There’s always a road to New Hope, somewhere in Daydreaming on the Porch

I’m back in the Memory Vault, reading essays I wrote many years ago. This one brought back both dreadful and bittersweet memories of a year and time that marked a new beginning after my second struggle with a long period of unemployment, followed by major depression and anxiety.

Most of 1994 was a lost year. I had no incentive, seemingly no ability to accomplish anything, and very little hope that this agony would end. Terrible side effects from older antidepressants years before kept me from taking any meds for depression then, relying instead, and becoming hooked on, benzodiazepines for intense and sometime manic anxiety.

I shuttled back and forth from Sumter, where I stayed with my aunt, and Charleston where my mother had relocated from New Orleans after my father passed in 1992. I would take drives in the country but I couldn’t concentrate on anything but reading the newspaper. This was pre-internet, so there was no way to reach out to people as I do now via text and email, and through my writing community. Nothing like we have with today’s internet to stem boredom and distract oneself from unrelieved loneliness, intense self-preoccupation, and feelings of loss of that very same self or ego. I don’t know how I ever got through the days with nothing to occupy myself or express any interest in.

Once, during the summer of that year, I made a half-hearted attempt to get an English composition teaching job at a technical college in Columbia, and was even looking for places to rent. I felt a little surge of hope then, but the dull heaviness of depression returned, and nothing came of the brief June venture out of the darkness of that deep pool of melancholia.

But I had made an effort. It was, after all, the beginning of summer, and I had many good memories of years living in Columbia in the 1970s and early 1980s.. Whereas that Spring didn’t bring the hope and lift in spirits the season usually brings, surely summer, the carefree season of freedom and warm, sunny days, would.

The long ordeal came to an end in December when, after a series of events, miraculous really, I got a part time job and entered a career that carried me through to retirement.

Eight years later, I thought about a trip I had made to Sumter back in 1994, and how I noticed once again the little rural community of New Hope and the short, five-mile stretch of highway named for that community. I haven’t driven on that road for at least ten years because I have no real need or desire to visit Sumter, other than for the sake of nostalgia, and to revive sweet memories from long ago, going back to childhood.

Here is what I wrote on September. 21, 2002:

New Hope Road

Saturday was the kind of day in the country I long for, but rarely experience. There was this mysterious convergence of feelings and sensations while in the car driving, windows down, fresh air blowing in. You know those nice reveries and daydreams you have in summer somtimes? Maybe at the beach, or the lake on vacation. Or at the park on a Sunday afternoon. The countryside was spread out before me. A road traveled countless times. I was so relaxed. Anxiety, rushing, hurriedness — it was all gone. It was very subtle, this mood or state of mind, whatever it was, but I was on the verge of something profound. You can sense it, even if you don’t know what it is. It’s there, and yet it always wants to elude your grasp. That’s how I felt.

Sights, sounds and mysterious little intuitions drifted by and away from me, outside the car windows and within my thoughts, as I drove that quiet back road connecting the Interstate with the old Charleston Highway. I saw the expected sights: the abandoned general mercantile store; pine trees and thick woods crowding close to the road; the dried up creeks after four years of drought; the sign for the deep-well drilling company, likely doing extraordinary business these days; the beginning and end of the New Hope community; the houses, farms, barns and pastures, nestled along this winding road, this little oasis only a short distance from the madness I left behind on the interstate. I found myself once again light years from the screaming trucks and blazing SUVs zinging past me earlier before I turned off and found sanctuary along New Hope Road, this highway that straddles two worlds.

And the skies! Oh, what clear blue tints and startlingly sharp and vivid clouds. It was one of those days when the air seemed as clean and fresh as an afternoon rainshower. Into this tableaux, the sun cast a warm and mellow light that had the slanting edge of late September in it. Landscape and skies were bathed in a hyper-real luminosity, painterly almost, dreamed up, too real, inspiration for artists and writers.

I had the windows down, my arm oustretched to catch the wind. I kept thinking I was having these rather remarkable feelings of well-being. But why? Was it just a passing figment of my imagination, called forth by a drive in the country on a beautiful day?

I passed more fields and farms, houses and rolled bundles of hay, barbed wire fences with weeds, grasses, and plants about to turn brown and gold in the first days of impending autumn.

Only with the windows down did I hear the crickets and insect sounds in the woods that told me the earth was alive with unseen creatures. Overhead, and in front of my car, little yellow butterflies danced on tiny pockets of warm air rising from the pavement.

Everything was so lovely. The air, I have to say again, was so fresh. The clouds were so close. The miles slipped past as I sat rather transfixed in the driver’s seat, wondering when the exact moment would arrive when the final barn and silo showed up on the left, remnants of a larger farm now being consumed by undergrowth and kudzu, slowly, until it would be just a pile of debris in a mound of green, one day a few years hence.

But then, just then, a large clearing appeared, and I saw the AME church on the left. That day there was a funeral, and a black hearse was out front and people were standing and waiting on this most splendid and glorious blue-sky day. There was no trace of anything somber or sad, really, except the two big black cars and a moment when gravity seemed suddenly close about me, for just a few seconds, and I was, for the briefest time, caught off guard by another person’s death on a day when life had no limits and mortality seemed as light and fanciful as little yellow butterflies crossing the road ahead and in the distance, everywhere.

And the crickets sang their farewell song, and the sky was like a dream, and New Hope Road stretched out ahead in a straight line in the direction of my destination.