Season’s Greetings, my friends! It’s been a while… again.
Last time we spoke I gave an extremely abridged version of my early years ending with my enrollment at the University of Tennessee and my apartment in the Fort Sanders neighborhood.
I enjoyed my experience at a major university. I excelled in my classes and felt like I was a part of something bigger. Despite this, I still couldn’t shake the feeling of being a fish out of water. Some of the lecture halls held more people in one room than there were in the entire town of Long Lane, MO. Every time I walked down a different hallway or through a different building I would be amazed at the material on display, and had a difficult time narrowing my focus on one subject. I was more of a renaissance man than a specialist.
I auditioned and interviewed, and was accepted to the UT School of Music for studies in musicology. The curriculum for their program was daunting, and certainly not designed for non-traditional students holding down full time jobs. My music theory class and transcription class were taught by the same teacher. He was from somewhere up north, and he was new that year to the faculty. His classes were so tough. I spent many sleepless nights working on counterpoint exercises or handwritten transcriptions of full-score Stravinsky works. With much sweat and turmoil, I made A’s in both of his classes. He failed several students, including one student who was the daughter of the department chair, and the next year he was no longer on staff. The politics of the music department were saddening to me. I thought he was a fair teacher, and I learned so much from him. This wasn’t the first, and it wouldn’t be the last time the integrity of any educational system came into question for me. Furthermore, the requirements for any music degree include several hours a week worth of practice, lessons, ensemble performances, and ear training all of which are not worth any credits therefore a student must have a full-time load of classes as well as an extremely demanding extra curricular schedule. The only students who can survive this are the ones who do not have to work in order to pay for things like rent, or child support in my case. I simply could not afford the time to practice and participate in the program, especially when the outlook for careers in musicology did not seem rewarding to me. I knew I didn’t need a degree to be a musician, so I tried something else. The degree audit feature on the school’s web page became my best friend for a while.
While at UT I tried student teaching to fourth graders. They actually called me, “Mr. Dickens.” That was a trip. I took poetry, film studies, social psychology, and an entire year of sound design. The second semester was the advanced sound design course, and I worked at the Clarence Brown theater as part of a work study. I even took a two-semester doctoral level course in energy science. This was a challenge to say the least. The only reason they allowed undergrads in the class was because technically half the class was focused on policy, so much so that a deep understanding of advanced physics and calculus would not be a detriment to the student. This was not my case. On the first day everyone went around introducing themselves to the group. There were students from all over the world in this class, each one of them already in their respective fields of nuclear engineering, biochemical engineering, materials engineering, or whatever engineering, I think you get the idea. They all stated where they received their bachelors and their masters, and all of them were working on their PhDs. When it was my turn I said, “yeah, uh, I work in a couple of restaurants and I used to be a bricklayer. Oh yeah, and I write songs.” It was a little bit embarrassing, but I ended up getting to know these people well over the course of the year. On homework assignments, I had pages and pages of handwritten calculations and attempts, I spent hours upon hours teaching myself the advanced calculus and physics needed to solve the problems (most of them related to energy conversions of various types), and when it came time to go over the homework in class the teacher would display the correct answer and I would invariably be wrong more often than not. However, I learned so much about renewable energy as well as climate change and technological improvements in how we can mitigate the effects of fossil fuel consumption. Our final team project was a mock policy proposal presentation given in front of the former governor of Tennessee, Phil Bredesen. The same guy they named the school after, “The Bredesen Center at UT.” Our group’s topic was combined carbon and sequestration. I tried hard and expelled a lot of energy, but at the end I only made a C the first semester and a D the second semester.
So, after doing several degree audits and merely finding the path of least resistance, I finally decided on a communications major . By this point, I just wanted to finish, but changing majors and lack of focus would end up being my own detriment. I was registered and set to go one fall when all of a sudden instead of getting a negative statement and refund I received a bill. Apparently, I had reached the end of what the federal government was willing to loan. In order to continue I would have to pay out of pocket and that meant I had to raise nearly $1,400 within a week. Being a server and bartender at two restaurants, behind on rent and child support, starving, driving a jeep with over a quarter of a million miles on it, with a child living in another state, trying to keep up visits, birthdays, Christmases, and everything else… this was more than impossible. I had to drop all of my classes in order to avoid a charge, and just like that I was finished at UT. My heart dropped.
During my time living on campus, I rode my bike everywhere. I took advantage of local mountain bike trails from time to time, but I never took the time to go hiking or camping and get back to nature. So by this point I was getting pretty low.
With my class schedule suddenly and unexpectedly cleared, I found myself looking for a regular daytime job. Working late nights and weekends, holidays, gamedays, and not having any kind of regular consistent income was getting old for someone in his 30’s. I reached out on FaceBook and a couple of my old friends were working at a place called Threds where I was able to get a job making $10 per hour (maybe less?) in the shipping department.
Threds is an apparel and design company that specializes in screenprinting and embroidery, and they also manage online fulfilment sales and distribution for their clients. That’s where the shipping department comes in. They stock and inventory a warehouse where they pick orders put in by customers on the client’s website. The orders are then packed and shipped to customers all over the world. The environment isn’t conditioned, and the work is very demanding. I did very well in this role, quickly learning the various tasks and positions in the team.
This moment right here is where my blog starts. It was at this moment in time when my body and soul were longing for an escape to nature. After all my failures and defeats so far I just needed to know that I could survive if my world boiled down to what I could carry with me. I lost my apartment and moved into my mom’s basement. Again. I was in a room with no windows half filled to the ceiling with boxes and totes full of old crap in storage. I felt like old crap. I desperately needed to get out of my rut.
It was 2017. The news for the last year was a whirlwind. We elected this president and it felt like everything we knew was just being thrown out. I felt like the world was declining socially, politically, and culturally. The eclipse seemed to offer some kind of fulcrum. As if we could teeter back into normalcy, pivoting on this moment. A before and after. A milestone. I had to experience this, but not in the same way everyone else in the world wanted to experience this. This had to be personal. I knew the world was watching. There were visitors flocking from every corner of the globe, hotel reservations for years in advanced, traffic delays expected to last for half a day or more, and very little chance of finding a quiet, isolated place. Challenge accepted. I bought some maps and lined up the path of totality with backcountry areas, and located a trail I could hike out on to camp for this monumental occasion. I didn’t know if there would be others out there, but I went for it. I ventured out a couple of days early in order to find a good spot and avoid the traffic. Taking back roads and parking at an obscure trailhead I was delighted to find that I was the only soul in the Citico Creek Wilderness in the Cherokee National Forest.
That trip was exhausting and exuberating. I was so out of shape, but it opened my eyes and gave me a new set of goals to work toward. I remembered my connection to nature. Writing about my trip also gave me solace. Returning from my backcountry camping trip during the Great American Eclipse I decided to begin this blog. And there you have it, a little bit of history. Thank you for reading, stay tuned for more poetry and adventures. I will finish my eclipse adventure story, and I have a whole collection of adventures from 2022 I can’t wait to share with everyone! Happy New Year! ~Steve
Beyond the Smoky Mountains 