Dirty little secrets that the U.S. Forest Service never told you!

During the summer before I was to become one of the youngest Eagle Scouts ever, a select group from Boy Scout Troop 26 in Gainesville, GA spent several weeks hiking on the Appalachian Trail. Most of the time was in the Chattahoochee National Forest. This is how I was able to garner so many merit badges required for being an Eagle Scout before even turning 12 years old.

After this incredible experience, I dreamed of becoming a U.S Forest Ranger or at least living in a tent or cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains. Fast-forward to the winter of 2010, My first long-term campsite after becoming homeless, was in the Great Smoky Mountains. The view from my campsite is below.

On February 23, 2010 a North Carolina couple invited me to stay in their vacation cabin in the Smokies for a few weeks, until the weather got warmer. Life is stranger than fiction.

However, this is just the beginning of ironies, associated with the U.S. Forest Services, “Maya Myth-busting in the Mountains” political campaign in 2012. You will be rolling in the floor, laughing

by Richard L. Thornton, Architect and City Planner

View from my tent – January 2010

When I published the first article on Track Rock Gap on December 21, 2011, I optimistically hoped to get at least 1200 readers, since it was just before Christmas. Instead, within a few days I had garnered somewhere between 350 million and a half billion readers around the world. Instantly, my situation went from having little hope of ever getting my architecture practice going again to “highly probable.”

When I originally wrote the article, I mainly had in mind creating work opportunities for the 85% of archaeologists in the Southeast, who were unemployed, but my main focus was getting back into my professional life. After the incredulous response to the Track Rock Gap article, I wrote a series of books on architectural history and American history for the next six years to let people know that I had extensive, award-winning, experience in the restoration of very old buildings and was a man of impeccable personal character. Once an Eagle Scout . . . always an Eagle Scout.

In the short run, the books didn’t help the situation in Georgia, because the pejorative lies flung at me during “Maya Myth Busting in the Mountains” campaign, stuck to me like wet, used toilet paper. We live in era, when many Americans would rather believe a lie, rather than the truth.

The surrealism of the current situation is metaphored by a event yesterday. I was talking with the assistant manager of a store about a vibrant lady, who moved here from near where I was born in South Georgia. She wanted to know if I had ever come into the store with a wife or steady girlfriend.

Last week, she put her hands on my shoulder, while flirting with me. That’s the signal used by traditional South Georgia Belles, French mademoiselles and Latin American señoritas that they would like you to come into their lives. In contrast, Swedish flyckas wait seven years to hold your hand in public. LOL

Meanwhile, a depraved Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent was standing nearby and pretending to be a homosexual. He was desperately trying to get my attention. (Hint GBI – there is a reason why I scored in the high 90s on the CIA Aptitude Test.) Their old time, white agents believe that anyone, who has not accepted Adolf Hitler as his Lard and Saveyer, must be a pervert.

Getting back to the main line of irony

In 2012, the Chattahoochee National Forest Public Affairs officer, Chattahoochee National Forest staff archaeologist, the National Security Agency archaeologist and clique of aged Georgia archaeologists, who were the spokespersons for “Maya Myth-busting in the Mountains, portrayed me as an anti-government, mentally deranged, sexually-perverted, women-hating, eco-terrorist, who knew nothing about archaeology and had this crazy idea that Maya commoner refugees came to Georgia and built an agricultural terrace complex exactly like the ones they built in the Chiapas and Guatemalan Highlands.

Update: The Public Affairs Officer is now the Supervisor of the Chattahoochee National Forest. We now have identified 34 terrace complexes in Georgia and East Central Alabama.

By mid-2012 they were saying that I was a WHITE man, who also hated archaeologists, Native Americans and Jewish people . . . plus, he had also never been in Mexico. As a result of the Anti-Semitic charge, two veterans of the Israeli Defense Force drove up to my cabin in their sports cars to beat me up. However, when they got close to me, they realized that I was much higher up on the food chain . . . and had a large chain saw in my hands. LOL By the way, my first love was Alicia Rozannes, a Sephardic Jew, living in Mexico City.

(1) Our next door neighbors in Gainesville were the Supervisor of the Chattahoochee National Forest and Ed Dodd, creator of the very popular Mark Trail newspaper comic strip series.

“Mark Trail” . . . now a 77 year old American institution, portrays the adventures of a U. S. Forest Ranger in the Southern Appalachian Mountains, but through the years, he has been dispatched to other National Forests or National Parks to investigate crimes. His headquarters office is in Gainesville, GA – the same office that slandered me repeatedly in 2012. Oh, by the way, that building is two miles from my childhood home.

The USFS Supervisor was my counselor for the Forestry and Soil & Water Conservation merit badges. Ed Dodd was my counselor for the Architecture and Art merit badges. Dodd had studied Architecture at Georgia Tech, but found that being the creator of Mark Trail was far more fun and financially lucrative.

(2) Chattahoochee is derived from the Itza Maya words, Cha’ta hawche, which mean “Carved stone (stele) – shallow river. Thus, the personnel of this national forest embarked on a $100,000+ political campaign to prove that migratory birds brought the name of a one of the South’s longest rivers to Georgia.

An acquaintance of mine, who is a Maya from the Guatemala, told me that the words mean the same in his Maya language. He lives near the Chattahoochee River as I do, but it never dawned on him that it was a Maya word.

(3) Sylvan Myer, Pulitzer-prize winning editor of the Gainesville Daily Times, was my counselor for the Journalism merit badge. Mr. Myer was Jewish as was his daughter, Erica, who was a classmate and good friend of mine. Harry and Lillie Lerner, survivors of the Holocaust, were dear friends of mine in Asheville, NC. Lillie was one of the few people, who survived Auschwitz.

(4) Native American hater? Nope, I dearly loved my sister, mother, grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins. Do you really think that the Oklahoma Centennial Commission would have hired me to design the Trail of Tears Memorial, if I was not legitimately Native American?

(5) At least six female upper tier administrators in the North Carolina and Atlanta Regional USFS offices in 2012 were members of a cult that held rituals on our farm in the Reems Creek Valley of North Carolina during the late 1970s and 1980s. There may have been more, but I didn’t get to see the faces of many attendees.

My ex-wife claimed that it was a sorority, but I was required to leave the farm, when the women in black satin robes started arriving. I would return to see a circle of burned out candles in the living room or under a large cherry tree in back of the house.

In Virginia, I found the photographic proof that they were doing occult rituals, like incubus, and that she had multiple abortions, while we married – so divorced her. I like women, but don’t like witches. She and her female friends also like to portray witches at school events. Recruiting new members?

(6) Hate archaeologists, especially female archaeologists? Of course, my co-adventurer in Chiapas, Ana Rojas, became a highly respected cultural anthropologist. I didn’t know Alejandara de Mendez (Dr. Pina-Chan’s graduated assistant) very well until two days before leaving for home, but we ran into each other in Tepoztlan in December 1980, where we became cozy. Then in the mid-1990s, we toured archaeological sites in Morelos State for two weeks, where she had been the supervising archeologist.

I first met archaeologist George Stuart of National Geographic in Palenque in August 1970. I became friends with he and his wife Gene, also an archaeologist in North Carolina. They had a vacation home near my farm. In Virginia, Gene became a big booster for both my cheese creamery and architecture practice.

(7) Anti-government? I was supposed to become the next Architect of the National Capitol in 1993! I scored first place on an exam given to 138 candidates. However, the review committee later ranked me third, because two other candidates got bonus points for either being a veteran and a federal employee or being a woman, African-American and a federal employee.

When reviewing their decision, NPS Director Roger Kennedy noticed that of the ten finalists, I was the one who actually had any experience with historic preservation. He also noticed that the committee had not given me points for that or being Native American. When those points were added, I became the nominee again.

He sent me a letter officially asking my permission to give my name to President Clinton, who would then nominate it to Congress. My estranged wife never gave me the letter and she told Roger’s secretary that I had disappeared on Good Friday and had not been heard from since. That is the reason that many of my friends in Virginia (plus Vivi in France) thought I had been murdered in mid-April 1993.

Just because a newspaper, politician, archaeologist, bureaucrat or law enforcement officer says something, does not mean it is true . . . especially, if he is a white, North Georgia cop.

Now you know!