A good friend of mine just completed a road trip of a lifetime.
With no real itinerary, he wandered south by southwest, eventually ending up staying with a friend in Arizona for a few weeks. He briefly drove out to California, and finally wandered his way home, staying at cheap motels, eating at local restaurants, following strange roads to out-of-the-way places, and generally having a grand adventure. All in all, he had a wonderful time.
He said he may well move out to Arizona one day, if he doesn’t decide to go to one of the other states that called to him.
Another friend has had it with our current governor, the influx of misbehaving Yankees and a number of other issues as persistent as bedbugs. She is making firm plans to move her entire family out of North Carolina, whilst saying good riddance.
Yet another friend enjoys traveling here, there and everywhere. She, too, keeps threatening to uproot and replant in another state.
Me? I can’t conceive of living anywhere else.
I wasn’t born in Southeastern North Carolina, but far up in the northern Piedmont. One could argue I wasn’t technically raised here either, since I did grow up on the fall line of the Cape Fear, but I would counter that I have never really known anything but tall pines and brown water, even when the soil shifted from sugar sand to loam to clay. The line between Southeast and Central was no farther than a pine cone’s throw from our back door.
I’m kind of embarrassed that I’m well passed a half-century and haven’t traveled more, but like I always say, somebody has to feed the animals and somebody has to work. I enjoyed visiting Virginia and Washington City with my parents when I was a little kid, but I missed home. My one trip to New Orleans was non-recreational. A trip to Iowa was business, and odd business at that. I never really saw anything in Florida on my few trips down there that tripped my trigger.
I did enjoy my first earthquake in the North Carolina mountains, but I would have enjoyed it better had not the first cup of coffee for the day gently trembled off the hood of the truck. I spent a little job-related time in a pleasant Mississippi River town in Iowa. Living history took me throughout Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware and South Carolina, but I was always ready to go home.
I’m not going to criticize my friends who enjoy traveling, or those who might even consider relocating. I just have no particular desire to leave home, and I don’t necessarily mean our place in the woods.
I am sure there are cathedral-like long leaf pine forests elsewhere, but I know and love the woods in three or four counties. A trapper friend in western Louisiana assures me the water there is also brown from cypress sap, and that the snakes, gators and other things are even bigger, but they wouldn’t be the same as the swamps I know and love. Another friend regularly asks me to come a bit further west, where we can ride horses for days, trap coyotes and even cougars, and watch the tall grass dance in the wind for days.
I have a friend planning to move to the mountains of Tennessee as fast as he can. Having seen the sunrise paint Monticello, watched a tornado walk down the east-facing wall of the Shenandoah Valley, and spent the night on what was marketed as one of the highest picnic tables east of the Rocky Mountains, I agree that there is beauty in the mountains. It’s just not the same as rounding a corner in a Carolina cornfield at dawn as the sun breaks loose and turns everything from blue-black to gold, with a silver layer of frost.
I miss the way things used to be in my territory, when Robert Williamson shared watermelon and talked about trees he wanted “to put an axe into”. I miss being able to drift along down U.S. 17 in light traffic — even on a summer Friday – and roll up in Hugh Howard’s front yard in Hampstead, where we talked about spots and Spanish and blues while his fingers and toes deftly wove a net. I miss talking about old farm equipment with Ralph McGill.
I miss when you could drive across Wilmington from the Cape Fear River to the beaches in an hour or less. Fayetteville might take two.
I miss the stores that were run by generations of families, or a semi-philanthropical entrepreneur who didn’t want his neighbors to have to drive 20 miles for a bottle of milk. Most of the stores have closed due to flood or fire or Walmart, although some have survived and been made over in the wake of changing times. Some have been bulldozed and erased, replaced by the ubiquitous Dollar General stores that I am sure will someday sprout on Mars.
Although I miss how many things were, I still love the things that remain, and I can dodge many of the changes I don’t like. I rarely have a need to go to the city, so I avoid most of the problems that come from cheek-by-jowl traffic of people convincing themselves that they are happy.
Not that long ago, a semi-serious offer of a job came with the requirement to move to a place that was like where we live now, but with mountains and snow. Much as I love snow, the casual mention of moving to the mountains never really made it on the radar screen. I ain’t lost nothing out there.
I am sure there are other places where the otters bark and the gators bellow, where foxes yap shrill in the night, owls mourn in congress and deer snort and bears grumble.
But they aren’t my place.
I never want to leave Southeastern North Carolina; and yes, I learned a long time ago to never say never. My folks had no ideas about leaving the Northern Neck of Virginia when they first met. They surely had no idea that their son would never know the red clay river country they called home back then. I reckon things could happen that would send me off somewhere else, since God’s ways are not our ways, but I can’t really see it happening.
Changes and all, good and bad, right and wrong, the lower righthand corner of North Carolina is my home. Lord willing, it will stay that way.
