Having recently run through the glass of my second-story window, I’m recording this first episode from my hospital room. It’s been 26 years, but I have to remember what keeps me up nights.

The headwaters of the Cahaba River are neither wide nor fierce. So, it’s almost unimaginable to think what the Police had found there, below the surface.

The first fifteen years of my life have been spent in commune with the Cahaba, tracing its winding path through the beautiful valleys of our small hometown, Shilo’s Beat, Alabama. But in the Fall of 1994, the same landscape that long comforted me, seemed to then be conspiring against me.

I was intent on finding answers, and like the episode I just had, the one that’s left me here in the hospital, I was haunted by a progressive parasomnia that blurred the edges between reality and dreams, the symbolic and the supernatural. So I leaned on my eccentric Uncle John and a cast of characters as authentic as the Cahaba itself to make sense of it all.

But to learn the truth, I was going to have to grapple with the long and varied history that’s hidden deep within the red clay of that old land –  the persistent, distinctively southern legacy that followed the Scotch-Irish into the foothills of Appalachia.  But the truth is messy. And as well as I knew that old creek, I wasn’t wandering alone.

Written and Narrated by L. R. McDonald
Music by Benjamin Bostick: Independence Day Eve (Intro) and Central Valley (background)