After leaving Jackson on Friday the 26th things got a little busy and I didn’t manage to add another page to my blog. I went from Jackson to Hatiesburg, traveling most of the way on a “normal” highway cutting a lot of time out of my usual approach of wandering around on whatever small roads looked promising. Before arriving at Hatiesburg my friend Lee told me that there was likely to be “a little” discussion about baseball in town. Hatiesburg is the home of University of Southern Mississippi and everyone I talked to had something to say about the baseball games going on at that time. I haven’t kept up with college baseball, but obviously this is an exciting year for those living near “Southern Miss.” My hotel was almost surrounded by the campus, so there was no missing the excitement. The little bar and grill that I stopped in before dinner had 40 televisions that I could see from my seat, there were undoubtedly more – all tuned to the same game!

The main thing that I noticed about the difference between Mississippi and the other states I had been traveling through is that it feels a lot more prosperous. The small towns are still vibrant, the houses in the country are more likely to be modern homes rather than small older homes or single-wide trailers. It just had a feel of “prosperous” instead of impending ghost-town.

The following morning I had some “homework” to take care of, leaving my room right at check-out time. I got to the home of my friend Lee and his wife Shirley’s by mid-morning. The trip was quite pretty, traveling the freeway down through lush forests, but with very few signs of civilization. Just forest, the people must have been all hidden by the forest. The Lees live about 30 miles north of Pascagoula on their 45 acre piece of the forest. They carved out an amazing place, beautiful in every sense of the word. Their house faces a five acre pond, which is surrounded by acres of well kept lawn. The bought the property about 25 years ago and slowly cleared the land and finally built a really nice home by the pond.

In the evening we went to a really neat old-timey seafood restaurant on the gulf called Bozo’s. Lee gave me a copy of a print by Dena KcKee showing the place about twenty years ago. It has expanded since that time, but looks pretty similar even today – but with a much larger restaurant located to the right of the building, behind the Christmas trees.

My travels through Mississippi was memorable for the large number of “Blacks” everywhere. As a Californian I am of course familiar with many races of people, or whatever the politically correct term is these days, but seldom find myself in places where I seldom see other white folks. At first it felt odd, but quickly it just became comfortable – and fun because they seem to like to be more creative and flamboyant with their attire. The only times that I felt uncomfortable were when aggressive white guys were there – not physically but standing in “fight” posture, glaring at me and others. They felt like the radical right folks in California, just angry and appearing ready to pick a fight. I found them to be quite scary, I can’t image having to live amongst them on a regular basis. I was told that that the theater in that part of town used to have two drinking fountains, and three bathrooms. One for white men, one for white women and everyone else could share.

One of the fun things about Lee’s place is that he has a lot of little “get-ways” scattered here and there. There is his shop where he tinkers on fixing up old John Deere tractors, sharing space with an outdoor kitchen set up to entertain his large numbers of family and friends. Upstairs is his official office space, I am envious about the size and beauty of it done up in natural wood for paneling and decorated with may interesting trinkets and momentos. There are a few other outbuildings housing more tractors, wood storage, blacksmith tools and more. On the far side of the pond he has an elevated structure that make perfect viewing of whatever wildlife might be enjoying the pond. Overall, it is a really neat place. I consider is an amazing work of art.

As might be expected, Lee and I talked about many things – but perhaps mostly about our shared profession of System Safety Engineering. I don’t think we solved anything, but we commiserated on the problems.