It’s called sea legs, that feeling one has after riding on a boat, then getting to solid land only to feel as if still on the boat. The feeling is similar to that of swimming in the ocean, dodging waves, only to leave the water and still feel the waves affecting your balance.

Ride a train for any length of time and feel the rhythmic bounce of the rail cars against the steel rails below.

It’s the feeling that surrounded me from the overnight hours in Rocky Mount, N.C., to morning in Atlanta and the final 10 grueling hours to a town known as Hattiesburg.

The Amtrak Crescent left Penn Station in midtown Manhattan, and for 24 hours slowly rambled through miles and miles of the same scenery — an odd-looking green plant run rampant, taking over hills and trees and … what the heck is this stuff?

Seems like half my life has gone by since feeling those sea legs on the blazing hot platform, the temperature that August day far exceeding anything in my memories.

Downtown Hattiesburg, where the train station is located, today is a treasure — downtown in 1992, not so much. Shotgun houses, seedy juke joints and dusty streets surrounded the station that day.

Hattiesburg, Miss. No family. No friends. No reason on Earth to be here, having spent my entire life an hour’s train ride from America’s largest city. The sun blistered my pale, Irish skin. Sweat poured from the forehead. I had sea legs.

The first words uttered two days before my first college classes at the University of Southern Mississippi? What the (family newspaper) am I doing here?

Bond Hall on the USM campus was not much nicer than the train station, but it was “home” away from home.

The first meal at the school cafeteria included fried round objects I assumed were tater tots. Fried okra is no tater tot.

I learned about grits and fixin’ to do things was not actually fixing something. I learned that the green vegetation I remember so vividly was kudzu. I learned Mississippi is one of the most misunderstood places on Earth. I learned to love the blues.

I still don’t know what brought me here. I might never know why this place grabbed me like it has.

I do know I still get sea legs thinking about that long, quiet Amtrak journey 1,500 miles and half a lifetime ago.

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Sean P. Murphy is web editor. He can be reached at smurphy@vicksburgpost.com