Mystery In The Grove - updated

Not long ago, we spent an afternoon at a nearby park. The area was a farmer's pecan grove once, but is  now public land. It's a peaceful friendly-feeling place, green and leafy with walking paths winding through. There are a few benches where a person can rest, listen to the wind rustling in the leaves and forget  about the outside world for a moment.

It's also a fun place for children to play tag or hide and seek, investigate tree hollows and chase the occasional squirrel.

There's nothing gloomy or melancholy about the place at all, or so it would seem. There's a freshness to the air in a pecan grove that makes even a depressive like me feel better. So I was merely being curious, not melancholy, when I noticed that part of the Southwest edge of the park seemed a little darker than the rest.

I walked the fence line with my camera, wondering why the park felt so different here. Perhaps it was just that the undergrowth on the other side made it more humid and consequently more oppressive. Nothing unusual about that. Then, suddenly, the feeling was far more than oppressive. It was outright grim.

 As I stood in the spot pictured above, a despair came over me. It chilled me to the bones, too, because it wasn't a general feeling of despair, but very specific to my memory. It felt as if I were back in time, during what was perhaps the worst depressive episode of my life. The kind of despair that does not come in a lifeless gray haze but in the searing colors of a nightmare.

I'd lived in dread of ever feeling that way again, and here it was. But it was alien. It didn't seem to belong to me this time - it seemed to be in the location itself. This is why I snapped the photo, not so much an attempt to capture a feeling-state on camera but as a way to mark the place.

The one unusual thing I noticed at the time was the tree above me - the one closest in the photo - is one of the very few on the property that is not a pecan tree, but a hackberry instead. I'm no fan of hackberries, they are a nuisance, but that's not much reason for the sheer negative energy I felt in that place.

Experimentally, I decided to move on, wondering if the sensations would fade or intensify as I continued down the fence line. The underbrush and overhanging trees were thicker down the way, so it seemed if it was darkness and humidity (or just simple creepiness) affecting me, the feeling would have become stronger as I went along.

It didn't. The photo above was also taken to mark the place. It's far darker and more overgrown (and a tad creepy too) but this spot felt much more pleasant than the area of the hackberry tree, and there was no feeling of despair here, nor was there the further away I walked.      

I slowly made my way back toward the hackberry tree, paying close attention to the landscape, amount of light, scent or anything that might be be affecting my mood. Still, nothing seemed awry until I came near the vicinity of the hackberry again. When the despair began to creep up on me, I noted a fallen tree on the other side of the fence.

Well, that was an unhappy sight. Death and decay. It looks forlorn even if there is more light. Maybe that's what was triggering my ill feelings. I moved away, slightly to the left, and the despair hit me full force.  I was under the hackberry tree again.

I looked close and studied it for a while. I didn't like the tree overmuch, but there was nothing very unusual about it.as trees go. One fairly thick branch jutted out toward the park, and I followed it with my eyes. I followed it upwards, directly over my head, That's when I saw something unexpected.

There was something hanging from the branch. I used a stick to reach it and pull it close enough to see. I didn't want to remove it from the branch, even if I could. The object gave me a strong feeling of repulsion, I didn't want to risk touching it at all. It was a navy blue elastic cord,  knotted, like the kind of cheap necklaces that local teenagers wear. There was some sort of object strung on it as well, but it was broken, too difficult to tell what it ever was. The elastic cord was tied to a long piece of wire, quite strong, looped around the tree branch right over head. 

I tried to photograph it as clearly as possible, but it was high up and hard to see in any case. The cord is visible close up, though the wire is nearly impossible to make out.     

A cord, perhaps a necklace, tied to a wire in a tree branch. What did it mean? Maybe nothing, maybe someone disposing of an object in an offbeat way or idling by tying knots in things.  Maybe the wire was left by some city workers for some project. Maybe it had some kind of practical reason for being there. I looked around for other wires, other blue cords, but there was nothing.

It might have seemed a strange thing to find, even without the overwhelming feeling of despair in that place. Given this, though, and where it was, and the length and how high, it immediately struck me that the wire was meant to be a makeshift noose. Maybe someone had stood there once, exactly there, leaching despair into the landscape where it still remains. Maybe the necklace was what they sacrificed instead.

I don't know. I probably never will.

Update, June 7 -

Last week I went back to the park, wondering again about the object in the tree. Maybe I could get a better look this time.The park was just the same as always, light and breezy. I walked toward the hackberry tree, waiting for the onset of despair that I'd felt before. Instead, I felt nothing. I walked along the fence line, just to be sure. No, there was no difference anywhere. The feeling of despair was gone. Back at the hackberry, I went to look for the object, the wire and necklace, or whatever it was. It was nowhere to be found.

I searched the tree as much as possible, I searched the ground, even where wind or flood waters might have pushed it. There was nothing at all. Not even a bad vibe left reverberating in the air.

It's for the best, I think.

A Dark Road

It's been a year since I came back to my hometown. It's been a hard road. Desolate.There are few ghosts here, on the rim of the desert. Mostly they are ghosts of the mind. 

In a strictly practical way, things are better here than the dead end of the gulf coast.You can see it in the people, with their yoga bodies and shiny hair, no look of desperation to distort their features. No one is selling crack in the 'hood - there is no 'hood, and no need to worry about your children's education. It's all so very positive, so...upwardly mobile. The dark side of this coin is that failure is spurned equally as hard. 

On the gulf coast, failure - if not a way of life -  is something one co-exists with, a condition you are simply too hot and too tired to rise above. Oh, maybe not in the cities so much, but in these little port towns where even the most successful are at the last bus stop on their career path - it only takes one blow to send people toppling like a row of dominoes. And the air is so heavy, it's hard to get up again. 

So, in a very practical sense, it's better. But who wants to go back to a place that has cruelty in its bones? I spent the worst years of my life in this place and frankly, it hasn't changed. Old traumas lurk at every corner. Memories break through the surface like tree roots through concrete. I'd never had the faintest desire to come home, for good reasons. I can't wait for the day I'll be able to leave it again. 

One evening this past Winter, I walked to the end of the road and looked down the hill. Everything was dark but for pools of light beneath distant streetlamps. Music drifted in from the dance hall above the town, an exacting cover of  Mary Jane's Last Dance. I studied the pools of light. Somehow, the sight of them made me feel less lonely.