170. HIGHWAY 90. THE JOBS ARE GONE

From the Archives

(November 2005) Southern fried rocker Charlie Daniels sings a song about missing the Carolina of his childhood that includes a little boy with a waggledy-tailed puppy, thus rivaling Mary Chapin Carpenter’s song about the short-lived kittens that were born on her old demin shirt in manufactured hokiness.

Despite Charlie’s hokiness though, he does include a line that captures perfectly my response to driving through the rural low country last week: Carolina, I knew you before the highways got to you.

It is impossible for me to drive those rural roads now without hearing Nanci Griffith singing Hwy 90. The jobs are gone. I see lights in farmhouse windows way out in the middle of nowhere and imagine the graying couple inside, getting by on their Social Security checks and what they can grow in the garden now that the mills and factories have moved overseas.

These days, they’re resigned to the fact that their children have moved to Raleigh or Atlanta or Chapel Hill or Charleston or maybe Portland or New York or Seattle and they won’t ever return to Smallville Carolina. Ever.

The rural roads of my childhood are beautiful, are holy to me, with Spanish moss hanging off the knuckles of gnarled old oak trees and winding mysterious roads set between wide trees that make music when the wind blows through their branches.

The low country, then and now, smells like wisteria and honeysuckle and it sparkles with fireflies. It is lush and occasionally magical and the seafood is fantastic. But, boy, is it ever conservative.

Those country stores that sold Nehi’s and boiled peanuts and pickled pigs feet are gone. Ditto the peach stands run by large black women with paper church fans or those vegetable stands run by a toothless white men who want to talk about Jesus.

Now there are Arby’s and Subways and Wendy’s and Walgreens and the occasional Ruby Tuesddays, just as there are on any northern highway.

And how can I begin to describe the tackiness that is Myrtle Beach?

Imagine a white sand landscape slathered in giant plastic water slides bursting out of brightly painted concrete-block buildings with the jaws of a giant shark constructed around a cheap Lowe's door in between the ubiquitous Hooter’s or XXX Gentlemen’s Clubs; add a million multi-colored fire-breathing putt-putt courses and too many Calabash-style (fried) seafood restaurants to count and you get the general idea.

I took those local roads to a spiritual retreat center and, let me tell you, it felt as if I had returned to paradise when I finally turned off the main drag into those woods. The retreat is on 500 acres of virgin forest with lagoons and lakes and wetlands and, of course, a private beach.

Their message: go inside yourself and find silence in order to grow spiritually, but recognize that you can get there through any number of different spiritual paths.

It’s been an exhausting semester, and this silence allowed me to see glimpses of myself again.

I stayed in a lakefront cabin with a screened-in porch across the front—an excellent place for writing and observing snakes crawling down pine trees.

My bedroom door opened onto this porch, so I opened my eyes in the morning to gorgeous pink sunrises over the lake.

And the place was quiet! Very few people were on the land and most of them were gentle souls trying to live authentically in a plastic, throwaway culture ... if only for a week.

I have to admit that returning to civilization has been more than a little jarring.

86. VIOLENT PINOT POETRY

From the Archives

(May 2005) I checked my e-mail a little while ago. My spam says that Women Will Love Me and that Julie [7] says Hi Honey.

Am eating some locally made brie on crackers and drinking a nice glass of pinot noir because the lovely woman in the Whole Foods wine department snared me as I walked past with my creamer and cilantro.

“Hi there,” said she. “Would you like to hear about our pinot noirs?”

I thought well I would certainly like to look at your dimples a while longer and my purchases ARE disgustingly alliterative, so sure, show me your wares.

She described several pinots as I studied her gorgeous jaw line, then I said, So tell me, which pinot that doesn’t cost a small fortune has made you smile most recently?

She grinned at my question and handed me the bottle that I have just now opened, which is quite good ... plus I get to imagine her dimples deepening as she discovers this taste.

Yesterday, I passed the Joy Delight Commandment King Church van on my way up the mountain. I really wanted to look through those tinted windows to see if the bus was filled with shiny happy people (who probably wouldn’t get that REM reference) too. Their name reminded me of the (shiver) Baptist camp where I spent too many summers.

Whew what a God um forsaken place that was!

The shiny happy counselors confiscated my Neil Young cassettes (AKA Devil's music) way back in 1976 and I still want them back. They also forced me to memorize Bible verses and recite them before getting in line for my meals.

In my book, if you f*ck with someone’s food, then it’s brainwashing.

I did enjoy canoing there though—when the counselors left me alone. Usually, though, they decided that this introvert spent too much time alone and so called me in off the lake and made me join in a variation of kickball/dodge ball that involved us kids pushing a ball that was bigger than all of us combined up and down a fresh-mown field.

Idleness is the Devil’s workshop, I reckon, so canoeing instead of playing with big balls must have put my soul at risk of eternal damnation. Or something.

(Just an aside but wouldn’t you think that someone who places a bumpersticker of the American flag announcing These Colors Don’t Run on his truck would replace the dumb thing when it fades to almost white?)

•

My friend gave me a copy of her spiritual autobiography yesterday. She grew up attending a Seventh Day Adventist church—“the cult” is what she calls it—and first encountered television and films as an adult. She can’t watch either though because the violence is too real and the stories make her lose her faith in the goodness of people.

This fascinates me.

She wrote this last week:

You aren't afraid to go anywhere, are you? I just managed to make it through [my blog entry] SITUATIONAL ETHICS. You grapple with things I can't even get close to without nearly dropping off some inner edge. The first time I heard about snuff stuff, I threw up, and couldn't sleep for days without waking up screaming. How can you ponder these things, and then go about your daily routine? ... I wish I had not read that entry! Please remind me again that the vast majority people are not out to damage other people.

Um, okay. The vast majority of people are not out to damage other people. There’s no tangible evidence that anyone has ever made a snuff film. And, when you think about it, we mostly find a way to love extravagantly despite it all.

I wrote a short story and painted a disturbing, multilayered torture painting that Mud dubbed “The Angry Painting” in an effort to get the snapshots I talk about in that entry out of my head. I wouldn’t say that I ponder atrocities and then just go about my normal routine though.

We carry all that shit around with us like luggage (note absence of baggage here), I reckon, just as my body carries around every punch my father ever delivered and all the terror I felt as a child, and so it stays tensed and ready to bolt even now if I’m not paying attention.

But my body also carries around healing caresses, the comfort I feel falling asleep as my lover kisses my eyelashes, a snapshot of my little brother at age 4 holding out his grubby little hand and saying “I Made You a (dirty) cinnamon toast ball,” and so many acts of kindness, and passion and love and unsolicited generosity. So there is some balance, I reckon, if we’re fortunate.

I don’t think my friend could read JM Coetzee’s Waiting For The Barbarians, but his main character asks similar questions.

This pal has lost faith in humanity because a patient told her horrible abuse stories last week, in which a father anked his daughter out of bed and held her underwater till she thought she would die every time she peed in bed. This has made her lose faith in our goodness. Again.

I’ve been pondering what poems to send her way.

I'd send Vassar Miller’s sonnet “Without Ceremony” to myself, but am not sure it would comfort her. The final stanza of Frank O’Hara’s “Steps” would comfort me too:

oh god it’s wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much

but I believe I will send her Kathleen Lake’s “In The Absence,” Mary Oliver’s “Morning Poem” and “Poppies,” and Wendell Berry’s “Work Song. Part 2, A Vision: The Wisdom to Survive,” which seems like the perfect poem for her.

79. WILLFUL IGNORANCE

From the Archives

(April 2005) SC voters will soon decide whether their state constitution should be amended to ban same-sex marriages. I grew up in the deep south, completed undergrad studies there, and can already tell you that their answer will be yes.

Sadly, I also know that many of the southerners in my extended family would vote to legalize this selective bigotry.

And speaking of the humid Carolinas, someone just emailed me to say that notorious homophobe Fred Phelps and his clan plan to protest a high school production of The Laramie Project near Duke University. This play is about the afteraffects of the savage death of Matthew Shepard, the twenty-one-year-old gay man who had recently moved to Laramie from nearby Chapel Hill, NC.

Phelps is the asshole who held up “God Hates Fags” signs at Shepard’s funeral and shouted to his mourning parents that their son was in Hell where he belongs.

(Cruel. And to do so in the name of Jesus! These homophobes have no decency and it is so deeply offensive that they couch their hatred in Jesus’s name.)

Phelps et al. show up in DC too, where their seething hatred is a sight to behold.

How will Dukies react to this show of hate? I'd like to think that kids in the art department will make paper-maché Jesuses with their arms around a gay couple and holding big “Hate Is Not A Family Value” signs. Or maybe Jesus can wear Reeses shirts and their placard can read “Look. They put their hatred on my Jesus” or something.

What rocks did these hate-filled people crawl out from under?