IF HUMANITY IS BORN OF CLAY, MINE IS SURELY RED. I was born in Northeast Georgia, and any Georgian who knows the business end of a shovel knows the grip red clay exerts on the roots within it. Nonetheless, I left rolling hills and pastures for three peripatetic decades spent wherever the Marine Corps sent me before settling on the black mudbanks of a North Carolina tidal creek. I come by my restlessness honestly, through my mother’s family, a fact amusing and perplexing to my paternal grandmother, Imogene Parker. “That’s the Russell in you,” she would say, laughing. “Y’all like to go places!” She recognized before I did my instinct to redraw the borders of home.
So it was I found myself driving north on Miccosukee Road outside Tallahassee, Florida, a patch of red earth from which my familial roots stretch northward. My hunting companion, Seth Vernon, a saltwater fly-fishing guide and naturalist, and I had driven to the Red Hills—436,000 rolling acres of longleaf and wire grass-covered red clay between Thomasville, Georgia, and Tallahassee—in an all-day push from Wilmington, North Carolina. We arrived in the remnants of a torrent driven by fifty-mile-an-hour winds. Rafts of Spanish moss lay draped across the road, torn from meandering live oak limbs before the limbs themselves were hurled through power lines now sagging along the shoulder. In the absence of electricity, my headlights rendered the famous canopy road a sopping tunnel so dark I felt as if I were at the bottom of a hole, wondering if all the darkness in the world had fallen in atop me.
In the final few miles, we sought only to avoid electrocution while seeking a private quail plantation called Martha, where I’d received a generous invite to my first quail hunt. Given the hazardous weather, our arrival felt somewhat ominous. But having left Tallahassee seventeen years prior, after four happy years, it was also a sort of homecoming.
Quail played an outsize role in my grandmother’s life, and Betty Ann Campbell Russell played an outsize role in mine. My great-grandfather Louis “Bub” Campbell was did not suffice. He and my great-grandmother Annie Reid Campbell had two girls when Annie died young in 1928, and my grandmother Betty Ann grew up assisting in hunts on horseback, with dogs carried by wagons and silver service luncheons midhunt. As a result, she forever valued fine shooting and the bobwhite quail. Marriage took her to Northeast Georgia, where Bub’s death in 1948 left her enough to buy 600 acres of farmland and build a home decorated in quail feather hues. She raised five children there, and in no small part, me.
