You won’t find anything about him on Google. If you ask around at random in Clay County, Alabama your inquiry is not likely to be met with one who has heard his name. Only a handful of people will even be able to remember he lived at all. His life was obscure but he lives durably in my memory although it was over forty years I saw him last. “He” was Willis Johnson and he was a childhood friend to my brother and me.

There is little I knew about Willis. He did not talk much. He had two older sisters and the three of them lived with their mother in an old rented house. Their origin was not there in rural Shinbone Valley, Alabama and I never knew where the family came from. Willis was a year older than me and for two summers in the early 1960’s we three boys were together frequentlyriding our our bikes and exploring as young boys like to do. We had many fun adventures and vivid memories from those time are catalogued securely in my head.

While my family never had much, Willis and his family had far less. They always seemed to get by though. No one was over-weight in his group because I suspect food was never plentiful enough to allow such a thing to happen. During the school year when Willis still attended he wore the same few clothes over and over but they were always clean. While he suffered from a general lack, I never got the feeling he was abused in any way. We did not share classes and at school he stayed off by himself and spoke little.

We three boys of Shinbone Valley, Willis, my brother and I, rode our bikes over all the country roads within five miles or so of the main crossroads of our community. We also journeyed down miles and miles of dirt logging roads, pasture cattle trails, hillside paths and did our share of “mountain biking” long before anyone had ever heard of the term. Willis knew the woods and about most everything in them. Being the only male in his household he was hunting and bringing home food from the hills at a very young age. My brother and I were always impressed with his knowledge of the land in ways that pre-teenage boys could especially appreciate.

One particular skill Willis had was making an “Indian owl sound” from his cupped hands. With thumbs side by side and hands tightly together like holding something round inside he could blow across the creases of his thumbs and get a “hooting” noise. For two summers I tried and tried and tried to create it. Over and over Willis showed me how to hold my hands but for the longest time all I ever got was the sound of my breath blowing rapidly over my fingers. It easily could have been the one hundredth time he showed me how to hold my hands when I first made a little of the right noise. Rough and inconsistent at first, over time I became proficient at making this prized “Indian sound”. Later Willis showed me how to alternate lifting the fingers of one hand to change the pitch.

When I was eleven years old my family moved much closer to town and Willis was no longer a part of my life. Once in a while when visiting my Grandparents and my Mother’s family in Shinbone Valley I would see Willis and say “Hey” but never much more. By then those innocent childhood years before puberty were fast-moving deeper into the past. He quit school to work as a manual laborer before he was sixteen.

I moved two hundred miles away to live with my Father at seventeen and never saw Willis again. I lost track of what happened to him for a long while. My Brother who kept in touch with family and folks in the valley told me years later that “Willis went wild”. He took to living in the woods by himself living off the land and only coming back to civilization occasionally. No one seems to know exactly why he did that. Willis was always a bit odd and some say he had a mental breakdown. I like to think he simply lived where he was the most comfortable, out in the woods in the highest mountains of Northeastern Alabama near what I call “home”.

I heard they found Willis Johnson’s remains at his “home camp” about 20 years ago. No one knows what happened. I like to imagine he simply joined the spirit world and was taken in there by the Native Creek Indians the valley belonged to for hundreds of years. I am grateful to have known such a unique individual who could easily have been a character in a Mark Twain novel, but instead was very real. Thanks Willis! I won’t forget you.