Terrorists in the Holler?

Saturday night the Amazon and I were sitting in the living room watching the boob tube, when I heard a distant boom. I shrugged it off as thunder over on the Tennessee side of the mountain. It was weird though, because Sammy is usually all to pieces if he hears thunder and he didn't seem at all concerned. About an hour later there was another, larger boom. The house shook, the windows rattled and the dogs went all apeshit. I turned to the Amazon who was peeking over the top of her laptop screen with one eyebrow raised.

"That is what that earthquake felt like last year," I explained. The Amazon was away at school when it happened. We checked the USGS website to see if there was any data available (I love looking at earthquake data, I'm a geek that way,) but there was no mention of anything near us.

Ma yelled from her room that she couldn't hear the police scanner. I'd turned it down the night before when some yeehaw deputy sheriff was sitting on his mic and the dull roar was getting on my nerves. I turned the volume up just in time to hear the local cop (yes, there's only one) give the fire department the okay to clear the scene and let people back in the gate.

Gate? What gate?

The only gate I could think of was the one that comes up to the plant. Had something blow up at work? Was I unemployed? Or at least getting a short, unplanned vacation?

We didn't discuss it much the rest of the evening. Weird sounds aren't uncommon around here, especially late at night on the weekends. Drunken hillfolk have a habit of standing out in their yards late at night and shooting guns in the air while the Dixie Chicks blare from their pickup truck stereo.... I figured that's all it was.

It wasn't until my aunt called yesterday that we found out what really happened. Apparently there were two (or one.. depending who you ask) undetonated hand grenades along the railroad tracks on the campground side. The campground (which has a gate) was evacuated, roads were blocked and every government agency with a three letter acronym sent people down to investigate.

One version of the story is that there were two devices placed in a way to blow up the train tracks and that the two explosions were the two grenades being set off. Version two (and the one that sounds more logical to me) is that there was one dummy grenade found and that it took the Big City bomb squad two tries to blow it up, just to be safe.

I've not heard anyone mention the fact that during WWII, the campground was used as a German P.O.W. camp. I bet that grenade has been laying there, just under the dirt for the last 60 years.

I'm not going to mention that to anyone, they all seem too wide eyed and excited to think there were terrorists in Frog Pond Holler, with plans to blow up the railroad tracks. We need a little excitement around here once in a while.