COPYRIGHT MATTERS:
This publication is made freely available to anyone who wants it. You can download it, print it on paper, and give it away if you want. You can even print it out, bound it and sell the finished product if you want. Just don't claim that you're Jim Conrad, like a fellow in Florida did. I got my payment living the days the book describes.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank the owners of the plantations on which I lived during my years in the Natchez area.
Also thanks to Karen and Jackie Wise of Kingston, Mississippi who befriended me while I was there, moved my trailer when it needed moving – twice – and helped me in so many other ways as well.
NOTES BEFORE BEGINNING:
In this book often I mention eating cornbread. That's a cornbread of my own invention, very unlike the spongy cornbread people make from store-bought, packaged mixture, and baked in an oven. My cornbread is made on a campfire in a skillet with a top. Usually the batter is about two-thirds plain, dry, granular cornmeal, and a third wheatflour with baking soda added. Nearly always it contains chopped onions, sometimes cabbage, pears, carrots, broccoli, chili peppers, wild mushrooms -- whatever I have. The resulting creation is heavy, usually somewhat burnt on the bottom. Before it's done, I flip it, creating a hard surface on what was the top, so now both top and bottom are crusty, with the center softer. You can thump it like a drum, and it scratches on the way down. Really, I don't care much for what most people call cornbread.
Though the events in this book took place during the late 1990s and early 2000s, as of late 2018 I'm still alive, and may still be when you read this. You can catch up with me at http://www.backyardnature.net/j/jim.htm
PREFACE:In early 1997, at age 49, I pulled a tiny, hangdog-looking trailer into the woods of a large plantation a few miles south of Natchez in southwestern Mississippi and began living there. Mornings I’d work in the plantation’s garden, then the rest of the day I’d study and work on the Internet. I’d strung wires through the woods for the Internet connection.
During my years there, thanks to the Internet, I always felt well connected to the world, even though sometimes I spent entire months without speaking a single word to anyone. On the Internet I created several web sites and exchanged emails with people all over the world.
Still, in 2001, I began worrying that I was losing my ability to order my thoughts in a way that permitted me to communicate with others. Though I could think abstractly better than ever I was becoming an awful word-groper. Also, maybe around that time I was beginning to miss being part of some kind of human community.
Consequently, each week I began issuing, via email, the Natchez Naturalist Newsletter. The idea was that each week this would oblige me to exercise my mind with thinking patterns of the kind needed for regular conversation. Before long I felt my talking powers returning, plus I was gratified by how many people subscribed to the newsletter. Gradually a nice little cyberspace-based community crystallized around the newsletter.
In 2003 I had to leave the plantation, but a newsletter subscriber invited me to move onto his unoccupied property a few miles east of Natchez, adjoining Homochitto National Forest. I took my trailer there and continued my work and issuing the newsletter as always.
Therefore, some entries in this book were written at the first plantation, and some were written at the second. The “Broomsedge Field” and the hunters were at the first, the barn and the “Loblolly Field” were at the second. I’ve mingled the entries here so usually you can’t know which plantation the entries were written at.
In 2004 I left the Natchez area and until now haven’t landed anyplace that feels permanent. Maybe it’s because wherever I find myself in the presence of a few trees and birds I feel at home. Now my newsletters are called “Jim Conrad’s Naturalist Newsletters.”