If you need to escape life’s ills, put some glass in front of your eyes and forget your worries on a back road. You’ll discover the bones of the land, the DNA of real life, and surprises. I do. Here are three.

Surprise no. 1—I passed two men walking with purpose along the shoulder. I turned around where purple martin gourds hung from a pole and pulled over to talk to the hunter-gatherers. The younger fellow came over carrying a stalk with big green leaves.

“You must be getting up a mess of poke salad.”

“Mama says it’s great. Gonna eat some tonight.”

A free meal courtesy of a sun-dappled country road, but labor, nonetheless. Polk salad’s toxic. It has to be properly prepared, boiled three times in a change of water. Mama would be busy tonight. Poke salad resembles spinach in taste and texture. Water would boil tonight.

Surprise no. 2—As a boy I recall a winter night, blazing wood stove, and great aunt who told tales of “the white thing.” Aunt Annie wore her snowy hair in a bun, and she saw a panther slink from woods to strike fear into horses. The buggy ran over the white thing. It sprang up and shot into woods.

Aunt Annie was describing an albino Eastern puma, long vanquished from Southern bottomlands. Tell someone you saw a puma or panther and they’ll give you a strange look. “Well, he’s touched in the head.”

Well, I’m touched in the head. Dusk-blackened pines bordered a back road, that time when headlights should be on but often aren’t. I checked my GPS. As I looked back to the road, the low, lean silhouette of a panther cleared the shoulder. It was not a bobcat, coyote, deer, or dog. It was not my eyes. I see 20-20 thanks to state-of-the-art implants. It was a Florida panther or perhaps an exotic set free.

Surprise no. 3—On a Sunday morning I drove into deep countryside. My destination? An old religious campground, a grandchild, perhaps, of the Second Great Awakening. I walked from tent to tent, some painted in pastels, feeling like I was in some Caribbean country. A good walk away stood a cemetery near woods. Up the hill stood a church with four cars in its parking lot.

An hour later a church member walked up. He told me about the campground and we went to the cemetery where rocks, slaves’ tombstones, had been displaced by men mowing the grass.

“Other graves in the woods,” he said.

We walked into a thin strip of pines. A weathered, worn headstone stood alone. Couldn’t read but a word or two. We could barely make out clasped hands art.

“It’s too bad we can’t read the words.”

Just like that. Right before our eyes the stone revealed its art and words.

“We just witnessed a spiritual miracle,” said the man.

The light hadn’t changed. Maybe Olive Jackson communed with us and we were too mortal to know it.

You who toil beneath pressures, worries, and fears, try some windshield therapy. As Charles Kuralt pointed out, “The interstate highway system is a wonderful thing. It makes it possible to go from coast to coast without seeing anything or meeting anybody.”

Choose your windshield time wisely. Poke salad, panthers, perhaps the paranormal, and more wait down a back road. Tedium and danger wait on the interstate.

Tom Poland’s website at www.tompoland.net
Email Tom about most anything at at tompol@earthlink.net 

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