Insecurity On A Concrete Road

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In the past I've written about how I was born in Mississippi along with my two older sisters, and our family moved to North Carolina when I was two years old. I have two younger brothers who were born after we arrived here. I've written about living in crossroads villages and small towns in the rural coastal plains, but I just realized all three of those villages were located on the only paved road in this part of the state.

This concrete paved road was only here after the American Civil War ended in 1865 and Reconstruction began. The existence of the paved road was not a reward for the citizen's tax monies, but to connect two federal military bases that were located in Fayetteville, North Carolina and Jacksonville, North Carolina to control the activities of the losers of the Civil War. It was all part of the Bluebellies determination to punish the surviving residents of the Confederate South.

Ordinarily, no federal money was spent in the South until after World War Two. Especially on things like better roads and bridges. The fact that this one road was paved with concrete and had modern concrete-encased bridges was because it connected these two military bases that were built to have federal troops available to control the rebellious populace.

Even odder is that the road is a State Road. S.R. 24. Why the federal government would pay for a State road to be paved probably has some weird history I probably don't wanna know about. It would be too much information of the kind I'm already working at dumping as baggage.

When my family moved here the first little village we lived at was at a place called Pink Hill. I don't know why it was called that. Probably because it was located on a clay ridge between two large swamps that covers hundreds of thousands of acres of the coastal plains. It may be the same hill that has the State fire tower on it just north of town.

This place is still just a crossroads village with less than a thousand people actually living within the city limits, and most of the houses within the city limits are the same houses that were there when my family lived there for about four years. I went to the first grade there. We rented half a house from a widow that was located about twenty foot back from the concrete road.

The next town along that road was called Richlands. It was further south and closer to the U.S. Marine base at Jacksonville. We lived in four different houses in this little town over the next four years. All but one of them were adjacent to Highway 24. We had milk cows that needed housing too. Jacksonville was about twenty miles away. I went to the second through the fifth grade there.

I learned to swim during the period we lived in Richlands. Camp Lejeune, the Marine base, had some sort of community program where they bussed in kids from the communities around the military camp. None of us had ever seen a real swimming pool before. Much less a diving board and a twenty foot high platform the Marines learned to jump off ships from.

That Marine program for learning to swim was cancelled due to the trouble in Korea, but I had already learned to swim a little bit in a natural lake near Richlands called Catherine's Lake. It was a scary place to swim because the water was so dark from the tannic acids produced by the trees in the swamp. We couldn't see our hands held just a foot under water.

They're called bay tree lakes and happen all around the coastal plains of the Carolinas. The last town we moved to along the concrete military road labeled Hwy. 24 is surround by the bay tree lakes. Nearby is White Lake which seems to have avoid the tannic acids and is filled with pure spring water and is two miles across, and Black Lake which is very nearly black from the above mentions plant acids.

True to form in the Jim Crow South, blacks went to Black Lake to swim, and whites went to White Lake. Now, Black Lake is called Jones Lake and has been included in a State Park. White Lake is still called White Lake, but anybody who wants to uses it now. The more recent Latino population likes it a lot.

The White Lake area is not so pristine anymore as a recreational area. It's completely surrounded by house trailers and some of the original cottages all crowded together. The spring water welling up through the still sandy bottom still sends plumes of fluff to show where it's coming from, but the water captured by the low shoreline ain't so pure anymore because of all the motor boats that dump their trash there.

As I remember it from my childhood, not that many people had boats for any reason except maybe for fishing on the creeks and the beaver ponds. I don't think outboard motors for small boats were readily available then. What they did have at White Lake were ChrisCraft speedboats that were the slickest motorized objects a backwoods village boy like me had ever seen.

I was a little boy then, so I don't know the facts of the matter, but it seemed like to me that certain people made investments in these wooden motorboats that had race car engines or the equivalent in them. These investors would take you on a fast ride around the entire lake in a given amount of time, if you were willing to pay their asking price.

Later, I found out these kinds of boats had been popular up in the northern states around the Great Lakes and places like Minnesota for a fairly long time. People up there were used to seeing them around. Not around here they weren't. I suspect certain entrepreneur types hauled these fascinating speedboats around on trailers to local lakes, like White Lake, that had never seen them before.

They were a sort of a thrill ride like barn-storming airplane pilots taking off and landing in cow pastures to make money from the local yokels. That would be me. I was just like that. I gawked at anything I'd never seen before.

I still get astonished when I don't expect to perceive wot's sot before me in real time, but I'm also jaded and blasé . I do it on the sly because I don't want anybody to notice that I'm still the sa-me ol' fool I am has always been. It must have never larned nothing despite how long it's been here and how many second and/or third chances it's been given.

Occasionally I sense that I'm given more chances than the average bear because of the Jupiter/Venus conjunction in Pisces in my natal chart. That conjunction, however, is opposed by Pisces' sign ruler Neptune located in Virgo. This battle of the gods takes place in the Fifth house of romantic love, and the Eleventh house of friends. It's not all wonderful or nothing like that to have crap like this going on at some rudimentary level of ex-is-tense.

Friends and lovers play ping-pong with my feelings and emotions such that I've grown stone cold to many of them without explaining my supremely inadequate reasons. I've wasted plenty of ti-me doing that very thing previously, and I am is convinced it's a lost cause. It doesn't listen to me anymore, and that's a long way from atonement.

Whatever it is that I am is doing to compensate for its fatal flaw with friends and lovers ain't kicking my me into warp speed when it's ti-me to get the hell out of Dodge. It might seem like my me's resolution to all confrontation is the boogie on down the road until out-of-sight means out-of-mind. So-me-ti-me it me-ands be-co-me-ing a pillar of salt.

Be-co-me-ing inanimate objects is not on the seminal list of neediness in learning to abandon the persona one adores in the first person singular to be that. Any that. That of any kind. Just not being my me is frequently enough of a disguise that the boogieman I am can be will pass it by as if what I shape shift to is not actually my me.

It's a little bit like "bringing it on ho-me to Jesus" as I learned it as a young boy living in total despair. I lived in total despair as a boy because about every time my family stayed in one place long enough to assert myself as my own person, they moved, and I had to do it all over again in the next place. In so-me other place where nobody knew my na-me.

Nobody knowing my name is somehow equivalent to be-co-me-ing a pillar of salt in order to be passed by as if insignificant to my pursuer's reason for chasing me. My ti-me of being a bum on the road was filled to the brim with de-possessing my Self of all the baggage of what I was supposed to be for-the-other.

There is a permanent image in my mind of a crossroads somewhere out west where the entire country-side was brown. It wasn't in the desert like in California or Africa, but semi-desert at the least. West Texas, maybe. There was a stop light at this crossroads. I was headed west and the cars had to either stop when the light turned red or at least proceed slowly because of the traffic.

Despite the experiential fact that this was a great place to catch a ride, I wasn't getting nowhere. Nobody was stopping. It wasn't unusual for some people to see me standing there, and lock the doors on their car although they were going thirty miles an hour when they passed me. It was a lonely place and a sorry lot in life for me.

As the hours passed and hundreds of cars passed by me as if I had the Black Plague I began to count all the decorative license plates that read "God is my co-pilot", and it disgusted me to think of the story of the good Samaritan. These people acted like they couldn't trust me to be in a closed space like an automobile. I remember asking myself, "Don't they know who I am? Don't they know I was raised by decent, hard-working people?"

Nope, they didn't, and there was no blame in their not knowing. They treated me like what they saw me as. They treated me as what they would be if they were standing there by the side of the road begging a ride to nowhere, and I had absolutely no control over what that was.

It didn't take forever to realize I never did and never will have any control over what other people perceived me as. Either standing by the side of the road as a bum or wearing a snazzy three-piece suit to a business meeting.

It took a lot longer than my begging period to realize I wasn't required by any rule or laws I'm aware of to try to control what other people perceive when they deliberately observe me as if themselves. I can just as easily waste my ti-me attempting to control my own perspective of me, as if magically endowed by the docetic comforter to do as I please. Selah
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