Animals This Morning; Mississippi Tonight

We were drawn to Mississippi by William Faulkner; his house, Rowan Oak, and his grave. But what we found during our three days in the state surpassed our plans and became the most impactful moments of our last coddiwomple.

It’s taken a while to put it all together, to get the facts right, and wrap my heart around it. Tonight, you’ll get chapter one. It directly follows our time in Key West when we cut across the Everglades, drove north through Tampa along the Gulf of Mexico, and spent a night in one of Florida’s most flood-ravaged towns.

Fair warning. It’s not bright and light. It reflects poorly on who we were and who we are in danger of becoming. But it has meaning, and I’ll let you know why these became the most memorable days of our trip.

Chapter one is bleak; chapter two is lighter, chapter three begins in darkness but ends with something akin to our meeting with the wild mustang in Theodore Roosevelt National Park four months later. Was that a visitation on the final day? I let you decide that when you read it.

But before we get into all the drama, let’s start the day with some of our favorite animals we met on the road. We could all use a bit of beauty, right?

Mississippi: Chapter One drops tonight.

“An animal’s eyes have the power to speak a great language.” ~ Martin Buber

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

~ Henry Beston, The Outermost House

Please feel free to share this post with the animal lover in your life. It is unlocked. The Mississippi stories are for paying subscribers only.