…Live for what the day has to offer, not what yesterday has taken away.

Author not known

If you live in one place long enough, you begin
to lose the defenses you’re erected in order to survive in industrial civilization, and you fall into the rhythm of the land. You develop a different sense of the natural world and no longer have to think of things in the abstract You think, instead, of how the land looks and what it’s telling you… you have an ongoing experiential context. If you don’t, life is limited to little disconnected experiences.

Vine Deloria

Flashback: Hattiesburg, a city in southern Mississippi, home to a sizable university where I worked on a PhD and taught classes for two years.

I am in a shabby, and quite depressing, one-bedroom furnished apartment, residing there during my second year of grad school only because of the ridiculously low rent. I could easily walk to the university.

I am lying in bed, looking out the window, listening to a cassette tape of guitar music by Gabriel Lee titled “Impressions”; dazed, weary, wondering why I am there. I am marking time in the wrong place. Negative emotions. Dealing day in and day out with some truly life-draining and awful people, but that is juxtaposed, thankfully, with a very rewarding teaching experience.

Thinking about ill-fated decisions made out of the dire hopes which spring up from the abyss of depression and unemployment.  These became fire-eating dragons causing me to jump at any lifeline thrown my way.

I didn’t know ahead of time the workplace environment would be so toxic. No one warned me because the in-charge people were desperate to fill a job slot. Almost immediately I knew I was at best only a casual visitor in this place I came to dread. But I had to have a job and pay my bills.

Each day, therefore, I had to take the measure of the place, live there one day at a time and forget about the days just past. I had to find the good in each day. I couldn’t just pack up and leave. It wasn’t the emergency mental health situation I faced a few years later at another teaching job. I had obligations.

And so time passed without any sustained or meaningful human contact. I had a couple of casual friends. I taught my classes, and worked on two chapters of a future dissertation that was never completed. My salvation was drives in the country to let the back roads in that beautiful rural part of southern Mississippi carry me swiftly and magically out of my numbness for a while. I also took many invigorating and rejuvenating walks in my neighborhood, a quite beautiful area of nice homes, tall pine trees and azaleas that bloomed magnificently in the two springs I was there.

Despite the depression and isolation, I always felt those walks among the towering pines and those drives in the countryside to hike along scenic and wild Black Creek for short distances, and then back back down to the water’s edge to sit out on the sandbar and watch for long moments the river silently flow by, gave me a tiny inkling of what it must be like to really live in that part of the country, to know it deeply and familiarly as home, as everyone in the country homes and farmhouses I passed on back roads must know this part of the state.

This is truly splendid countryside. There are lots of farms, old houses set back from the roads, clear creeks with tea-colored water, sandbars and white sandy bottoms, and, of course, the long stretches of pine woodlands which characterize the terrain there so well, and which really form its geographical identity. That entire area is accurately referred to as “The Piney Woods.”

As with so many memories from the past, my recollections of this place have two sides to them, as I alluded to earlier: the awful and toxic (there is no better word to describe it) work environment, and the richly rewarding teaching experiences and lovely countryside to explore every weekend.

So much tension would build up due to various personality clashes, and bottled up enmity, that getting in the car and driving anywhere and in any direction after a week of trying to avoid all that, calmed me and gave me good reasons to carry on and make the best of a bad situation. It is a curious thing, but when you are faced with adversity, or in a difficult period in your life, those opportunities to get away into the fresh air of the countryside are all the more precious. I escaped and got my mind off my troubles for a short, but merciful, period of time.

I remember as if it was yesterday driving on those country roads, sometimes for 50 or 60 miles on a Saturday afternoon, and feeling the anxiety slowly ebb away. Something as simple as pastures and oak trees along a deserted back road had an enormously calming effect on me.

I’m looking at a picture of one of those roads now. It is, in fact, my favorite stretch of road in all of Mississippi. I drove it countless times on my way to Black Creek and would always stop by the spot where Little Black Creek passed underneath. I’d turn off the engine, get out of the car, and listen to the deep stillness of the surrounding country and the waters of the creek flowing steadily toward the larger Black Creek a few miles away.

Thus, there is this interesting paradox. I don’t think my memories of that road, and that countryside, would be as sharp and deeply etched today, or as truly pleasurable to recall, if the overall circumstances of my life then had been more routine or normal.

I counted off the days until I could leave Hattiesburg for good, but I endured and made the best of an unfortunate situation. Those little country roads made all the difference.

Sadly I was never to have true knowledge and awareness of that “place” in the fullest and most meaningful sense. As soon as my final semester of teaching was over, I sold my bed, packed a few boxes with books and kitchen utensils, and left, never to return. That was 37 years ago.

What makes this particular chapter in my life so poignant and difficult to leave in the past where it belongs, was the dream it represented. In 1984, I had set my goals on getting a doctorate and becoming a tenured professor — teaching, doing research, and publishing, but most importantly, teaching and advising students about a field of study I felt passionate about. This would be by dream job. But it never happened. I was 36 when I moved on, with more unsettled years ahead of me.

Until I found my life’s true calling in 1995, life had consisted of many such brief encounters with places in different parts of the country, places where I lived just long enough to know and feel something deeper than words can express. I thought each time I could actually put down roots there and perhaps, just perhaps, find the happiness and contentment I was always looking for but didn’t find until later, in due time, and when it was meant to be.

In the meantime, those rather naive and idealistic dreams were thwarted time and again by circumstances I created, or was an unintended victim of, but which I seemed helpless to alter. The experiences and temporary jobs and careers were always short-lived, my few belongings had to be packed up once again, and I had to move on. I endured and survived it all. Despite the terrible setbacks, life has been richer and more fulfilling because of those very setbacks and failures. Of course, I didn’t know all this at the time.

A photo I took of Little Black Creek in southern Mississippi in 1987.

https://imgur.com/a/obPGI3F