writing – Spotty West Goes East

January 4, 2026

I was helping one of my students with doing some multi-digit subtraction a few days before our winter break and he asked me “Why do they call it borrowing if you never give it back?”.

I was flummoxed. I didn’t have a good answer and I’m not sure if I do now. Subtraction is just about taking away. You don’t give back at all. In the subtraction algorithm one digit takes from the next digit over so it can give what it needs to the digit below it. It’s all just part of a process. It’s like your body taking nutrients from your stomach to power your brain.

I think in the education world the correct term to use might be “regrouping” which makes more sense in terms of meaning but maybe not as much in common language. We are a nation of borrowers, but how often do we regroup? That involves teamwork or at least the notion that we have multiple things going on and sometimes we need to sort them out.

The language is important to me as a writer but I didn’t care much about it as a kid which made this student’s inquiry kind of special.

Back when I was his age my number sense was better than my word sense so when teachers said, “borrow from the whatever and carry the one”, it didn’t matter that the language didn’t make sense. I understood it was just a shortcut to get to the answer even though there was more wrong with the language than just the teacher saying “borrow”.

Carry the one was a complete lie. In the subtraction algorithm you never carry a one (for whole numbers any way). You might carry a ten, or a hundred or a million, but one is not a number that gets carried.

From what I remember teachers didn’t pay much attention to number sense. You either had it or didn’t and the addition and subtraction algorithm (stacking numbers on top of each other) was hoisted on us pretty quickly before we had a good idea of how much bigger 1,012 is than 112.

But what did I know about what teachers were paying attention to? I wasn’t paying attention to them!

_________________

I made it back to Tennessee for some time on the land and family visiting. My old friend Steve joined me. I met Steve way back when his wife was his girlfriend and I worked with her at Hospitality House in the Tenderloin neighborhood of SF.

Steve and my Aunt Linda hit it off big time. Often, when I left them alone I’d come back in the room to see them laughing and smiling, telling stories or talking history.

My trip was short. Steve’s even shorter. I arrived on a red-eye last Saturday and he came that night. He left on New Year’s Eve and I left New Year day. Still we got a lot in which included some delicious meals made by Aunt Linda and winter camping on a night that got down to 22° F.

Surprisingly, the red-eye wasn’t too bad. I had everything I needed to make sleep possible—my 40+ year-old down jacket from college days, a window seat, a neck pillow, Benadryl and two doses of NyQuil in a 2-oz bottle. It’s one of the few times that having a congestion cold was convenient. If I ever take a red-eye again I might try to skip the cold but take the doxylamine. I made sure to clear my ears with a gentle, pinched-nosed push at intervals all the way up to cruising altitude and again on the way back down for both jumps of my trip.

I think another thing that helped was that when I got to Tennessee, I stayed up and didn’t try to “sleep off” the red-eye which would have likely just confused my body more.

I purchased the track barrow I’d been pondering. Linda picked me up from the airport and when we got back to her house I went straight to work unpacking the crate and putting it together.

Before I got too deep into it I walked down to the farm office nearby and picked up Stewart’s truck, then drove out to my land picking up some gas for the new machine on the way. I wanted to see if I had any lumber that might fit the bill for making ramps, but I pretty much knew I didn’t. It was really just an excuse to check in on the land.

It’s exciting to walk the main trail after I haven’t been there in a while. Not much had changed beyond everything. Absent summer foliage, I could see the shape of the land through the vertical line of timbers. Shades of brown was the theme instead of green. There was a small tree down across the trail near the south entrance. It was at head-height caught up in some limbs and would be easy to take out with a chainsaw.

At the north driveway entrance, the long limb barrier that I had placed on forked branches and hammered into the ground was down on one side. A fork had rotted out.

A thick pile of leaves covered the gravel drive and all the trails. The top leaves were dry but underneath recent rains made a wet matted layer. My footsteps had a lighter, higher pitch than the tumbling sound that can happen when walking through leaves that are dry and basket-deep.

The planks I’d cut from the oak last summer had all dried without warpage, but none were thick or long enough to be used for a ramp. My new machine weighs 660 pounds. The ramp kit I bought recommends two 10’4” 2x8s for the truck tailgate height of 32”. In the shed I had one twelve foot, 2×8 from the orange box store, but by itself it was useless and two six foot planks were two short.

By the time I walked the land and looked around the sun was getting low and I still needed to pick Steve up at the airport. I locked the shed and started out the 22 miles to the big box store. I at least wanted to have what I needed to load the machine the next day.

The next morning as Steve birded on Linda’s front porch I finished attaching the handles and sides to the track barrow. It comes partly disassembled to fit in a smaller crate.

Steve scored a Red-breasted woodpecker for his life list and I grabbed Linda’s binocs so I could add it to mine. When I finished putting together the barrow and ramp I lined everything up to load. Steve helped with the eyeballing. Of course, I’ll have to get used to doing this alone, but it was nice to have the extra set of eyes this first time. I’d had the not very practical thought of only loading the track barrow on ground where I could stake the ramp planks to keep them from moving but Steve had the idea of cross bracing the planks by screwing a piece of lumber between them.

First time loading the track barrow I ran out of gas half way up the ramp! I had only added a little because I wasn’t sure how much I would use on this trip.

By the time we got the track barrow out to the land there was only enough time to unload it and hide it beneath some tin roofing inside the falling cabin. Days tend to slip away fast in the winter. Hiding the machine was in all likelihood an unnecessary step on a private road that has numerous postings about its privacy including, until recently, one that mentions getting shot, but I was beginning to consider the machine my baby and asked Steve to help me take measurements of the bed so I could cut some plywood from the crate it came in to protect that beautiful powder coat from any scratches and dings.

I imagine the neighbor took down the posted threat of trespassers being shot out of consideration for our other neighbor’s relatives. The other neighbor, Dennis, was shot and killed by accident last April. I’m sure his relatives appreciate not having reminders about what will likely never be far from their minds.

Screws to hold the ramp together evolved to push pins which make for easy removal and loading in the truck.

When we got home I used the last light of day to cut the protective pieces for the track barrow while Linda and Steve talked in the kitchen. That night we celebrated and relaxed with drinks, food, and wonderful conversation.

The next day we set up camp at the proposed cabin site and then headed over to the falling cabin with the track barrow. We did three loads of rock and a load of seasoned, cut oak to take back to the campsite. I learned pretty quickly that a full load of heavy rock gives the machine a heft that can pretty much yank your arm off if you change direction too quickly. Back at the camp I also learned why people like chopping seasoned oak logs with an ax. It doesn’t take much to split. The pieces fly apart with a satisfying crack.

Load of big rocks. The machine is rated for moving 600 pounds but one YouTuber claims to regularly use it to move 2,000 pound loads.

When it got dark and we had the camp ready to make a fire we walked back to the truck and went into Blaine for a meal at the Mexican restaurant. We returned full-bellied, started a fire and played two games of chess reaching down to the ground between our camp chairs. When we turned in we didn’t feel the need to bank the fire as it was safe in the rock walls.

It took me three hours to go to sleep which is how long it took for my body heat to win out over the intransigent cold inside my sleeping bag. After that I slept pretty soundly according to Steve’s report of my snores although I felt like I was just below the surface of wakefulness. In the morning I stuffed my down jacket in my sleeping bag to warm it and watched and waited for the light to grow before I rose.

It was easy to build a fire back up from the coals. When Steve woke we went back into Blaine and ate a hearty Waffle House breakfast, came back, broke camp and then hiked up to the top of the knob and came back to camp on a longer path. Driving out with the track barrow and all the camping equipment we stopped at a pond to look at some small birds floating among Canada Goose. We steadied ourselves on a fence to get a good look with our binocs. Ring-necked ducks—another addition to both our life lists.

Denouement

It certainly wasn’t the highlight of my trip but yesterday, I found a had a stowaway accompany me back from Tennessee. Ticks don’t have necks, so I guess the best way to describe the one found on my back would be to say it was embedded up to its shoulders. (So much for the idea that ticks aren’t active in cold weather!)

It apparently was dead and didn’t wiggle its legs when I asked Jillian to touch it with a hot match hoping it would let go and back out. (No longer a recommended procedure.) While I’d like to believe that my body produces some substance that kills ticks who dive in head first, it probably has nothing to do with any superpowers of mine.

Complete removal was unsuccessful. The head is still in there.

An interesting psychological awareness has come from this. I’ve learned that I’m not freaked-the-fuck-out by a tick embedded in me. I only get that way when I find one crawling on me.

I have a prescription of Doxycycline which I got specifically for this contingency. I’ve taken two doses. Unfortunately it has a “Discard 6/2/24” date on it. An email with pictures has been sent to my doctor.

I think this was coming into Chicago which was 12°F

November 26, 2025

There is a perhaps unreasonable concern around our house that our dog Sasha doesn’t crunch her food enough. Nevermind that Sasha Moon Piperaceae doesn’t have teeth for grinding—that her teeth, much like a shark’s, are meant for tearing flesh into portions just small enough to fit down a wide throat. We want to hear the sound of her kibble actually breaking into pieces. Somehow we believe, without science or reason, that Sasha needs to chew her food, if not 26 times, at least once.

This is Sasha a few days ago at the school which I had to get her to squeeze into through a gate while I climbed over a fence. The powers that be have made is so the school yard is inaccessible to the elderly, families and anyone with a physical disability assuring that only young punks who like to graffiti and break into classrooms can get in. (Okay, there are some good kids that will still climb over the short fence like us, but what’s the thinking here?)

In the morning Sasha only gets dry kibble. Then for her three additional daily feedings at 10 am, 2 pm and 6:30 pm she gets kibble with wet food mixed with water.

In the morning—to get her started on a good paw—Jillian holds one piece of kibble at a time and says, “Okay, crunch it. Crunchy-crunch.” Jillian does this three or four times and when she hears a few crunches and is satisfied she says, “Good dog,” and then pours the first of two installments in her bowl to discourage her from gulping it down all at once.

I’m just as guilty wanting our little Piperaceae to have more thoughtful eating habits. When I take Sasha to the small, oval park around the corner to play frisbee we often walk over to our neighbor Heidi’s chain-link fence to say hi to her big, white, shepherd, Abby. Both Heidi and Abby are equally aged and Abby is not in the greatest shape. When they go on walks Heidi reports that Abby sometimes looses her balance, sits down and then slides into a splayed position that she cannot get up from. Heidi has learned to take a strap with her so she can thread it under Abby’s belly to lift her back onto her feet.

Still, despite Abby’s decrepitude, she is better at crunching than Sasha. Part of our visiting ritual is to give Abby a little handful of kibble through the fence followed by the same for Sasha. Abby seems to average about three or four good crunches out of the tiny handful I give her. Then I look at Sasha and say, “Look what a good cruncher Abby is.”

This doesn’t seem to register with the little Moonbeam although she does sometimes turn her head to the side in what appears to be an attempt to understand. The perky ears and noble face are effective in making me think some learning might be going on. Afterall, my comparison of Abby’s crunching to hers is not meant to shame her as much as get her to see old Abby as a role model to live up to in terms of mastication.

When I give Sasha her small handful, more often than not I don’t hear a single crunch. She swallows it down happily but despite her joy and obvious desire for more (if I would only do her the favor) it displeases me that there is no deliberation, no sign of savoring the texture or flavor of the baked-in crumble.

Even our cat Ruby Lou with pointier teeth is better at crunching. It could be there are more chances for a nugget to hit upon a tooth in a smaller, rounder head.

To get my fill of good chewing I really need to head out to the country and be among the horses and cows. I’m going to do that when I visit Tennessee for a few days after Christmas.

——————————

The iconic image of General Ulysses S. Grant outside his field tent keeps popping into my head. It’s not because I think we are headed toward a civil war. A unified uprising is more likely when people realize the scales of democracy have tipped heavily toward a wealthy oligarchy. Things may end up more like the age of the guillotine in France when someone famously tried to say to the poor masses, “Let them drink a double mocha chai latte with oat milk.”

The real reason Grant keeps popping into my brain has more to do with his tent than his position as a warrior. I’m starting to think more seriously about using one in place of a cabin or, at least, as a placeholder to get me more quickly to the real reasons I want to be on the land — for peace and quiet, reflection, to learn about nature and commune with it. Those reasons spiritually, philosophically and aspirationally outweigh comfort but in actuallity it remains to be seen if comfort outweighs them. (I installed a small, window, air-conditioner in Aunt Linda’s upstairs room where I stayed last summer.)

It will be easy enough to test my theories about camping out. I’ve done it once on the land but really should experiment more outside the hottest and coldest times of the year. That will be easier when I retire. The count down for that is a year and a half although I sometimes have a strange premonition that I won’t make it that long, that I will die a violent death or that a disease will latch upon me. Is this merely the next stage in aging—to prepare for one’s own demise or is it a dangerous meddling in self-fulfilling prophecy? Did the crooner d4vd actualize his darkest thoughts put forth in his music videos or is he being set up? For a frightening exploration into dark self-fulfillments this old movie based on the Stephen Crane story can’t be beat: The Blue Hotel

I guess the reason the image of Grant works for me is that I imagine his tent furnished with a desk and chair and other amenitities which might make living out in the elements feel less so. But the reason his persona doesn’t work is because I don’t wanna study war no more although, of course, our society is steeped in the expertise and it’s hard to escape its constant advertising. I should nudge my imaginings toward replacing Grant and his tent with something like a biologist’s which no doubt have been equally accommodating for some. Jane Goodall? Surely there was a time when John Muir had something more than a bed roll and a backpack out in the field.

Lower cost and effort are obvious advantageous to tent living versus cabin living. Effort is debatable, but I think if you compare everything that will go into building a cabin, there are many, many years of setting up, tearing down and furnishing a tent before those lines would cross on a graph.

The lessor environmental footprint is perhaps the biggest, lasting advantage of going with a tent. Although I’ve already invested in some destructive/loud tools like my chainsaws, after thinking long and hard I’m pretty much set to do without heavy equipment like tractors, skid steers or comparatively benign ATVs. My next post may deal with that.

I am thinking very hard about buying this power wheelbarrow although greater acquisitions are a slippery slope. Going the way of bigger, better, and more expensive is dazzling and compelling but ultimately that way is more about chasing a dream that isn’t mine instead of living the one I have.

On the health front, I recently found out I have some beginning arthritis at the base of my left thumb. In the x-ray report it is called “mild first interphalangeal joint degeneration”. Interestingly, it’s not bothered much by indoor bouldering, but hurts a lot (or was) when riding my electric bike. It’s a very specific sore spot activated by direct pressure or a sort of fulcrum grip for instance if I were to lift a tray of food by the edge, one-handed with the pressure of my fingers under and my thumb on top.

I’ve actually been listening to the doctor’s recommendation to rest. I’ve not been climbing or riding my bike for close to a month now. In some ways the less busy schedule has been nice but I’m starting to miss not having a windshield between me and the world and the fun of indoor bouldering.

I bought some rather expensive herbal pills that seem to be helping with arthritic inflammation and some padded bicycling gloves which I’m going to test out when this Thanksgiving break is over.

__________________

Since many of you may have some relaxing time coming up I’ll tell you about what I’m watching and reading (or rather, listening to on audio).

The Change — British comedy-drama about a woman who keeps a journal of every household chore she’s done for the last thirty years and then decides to split and take a break from her family. Written and co-directed by lead actor Bridget Cristie the second season is co-directed by Mackenzie Crook creator of Detectorists, another favorite show of mine.

Plurabis —Vince Gilligan, the maker of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul created this interesting twist on the zombie apocalypse theme. Funny, frightening and thought-provoking it stars Rhea Seehorn who was the lawyer girlfriend of Saul in Better Call.

Good Cop/Bad Cop — Light, lightly irreverant and comically macabre with a cast of not overly attractive characters who you might get a crush on. Sibling rivalry with sibling love. Cute is a word that doesn’t quite fit but wouldn’t be wrong.

Matlock — Kathy Bates plays a lawyer fronting as a homespun, lovable, story-spinner inside a firm she’s trying to get the dirt on. I like it but Jillian is kind of over the second season.

Man on the Inside — It’s so refreshing to have a mystery/detective show that doesn’t involve murder. Also, it stars Ted Danson and is set in San Francisco. What’s not to love?

Books

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and James by Percival Everett. James was picked for the Pulitzer Prize this year. It is a reimagining of the Huck Finn story with Jim, the slave, as focus and main character. The jacket cover claims it is ferociously funny which is a stretch, but it is certainly ferocious. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so clearly what it might have meant to be a slave in a world surrounded by the enemy. This was the real zombie apocalypse with all whites as the zombie’s. Are we awake yet? It is certainly worthy of the Pulitzer though it didn’t win without controversy.

As for the original Huck Finn it’s clear why it is considered an American classic. I don’t know how much Twain has been studied as a nature writer but I felt it strongly in his descriptions of the Mississippi River. He is certainly a humorist and on par with the likes of modern-day David Sedaris. I don’t get the last fifty or sixty pages of Huck Finn and why Twain decided to give so much ink to the sadistic nature of Tom Sawyer. Maybe someone can explain?

All Fours by Miranda July — a disturbing, dark dive into sex, self-actualization, partnering, parenting, art and public acclaim. It’s called a novel but I’m guessing it’s autobiographical. If you’re a tortured egoist or have done a good bit of navel-gazing you might not want to revisit and if you haven’t you still might…not. Nevertheless, the main character’s misery and trouble are compelling and often very funny. What happens when the Anti manic-pixie-dream-girl becomes perimenopausal and feels like the window is closing fast on her last chance at sexual fulfillment? I’m just two-thirds done so I can’t say if there is a happy ending. (Not that I need one but I’m kinda hoping.)

Phew. I’m glad to finally get out a blog post after so long. It helps me stay sane, ground me where I am, tell me what I’m doing and what I want to be doing.

Happy Thanksgiving!

June 22, 2025

You really know you are in the south when people inquire about the status of your eternal soul. I have answered a question and settled a long-brewing debate for the time being, but it’s not about that. The question has been how am I going to get the lumber for a cabin using the wood on my land.

The debate was between pulling logs off the land to get milled by a professional or milling the lumber myself with a chainsaw. The first will be faster and easier on my body and will likely result in a superior product but it will involve buying or renting expensive equipment and a greater impact on the forest. With a chainsaw and Alaskan Mill I can make lumber where the trees fall.

I might end up doing it the faster way, but for a project that is still more in the dream phase it makes more sense to ease into it with on-site, forest milling.

To do this I bought another chainsaw and ordered and assembled an Alaskan Mill. The Alaskan Mill is basically a metal frame to guide the chainsaw down a rail screwed to the log. It allows the chainsaw to make smooth, even cuts and turn logs into usable building lumber.

I’m more than a little intimidated with the chainsaw I bought. The Stihl 500 is heavier and twice as powerful as my Stihl 251. I take some consolation in the fact that the smaller chainsaw also intimidated me when I first got it. The general wisdom is that you’d be foolish to not be wary.

I had trouble sleeping the night after I bought the larger one. It helped to stop stewing, turn on the light and watch some Youtube videos about it.

You can expect to see pictures and hear more on the process after I practice on my first log later this week.

Another of my purchases was a farm jack. I have a notion that I might be able to lift logs with it and put them on stands for milling to save my back from bending over too far.

I don’t know exactly how I will engineer this but I think it’s possible. I had a good conversation with an old farmer in the hardware store and he had lots of good ideas beyond his most frequent suggestion that I really should just buy a tractor. Still he didn’t give up on suggestions about how to use the jack until he asked me if I went to church and if I’d been saved.

This is always awkward. It seems to happen in the south more than other places I’ve lived. I told him I’m atheist and don’t subscribe to those beliefs hoping this definitive statement would end it quickly. Of course this may have just sweetened the pot if he thought he might get extra points for such a hardened case.

He went on a bit about the big guy on his throne in heaven and I started to get that aching feeling that I really wished he’d stop his pitch. Instead of fighting it too much I waited for the next pause and tried out an abrupt change of subject. Lo and behold it worked. We were even able to continue our conversation a bit more. He talked about Snatch Blocks and Clevis Hooks and other things I know nothing about except that the first step to learning is often just hearing the names.

After shopping there were several hours of sunlight left and I decided I had time to go to the land and do a little more brush-pile clean-up. I’ve decided not to burn but move the five large piles into the woods to rot.

After telling the man at the hardware store that I’ve never seen a snake on my property I saw my first one that evening. Strange how things seem to work that way — or is it because snakes are often on my mind when I talk about the forest the way sharks are on my mind when I talk about the sea?

There were several hours of sunlight left when I made it to the first brush pile to start work. These are mostly pine branches that are matted with wet needles from the recent rains. As I reached for a limb I startled a large black snake coiled on top. It immediately uncurled and slipped into the pile. Of course, it startled me a bit too but I recognized it as non-poisonous.

There are no all black poisonous snakes in North America. The often black Cottonmouth, aka Water Moccasin, has a yellowish belly and from my experience seeing dozens as a kid in Texas, they tend to be tapered and fat in the middle unlike this sleek serpent. Anyway, my land isn’t the habitat for Cottonmouth who like a year-round water source nearby.

I got out my phone and leaned it against a tree to be ready in case of another appearance. I kept my eye out as I worked to see if the snake would slip out of the pile somewhere.

It was disruptive, pulling on the pile, stuffing branches into the rolling trash- tote I bought to accommodate long limbs. I figured the snake would wait until I was taking a load into the woods and then slip out through the weeds, but then again, it might just hunker down. After all, what does a snake know about human intentions around clearing brush?

When I got to the bottom layer of the pile I took the load I had into the woods and came back. I took a glove off and held the camera while I pulled a big log from the pile that I thought the snake might be under. Nothing.

The wet, matted branches lift like shelves and I toed one up with my foot and there it was. I believe it would’ve stayed there and watched me had I not been both unbalanced and surprised and dropped the cover back abruptly. Finding a snake you think might be there is the same as going into a haunted house. You know to expect something scary but it doesn’t keep you from freaking out when you open a door and see a mad clown holding a knife. Besides, black snakes have been known to bite when cornered.

Had I been more careful lifting this bottom layer with a rake pole or stick I might’ve gotten a better shot. When I lifted the mat again it was done with staying put. The race was on. It headed toward the next brush pile and I got four fuzzy shots.

I won’t go so far to say that our human endeavors are anti-nature. We are nature. But, had I approached that brush pile with my powers of observation leading the way instead of my desire to get to work I might have gotten a clear photo of the beautiful creature curled on top.

My best guess is that this is a Black Racer but it could be a Rat Snake. A closer sustained look would have helped.

I’m more inclined to see a deer while hoeing the trails than using the weed whacker or while swinging an axe instead of firing up the chainsaw. There are costs to efficiency and speed. Even the plants I want to keep pay the price. I find myself cutting down cedar saplings and ferns simply because my eyes can’t keep up with the speed with which I swing the trimmer.

After seeing the snake for the second time and getting my fuzzy photos, I went over to a pile of logs to sit and take notes. As I was quietly getting my thoughts together, a hawk swooped by and landed on a stump 15 feet away.

“Hello there,” I said astonished.

It was a greeting that might be appropriate sitting at a city cafe when a friend walks into view and stops at the nearby cross walk. For the hawk however it was like, shit, who are you? She immediately took off.

Nature requires a certain formality. My introduction to both the snake and the hawk were forward to say the least.

The same day I saw my first snake I got my first tick…of the trip. Yes, I’ve had plenty of these, maybe 15 over the course of being out here (if I don’t count the raspberry picking episode with my nephew where we each got about 10 all at once and saw them creeping everywhere across our clothes toward open flesh).

The number of ticks I get each trip is getting smaller and usually it is caused by a lapse in protocol. In this case I was working with my short-sleeve shirt untucked. (My bare arms where sprayed with Off which does seem to keep them away.)

Ticks still freak me out more than any other animal for the obvious reason that they are gross, blood-sucking vampires that bore their ugly heads into your flesh and because they can carry potentially devastating, disease-causing organisms. The Borrelia burgdorferi spirochete carried by the Black-Legged, aka Deer tick, causes Lyme Disease. They can go into a cystic form that researchers believe may allow them to lie dormant and unaffected by antibiotics until they reawaken later to cause havoc.

I found this tick on my belly as I undressed to shower. It was fastened but came off with a steady pull that left it holding a tiny bit of my flesh in its jaws.

I dropped it in the sink. It landed on its back bicycling its eight little legs in the air. I rushed out of the room with a towel around my waist to get my phone. Pictures are important to identify the species and potential, associated disease.

The phone wasn’t in my room. It wasn’t downstairs. I tenderly hoofed over the gravel to the truck in the garage and couldn’t find it there either. I asked my Aunt to use hers.

This all took less than three minutes and when I arrived back upstairs the tick was gone!

Freak out time! In slasher movie this is the part where a high, screechy note is played on the violin. The killer was just standing behind you. You turn quickly. It’s gone.

Shit!

Now there was a deadly parasite loose in the house. I scanned across the floor near the sink using the phone’s flashlight. I moved items and searched the top. I aimed the light down the drain and in the little overfill hole. Nothing!

I figured maybe is slid into the drain. Ticks don’t seem great about walking up inclined, smooth surfaces. I ran water for a few seconds and then ran it another 30 until it was hot and then ran it some more. Agh!

Surely it fell down the drain.

The next morning I went to brush my teeth, my memory of the sanguivore present but dulled by sleep. I casually scanned the surface again and then my eyes popped, jolted awake.

There it was flagging at the top of the liquid soap dispenser! That little fucker had somehow crawled out of the sink in the three minutes I was looking for my phone. This was equivalent to a sprinter running the length of a football field.

During the night the little mole-mimicker had found one of the highest points and resumed the position to grab hold of its prey.

I think this is an American Dog Tick. They like humans too.

Without disturbing it I got my phone in the next room and took a picture. Then I scrapped it in the sink. I tried mashing it with the bottom edge of a glass before remembering how unmashable they are.

I opened a sink drawer and found some long toenail scissors and cut it into little pieces. Then I washed it down the sink for real this time. I ran the water, unreasonably, abhorrently long, letting it get hot, piping hot — letting it stay hot. I was the final victor in the slasher movie where I’d been stalked. I imagined myself in the final scene. I would be yelling down the pipe, screaming, out of my mind — “Are you dead yet fucker? Are you dead?”

Ugh. I don’t like to say it but I hate ticks.

It’s taken a while but I’ve gotten over an incident with my nephew about 17 years ago when we visited the land with my mom, Sharon and Linda and saw wild raspberries growing all along the dirt road to the falling cabin. Anthony and I got out of the car to pick raspberries and about a minute into the activity looked down and were covered with ticks. Nary a tick was seen when I got these a few days ago. So delicious!

Southeastern Five-Lined skink next to the shed

String-trimming (a more delicate way to say weed-wacking) is so much easier than hoeing the trails.

This rotted tree stump had this layered-set of concentric bark rings at the bottom as if the tree rotted or was eaten from top to bottom carrying the more hearty, resistant bark with it as it went down. Who knows how it happened? Other theories?

June 15, 2025

“There’s a gun I brought over from the condo that I want you to have a look at when we get back.”

Aunt Linda said this when I first arrived over a week ago to vacation with my family in Florida. She brought it up again when we were driving back to Tennessee with Linda’s granddaughter in the front passenger seat and her boyfriend driving.

“All the farmers and anyone who owns land around here have a gun for snakes and to scare off bears and things. I’ve got it in one of those old ammunition boxes and I want to show it to you when we get back. You know you really should have a gun.”

I knew I wanted to see it but I wasn’t sure I wanted a gun. I wanted to think about it more.

The car trip back ended up being kind of grueling — eleven and a half hours with several breaks and lots of rain.

I slept late the next day and went out to check on the land when it was nearing dusk. Even if I wake early it’s hard to get an early start. I like to do my daily partner-write in the morning while I’m fresh. Then I want to read some of the day’s news and there is usually something about logging, building or a tool that I want to research.

On my third afternoon on the land I was working up at the fallen cabin and a man came by on a four-wheeler. He introduced himself as Luke, my neighbor Steve’s son.

“I didn’t know Steve had a son as old as you?”

“Yeah, I’m forty and I have a brother and sister in their 30s.”

“How is Steve?” I asked.

I met Steve four years ago when I first started visiting the land. He’d bought a section near the steep base of the Clinch Mountains bordering my property where the falling cabin is. He’s almost finished building a beautiful home that he’s been living in since he got the roof and walls up. He milled much of his own lumber and said I could use the mill too.

“I’m sorry to tell you that my dad died on March 5th this year,” Luke said. “It was all over the news.”

It was a gut punch. I always had good conversations with Steve. As busy as he was he made it seem like he had all the time in the world to stand there on the dirt and gravel road and talk with me.

“What happened,” I asked?

“Well, it’s a terrible story,” Luke said.

He then told me about how his dad was shot accidently by his younger son, Luke’s brother Shawn, who was handling a gun in the back seat of Steve’s big four-door truck. There was a friend in back with Shawn and Luke was in the front passenger seat with his dad driving. They were traveling locally on the interstate.

I asked if they’d been hunting but Luke said no it was just a gun his brother was looking at.

I wondered if it caused them to crash. Luke said after their ears cleared from the ringing he hoped it had just gone off into the floor but his dad said he was bleeding pretty bad. Luke said it seemed like it took ten minutes but it was only a matter of seconds before Steve was able to pull over to the side of the road before going unconscious.

Luke said he worried about his brother every day and how he was dealing with the guilt.

I googled the news stories and obituary. Steve had told me he was retired but working harder than ever doing some construction work. The oak siding on his house was taking a long time to finish because he was doing these extra jobs. For this reason I thought he’d “retired” from construction but it turns out he had been a captain in the Knoxville Fire Department. He was sixty years old, the age I’ll be in less than a month.

He loved music and was a singer in a band. He told me when I first met him that he’d be interested if I ever wanted to sell my land. He wanted to start a music festival there.

He had a long white beard in retirement. I could see from the pictures on his obituary pages that he’d had a more cropped appearance when he was fire captain. The beard reminded me of the goats he had that came to visit me in my falling cabin. He loved those goats. The billy would sometimes come up and push against his leg while we talked.

When I told him in December I was going to take the cabin down for lumber, he said, “We’ll sure miss her.”

In late March I texted him about a new idea I had about how to keep the cabin up and use it as a place to store lumber. I wondered why I didn’t hear back from him. I just figured he was too busy and had forgotten.

The morning after learning about my neighbor’s death I asked Linda to see the gun. We were sitting in front of the tv and she immediately got up and went to the closet under the stairs.

She moved a vacumme out of the way and handed me a bag and then a box to set on the table behind me.

“Oh lord, what are we getting into here? This is where I keep all my Christmas wrapping,” she said.

“There it is. That grey ammunition box.”

She backed out to let me in.

“Be careful. It’s heavy.”

I went into the triangular space that gets darker toward the back and bent over the metal box.

“Oof. That is heavy,” I said as I lifted it out exactly the way I shouldn’t—not using my legs.

I turned around and set it on the dining room table and unlatched the four metal buckles that held the top down.

Linda lifted out a folded display mat and I unrolled it on the table to reveal about twenty pocket knives of differing size including a stiletto with a six-inch blade making it as long as a ruler when unfolded.

“Oh, there’s two guns in here!” she said, slowly pulling them out and setting them on on the table.

My breath quickened and I felt some extra heartbeats.

It’s different looking at a bottle of pills or a hammer or even the long stiletto which is plenty frightening. All these can be lethal. I guess I’m just not used to seeing guns and considering their power and potential for a serious accident. This was a good time to look at them after learning about my neighbor.

We heard something on the news and went back into the tv room distracted for a moment and sat down in the two big reclining chairs. It’s almost as if we needed a break from finding the guns and having them out.

All Linda’s partners have been gun owners. When I was a teen her first husband Wayne was interested in seeing my father’s family land and he brought along a short black semi-automatic rifle that he wanted to show off. I’d previously only fired a shotgun on a friend’s land in Mississippi.

My dad had a theatre pistol which I snuck into the back yard and fired into the air when he wasn’t there, but it only fired brass caps.

Wayne invited me to shoot his gun and feeling the kick and the ease with which I could pull the trigger was exhilarating. Then I turned while still holding the gun up and accidently pointed it at my dad.

“Whoa, Whoa, Whoa!”, he said.

My grandmother had a pearl-handled .22 which she kept hidden in the long medicine cabinet in her bathroom. When I was a young child I would climb atop the two-sink vanity, slide open one of the long mirrors and reach up for the loaded pistol on the top shelf. Children always find the things they aren’t supposed to.

I’d feel the weight in my hands and then quietly put it back in it’s place. I’d do the same with grandpa’s double-barrel shotgun, slipping between hanging clothes and clear, dry-cleaning bags to the back of the mothball-smelling closet. I’d catch a glint of the gun metal and feel for the barrel, then lift it into the room to get a better look. I had a reverence for these guns. I knew how dangerous they were. It was enough just to weigh them in my hands.

Linda rose from her chair and buzzed off to whatever her current activity was — laundry, dishes, watering plants, cooking. There are always a million things to do and at 82 she is still doing them.

After a breather, I went back over to the table and looked at the guns that had belonged to her second husband Ron. One had a long barrel that made it look a bit like an old west, gunslinger’s or a slightly larger, less ornate version of the pop guns that the character, Mike Teavee, played with in the original Willy Wonka movie. This one was a .22.

The other gun had a snub-nosed barrel. It was a .38 special. It looked more like a gun that a mobster or film noir detective might use.

Stamps on the barrels told me the manufacturer. The .22 was a High Standard and the .38 a Smith and Wesson.

Without pointing the guns at myself I looked at an angle to see the barrel of each—like peering around a corner in a dangerous neighborhood. The bore of the .38 was double the size of the .22 making it twice as deadly I suppose.

I couldn’t see if either gun was loaded. Only the chambers on the sides showed. I aimed the .22 at the floor and pulled the stippled hammer back hoping that would help me see better but it didn’t. Then I tried to slowly release the hammer back into its slot but my thumb slipped and it struck the chamber with force. I grimaced. If there had been a bullet in there it might have gone off.

I looked at the gun more carefully and figured out how to pull the rod that releases the chamber. It opened out to the side. I saw three bullets in there. I was just lucky that I hadn’t put a hole in Linda’s floor. Using the bullets as a starting point it was easy to count the chambers. This was a nine-shooter.

Linda entered the room to see how my inspection process was going.

“This gun had three bullets in it!” I exclaimed.

“Well what good is a gun that’s not loaded,” she said.

I held the gun toward the ceiling and tried to tap out the bullets from the splayed chamber.

“Look, even I know more about guns than you.”

She took the gun from my hands and pushed the chamber release rod the other way and it ejected the lipped shells out of the barrel into her hand.

She gave these to me and walked out of the room.

I pushed the release for the cylinder on the .38. Even though the gun was more compact than the .22, the cylinder was much larger and could only hold five bullets.

I carefully pulled everything else out from the ammo box and laid it on the table. There were rectangular boxes of bullets, several holstered knives, a small leather holster for the .38, a cleaning kit, and two more guns in a single wooden box that presented them on red velvet, yin-yang style. These were tiny, single-shot, Butler derringers that Linda called dueling guns—one with a pearl handle and the other dark wood.

Satisfied that I’d seen everything I packed it all back up until today when I took the guns out again and photographed them.

I watched a video on cleaning the .22 and watched a couple of other videos of a collector shooting both models at his homemade gun range. I gave some more thought to keeping one. Linda clarified that farmers also have guns in case they need to put down an animal that might be sick or suffering.

I considered maybe that I could at least take them out to the land and try shooting them. Then I thought about the noise. Even the string trimmer makes too much for my liking but I make an exception because my back appreciates not having to work for hours to clear the trails with a hoe. I decided the last thing I want to do there is shoot a gun. The bang will echo throughout Poor Valley (not that I haven’t heard it before).

It’s probably silly, but I don’t want the animals to think they can’t call my piece of land home. More importantly, guns still scare me …though maybe a little less now that I’ve gotten to know these better.

The Great Spangled Fritillary on Woodland Coreopsis

Eastern Box Turtle discovered by Linda’s grandson who was helping me clear brush. I like the letter E. Cee it on the side?

Greenhouse Camel Cricket. I found it in my dark shed which might be the distinguishing characteristic that separates it from the Eastern Camel Cricket which apparently likes being out in the sunlight more.

December 29, 2024 — Somewhere in the Air

I’m heading east to Tennessee. I’ve boarded a plane and I’m sitting on the rainy runway at SFO. It’s still dark at 6:56 a.m. The sun won’t likely be coming up as much as faintly glowing behind these clouds that are low and grey and closed in. I’m guessing we will be above them in the near future breaking through to a strikingly sunny world that appears to be opposite this place below.

I don’t know how many times I’ve started a blog on a plane or in an airport. This part of a trip rarely makes it to the final draft, but I’ve had such a hard time writing anything I want to publish lately that I’m likely just to let it be. What’s that saying, perfection is the enemy of progress? This new year I’d like to embrace imperfection—my own and others.

There is a “particular issue” that the captain has announced “needs to be looked at” so we are getting a late start. I’m all for issues being looked at.

Getting on a flight for me is a bit like being one of those thousands of thirsty, dehydrated wildebeest looking at the water and knowing there is a very large crocodile in there that will eat one of us. It is a sad fact that flying results in plane crashes and that plane crashes rarely end well, but it is the price we flyers pay to get from here to there in a rapid fashion.

Statistically it is still much safer than driving but, to me, pondering the moments of terror before a plane crashes bears a closer resemblance psychologically to being caught in the jaws of an aquatic carnivore. I think we’d all rather take our chances with a car spinning out of control.

It did not help that this morning I read about the Korean airline crash that killed everyone on board except for two people in the tail section of the plane. The tail section, I’m guessing, is the best place to be. I don’t know the physics but I imagine tail sections are light weight and once they are separated from the heavy engines and wings they probably act a bit like a parachute.

Under normal circumstances the tail end doesn’t offer the best ride. Every bump has the feel of riding a broncing buck as it flexes and pops. It is also, of course, the section that takes the longest to get out of after landing, so generally, it’s less desirable 99.99 percent of the time.

I’m sitting above the wings and engine on this flight. It’s smoother here, but this is where these planes usually rip in half. Mine will at least be a quick death.

Four days ago I read about the crash that happened in Kazakhstan. Almost half the passengers lived. I wrote this poem about it:

If I’m lucky I’ll have 3,500 more breakfasts. If I’m very fortuitous 7,000 or more and hopefully without surviving an airplane crash.

Anyway, It’s probably best if I just move along to my Tennessee plans. Better not to harp too much along this line of thought.

I’ll visit family of course. As for the land, I really only have a few things on my list—more clearing of the potential cabin site and a burn of the brush pile I made last summer. It’s probably best to wait on burning any new piles I make. They’ll be less smoke if I give it a chance to dry out.

This sign will replace the Fairyland sign for the next year. Fairyland is a fairytale inspired theme park in Oakland that I took my 1st grade students to half a dozen times over the years. The park changed the sign in conjunction with the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust to recognize the ancestral caretakers of the land—the Lisjan Nation—and reinforce the park’s commitment to amplifying Indigenous voices and stories within its programming. I have a desire to learn more about the people who were on the land I’m caretaking.

No local burn permits are required in Grainger County. However, the state requires burn permits except in the summer months. This is counterintuitive to me. I would have thought it’s safer to burn when it’s cooler but apparently it is dryer in these months and therefore more prone to start an unwanted fire.

I recently went on line to get the permit. It was wonky. I couldn’t figure out how to put in a date or the location. Of course, I don’t have an address just a parcel number. Finding the location involves using a zoom function that feels as awkward as trying to pinch a small piece of egg shell out of a bowl of raw egg whites. I just ended the pain early and clicked enter to see what would happen. I was issued a permit for a piece of land that looked to be a dozen or so miles away from mine. I didn’t see any way to cancel it.

My guess is the state doesn’t take these permits too seriously. It is probably a way to collect data and a way to quickly issue a No Burn notice in the case of weather events or conditions that would make burning particularly dangerous.

Anyway, at least I now know that I can register for a permit on the day I need it and I’ve had some practice using the site.

I picked this book up at school. It’s a great read. It’s the first in Wilder’s series of autobiographical stories. A friend said it’s a book hailed by “preppers” (people who prepare for disasters and end time scenarios). Certainly it is useful for anyone interested in homesteading. The detail Wilder goes into makes you feel almost prepared to smoke deer meat, make cheese or tap your maple trees. Apparently the series has negative stereotypes of Native Americans. I didn’t run into that in this first book but I wouldn’t be surprised since the U.S. government had a full scale war going on against Native people at the time when Wilder was a girl. Sounds like these books have plenty of teachable moments for any educators who would like to take them on. I have a friend who would like to do a parody of these books she loves. They do feel ripe for something to contrast the clean-faced, Michael Landon tv version.

Environmentally, burning is not the best thing to do. It would be better to wood chip all the brush and spread it out in the forest. But how do you get a wood chipper? Can I rent one and how would I get it up the little hill to the flat spot where I have all the brush and trees chopped down?

This sort of thinking further leads me down the path of getting an all-terrain vehicle. Of course, buying an ATV and using the gas or electricity required to power it would likely negate several times over the environmental benefit of wood chipping all the brush I will ever produce. Where would I store an ATV anyway? Do I build a secure shed at the end of the new gravel drive way? Do I see if I can store it in my aunt’s garage? In that case, can you legally drive an ATV on the roads to get it from point A to B or would I need a trailer and the use of Stewart’s truck to haul it? With all that, wouldn’t it be time to get my own truck?

You can see how the dominoes begin to fall and this is just around the thought of wood chipping some brush? Building a cabin will entail a massively larger set of details.

And to that…about three months ago I had a fall bouldering at the climbing gym. It was a sideways fall onto my right side and I stuck out my dominant hand to brace myself. With a locked elbow my arm became a pole shoved into the socket. I stood up feeling a pulsing, but not unbearable, pain in my shoulder and told the people around me “Well that’s a good way to break your arm”.

After some self-massage I continued to climb for a while. I still have good mobility. I kept going back to the gym and playing tennis (serving underhand) before it became apparent I needed a longer rest. I went in for X-rays a month later. Looking at the black and white prints the doctor showed me something that he said may be a hairline fracture in my collarbone. He said it should heal on its own in six to eight weeks. He even said I could continue climbing if I was careful. I did that for a while but without fail I inevitably moved in a way that resulted in a sharp pain. So I’ve basically stopped all activities that involve any unpredictable motions with my right arm. I even stopped throwing frisbee for Sasha with my right hand and taught myself to throw with my left. I’m still not as good with that side but much better than I was. It’s felt like being six again and first learning to throw. It’s a good reminder of what it takes to build coordination—lots of practice.

A week ago I passed the two month mark for my shoulder to heal on its own. I haven’t seen much improvement. I scheduled an appointment with a physical therapist for when I get back. I hope I might be able to get some advice on how to help move the healing along.

This is all just a long way to say it is increasingly unlikely that I’ll build a cabin in the least environmentally-impactful way. At my age and with slow healing injuries like the one I’ve got, I’ll likely require considerable help from machinery.

Of course the least impactful thing I can do is to not build a cabin at all and to not jet off twice a year to visit this land or my ancestral people. Perhaps writing about these quandries is a sort of carbon offset along with my commuting by bike and the solar I’ve put on my house. I don’t like to think of my life as some sort of accounting tabulation and I’m kind of agnostic about karma or someone with a quilled pen and ledger at those imagined pearly gates. But how can we love life and not look at ourselves as caretakers? I’ll have to just balance things the best way I can.

I was happy to come home one day last month and see the street filled with these bike sharrows. This one is right in front of my house. This was the last phase of the new sidewalk and street paving project that is happening in my neighborhood.

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We’ve been flying in that sunny, strange, high altitude world for a while now. The cloud layer gave out past the Sierras and picked up again above the midwest. I have a two or three hour layover in Philadelphia before getting on a smaller plane to Knoxville. The goal is to get this piece posted in that time and set up a landing for whatever I happen to get done while I’m in Tennessee. If I can learn to throw left handed I can learn to be okay with the imperfect and whatever that means in terms of my writing. Hopefully some of you are still with me on this journey.

October 12, 2024

Two Italian-American companies are putting in new sidewalks on my street. Sposeto is doing the sidewalks. Ghilotti is doing the accompanying roads. Taken together the names make me feel like I’ve walked into an Italian creamery. The job they are doing is sweet. The sidewalks have beautiful lines and are clean like a newly frosted cake. The project is moving along quickly. The whole neighborhood is smiles as we see our tax dollars at work.

Concord is a town in what is increasingly less of an outskirt of the central Bay Area. But it is on the edge of country and I often relish the knowledge that I can drive west of here and quickly be in an area that feels like amber waves of grain. If you walk around my neighborhood you occasionally come across a fenced in yard that upon further inspection is really more like a field. At the back of one nearby is an old metal windmill rising up between patches of prickly pear cactus.

My street is half of a large oval. It starts and stops on the same street it curves off of. It’s what’s left of an old horse race track that existed in the late eighteen and early 1900s. The green park around the corner where I take Sasha for walks was the centerfield where the winning horses were given their ribbons and where fans sat around picnic baskets to watch the race.

The margins of the street were all gravel until this new sidewalk started to appear. All told, a peek into a backyard field strewn with piles of junk and blackberry bramble could give a deceptively country feel. But walking in most directions you will find that soon enough the squabbling of scrub jays and mockingbirds is replaced by a yawling white noise as you reach one of the main thoroughfares that flow cars like red blood cells through an artery.

A good portion of the 125,000 residents that live here are commuting in the direction of Oakland and San Francisco. The ones that don’t get there by BART train are doing it in their cars.

Recently I’ve started walking Sasha in different directions to try to accustom her to the sights and smells that surround us in case she ever gets loose. She is skittish around loud noises so it’s hard to walk her along one of the busy roads but I hope that she will build up some tolerance. I’d hate for her to run hairy scary into traffic for being too freaked out.

On our walks I have her sit at cross streets and wait with me to look both ways before we cross. I’m not sure if she’d do that on her own but I want her to know that where a road crosses you have to be extra careful.

On a recent walk Sasha and I stopped by a Little Free Library nearby and found a copy of Mo Willems’ We Are in A Book. I almost never find used copies of his books much less free ones. This title along with Should I Share My Ice Cream is probably the most popular of his twenty something titles.

We Are in A Book is funny and profound. It gets you thinking about mortality and what it means to exist. For several of my last years teaching in Oakland another first grade teacher, Ms. Sandoval, and I would act out one of these two books at the school’s annual Family Literacy Night. It was always a hit and we’d have a fifteen minute show within each of the three thirty minute rotations. Several times we got donations of Mo Willems books to hand out. It was so fun! After doing this for a few years we had it down and could get the show up and running with only one or two rehearsals. Ah, the excitement of live theatre!

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I want to tell you about another fantastic book I recently finished. It was recommended by my old friend Elijah. It’s about the Mississippi city he grew up in and where I went to school from 8th grade through my first year and a half of college. It’s called Hattiesburg, an American City in Black and White.

There is certainly something extra special about reading the story of a place where you walked and grew, but this book is also extraordinary because of the way that the author, UNC history professor, William Sturkey, shows the power and framework of Jim Crow.

Sturkey is particularly effective because he manages to resist any discernible ax grinding despite having black ancestry. He lets history itself be the flat stone that makes indisputable facts sharp and painfully apparent.

The book helped me understand better how a boy like myself raised in a liberal, artsy, educated household could not be immune from racist beliefs. It helped me understand how Hollywood may have got it right spiritually and mentally (if not physically) when they sometimes showed southern black communities with white picket fences and children dressed in clean, starched and pressed clothes. And it helped me understand the depth of a brutal social construct that I always felt as a coiled threat beneath the gentle surface of southern hospitality.

Without trying to explain what I mean by all those statements, I want you to know that Hattiesburg is both horrible and hope-filled as it looks at the resilience and determination of black people in a Jim Crow southern town. These are the people that went to Washington to try to get their right to vote enforced. It explains some of the humored looks I got from a few elders when I stepped into the black neighborhood that started across the railroad tracks behind my house, a naive but sincere 18-year-old trying to register voters to support the Mondale/Ferraro ticket in 1983. I had no idea who I was talking to.

It was also fascinating to make a connection with a previous book that I’ve recommended: “Ecology of a Cracker Childhood” which bemoaned the loss of old growth Long Leaf Pine forests throughout the south. It turns out that Hattiesburg was founded and built as the hub of a vast network of lumber mills cutting down those forests. The mills ran continuously for fifty years bringing prosperity to hundreds of thousands of people from the 1880s up through the Great Depression until the last of those great, majestic pines were cut down just like the fictional Truffula trees in Dr. Seuss’ story The Lorax.

Hattiesburg, the book, also ended any misconceptions I had of white Mississippians who tried to wear the banner of proud, self-determined, state-rightist who remained independent of outside influences they thought would sully their whiteness.

The town was established post slavery and grew quickly because of the help and investment of northern industrialists and the mass of low-wage workers. After cutting down all the trees it survived the Great Depression, holding on by its fingernails with federal relief and recovery funds. Then leading up to WW2 Hattiesburg was renewed as an economic hub with the federal renovation and expansion of Camp Shelby which housed and trained up to 40,000 soldiers at a time.

Throughout this era blacks took the lowest wage jobs available to them and during the depression only received federal and NGO relief when it somehow made it past the hands of local authorities who made sure whites got more than their share.

Eye-opening indeed was the extent to which white southerners held a burning cross in one hand fighting off what they saw as federal encroachment while using the other hand to collect federal funds. Socialist-minded Franklin Roosevelt got well over 90% of the Mississippi vote in all four of his presidential elections…and almost all of those voters were white because of exlusory voter registration practices.

In Hattiesburg the racist registrar of voters regularly used the question, “How many bubbles are in a bar of soap,” to exclude blacks who needed something harder than the state constitutional law questions or reading tests required to gain their voting rights.

The unexpected story is the community pride and the black town that grew up next to the white town with its own set of businesses and its own set of leaders. The unexpected story is the way people not only survived but thrived. Even for those who moved away they remained connected to Hattiesburg. Chicago may have been the most popular destination. The latest issues of The Chicago Defender newspaper were regularly passed around until they were worn out and news stories about Hattiesburg regularly made it into those Northern black-owned and operated papers.

Anyway, there is so much more to say about this book but it is better read.

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Before I go, I want to show a few things that I left out of my last blog post concerning work on my Tennessee land way back at the beginning of July. (I’ve really missed getting a post out sooner.)

These are the steps I put in to help make the walk easier up the small hill on the main trail that leads to the proposed cabin site. This work is what had me battling the horse fly. (Yes it was usually just one at a time but that was enough.)