Peggy and Big Mama and Me

Fredericksburg, Ohio, 2010.

It was the mid-1970s. My first cousin Peggy and I were both teens, and we were standing together at the top of The Cliff.

The Cliff bordered my grandparents’ property and overlooked a portion of the village of Fredericksburg. Someone once told me it was about 140 feet high, but in my memory it seems much higher than that.

It was cluttered with trees of various girths and scrubby weeds and rock outcroppings all the way down, and its base disappeared into the shallow water of Salt Creek.

Mom and Dad and the grandparents had one rule about the cliff: Stay Away From It! So, being compliant children (as all children were in the 1970s), we obeyed. Until we got somewhere they couldn’t see us.

We kids had a secret hideaway called “the Cliff House.” It was really just a little indentation in the rocky cliffside that you got to by holding on to a small tree as you went over the edge and stepped into the indentation. Its floor was maybe eight feet from the edge of the cliff above, and the rocks formed a little seat where you could sit and look out over the valley.

Was it dangerous? Well, yes, actually it was. Had one of us fallen from there, we may not have been killed, but we would surely have been seriously injured. Town lore had it that sometime in the past a teenage guy had started at the bottom and tried to scale The Cliff—only to get stuck part way up. He had to be rescued by the fire department, an extremely humiliating event when you live in a small town.

So, as I was saying, one day when we were teens, Peggy and I stood at the top of The Cliff. Someone had cut down trees nearby and had left four or five huge trunks—two or three feet in diameter and eight to ten feet long—just lying around on the ground.

“Wouldn’t it be cool,” Peg asked, “to push one of those over and watch it crash to the bottom?”

Pretty much all of Peggy’s ideas were amazing in my book, but this one surpassed all previous efforts. It didn’t take long for us to find the trunk that was the easiest to access, struggling and laughing as we pushed and rolled it to the edge—and then—one, two, three!—over it went, tumbling end over end, crashing, crushing saplings and weeds and causing rocks to dislodge and follow it down, until it slid to a stop near the bottom.

Our efforts had been unspeakably successful.

Weak-kneed with laughter, we repeated the process with another log. And another. And another.

The largest log, which Peg dubbed “Big Mama” and which we had been eyeing from the beginning, was farther from The Cliff than the others. When we started, Big Mama looked like an impossible task. However, with the adrenaline flowing now and the buzz one gets from an amazingly successful, albeit difficult, endeavor, we knew Big Mama must also go.

She was a challenge. We wrestled her to the edge, sweating and, of course, gasping with laughter, where Big Mama waited, full of potential energy that was eager to be turned into kinetic energy. One more push would send her tumbling down to rejoin the rest of her fractured family.

It was quite a moment. We both stood, panting and perspiring, savoring it.

“OK,” said Peg. “Time for Big Mama!”

We heaved her from behind, forward, forward, forward—till she reached the point of no return, and, like the Titanic, her stern began to reach for the sky as her bow sank lower and lower. And down . . . she . . . went!

BOOM! CRASH! CRASH! BOOM, BOOM, BOOM! Tumbling over and over, clearing her own swath, rushing to reach the rest of her family, crashing, crushing, rolling, thundering, pounding, until she finally skidded to a satisfying stop followed by rolling rocks and rubbish that brought the whole affair to a perfect decrescendo—followed by silence.

I watched Big Mama go, my mouth open, thrilled with the spectacle. When she stopped, I jumped up and down, hooting and laughing. “Yes! Yes! YES! That was GREAT!”

Peg was laughing too. But something was odd.

I could hear her laughing, but I couldn’t see her anywhere.

One’s mind races at such moments. Surely she—surely she hadn’t gone over with Big Mama! If she had, I couldn’t imagine that she would be laughing. But maybe she had gone over, and I was hearing her happy soul soaring to heaven?

I approached The Cliff and looked over.

There was Peg, fingers locked around the base of a skinny sapling at the top of the drop-off, dangling freely over nothingness. And laughing hysterically.

As a part of Big Mama’s revenge, she had attempted to take Peg with her. But, no! Peg was too smart for her, grabbing a sapling that God had put there for just such a time as this, and saving her own life.

And, because we were both teens and had just experienced a brush with death, we laughed like idiots.

I don’t recall how we got her out of that predicament, but we must have, because she’s still with us today. For which I am very grateful.

Is it a coincidence that I waited until my parents and grandparents had all passed away before sharing this story?

Mm, maybe.

Copyright 2023, Steven Nyle Skaggs

PLEASE NOTE: The story above is closely based on real events. The photos below, not so much.

Actual photo of Peggy standing at the top of The Cliff.
Notice how modestly we dressed in the 1970s.
Peg claims she still has this dress.

This is how the woods looked before we cleaned it up.

Peg and me sizing up Big Mama.

I told you Big Mama was big!