Whoa...did you see that Sea part?
There’s no getting around it: the American South is it’s own place.
Arriving in Colorado or even Northern New Mexico, you are face to face with Tesuque mysticism, with fragrant high desert pignoli and sage and Chaco.
Venture north of Connecticut, which seems to have become just a 200 square mile suburb, and Yankee thrift still eludes; that is until the Isle of Shoals reminds you how fierce one had to be to make a go of it on Appledore, Star, and Smuttynose.
Deep into shrimping waters in and around Grande Isle, Louisiana – well, now or soon to be Valdez waters (or dead shimpin’ waters as the case may be with 42,000 gallons of crude/minute rushing towards what’s left of egret, panther (oops they’re already gone), and pelican breeding grounds) with the thermostat way up thanks to the O and G sychophants – the pace is all langour, the conceit all fertility, the fertility all peat, the time all mossy warmth, and the hue all pink sunlight.
In these places the land and culture seem to have struck a bargain.
In Boothbay Harbor it can seem as if weathered gray lobster traps are actually cultivars from special crustacean orchards around Damariscotta, they are so organically derivative of coastal topography. Yeats’ silver moons offset Maine blueberries, and a sort of downeast version of a Welsh hedgerow economy has managed to hold fast and trim.
But in the American South it’s different.
Mysticism and land and humus have given way to giant four story metal crosses along the highways that compete against fireworks and tobacco sell-job billboards for real estate on cattle farms that will soon just be roadside truck stops. Which is to say places for wizened men in their Hemi Rams to get cigarettes, and too many calloused, metastasized women to pump gas into their Sunbirds. Which is to say places that have forgotten about the land, and where into such forgetfulness has arrived more (and much less) myth than magic, and a kind of gaunt pre-Prague Spring laughter.
Somewhere along the line the Ocoee became the Cahulawassee which was stolen by North Atlanta housing developers financed by Bank of America’s pink white men and their paunches and John Deere-Chemlawn saturdays.
At least they got their Piggly Wiggly! But I swear if I see one more poor community in a America with five churches and no fresh vegetables, with lots of cigarettes, and no jobs except selling Marlboros at the Pilot, I am just going to cry.
Except that you can’t. Cry, that is. You have to swing at the pitch that’s coming.
Because if you really think about it, it’s a kind of comeuppance.
Of the morally bereft form of capitalism our Newts in Georgia and Rubins in New York helped craft.
Of the value-less extraction economy the so-called greatest generation gave us (see Love Canal, Ohio River, Santa Barbara, Valdez, the Gulf…)
In this American South, we have become the Cherokee. Only it’s we, ourselves who are forcibly removing our children from the land. To say nothing of dwindling p0pulations of tree frogs.
Leavers or takers. Indeed.
What has happened to so much of the American South is that it has seemingly moved away from the land in a kind of biblical assault on nature. As if it’s not a beautiful enough of a place all by itself to bring tears to your eyes that we have to put a cross on top of it like a dog marking territory.
Prolly just as well since dogs are everywhere in the south, anyway; loose and unclaimed whose sole purpose seems to be to wander highways and back roads alike until they become flattened Cohutta Beagles.
Funny thing is, throughout Eastern Tennessee, North Georgia, and Western NC – if this past week is any indication of the norm, two things above all stand out.
First, everyone was nice and smart and genuine. Second, there’s wasn’t a confederate flag to be seen. And when lost, people offered sincere and sincerely friendly directions. When not lost, people offered sincerity and kindness.
Yet in Western NY, a full 250 miles north of the Mason-Dixon Line, confederate flags are omnipresent. Get lost and people tell you to get lost.
