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July 7, 2021

Those of you who have read my most recent entries know that I am living in luxury at my Aunt Linda’s Corryton, TN  condominium after urban boondocking across the United States visiting all my hometowns. I only have Winchester, TN and Sewanee, TN left to visit. Most likely I will continue my journey to those places sometime next week, visit nearby family and then return to Corryton for more family visiting before returning West. 

Right now I am of the mind to return to Denton, Texas on the way back across the country and try to find the old Shady Oaks Ranch or the space it once occupied. I have a lead on where it may be from a woman who returned my call. On a message she left to me on my phone she said she used to go there with her Girl Scout Day Camp but that if it is the place she is thinking of “it has been gone a long, long time.”

At the moment I’m very close to the kernel of my existence. Winchester is where I was born. It’s about 3 hours east. However, Knoxville is where my parents met going to school at the University of Tennessee. That’s just 25 minutes away. Dad was a Knoxville native; mom from Winchester. A secret that came out after dad died was that he had been engaged to marry another UT faculty child like himself, but he called off the wedding the night before and got one of his brothers to drive him directly to Winchester to see my mother. According to my source, he had felt that he didn’t have much in common with the woman he was engaged to and that it had felt almost arranged—like it was an inevitable expectation that developed after they began dating. 

I’m sure my mother’s rebellious spirit felt exciting, perhaps almost exotic to him. Dad was an eagle scout and youth minister. Mom, who had it in her nature to challenge everything, may have been the yin to his yang. 

Maybe when he broke up with his bride-to-be he had in mind the Everly Brothers, that duo that rose to stardom in 1957 with Bye-Bye Love. He went to West High School with them and not too many years before, one of the brothers (Don probably) slashed his tires and stole the date he had taken to a school dance.  

July 5, 2021

Get me alone in a place with cable tv and I invariably end up watching the most gruesome stuff like 20/20 and Forensic Files. What is it that attracts humans to the macabre? Having known a few murderers in the Tenderloin (at least two before they committed their crime) I can say they were mostly sad or terribly disturbed people—except for one guy—a senior who came into the drop in center where I worked who had done a few decades in San Quentin after knifing a guy to death during a botched drug deal. He was actually kind of upbeat. 

“Let me tell you buddy. It was either me or him and you know, from my perspective, him was better than me.” 

Chuck was gruff but humorous except that every time he’d get his social security check he’d go to a bar, flash his cash and end up getting rolled on the street. He’d show up in the senior center the next day with a black eye or toilet paper stuffed up his nose. Okay, come to think of it, sad and terribly disturbed fit him pretty well if you scratched beneath the surface. 

Anyway, landlocked and docked, this urban boondocker has a lot of time to couch surf but I actually haven’t been watching much tv—mostly just before I go to bed. Nothing like the sad life of killers to give me sweet dreams. 

Actually, I’m a sucker for romantic comedies too. Adam Sandler has made some really bad movies but I’ve kind of enjoyed the ones I’ve seen him make with Drew Barrymore. Maybe she has a wholesoming effect on him. I watched “Blended” the other night. It only took about six hours—four hours of commercials and two for the movie. I did computer organizing in between. 

Early on in this endeavor to visit all the places I lived with my family I said it may just end up being a journal about gas prices. Well, now that I am on a bit of a hiatus before visiting my last two places—Winchester, TN and Sewanee, TN—this might be a good time to show you my little gas chart:

As you can see my best fuel economy took place early on in the trip when driving away felt like a Sunday stroll and I crossed some great expanses as if I was just headed down to the local ice cream shop. 30.9 miles per gallon is pretty good for my old 2006 Ford Ranger. I estimated that I was going about 60 mph to get that. My worst average was in Tallahassee where I did a lot of city driving.

Finally, for you male urban boondockers I have found that a half gallon milk container and a binder clip is the best pee container to use while camping—no real aiming required and you can pretty much relieve yourself without having to get out of bed. 

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.

July 2, 2021

I did my first sun salutation of the whole trip this morning. It’s a yoga stretch I usually do whenever I wake up. The only excuse I have for not doing it is that I’ve been in a lot of dirty parking lots and the sun salutation involves getting on your belly. Exercise is about routine and my routine has been pretty unsettled. 

I arrived at my Aunt Linda’s late afternoon yesterday. She has a beautiful condo out in the middle of some fields in Corryton, TN. They are for seniors 55 and older. I guess I qualify. I’ll have the place mostly to myself for the month or so I plan on staying here. Linda fell in love with a local Lily magnate and moved in with him. 

Stewart has a Day Lily farm and ships the plants all over the world. I met him for the first time last night. They are good together. 

Jillian and I aren’t married and I call her my partner. For some reason that came up last night while we were eating and Linda said, “That’s what Stewart and I are, partners. There really isn’t a good word for unmarried couples.”

I said they could be wild and introduce each other as lovers.

“This is my lover Stewart,” I said, trying it out for her. That got a good laugh out of them. Stewart mentioned that they are both going on 80-years-old.  

I managed to hit the road to leave Tallahassee a little after midnight yesterday. I only got about 45 minutes before tiredness overwhelmed me. I made it to a place called Bainbridge and I pulled into the far, back corner space in the parking lot of an Anytime Fitness. Across from me was a big rig parked in front of the neighboring Holiday Inn Express. This morning I realized I had parked next to a dumpster again; I was tired. 

As a reader you only see the seamless beauty of these posts (ha!). Sometimes they come easy and sometimes I struggle for hours as I did late last night. Even when they come easy, I make dumb mistakes like calling barbed wire bob wire. (Thank you for keeping me on track my favorite unnamed proofreader!) 

Bob-wire is a regression back to childhood. There really was a time when I thought it was bob wire. It made sense. As a child in Texas I saw a lot of bobwhites. They make themselves known in the fields there calling out “bobwhite, bobwhite”. And the fields were always surrounded by bob-wire. Then, of course, our northern friends have the bobolink. But I really can’t claim that has anything to do with this inaccuracy since, as a child, I never lived in the North. 

However, it is also the case that it takes a special kind of southerner to actually go to the effort to contort their mouth in the manner necessary for saying the word barbed. Southerners only want to open and close their mouth once per word and barbed goes from an open a to a closed(ish) r to the b with its delicate little but-I-was-going-to-say then into the tongue doing a little top-plate mash for the d. This is more gymnastics than most southerners want to do with their kisser unless the kisser is kissing. Bob, however, is an open and shut case as far as words go. Only a little idiot child would ever think it was somehow related to bobwhites and bobolinks or, that it might have been, that the person who invented bob-wire was named Bob. 

But I am going far afield here into these bobwhite pastures and I’m not done with Texas and I’m not done with Tallahassee, Florida. Mississippi is good for the moment, but I’m sure I’ll be coming back to her. 

Most importantly I have a picture here of the last house we lived in in Tallahassee (which I’ll post tomorrow) and a picture of my old friend Tracy who, by the way, I would not have recognized on the street. Some strange things happen to humans between the ages of 7 and 58. But you know, while I was with Tracy I kept looking for clues of that 7-year-old and they were there. The most telling was the way he held his body when we stood for the first picture at the brew pub. 

As a child, Tracy always seemed ready for the next thing, ready for the next movement. When he stopped he was completely relaxed but there was always something in his eyes looking for what was next and in his body that was ready to move toward it. That’s what I see in this picture. Maybe it’s a characteristic that is unique to athletes. Tracy played basketball in high school and college. Athleticism ran in the family along with academic smarts. 

On Wednesday, I went to visit him in the home he built on some land near Wakulla Springs. Turning off the highway onto the country lane where they live I came to a fork in the road. As I approached I saw a woman with a baby in her lap take off in a golf cart, leading me without acknowledging me, down the final drive to their home. She disappeared behind some trees before I turned. 

Wait, isn’t this the way country folks lure people further and further into the backwoods until they become lost and eventually stop in a clearing where they exit their car, turn in circles looking at the window of blue sky above, and then, one by one, people appear from behind trees holding clubs and pick axes? Before the person is bludgeoned and chopped to death the soundtrack of cicadas rises to a deafening level. 

Phew. I’m glad I never have thoughts like that. 

When I got to Tracy’s house, his wife Renee was standing at the garage opening holding their grandson, Tristen, who they are part-time caregivers for. Tristen is their first grandchild, child of their middle son. (They have three children— another younger son and the oldest, a daughter.) Renee and I introduced ourselves and then I followed her into the house.

Tristen is beautiful. The 14-month old stood a long time at the door of the room where we were sitting before he decided I was okay enough to come in. Grandpa has 14 basketballs for him of various sizes. It’s clear there is just a smidgen of aspiration for him. 

Tracy applied to be his own contractor for the house he built 22 years ago. It was a big learning curve. He grilled lunch for the workers everyday with the awareness that having builders show up consistently is the hardest thing to do. Keep ‘em happy with food!

White sand is what qualifies as soil here—it’s that close to the Gulf of Mexico. They have a nice lawn but Tracy said it’s hard to keep it going. The large, lovely brick home has vaulted ceilings, a two car garage, and a swimming pool off the porch in back. On the recommendation of his main builder he extended the roof over the porch and switched out the joists from 2x4s to 2x6s to support the extra weight. 14 acres of Tropical Florida jungle surrounds the area not landscaped for the house. 

When I was a child I didn’t have much of a concept about the human-made construct of race when I met the Warners. It did not strike me as unusual that they lived on a street with black homeowners who lived in beautiful, modern, affluent homes. It struck me as magical. 

The modern brick and block homes on their street had interesting  architectural features like multi-pitched, cross-gabled roofs, double front doors with wide sidelights, and long, multi-paned windows with muntins and mullions. 

The homes were set back with large front lawns landscaped with saw palmetto, palm trees and broad-leafed jungle plants. Each home was unique, but a common, sleek-lined, low-roofed modernity tied them all together. 

Tasteful color combinations were used on the homes: brown with tan panels and white with turquoise trim. The Warner’s home had cream-colored blocks (similar to cinder blocks but smaller and with a finer grain). The multi-layered roof sections had brown facia. The front, double doors and transom-like panels on a half gable above the lower roof were painted sunset orange. The color gave the effect of an orange glow emanating from the center of the home at all times. As a child I don’t think I ever paid attention that those were not windows on the half gable but panels. I was happy to believe that a portion of the sun rose and set in their home; it held such a place of love in my heart.

Outside at night, lights cast beautiful, palmetto patterns across the front. Pulling back a tropical leaf I could always find green tree frogs of various sizes. Some were as small as my pinky nail but could stretch and articulate each finger as if waking from a nap and holding up a digit to tell me to wait while their voice returned. 

The Warner’s pristine street ended after about 200 yards where another street connected at a right angle. This street was either dirt or very poorly maintained concrete. On one side, small houses sat close to the road on lumps of carved up land backed up to a hill. The road did not have a gutter and no driveways came off it that I remember. These houses did not have grass and the color of the dirt yards, homes and street seemed to be a single, whitish monotone that was a little glaring to the eyes. Turning the corner from Tracy’s street onto this one seemed like walking from a Technicolor movie onto an old black and white film. 

These houses were more like the first two homes in Tallahassee that I lived in, yet in even worse condition. These folks were poorer than my own family. I was only down that street once. There was not much room between a pedestrian and someone on their porch—if there was a porch and not just steps.  The street was short and, in my memory, dead-ended after about 75 yards. 

Yes, we were poor but had potential. Dad was working on his Ph.D. while simultaneously teaching a few survey courses in the speech department at Florida A and M. Mom, working full-time as the department of social work secretary, was probably making as much money, or more, than dad. I used to visit her at work and spin in her heavy swivel chair, then go over to a room next to her office that housed a huge insect collection for the Entomology department. 

The door leading to the room was one of those heavy wooden doors with the opaque windows—the kind of doors old buildings used to have and behind which private things went on. When I closed that door the world was silent. 

Expensive, tall-legged, dark-stained-oak cases with sloped and hinged glass tops lined the walls and formed an island in the middle of the room. Inside the cases, at eye-level for me, were hundreds upon hundreds of carefully pinned and labeled insects. There were whole collections of butterflies and moths, grasshoppers and crickets, flies, dragonflies and ants. The beetles contained every color imaginable, some iridescent with tricks of light that could swallow me. There were stick bugs, bees and wasps, praying mantis and other creatures with six legs that only a divine being, several million years old, with engineering skills, a 120-color crayon box, and the mind of a six-year-old could have imagined. 

I think my mom must have loved having that room as my babysitter when I arrived and she needed more focused time before leaving work. 

Before I left Tracy’s house I told him I was going to go back and have one more look at the colors on his family home before I left Tallahassee. 

“We talked about changing it at one point,” he said, “but mom said that’s the color your father wanted and that’s the way we are going to keep it.” 

I think most everyone else on that street must have felt the same way. The house colors are just as I remember fifty years ago. 

June 30, 2021

There were more water incursions in the truck yesterday. Actually, it didn’t come from outside so incursions is probably the wrong word. One of my half-gallon containers of water tipped over. The lid didn’t come off but it leaked enough to get the bottom of my mattress wet and a large part of my sheets. Lesson learned: keep water in cab. 

Most of yesterday morning was spent at another laundromat. This time I found an old school version operating with quarters. A new school version Price is Right was playing on the TV. Did I mention that Elijah was on the Price is Right in the 1970s? He has had more than his share of 15 minutes of fame. Here is the full episode he was on:

I had a nice chat in the laundromat with the lady running the place and a couple of customers. I forgot how a laundromat can be a hub of community for people.

I’m now in a McDonald’s—one of my many offices along with libraries. I’ve heard a number of people talk about how a cup of coffee at Mickey D’s is part of their community engagement. I’m curious how people make connections beyond the internet. 

I got a little even with the Wyndham Gardens Tallahassee. I stayed in their parking lot last night bringing my average cost down to $44/night. (It was $88 for one night.) As is often the case with vengeance, it doesn’t pay. At 2:30 in the morning a trash truck came and set off an atomic boom picking up and dropping a huge, beige-colored dumpster forty feet from my head. The piercing, back-up warning sound lasered away any vestiges of sleep. Being next to the four lane Apalachee Parkway wasn’t great either, but I did manage to get five or six hours of mosquito free shut eye in between all the commotion. Don’t park near dumpsters!

More big news about making old connections! I was able to hook up with my first, best friend in Tallahassee. Tracy was the son of my mom’s boss, Victoria Warner, a sociology/social work professor at Florida A and M, the historically black university here in Tallahassee. Mom was the department’s secretary.

The Warners were a big family of 2 girls and 3 boys—Claire the oldest, Tracy the youngest. All the children were just about grown when I met them, but there was at least a decade between Tracy and his next oldest sibling. He was the real baby. 

I can’t tell you how much it means to reconnect with this person. Tracy is two years older than me and was always a head or more taller. He felt like a big brother. I admired him and probably did my best to annoy him at times. The oldest sibling Claire confirmed my memory of myself.

“I was a little demon, wasn’t I,” I said to her yesterday. 

“Oh, yes you were,” she said. 

Claire answered the door at their old homestead when I showed up yesterday. I had driven by the house several times the day before just to scope things out—hoping I’d see someone in the driveway. What were the chances someone I knew would be there after all these years? The last time I’d seen a Warner was around 1987 when I came back to Tallahassee during a vacation away from college. I sat with Mrs. Warner and reminisced about old times though the times were only about 17 years old then—not the 48 years they are now. Mrs. Warner passed in 2006.

I went to the front door though I knew no one ever entered the house that way. After knocking on the door I backed up to be able to hear the sidedoor at the same time. I heard a creek come from there and backed up some more to see an older woman come into view. 

“Can I help you,” she said?

“I’m Eric Robertson, an old friend of the Warners. I used to play here as a child when my family came to visit. I’m wondering if any of the Warners are still around?”

“I’m a Warner,” she said.

“Joyce?” I asked. 

“No, Claire.”

The fact that Claire existed had slipped my mind, but it came back as soon as she said her name. I didn’t have a lot to do with the older siblings. I was a pipsqueak five-year-old running around their knees, probably getting in the way more than anything else. 

“What were your daddy and momma’s name?”

“Reva Jo and Warren,” I said. 

“Oh my goodness. Little Eric Robertson,” Claire said.

She invited me in.

“Wow, this brings back all kinds of memories,” I said walking into the kitchen. Everything was exactly the same. 

“Go wherever you want. I’m going to call Tracy so you can talk to him.”

A memory I always associated with that kitchen came to mind—something about St. Joseph’s aspirin. (It’s not a candy even though it’s pink and it tastes sweet.)

In the living room I looked at the modern (1970s) offset shelves that once displayed dozens and dozens of trophies. The Warners are a family of high achievers. Joyce was a Miss Black America. There were trophies for everything, football, baseball, basketball, track and field. 

I talked with Tracy and we set a time for me to check in later and try to make a plan to get together. I wasn’t sure if he was excited to see me or not. I followed Claire into a room that had been an alternate living room that was never used when I was there as a child. Now this was her bedroom and she had a big, comfy chair in there with a tv. As if I were being dropped back in time, Bonanza was playing on the tube. 

We caught up about family and work.  She told me about her twins. One died in 2014 and she said her mind hasn’t been right since. 

Twins! I suddenly remembered those babies and looking down into their bubble-producing faces. 

“What year did you have the twins,” I asked. 

“1971!”

When I left, Claire said, “I always loved your mama.”

I told her I still missed her, which I guess will always be true. 

The day before a hawk had crossed my path and flown up to a dormitory window at Florida A and M. I always associate birds with my mom, especially hawks which she once rehabilitated with an organization in Hattiesburg. As part of that work she raised mice in a little house behind ours. Hundreds of white mice!

Tracy and I met at a local brew pub that night. He was much more ebullient in person. I immediately felt comfortable with him. 

After years working with incarcerated youth including being the director of several programs, Tracy started a second career eight years ago selling Cadillacs, Buicks and GMCs. A long conversation ensued with the restaurant manager who had just bought a new Cadillac. Tracy had such an easy rapport with the man, it was like listening to long-time friends talk. The manager ended up comping our meal.  

The father of Tracy and his four siblings was always a mystery to me. As a child, all I knew of him was the portrait of a man in military uniform on their wall. He was deceased and because I knew he had been in Vietnam I assumed he had died there. 

Last night Tracy told me his father died of a heart attack at the age of 39, a few months before Tracy was born. He was not in the military when he died but back in Tallahassee working.

Tracy showed me recently discovered photos of his mom and dad that he now had downloaded on his cell phone.  The beautiful photos are a series of snapshots of the young couple laughing and holding each other dressed sharply in the fashion of the day.

It’s hard to remember sometimes that we were all once young. We have all lived many lives. 

Well…a rolling stone gathers no moss and as much as I like the hanging grey moss in Tallahassee I feel like I need to put some miles toward my next destination where I will take a break and continue this story of Tallahassee, how I reconnected with the Warners and memories about my life here. I’ve been from McDonald’s to visit Tracy’s in his home near Wakulla Springs, back to Tallahassee and the Main Library and now I sit at a Denny’s, the first place I could think of that might still be open. It’s 11:15 p.m. This place closes at midnight and I need to put some pictures with this. Then, a little night driving is in order. 

Good night for now.

June 29, 2021

You know how yesterday I was thinking about getting a room but decided against it? Why spend 80 or 100 bucks, I said.

Well, a tiredness overcame me later in the day while noshing on some pizza. With urban boondocking I’ve found that I need several power naps throughout the day—especially if I’m highway driving. Nothing so forcefully says You-Need-A-Nap-Now like speeding down the road and feeling like Linda Blair is turning green and twisting her head 360 degrees inside you. 

The need for sleep is an animal that won’t be ignored and seems to come on me with a vengeance when operating heavy machinery or driving a car. (I’ve never operated heavy machinery, I’m just pretty sure it would be tough to swing a crane deprived of sleep.) Masticating pizza with too little sleep is doable though. There has to be the imminent danger of death or someone else’s death for sleep to call me out like a possessed demon. Choking on stringy cheese just doesn’t qualify. 

So I ruminated some more and it seemed like a good time to throw in the towel—or use someone else’s. I was ready for that shower after all and I was better able to rationalize this extravagance because of a district email I received from my employer saying I was receiving $1500 for something. I couldn’t really understand why I was receiving $1500 but my interest in that sort of detail is more acute when I’m being charged money rather than given it. Which brings me to the next chapter in my journal which is titled:

Wyndham Garden Tallahassee, How Do I Hate Thee: Let Me Count the Ways. 

Except I’m going to spare you and not count the ways. I think it says enough that when I began to count the ways to the front desk clerk he began his sentence with, “Well, we aren’t really a Wyndham hotel…”.

The shower was nice at least, although, I did have a foot shoot out on the slippery tub bottom which almost led to a back injury that would have ended this trip forever and, possibly, made it so that I would have to drive a wheelchair with a toggle in my mouth. 

I’m trying to remember that there are many wonderful things about Tallahassee and it’s just that this hotel is not one of them, nor the laundromat I went to where I was required to purchase a plastic card for a dollar and then put money on it for the machines that charge 1.99 or 2.99 for wash loads and .52 for every eight minutes on the dryer. Come on people! I don’t mind being ripped off just do it honestly in numbers divisible by five!

Okay, I know that my first-world problems are petty. It’s just, at this point, I kinda wish they were more second-world problems and that I’d decided to stay in my truck and remain smelly. 

Let me move on.

I lived in Tallahassee  four years. My family did most of its moving—at least the state to state kind—in the summer. I think that’s true for a lot of families who have children and don’t want to yank kids out of school in the middle of the year. Plus, my dad was in the school business. 

So my birthday being July 8, I was a new four-years-old when we got here and an old seven-years-old when we left. Keeping track of my ages helps me keep track of where I was and what school I was going to at any given time. 

I went to a preschool when we lived at 1234 Pepper Drive, our first place in Tallahassee. A woman with very long fingernails liked to yank me around a lot. Apparently I was a bad kid. Also, nap time was torture and they played Hush Little Baby Don’t Say a Word every day on repeat. I used to lay on my cot unable to sleep thinking what a spoiled brat that kid was—Daddy buying her everything.

Remember how I said I seem to remember the bad things? I suppose trauma makes them memorable. At 1234 Pepper Drive there were three traumas: sitting in a red ant pile, trying to pet a fuzzy bumble bee and sticking my thumb in one of those old-timey metal fans that have about three curved wires as a front grate. I remember what I was saying when I stuck my thumb in there. 

“Want me to turn off the fan?” I asked the adults while indicating the fan behind me with my thumb. 

It must have been one of those kid things where I wanted to touch a button or click a switch because there is no good reason to turn a fan off in Tallahassee. You pretty much want fans on most of the year. 

I met an interesting woman while looking for my house. Cathryn has one of the homes on Pepper and she is really into Tallahassee history. I’d found a home that looked like the one we rented but its address was in the 2000s. There were no homes with addresses in the 1000s. I asked Cathryn about this and she confirmed that all those homes were in a flood zone and were torn down about 25 years ago. Some houses across the street from where our old house used to be are built on stilts. (We’ve gotten downpours every day I’ve been here.) 

According to Cathryn the neighborhood was developed in the late 1940s and red-lined then as a blacks-only neighborhood. The area was called Elberta Empire after the Elberta Crate and Box company where many or the residents worked. At the time the wages were good. When we arrived in the summer of 1969 ownership of the company had changed and workers were in the midst of a strike—which proved to be successful—for better working conditions and wages. 

Cathryn says there is a huge demand for small, affordable homes in Tallahassee. From what I’ve seen, this city has been good at keeping old neighborhoods like Elberta Empire. 

June 28, 2021

I got into Tallahassee last night after dark. Not the ideal situation for the urban boondocker, but I got a late start leaving Hattiesburg. These daily posts can be time-consuming what with loading pictures and all. Plus at my station at the McDonald’s in Hattiesburg (wifi and an electrical plug) there was an interesting fellow also using the booth in front of me as his personal office and workstation. He was houseless and was holding down the table while his partner panhandled outside. Kind of a rough life it sounds like. He was interested in discussing the bible and at the same time talking about the wrongs of how he was treated at some churches he frequented. 

There were a lot of intense thunderstorms on the way here. Most only lasted a few minutes. Nothing like southern Florida, Alabama and Mississippi for those intense showers. We are in the tropics here. Humidity is high, but at least the rains have kept it cool. I’d never thought about it, but I didn’t go into Georgia driving here. The Florida pan-hands you right over to Alabama skipping Georgia altogether for the driver. While I have travelled extensively in the South, most of the roads I’ve taken all led to eastern Tennessee where my nuclear family has roots. No matter the state I was living in, Tennessee was usually the destination. This particular path—Hattiesburg to Tallahassee never happened in my youth.

I was looking for a Taco Bell when I came into town: predictable food and wi-fi. And I can get veggie tacos now that I’m back on the beef wagon. (I never really got that term “on the wagon”. Does that mean that you are delivering the stuff to others and don’t have time to partake yourself? Seems like if you are on the wagon you’d want to have a little bit of whatever you are delivering.)

Anyway, I made it to the Bell at 9:50 with ten minutes to spare since I don’t like going through the drive-thru and that’s all that’s open after 10. The Bell was conveniently located to a Walmart so I went there after and picked up some groceries. I was in the nick of time for that place too since they close at 11 on a Sunday here. Top on my list of groceries were raisins as my oatmeal has been wanting. 

Apparently a lot of people boondock at Walmarts, but I’d have to be pretty hard up to do that. The parking lots look kind of sketchy and exposed to me. I guess all that space would be convenient if I was hauling a trailer.  

I did use the Walmart lot for getting the truck and myself prepped for bed though. I like to do this before I find my place so I’m not busy attracting attention. I basically just want to be able to park and then hop in the back when I get somewhere. So I opened up my tailgate and boudoir for the whole world to see as I did my nightly ablutions. 

First I stretched across my mattress and untied all my curtains for easy closing later. (Closing the side curtains and putting up the velcroed front and back curtains is the one thing I do at my campsite since driving with those closed isn’t so safe. An alternative is to do this somewhere very close to the campspot and then just roll in completely prepared, but I didn’t want to take that extra step since I still needed to find a place.) 

Next I straightened up the bedroom throwing away trash, finding my headlamp, stuffing some books and putting them out of the way in the cab. (As many times as I’ve imagined doing some bedtime reading it just doesn’t seem to happen—not wild about using the headlamp too much since that reveals me and usually I’m just too tired anyway.) 

Finally I washed my face with my musty smelling washcloth and brushed and flossed my teeth. I had a shower back in Hattiesburg at Elijah’s a few nights ago. I can probably go a day or two longer without offending people who come within smelling distance. Likely I’ll go to a gym here. I was thinking about getting a room again like I did once so far, but then thought, why spend 80 or 100 bucks? I like this urban boondocking and I’d rather eat some nice meals if I’m going to spend money on anything besides gas and other necessities. 

Leaving Walmart I went looking for a spot. I checked a Cracker Barrel first. I’ve never stayed at one, but like Walmart, people, especially with trailers, often stay there and I wanted to check it out. An app on my phone tells which Walmarts and Cracker Barrels allow overnight stays. The app said this one did not, but comments below contradicted that.  In a dark area of the Barrel’s lower lot was a motorhome and a truck with a camper, but I didn’t feel like joining. Seemed like three might get someone’s attention whereas two or twenty wouldn’t. I just go on instinct for these things. 

I cruised through three or four motel lots looking for something but they were all too brightly lit or only had spaces right in front of doors or parking on unlevel ground. One had possibilities but two guys were talking to each other nearby from their pickup truck windows. Being as it was night and this area of the city seemed unfamiliar to me I didn’t want to go looking for apartment complexes or other alternatives. 

The last place I drove through had a dark spot at the end of a row. It was only about fifty feet from the front door, but all was quiet. I found some weird holes in the bushes behind me after backing in and checking out my parking job. It looked as if some land campers might use a spot there. It was hard to tell in the dark, but the bushes looked like they led to some trails and a jungly kind of hillside below. It didn’t matter though since I lock myself in tight once I’m in my truck and I feel pretty secure with my bearspray and knife, though who knows if I could effectively use either if I had to? 

I waited for a maintenance worker to finish organizing his truck and tying up some garbage and then I slipped out of the cab and back to the camper shell. I unvelcroed my sandals, slipped them off and climbed over the tailgate (I don’t like how forcefully I have to slam it to get it to latch). I slid my windows open, closed all my curtains, turned on my fan and took off everything but my skivvies. I placed my keys on the ledge of my camper with my cell phone and finally my glasses. It was night-night time. Oh…and the parking lot? It was Marriott again. 

June 27, 2021

The goal today is to get out of Hattiesburg. That’s not an easy thing to do given all the things I’d like to write about. Denton still has pots brewing on the back burner, so geez, let me get a meal cooked here. 

Last night I slept in a USM campus lot. Just when I thought this urban boondocking is becoming easier a campus police officer did two drive-bys checking me out this morning. But hey, he/she didn’t hassle me. Just doing their job. I’ve gotten in the habit of picking up some trash wherever I boondock. I figure if I leave it a little better than when I show up I’m building a little good karma. 

For a college town, Hattiesburg has too many parking lots. There are beginning signs of a bike culture here. Elijah has plans for his next column (he writes one for The Pinebelt News) to talk about sidewalks. The main thoroughfare, Hardy Street, is basically one plant and grass lawn landscape broken up by lots of concrete business entrances. Makes it hard to walk down the street. Elijah praises a local restaurant entrepreneur (maybe baron is a better word—he has six successful eateries in town) who is putting sidewalks in front of his restaurants next to the street. 

I’ve also noticed a lot of new traffic calming efforts in town, especially in the form of planted medians. These are all first step efforts to give pedestrians and bicyclist a larger share in our car-dominated culture, making the landscape safer and more accessible. 

—————

The oppressor controls the historical narrative. 

Elijah just wrote an article about the Tulsa, Oklahoma Massacre of 1921. It has a full page spread in The Pinebelt News. He credits popular culture for clueing him in—specifically the tv series The Watchman and Lovecraft Country. In these past few days I’ve learned some history about Hattiesburg I never knew. Why is that local history so often denied public education students?

Goula is the word used by the black community to describe the section of town Elijah grew up in. We theorized the etymology of the word may derive from  the coastal African Americans in SC and Georgia named the Gullah, many of whom, to this day, retain an African accent. Someone I just met in a McDonalds thinks it derives from Pascagoula Street which is in the vicinity and also a Mississippi coastal city. Looking on a map the Leaf River flows into the Pascagoula River, so Goula may simply be an earlier name for the Leaf River.

The name I was familiar with for the black section of town was the quarters (sometimes called the bottoms). I went over the railroad tracks to this section to take my mom’s beer cans to the recycling center, to get our yard pecans shelled by a company with a special machine, and in the tenth grade riding the bus to school everyday. 

There are many fewer houses in the flood zone area of the black neighborhoods that existed when I was here.  The city doesn’t issue permits for homes there anymore. A large new park in the Goula borders the Leaf River and has open spaces for games, a stage, and natural wetland areas with trails to walk through and observe nature as it is without human interference. The area is becoming less and less “the black section” of town and more and more just “town”. While we were at the park two helmeted bicyclist came through. 

“Look, those are white people,” I said to Elijah.

“No they aren’t. Wait, they are white. The first person is but the…wait, she’s white too.” 

Hattiesburg proper is now majority African American and that population isn’t confined to one specific area. A black mayor was in office for four terms (16 years) until recently. (I’ll let Elijah talk about his feelings concerning this individual.) 

A few days ago Elijah showed me where the house he grew up in had been. There were only a few bricks buried in the ground that were left. It wasn’t a flood that took it away but a tornado that touched down about four years ago. Elijah hadn’t lived there for a long time. His mother sold it many years before.

Down at the old city hall there is a confederate statue praising the men and women of the confederacy. I’m not sure what should be done with these old monuments. My first instinct is to have them taken down and destroyed, but there are some good arguments for leaving and contextualizing them.

I was aware of the long history of voter suppression here. In the historical timeline blacks have been able to vote only a few years compared to the hundreds they weren’t.  But there was right-to-vote activism that I never knew about.

A few feet away from that confederate statue is a new statue of Vernon Dahmer, a mixed race community leader who died at the hands of the KKK trying to give people the vote. That’s a start to balancing things out. Elijah was at the unveiling of the statue shortly before the pandemic hit. A new park is named after Dahmer too. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon_Dahmer

“Things are changing Eric!” 

Elijah emphasized this over and over again during my time here. His positivity is infectious. I was suddenly learning all these new stories. Each contained differing levels of inspiration and horror. But cracking open the vaults of history and letting in the light is where healing comes from, not hiding it away. 

The story of Clyde Kennard hit me like a blow to the guts. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clyde_Kennard

Hattiesburg has begun to shed light on these stories with the new Sixth Street Museum District.

It’s blocks away from where Elijah grew up and went to school at Eureka Elementary, a segregated all black elementary school that has been renovated as an African American History Museum. Elijah’s mom was a teacher there and later the principal. Elijah had her for third grade.

“She made me call her Mrs. Jones like all the other kids,” he said. At recess he could call her Mo’Dea, a black conjunction for Mother Dear. In Tyler Perry’s popular movies it is Madea, but Elijah takes issue with that spelling. I told him he should see if he can get a consulting job with Perry and straighten him out.

Expect a second email today with more pictures of the Sixth Street Museum District.

June 26, 2021

I had a good night’s sleep last night at the Marriott. Not inside, but out in the parking lot. Actually, it was my best urban boondocking experience yet.  I may go back again tonight though that breaks urban boondocking protocol. Staying in the same place more than once can attract unwanted attention and I wasn’t being overly discreet this morning. I actually got out my stove and boiled water for tea in my little corner of the lot. At least it was early and there wasn’t much activity.

I’ve been at the Hattiesburg public library most of the day. It’s a new, spacious library. The old brick library downtown is now a museum.  Elijah wasn’t allowed in it when he was a kid. He was born in 1956—just nine years before me—but schools and many other public facilities remained segregated in Hattiesburg until 1965 and beyond. Elijah’s library was a small, segregated, non-public room in the African American USO club near his house.

Despite the racism Elijah has witnessed in his many years here (and in Los Angeles) he is one of Hattiesburg’s most vocal supporters. He closely follows local politics and doesn’t vote or advocate voting along race lines. He can pick a no-good con in any shade. 

“Hattiesburg has changed Eric. There are a lot of things happening here. This is a progressive little city. We are like what Austin is to Texas,” he said. “We’ve always been ahead of the curve.” 

Race defines place for a lot of Americans. Maybe not so much anymore, but certainly when I lived here.

When we moved here from Texas, my parents bought an old home on Main Street, close to downtown. It was the first time they’d bought a house since their first home in Tallahassee. I thought maybe that was a good sign we’d stop moving around so much. And we did. I completed junior and high school here and had my first three semesters at the University of Southern Mississippi (USM).  

Main street was the dividing line for blacks and whites then, though there was an apartment building across the street from us that was mostly black. Most whites lived west of Main. The older neighborhoods were closer to downtown and newer developments further out Hardy Street.

Behind Main Street, crossing over the the railroad tracks the land dipped downhill and during heavy, extended rains the Leaf River would rise above its banks and spill across the land. 

“What did you do when it flooded,” I asked Elijah. 

“We moved out.”

“Would you put your furniture up high?”

“Either that or took it with us. Things like tvs.”

“How long would you be gone,” I asked?

“Maybe two weeks. The smell took a few months to go away,” he said.