The Devil's Elbow
	This is a story that I didn't think could possibly happen until it happened to me. I felt if I told anyone, it would be the same as saying I'd been taken into a flying saucer or seen a Bigfoot. I get enough looks when people complement my cane, which has a giant squid chasing a mermaid carved into it, and I say, "I made it myself." Just south of the swamps where I live, about five miles down the road there's a very sharp, treacherous curve. I've always referred to it as "The Devil's Elbow." For years there was a several acre, wide open field. It was in the inside curve of The Devils Elbow. Every summer the field was covered solid with wild phlox growing. These bright red and purple flowers created a blinding thick fustian blanket that stretched out of sight. On the far side of the field of flowers, on a sandy bank of the Hillsborough River, was a wildlife rehab facility with nature education classes for kids. The combination of the swamps, the field, the curve in the road, and the river may be the ingredients needed to produce a thermal column. That's when heat from the ground rises up to the sky. When I would drive home from work at Busch Gardens, lots of times, almost daily, there would be a large thermal column rising from the swamps in that spot. In the beginning, because I'd see a dozen or more vultures, called a kettle, circling in the sky, always right there, I thought that the nature people were throwing out leftovers that they fed their animals. I later learned that although vultures often will circle a meal, checking it out, they enjoy resting while floating on a thermal column. The heat pushes them upward and they just hang there suspended in air, like a person lazily floating on an air raft in a swimming pool. I remembered one time in our living room on Ellicott Street; I was sitting on the couch next to the heater. There was an old feather pillow next to me that my grandmother Ash had made from their chickens years before. There was the tiniest quill poking through the cloth so I pulled the thumbnail-sized feather out of the pillow, looked at it and I don't know why but I held it over the heater, with the hot air rising from the vents on top. I let the feather go and almost as if I knew it would happen, the heat pushed the feather up into the air where it floated for a while. Years later, as a grown man, when the concept of vultures, also wood storks, floating on a thermal column in order to rest their wings was explained to me, it wasn't hard to understand at all. On one unusual day I was driving home like I always did. It had been raining. There was a rainbow in the sky. It was one of those rainbows that's very near perfect. I had been watching it for miles. As I got closer I thought, man, this looks like I'm getting close to the bottom of that rainbow. I just assumed that a rainbow would move along with you like the moon did when you were a kid, and your dad was driving, and you were asleep in the back seat of the car and you'd glance out through the window. But it stayed right in front of me as I got closer and closer and then it disappeared. The next thing I knew, I was seeing that same end of the rainbow, up above the area that I had just driven through, but it was behind me. I rolled down the window so I could see better, trying to comprehend what had just happened. Then I pulled over, stopped and got out to look. There was the finest mist in the air and there was a slight taste in my mouth that was similar to a honey dew melon. The bottom of the rainbow was definitely behind me. There had been no colors when I went through it, except that greenish, golden color that sometimes is the atmosphere all around you after a rain in the summertime. When we were kids we called that Indian Summer, although I think Indian Summer is actually something else. And there was no pot of gold. I didn't tell many people about this because I didn't think they'd believe me. Then one night at dinner I heard a very responsible businessman tell almost the same story. Not to the whole table of guests, just to a couple of us sitting close together. I don't know why it happened to come up. Like me, he had also thought it wasn't possible until it happened to him. It didn't happen where I drove through mine. It was in a different state. But I bet it was also a pretty awesome area, like The Devil's Elbow. Lash Out Loud