Village Creek: The first and only eyewitness account of the second life of Gordon Baxter

Gordon Baxter's startlingly candid and poetic 1979 memoir, "Village Creek," explained his complexities better than any of the newspaper columns he ever wrote, or the profiles written about him. It ranged from his rowdy youth to his unsettled middle age, explaining marital woes, his since-repaired estrangements from his kids, and his passions with the same eloquence he brought to his radio shows. Here are some excerpts from "Village Creek" that illuminate Bax's character: *** "I came out of the church feeling like I really didn't belong in there either. Not like the little old lady with the black shawl over her head, grown to the pew in the back. But just being outside and walking felt good, and I struck out down the railroad track that cuts across the field. ... I'd tell Mary I'd been to church, praying. Surely God understood sinners like me. He made king snakes, too, didn't He? They're snakes, but good-looking ones, and they don't hurt anybody." *** "They left me alone by (Mamma's) grave. When I finally turned around, the bunch of them were going away toward the cars. I stood a moment, feeling the separation. Then I hurried after them, head down, so nobody could see the clown mask both laughing and crying. Mamma had said, 'Son, you don't have to march along with the herd. That way you can only see their behinds. Go upstream if you want to ... you can see their faces.'" *** "My music. I am a feather before the winds of it. I cannot write it, I cannot play it, I cannot even describe it to my fellows because I am ignorant of the language, the terms of the art. But when I am open and it comes pouring out of me, they know out there in the crowd and they are with me." *** [One time, he took J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson for a plane ride, where he tried to illustrate how easily a pilot might be fooled by his eyes:] "With his eyes closed, J.P. said it felt like we were climbing. I told him that if a non-instrument pilot flew into weather where he could not see the horizon, he would have about 90 seconds to live before he lost it. "We had just rehearsed the Big Bopper's death." *** "There were no guidelines for divorce back in my family. I grew up watching the other things you could do. You could faint, go crazy, get cancer, sink into the bottle and stare out with fluid eyes and keep saying, 'I love you, my darling,' while performing the long, slow hatred ritual of death by drowning in the sheets." *** "Outside, the thin clouds covered the glow of a full moon. Village Creek ribboned wetly through the forest. The cabin was the only glow of lights for miles, gleaming out on the water. In the distance an owl hooted. Slowly peace came under the roof." *** "What I am is a teller of tales. 'A rainmaker,' said my brother Tommy; 'he can march around beating all those drums and telling you lies ... but sometimes he makes it rain.'

Bax was not always the Mooney pilot we know so well. He really was young once, got married, had kids, got divorced, then remarried and moved to the swamps. The same human voice we read in his columns has been applied to his life. It was a heck of a ride. The Model T of his youth, the kids, the rage at his "no fault" divorce, shooting flies in his cabin with a pistol, falling deeply in love with his new wife, which we learn to love also. I laughed and cried, so will you.