Waycross, Ga
For three days i walked through the town of Waycross, Georgia carrying, tethered to my backpack, a wooden sign that read “This is a Sign.” What follows is an account of those three days on the road, recorded to the best of my ability.
These are what they call the dog days. Look out east far across the plains and swamps of Georgia at dawn and there is old Sirius, the Dog Star, just now rising above that far off line where the earth curves away, just now rising with the promise of long sultry days and hot restless nights, feverish and mad, this the morning star, the home of departed souls, this the keeper of deepest superstition – how true it is the universal mind calibrated to the cosmos. The ancient Egyptians knew this well, and the Sumerians before them, and now old Fabian too. The reminder – although hardly necessary – of our elemental humanness. And when the last sliver of morning shade has all but disappeared out on Oak Street where sits Fabian he’ll haggle with his wheelchair to keep from the glaring sun. And from out over the rooftops the barking of a dog playing out some distant hysteria confined within the trodden radius of a chain’s length. I can almost hear the links scraping over the barren ground.
It is the same story. A dusty town. A lone wayfarer passing through it. A place that seems too familiar although i cannot recall ever having been and am certain that i haven’t – the familiarity stemming instead from some primordial fragment embedded in my psyche, from somewhere that is not for me to understand – it being enough that i pause to notice. I sit on my pack at the roadside. It is midafternoon, sweat beads down my forehead and stings my eyes and blurs my vision just enough to call into question all i’ve known to be real and pressing me to substantiate my story. The elemental human, i think again. I pick up a handful of sand and let it sift through my fingers. A car races by now and again, even a school bus, its yellow paint weathered and fading, watching eyes obscured by the glare or the sun as they are taken homeward. “Homeward,” i think to myself. And again, “haven’t i been here before,” wondering with an unquenchable thirst that i might dredge some sense from it.
It all seems so fitting. That i should be here now in the town of Waycross, Georgia, at the northern fringe of the great Okefenokee Swamp not far from the Florida border. Years ago on a greyhound bus as it lurched west across nameless desolate expanses deep through the night i read in a youthful kind of wondrous zeal the journals of Kafka and am still haunted by a few words that have remained with me ever since, “It is enough that the arrows fit exactly the wounds they have created.” That such a revelation as this should resurface now, bygone years hidden in latent recess, walking past wooden steeples with peeling paint. And isn’t it so true that the present is the perfect meeting point of past and future. As though all that has been and all that has yet to be is somehow contained herein. More sweat beads on my wrists and arms, drips from my brow, blurs some of the words as i write them. A soft breeze lifts the page and sets it down again giving the briefest of interludes to the thickness of the day.
In the morning i woke hidden among the pines in a little margin-land hemmed into a triangle by the abandoned grounds of a small churchyard on one side, a dirt road and the railyards on the other two. If the city of Waycross had a sound it would be trainsound. All these last days the whine and rumble, the clangor and whistle and labor and chiming float freely through and infuse the air over town and for a great many miles surrounding. But i slept well through the night sheltered in my little screened tent not waking to the intermittent tumult from the near track. And the heat not a match for my fatigue from a long day on the road. I woke to the pastels of dawn. And as i lay there the old words came back to me – words i cannot seem to escape, such being their nature. “You have nowhere to go and nothing to do.” They first came to me of a fever dream now many years ago, although there are times i seem immune to them, push them far back inside my brain, times when this is fine, when the present circumstance does not require of them. And then i find myself here and reaching out for something familiar to grab onto and it makes sense, so much sense that tears begin to well in my eyes to know that there is a force beyond my understanding at play and that i am a part of it. And then it makes sense that i am in a town called Waycross – Waycross! – and i’m walking and – lo! – i remember and again the great spirit is with me – dear superstitious me! – i breath, my feet meet the road, nothing was ever more true but sometimes i forget it. All things corroborate this most basic truth. Waycross. The city of the south, the great junction, the great waystation where six freight lines meet, hence the name, where freight is carried to and from the six corners of the nation and all the things contained therein, shipments from across the globe comprised of all the raw materials of cities and industry and consumption operating twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year that the world should careen onward, a momentum wearying thin any objection to it, perpetuating a vital reliance like the beating of a heart the blood within the veins, a thing we only think about when we must stop for its passing and even then not much mind given as though it is only an inconvenient figment, or a movie, or the leftover from a time past – but suddenly all hands are on deck in order to restore it should it happen that there is a kink in the supply chain, a boat is grounded in the Suez Canal, another collides with a bridge in Baltimore, still another is hijacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia, or a virus forces mass quarentine, or a solar flare disrupts the electrical grid, a digital glitch compromises the software of international commerse and we – on a dime – exact the price to keep that ship from foundering and to keep that train a-rolling on down the line. Just like now – the cars racing by on Memorial Drive south towards Folkston, Hilliard, Callahan, Jacksonville, or north up State Street toward Alma, or out on Victory (route 84) west to Valdosta, Tifton, and of course old Albany where the Flint River rolls on through the center of things and Magik keeps getting up in the morning to go to work though he is prone to heart attacks, having had three already, but a woman stands by him, loves him, and i can still hear Michael beating on his old leather-bound drums conjuring up the sound of Africa and a certain ancestry that recalls the recessed likeness in all of us, “the sound of the womb,” he’d say, “it is the original music, the beat of your maker’s heart as she carried you into this world.” Some clouds drift in. Even a strange August fog descending over the city. Here i pause. I think about the words. What they mean. I have been here before. Walked these streets a hundred times. Stood before the fading monuments memorializing the countless lost in foreign wars. Or at the marble towers that pepper these towns praising the courage of the confederate soldier who gave all, water dripping from fountains like tears of mourning for the “good ol’ days” and the failed but valiant stand that was made to defend them. I wonder if Sherman marched through this town and burned all that came before on his march to the sea. Creation and destruction and creation in the wake of destruction. The great drum circle of life beating on, holding promise, calling upon us to stop and listen – to pause here a moment – and to think…”nowhere to go” until i know this, “nothing to do,” until it has registered in my feeble human brain – the ashes, the Phoenix, the brick and mortar of reconstruction, the fabric of cities, and the elements that comprise a life reimagined. I tread on past where the sidewalk ends, where first the grass and weeds grow up tall through the cracks of broken concrete and the reclamation of nature takes final hold. Yes. I have been here before. There is something familiar on such dusty roads as these. As if the road was written in me long before my physical arrival. I close my eyes. I breathe deep. The fog burns away once more. I am here now. I have returned and there is something calling within me, calling on me to make an account of it. It is something of the matter of life. I stop. I look around. Little flowers blossom underfoot – take hold in cracks – determine (what is the word?, oh…that’s right – resilience) they determine resilience that their place in the matrix of things not be omitted!
I say, “i have nowhere to go and nothing to do,” the ensuing explanation taking on the character of the hazy air, impossible to grab on to, not much to look at, yet all-pervading and vital. The word, “until,” often follows. Like, “until i know this,” or “until i see (like really see) this.” Until i solidify my faith in resilience. And how could i not, looking down between the weathered leather of my shoes to see such a delicate display of creation not just clinging desperately to survival from a crevice, but thriving and exuding all things life and not only this but this in a great proclamation of determined manifestation, this in a great celebration of color and efficacy. The language of the purple-blossomed Verbena in full bloom at my feet.
I walk past broken buildings… “until i know that i am exactly where i should be.” So that it is that my arrival is not happenstance but a timely passage in the story of the cosmos. Here i am – exactly where i should be. A block of broken buildings, the vestige of a time of concentrated prosperity. Shattered windows, zigzag cracks following the lay of the redbrick from the foundation on up to the roof plate and from the corners of windows and doorways. Curling plywood covering a few of the lower orifices. Drooping awnings, fallen and broken blinds clinging to final hangers and floral-print curtains still hanging in upstairs windows and virginia creeper climbing up from the sidewalk and…and chairs, the aura of their beneficiaries still potent as though they had only been vacated moments ago. And then another building of like disposition, rows of them facing each other and more chairs and there, there is Fabian pulled up in a wheelchair maneuvering with one hand as not to roll from the sliver of shade cast beneath and holding a beer can in the other. And Sylvia, his sister, sitting beside him in a plastic patio chair in a weary doorway, a doorway as haggard as its passers-though. “What’s good my brother, hey, wait a minute now, what’s thatch you got written on yer back,” and i greet him and turn that he can read it. “I like that,” he says, “tha’s alright.” And we talk. He was born and raised in this town, went up to South Carolina for some years, but missed his sisters and the rest of his family and home. Now he’s back he’ll never leave. He’s an old man with a white beard and a white ring of hair around the back of his head complimenting the darkness of his skin. He fusses with the wheels of his chair as the sliver of shade becomes just that much leaner. A woman comes out, has a brief exchange of words with Sylvia and walks with haste up the block as if the sun is an unwanted pursuer, tagging behind her at the heels. A musty smell lingers in the air after the door comes to a close behind her. He tells me of a woman from Waycross, a sergeant in the army, perished in Iraq by an enemy drone strike. Sad, he says. There is a deep nostalgia buried in his dark eyes. He asks me where i’m from, i tell him. They talk to me like nothing – like our meeting is in the ordinary course of things. He offers me a warm can of soda which i politely decline. I thank him for the conversation and take my leave. He takes a sip from his can and smiles at me, then says, wait a minute, wha’s yer name, and i tell him and we shake hands, good to know you, he says. And with a final glance behind me i see him fanangling his wheelchair as the shade all but disappears. I walk.
Just the ordinary course of things. I guess in the natural course of things words like “ordinary” and “strange” are extraneous. Things just, well, they just happen. Whether we want them to or not. I think of Margaret the night before sitting in her chair outside her downtown apartment building. Peering out on a little sliver of creation. She told me you can go down to the train station and there are benches out there where you can just sit and watch the trains go by. She told me about the encampment out yonder where the homeless reside. I went there too and hunkered in the filthy earth beneath the shade of concrete and vine and listened to Joshua and Brittany and Jennifer and Howard trading stories, hardships, Howard there repeating over and over about dressing up, turning the volume dial of his radio up and sitting out to watch the trains in some classic car he probably never had, or Joshua lamenting about his bicycle being impounded and how this ain’t no place for a pilgrim, you get caught sleeping in city limits and they lock you up three days. “This little sliver of creation”, i think to myself. Watching the trains go by. The great drama and the determination of the purple-blossomed Verbena. Yes, these are the dog days of summer. And the old words of Homer: “On summer nights, star of stars, Orion’s dog they call it, brightest of all, but an evil portent bringing heat and fevers to suffering humanity, Achilles’ bronze gleaming so as he ran.” I think of Odysseus, homeward bound. Homeward bound – it is the same story. I walk. It is not by accident that i walk these streets today, even if it is merely to make account of it, to make note of what lies in the ether, although i think that it is somewhat more than that. I walk (those old words doing endless loop-the-loops in my brain) until i understand this. All as the earth rolls ever east and the trains careen to and from the six corners of the continent. Dogs paw exhaustedly at the dirt to unearth the cool ground beneath where they try to sleep but do so only restlessly and then bark from their chains as i pass. I walk long out of town along the track and later along vast stretches of open road. Another school bus rumbles past. The sun beats down overhead and my feet begin to ache. I find a shade tree and lay my pack down and just sit in the dirt not unlike the dogs and drink my water and write this.
