Newspaper Page Text
SOUTHERN
TAKING PRIDE IN OUR CULTURE
SEPT 8 - SEPT 14 / 1994
Atlanta
playwright
Jim Grimsley
wins raves for
his first novel,
"Winter Birds"
PAGE 25
NEWS
Caremark, Inc. charged with
inflating PWA's medical bills and
paying kickbacks
Alabama judge awards custody to
lesbian mother PACE 4
Appeals court upholds Meinhold's
reinstatement into the Navy PAGE 7
Suspected killer of three gay men
surrenders to Dallas police PAGE 7
HEALTH
Estrogen therapy may be OK for
breast cancer survivors mgem
PEOPLE
Openly gay White House aide
Keith Boykin is the community's
link to Clinton PAGE 17
OUT & ABOUT
For Classical Music Month, a look
back at the lives of gay and lesbian
composers pagezs
VDLUME 7/NUMBER 2B PHASE RECYCLE 75C WHERE SOLD
by KC WILDMOON
The Flood
of ’94
There’s a joke going around the Sumter County
side of Lake Blackshear, the 8,700-acre south Geor
gia lake that was devastated when a dam broke dur
ing July’s raging flood. The joke goes like this: Do
you know why Ed and Sally’s house didn’t get
flooded? Because there were two dikes in the front
yard.
Make that “dykes”—specifically Elizabeth
Spilman and Nancy Guthrie, who did not evacuate
as the 11-foot waters rose steadily from July 7 to
July 10, wrecking docks and houses as if they were
built of nothing more than Lincoln logs. Spilman
and Guthrie ended up camping in a pontoon boat in
the yard of Ed and Sally’s house, which was on high
enough ground to avoid the flood waters.
Guthrie laughs about the joke. “We just heard
it,” she says. “But it’s been going around for weeks.”
Spilman and Guthrie have lived together in
Spilman’s house on Lake Blackshear for three years.
They lived closer to Atlanta for five years before
that—sometimes in the city and sometimes in a cabin
in Ellijay. But Spilman wanted to be closer to her
grandchildren—most of her family lives in nearby
Dawson—so the pair packed and moved into the
lake house, which Spilman built by adding to a one-
room structure that her grandfather floated down the
river from Cuthbert in 1935.
The rural setting suited them fine—but the sepa
ration from a women’s community, or even a gay
community, was chilling and isolating. Like other
women who leave urban surroundings for a simpler
life, Guthrie and Spilman longed for a sense of com
munity with other women living the rural life—if
only they could find them. They did, but it took a
devastating flood to bring them together in south
Georgia.
From adversity, friendship
On Sunday evening, the day the waters crested at
11 feet above normal, a storm blew in. The trees
surrounding the two-story house were blown nearly
sideways by the gusting winds. The waters rose
steadily higher, but the dam breached, and the wa
ters began to recede. Spilman and Guthrie moved off
the boat and into a tent nearer their own home,
followed by nearly thirty cats and two dogs.
And then a miracle happened.
“We had been in the tent about a week,” Guthrie
says. “And they just showed up.”
“They” were Karen Kirkland, a 35-year-old de
signer with an engineering firm in Albany, and Tina
Hood, a 32-year-old emergency medical technician,
two lesbians who lived just down the road. Kirkland,
Hood, Guthrie and Spilman had never met, although
they knew about each other. Hood and Kirkland’s
sudden arrival at their campsite brought a welcome
gift.
“Both of them were at the door,” Spilman recalls,
“saying ‘We have this trailer and we’d really like to
bring it up.’ It was a lifesaver.”
Spilman and Guthrie were still living in that trailer
in late August. The house, now cleared of mud and
debris with the help of 277 gallons of bleach from
supply centers set up to aid flood victims, still had no
hot water, although the women expected it within a
few days. They were waiting for an electrician to
replace wires ruined by the waters that filled the
house for a week, and the kitchen floor was to be
replaced at the end of the week. But meeting Hood
and Kirkland brought a shine to an otherwise devas
tating experience.
“We’d heard about them for years,” says Hood,
who has been with Kirkland for ten years, the last
seven in the trailer down the road.
“We had their phone number, but every time we
called we never got an answer,” says Kirkland.
As they recount their meeting, the four women
are sitting on Spilman and Guthrie’s rebuilt deck.
Not 30 feet away is the spot where their dock once
stood—now a mudhole with a spring trickling fresh
water toward the Flint River, several hundred yards
away through a field of mussel shells and stumps of
a long ago forest. A breeze keeps the weather unsea
sonably cool in South Georgia, and the four are
finishing a catfish dinner from a nearby restaurant.
‘The first time I saw y’all I saw the truck,”
Kirkland says. “It had a sdcker on it from some
organization I give money to. I thought, ‘that must
be them.’”
CONTINUED ON PAGE 10
Pictured: Nancy Guthrie (left) and Elizabeth*
Spilman stand on what was the bottom of Lake
Blackshear Jiefor* an earthen dam broke.
KC WILDMOON