The Ouachita River, that small river in Central Arkansas, has done more than poke out my eye. It saved my soul, damned my soul, and gave me the wisdom to know the difference between the two.

This is me at nineteen: an awkward, self-centered, over-zealous, tortured, weirdo, emerging for the first time from what we called “The Nature.” I am grinning. I am a virgin. I am bedecked outlandishly, and I’m with the most absurd looking, freakishly bald nineteen-year-old red head. He reeks of the effluvium produced from a single bath a week. Zoom in on his pant leg and see the encrusted buggers. We are happy as larks because we have been with Nature and with God.

On that first day that I discovered “The Nature,” I decided that my true college education was destined to take place outside the halls of education of Ouachita Baptist University and would instead be held in the halls of Nature. I would learn of God, books, and most of all community, there in the woods beside the banks of the Ouachita River. It would take a flood to alter my life and a drought to bring that growing season that first germinated at OBU to its end.