July 4, 2021, 3:26 a.m.
There really is no rhyme or reason to the way I create these time stamps on my post. Sometimes they represent when I start writing, sometimes when I finish and sometimes a point in the middle. This one represents a beginning.
When I was boondocking, I could claim noise or a sudden fright or the insecurity of lying in the back of a truck in a parking lot would wake me in the middle of the night. Here, who knows? I am literally in the middle of a cow field in Corryton, TN. Barbed-wire fencing surrounds me on three sides. It’s a seniors community and you have to be 55 to live in one of these condos. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a quieter place except when I was in a cabin in Willets, CA after a deep snow and another time when I tried out foating in a salt water isolation tank. I did hear the last of some early July 3rd fireworks when I went to bed last night, but I was fast asleep before they ended.
You’d think the frustrations inherent with being an urban boondocker on the road would end with the luxury of being in a newly built (within the last 15 years), two bedroom, senior residence condominium that has more square footage than my small California house. This place is a solid, landlocked ship, built on a slab foundation. The front door opens to a hall wide enough to accommodate that wheelchair I might have ended up in had the bathtub incident at the Wyndham Garden in Tallahassee not gone as well.
The hall floor, living room, and kitchen are wood though there is a laminate as thick as some pizza parlors put on their tables when they want to show pictures of pop culture buried beneath an inch of polyurethane that no hoodlum with a penknife could get to without spending several decades of his time and a good portion of his income sitting in the same booth working on it, in which case, in the intervening years, he would likely no longer be a hoodlum but would have traded in his penknife for a pocket protector or something and become a productive member of society.
The rest of the condo is carpeted. The slab foundation makes a person feel very special as if one’s movement is no longer mortal but related to the gods and how they walk across clouds making zero noise. When I come through the front door here I sometimes have a hopeful expectation that I will be greeted by a sloppy, excited dog; so profound is the quiet. It’s a writer’s dream until it becomes his nightmare.
Fortunately human problems exist here. It is ironic that the issues I have most as an urban boondocker—water incursions and wifi—have followed me here. The past two days I’ve taken these on with an aggression that can’t be equalled by anyone except another person with a great deal of time on their hands— a person, for example, like myself, living in a senior community.
But I’m not going to go into any further detail (proofreader please note correct use of further not farther) about Wifi because in the course of journalling about this just now I had an embarrassing epiphany. The truth is that I don’t have a problem at all if I pay a little extra money for additional data to use my phone as a hotspot. I can get as much fast internet here as I want. The issue is not about accessibility. It is about cheapness and stupidity and the fact that (green flag waving environmentalist that I am), until this moment I was of the opinion that I’d rather spend $3.99 on a gallon of gas to get to a McDonald’s with wifi than spend the same money to stay home and use my phone as a hotspot. Issue solved—idiocy acknowledged.
My other issue: water incursion. It certainly is not as dire as it was in the truck. It does not involve wetness where I need to bed down at night. Really it is more about using it as a scapegoat for a small bit of writer’s block I was having yesterday. You see, as I was sitting in the lazy boy—with an electronically controlled foot and back rest—about to embark on the further adventures of an urban boondocker, I heard a constant drip from the faucet. Having had a few limited, but successful, experiences in the plumbing department over the years, I assessed the situation and decided I could take it on. Six hours later this is what I’m left with:
I’m going to call a plumber on Tuesday. The one I’m interested in is closed Monday for the holiday. I’m okay washing dishes in the bathroom until then.
My aunt has told me not to spend money on her plumbing but, you know, this place is like a luxury hotel and it’s all mine as she has left it to go live with her lover across a few fields. Besides, at this point, I can’t even get the faucet put back together. Something happened in the course of taking it apart and the old cartridge, not to mention the new one, won’t seat back in the pipe so I can’t even return it back to it’s dripping glory.
Anyway, this rambling is all a bit of avoidance in terms of this trip’s mission which has to do with my somewhat rootless roots, recording the places I lived and reflections of how those places made me the person I am today.
I’ve touched on this human-made concept of race and I think I will continue to do so. I’m also beginning to see a theme in this journaling related to the environment and open space or the lack thereof—also, the general theme of housing.
I will admit to white fragility to the extent of being a porcelain figurine at times. I think we live in a shattered land with many shattered people. I am one of those. But have I invented this hurt? Is this just something like the wifi and the plumbing—a way to occupy my time? Or is it something real, something that needs to be fixed?
My opinion is if you don’t feel shattered by race then I think you are in what Kierkegaard called the greatest despair of all which is the despair of not knowing despair.
If you think that we just need to make America great again then you are not acknowledging that America never had a time when it was great—at least, not great in all things. We may have been great at war. We may have been great at industry. We may have even been great at opportunity, in comparison, in contrast to the larger world. But no, we were never great in all things. At best we were human. At worst, we were animals ripping the flesh from each other.
But I’m here to report that the manatee is not dead. I’m here to show you that humanity has potential. I’m here to offer up my experience in life. I’ve had one just as you have. I did not grow up in a bubble. Neither did the people of Corryton, TN. The cows that surround me in these fields will be milked two times today (maybe three if they are following the genetic breeding that is happening in Wisconsin). There are beef cows around here that will live their short life of one or two years and then be taken to the slaughter house and made into steaks and ground into hamburger.
As Hank Williams said, “I’ll never get out of this world alive”. Life is tough and old age ain’t for sissies (Bette Davis). So I’m hoping to grab hold of a little fearlessness in writing about my life. My plan isn’t to offend anyone. It is to tell part of my story.
The state park is close to Tracy’s house. I went back on my own after borrowing a snorkeling mask. The swimming area borders a spot hundreds of feet deep. On clear days the cold water is as transparent as air. Creature from the Black Lagoon and old Tarzan movies with Johnny Weissmuller were filmed here. This place heavily influenced my wonder and awe concerning nature as a child.
This is the last house I lived in Tallahassee on Chowkeebin NeNe Street. Of all the homes my family had, this is the one I wish we had never left. It is in the idyllic, wooded, Indianhead Neighborhood and is not much changed since I lived there in 1972 and ’73. I have no idea why my parents bought this first home and just up and left it, but college professors follow jobs. They sold some Pacific Bell stock my dad’s mom gave them for the downpayment. Homes in this neighborhood are in high demand.
My sister and I often went walking to this park on our own or with cross-the-street neighbor children Pat and Gabbie Barrett. It was about a third of a mile from our house. Dad had a carved out bull’s horn that he would blow when it was time to come home for lunch or dinner. It resonated through the air with the same pure vibrational tone that called enslaved laborers back to work in the 1960 movie adaptation of H.G. Wells’ book, The Time Machine. https://tinyurl.com/2w86uxht This movie had weird racial overtones. All the slaves were white and the enslavers were dark-skinned monsters.
Living in an area carved out from the jungle made me think that all neighborhoods should be green and lush. For many years I based my opinion of neighborhoods on this one. It’s one of the reasons it took some time to get used to the grasslands of California. Most of the native species here could not live in much of the western United States without draining the Colorado and other major rivers to meet this ideal of landscaping.
The Indianhead neighborhood was entirely white when I lived there (as far as I knew). The Barretts have been gone at least two generations. The older couple I talked to didn’t recognize their name and had lived there 15 years and knew the previous owner had also been there about that long. In the course of talking to them I looked across the street and saw an African American tween appear and begin playing in the driveway of my old house. I’m happy to know this.
This spider jungle gym was not in Optimist Park when I was there. On the same spot fifty years ago was one of those heavy metal discs on a center shaft with handles that you ran fast to push and then jumped on to spin around. I guess Merry Go Round was the benign name. No doubt children were killed or brain damaged by getting clocked in the head with this very fun, dangerous playground machine.
I sometimes played by myself in this creek that runs through Optimist Park. The owners of the Barrett house said that letting a child have that freedom would never happen today, but we weren’t completely naive in 1972. There was a legend among children in the neighborhood that a long, black limousine would come through and try to entice us inside with lollipops.
Spotty West Goes East 