This Side of Paradise

Ah, Pringletown, South Carolina, 60 feet above sea level, 53 klicks northwest of Charleston and just this side of Paradise. Paradise, the lounge, that is. Perhaps they had meant Pair-of-Dice because life in Pringletown is something of a crap shoot. Here are three cases where the dice came up snake eyes.

This past July a girl who was visiting from out of state, accepted the offer of a ride from a passing stranger at about 3 a.m. as she walked along U.S. Highway 78. The girl was found several hours later near Pringletown in Berkeley County. She had been held and robbed at knifepoint, authorities said. This little lapse in judgement is somewhere high on the top ten list of things we are born knowing not to do, but you've got to feel sorry for the girl in any event. After all that suffering she ends up in Pringletown.

In June a 13-year-old boy shot and killed his 23-year-old cousin in the doorway to his bedroom of the mobile home which they share in Pringletown. The shooting was apparently the last word in an argument over juice. The Deputy Coroner said the boy had used a "household weapon" to dispatch his cousin. Please pass the double ought.

A bit further back opponents of a proposed racetrack in Pringletown, SC, had appealed a decision by the state Department of Health and Environmental Control that the track's noise level will not adversely affect Francis Beidler Forest. Naw, that shouldn't be any problem at all. We were up that way just the other day when an Ivory Billed Woodpecker landed on the trunk clearly drawn to the seductive resonance of the Mustang's dual exhaust system. Many's the time little birds chortle with delight in our slipstream as we blast past them on our way through Pringletown. "Gentlemen, start your kayaks ? "...no way.

Color us gone from or at least many miles this side of that paradise.