If you need to escape life\u2019s ills, put some glass in front of your eyes and forget your worries on a back road. You\u2019ll discover the bones of the land, the DNA of real life and surprises. I do. Here are three.<\/p>\n
Surprise No. 1 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou must be getting up a mess of poke salad.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMama says it\u2019s great. Gonna eat some tonight.\u201d<\/p>\n
A free meal courtesy of a sun-dappled country road, but labor, nonetheless. Poke salad is 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.<\/p>\n
Surprise No. 2 \u2014 As a boy I recall a winter night, a blazing wood stove and a great-aunt who told tales of \u201cthe white thing.\u201d Aunt Annie wore her snowy hair in a bun, and she saw a panther slink from the woods to strike fear into horses. The buggy ran over the white thing. It sprang up and shot into the woods.<\/p>\n
Aunt Annie was describing an albino Eastern puma, long vanquished from Southern bottomlands. Tell someone you saw a puma or panther and they\u2019ll give you a strange look. \u201cWell, he\u2019s touched in the head.\u201d<\/p>\n
Well, I\u2019m touched in the head. Dusk-blackened pines bordered a back road, that time when headlights should be on but often aren\u2019t. 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.<\/p>\n
Surprise No. 3 \u2014 On a Sunday morning I drove into the 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 the woods. Up the hill stood a church with four cars in its parking lot.<\/p>\n
An hour later a church member walked up. He told me about the campground and we went to the cemetery where rocks, slaves\u2019 tombstones, had been displaced by men mowing the grass.<\/p>\n
\u201cOther graves in the woods,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
We walked into a thin strip of pines. A weathered, worn headstone stood alone. I couldn\u2019t read but a word or two. We could barely make out the clasped-hands art.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s too bad we can\u2019t read the words.\u201d<\/p>\n
Just like that. Right before our eyes, the stone revealed its art and words.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe just witnessed a spiritual miracle,\u201d said the man.<\/p>\n
The light hadn\u2019t changed. Maybe Olive Jackson communed with us and we were too mortal to know it.<\/p>\n
You who toil beneath pressures, worries and fears, try some windshield therapy. As Charles Kuralt pointed out, \u201cThe interstate highway system is a wonderful thing. It makes it possible to go from coast to coast without seeing anything or meeting anybody.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Tom Poland is the author of 12 books and more than 1,000 magazine features. He writes a weekly column for newspapers in Georgia and South Carolina about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle and changing culture, and speaks often to groups across South Carolina and Georgia, \u201cGeorgialina.\u201d Visit Poland\u2019s website at tompoland.net<\/a> or email him at tompol@earthlink.net<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you need to escape life\u2019s ills, put some glass in front of your eyes and forget your…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22314,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[13759,13761,13760,13762,9,13763],"class_list":["post-22313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-poland","tag-cemetery","tag-cougar","tag-gravestone","tag-phytolacca","tag-poland","tag-salad"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22313\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}