Following a four hour drive, two trips to the grocery store, one view of the mountains, a headache, and a tour of UNC Asheville, was when I began to think.
On the road I saw a sign for Dollywood that did all it could but nothing to melt the wind from the confederate flag on the left of I-40, which only really did remind me that we were driving west in the South where “Jesus Saves” is a highway sign, heat is meant to feel hotter and to see things correctly you almost have to squint.
My memory and my experience of the South, in which case I am speaking of the rural South, is a South where every other house has a “Thank you Jesus’’ sign and political ads have assault rifles.
This South was an experience of squinting and seeing and feeling mostly the periphery of things.
To love my North Carolina, especially on the drive from Hwy 64 to 421 to Asheville, and to love it from my view from the car window but not the view of the hog farms and the Tyson chickens, is to love the periphery of things.
The periphery, being the sting of hot sand and the slap of the ocean but not the Yacht club. Walking the trails to be stung by hornets and a view but not the Cherokee casino and the sunset over the field to my left that was once a tobacco farm.
You see, what I mean to mention is the knife behind this history. You cannot exist down here without finding yourself at a moral crossroads between a church and a confederate flag. The mere existence of a place and its unfolding life of sin.
It has become a time where I cannot appreciate an American flag, or red, white and blue because each would sooner mean “Guns, germs and steel” than freedom.
And until new memory cradles the old and we stop searching for a way out using ignorance, things feel a little less beautiful here.
However, what I know is that I find comfort in the familiar sound of the cicadas swapping space in the air of humidity on a summer evening. There is much I appreciate about this familiar. It’s the roads I never had to learn but just came to know, all before I knew a place could teach me something about myself by the way my skin felt on a summer night on the deck in the trees and the air felt like it knew me as I knew it.
In the South, there are in fact trees with leaves and tall grass that grows in the spring to become a brittle yellow by winter and animals that do actually live in these hills. Sometimes, people remember that these mountains can be just as rocky and steep and that lightning is often caused by heat. And evenings in Southern earthen language are the dissipation of heat into stale quiet thought and breathable air.
The mountains, as much as they are Southern, blessed, Blue Ridge, can still kill a wandering boy scout with the surprise of a cliffside and can be just as rugged of a hike.
Driving through these mountains, we stopped at a country store, called “Country Store” next to the Pisgah Inn. It was the sort of place that when you walked in you could already smell across to the corner of the room.
But, something about grabbing the handle of the pale blue wood door for a moment- — the year could have been 1940 and the Blue Ridge Parkway was brand new and the creak and slap of the door was all the same. And if you turned you felt the same wind coming from Mt. Pisgah and beyond as it was then, and through the mountains you can feel, may it be, the intense appreciation for the trees you have never seen and the people you have never met.
