president of the astronomy club.

So the idea for a scale model of the solar system was born.

And why not? Gainesville is already home to a bronze chicken monument and a statue of Old Joe, a Confederate soldier who really is a Rough Rider from the Spanish-American War. A few planets surely wouldn’t make things any more peculiar.

The solar system plan went through a few revisions before it came to fruition, however. At first, Webb and his group considered painting the circle that surrounds Old Joe yellow, to signify the sun.

“It seemed like a good idea,” Webb recalled. “But when we got home and got the calculator out, we found out that the next planet would be in Oakwood. Pluto would have been in Chattanooga.”

So they shrank their sun and came up with a workable, and walkable, equation: one mile on Earth equals 2 billion miles in space. It fit perfectly, from the square to Lake Lanier.

After a brief squabble with members of the local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who didn’t want Mars and Venus encroaching on Old Joe’s personal space, the astronomers got approval for their plan. The 70-member club then became incorporated so it could accept tax-deductible donations to fund the $30,000 project.

“It was kind of a big step for our little club,” said Webb, a boat mechanic with a bushy beard.

The Earth and moon monument was put in place Dec. 31, 1999. Several more were erected two days later. The sun came February 2001. The project was complete by April 2001.

It was a nationwide endeavor. Elberton granite was used for the monuments. Plaques were made in Virginia. Ball bearings used for some of the planets came from Connecticut. Gemstones used for other planets were shipped in from California and Oregon.

An outfit in Ohio supplied the sun — “That’s the only place I could find that would do big stainless steel hemispheres,” Webb said — which was welded together by a guy who builds dragsters in South Carolina.

The sun is by far the most noticeable of the planets in the scale model. That’s because it’s also by far the biggest. In comparison, the Earth is a quarter-inch in diameter. Mercury is the size of a nail head. An asteroid on the monument near the Hall County Library is a barely-visible speck. But it’s there. And it’s made out of an 18-thousandth ball bearing.

The speed limit of the universe is the speed of light. Webb and I broke the law. We walked to Pluto and back in about two hours.

Our starting point was the sun, whose surface has been buffed. Turns out the reflection of the real sun was blinding.

Mercury is just a few paces away. After the “Old Joe eclipse,” you’ll find Venus and the Earth and moon. And so on and so forth. Just follow the comets painted on the ground that mark the path.

Most of the planets have sponsors, some more fitting than others. For example, Venus, the only planet named after a goddess, is sponsored by Brenau Academy, the city’s private boarding school for girls. The sponsor for Mars, named for the Roman god of war, is Riverside Military Academy.

“We tried to do all the tie-ins we could,” Webb said.

I learned a lot during my celestial stroll. Like the fact that our days of the week got their names from the planets, the sun and the moon. Some — like Saturday, Sunday and Monday — are more obvious than others.

I also learned that Saturn is located really close to my house.

“No matter what age you are or how much you know about it, you get a little bit out of it each time,” Webb said. “The best feeling for me is actually seeing people use it.”

Sure enough, right around Uranus, we happened upon Paul Johnson and Jason Martin, two North Georgia College & State University students doing the solar system walk for their astronomy class.

“You get a good feel for how big things actually are by walking it off,” Johnson said.

It does really kind of put everything in perspective. We are small and insignificant, a small ball bearing floating in the vast cosmic toolbox.

When you arrive at Pluto in Longwood Park, another monument stands beside it. It directs you toward the star Alpha Centauri, the next thing you would encounter on your hike through a scale model of the universe.

But if you plan on going there, bring along your bathing suit. You won’t hit Alpha Centauri until you’re swimming in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Australia.