Did you reach an age as a child or a teen when suddenly you saw that whatever you had top of mind, it would multiply and stand out from the mass of other things around you like a colored object on a black-and-white print?
I’m thinking back to a 1980s beach vacation when ‘travel bingo’ (another silo!; another barn!; bingo!) and Mazda Miata sightings passed the long hours in the back of my Dad’s Chevy Suburban.
Patterning is core to the human experience. It’s also how we filter the modern media maelstrom. And so perhaps it’s not surprising that one of the things I pattern most is any reference to the state I grew up in – North Carolina.
Here’s a story about a mountain church evicting half its congregants for refusing to vote a certain way. Here’s another about a business that fired a good employee because she was ‘living in sin’ with a man. Here’s a man walking down Picadilly with a Tarheels baseball cap on.
Of course, I collect these sightings because now that I live in a whole other country they seem rather rare. In-state references are simply ‘the news’; and rather boring news at that. Which was how I came to purchase the New York Times while on vacation just over the border in South Carolina last week, only to find three North Carolina references on one page. There is no escape from one’s obsessions.
Each time I return home to the U.S., after almost a decade abroad, I feel a little more like a foreigner here. I stand bemused before restaurant cashiers, unsure of the protocol. I forget to say ‘to-may-to’ and have to repeat my order.
On the other hand, with the sense foreignness comes an enlightened journey; the opportunity to see the place both in light of personal history and impersonal detachment. Perhaps as an insider I would not have made a mental note of the following (rather bizarre, even when understood within the local context of immigrant labor and upward mobility) conversation between two ageing men in a rural North Carolina churchyard:
Robert, I hear you’re having a hard time finding you a Mexican.
I sure am.
They’re hard to get these days. Used to be you could go up here to the crossroads and pick one or two of them up any time you wanted. Anymore, you can’t even find any in Winston.
Or made a mental snapshot of the roadside billboard for a Cherry Grove, SC, grocery and hardware store that said, As locally owned and operated as the deer you’re about to hunt.
Within the United States, people’s emotional attachment to their home state is often as great or greater than their patriotism as Americans. That’s especially true in the South, and I grew up with a conviction – almost a religious persuasion – that North Carolina was the best of all the states.
I was far from alone in that. A few years ago I overheard a 20-something who had never seen another coast declare the sunrise over Wrightsville Beach ‘the most beautiful sunrise in the world.’ Willie, who knows the fierce orange and purple skies of Cape Town and Namibia, held his tongue.
As I flew west towards the California coast last week, over snaking bayou rivers (a gauze of protective cloud cover blocked the wounded landscapes of the Gulf Coast and New Orleans from our voyeuristic peering), dessert spikes, crimpled, barren hills and dozens of other marvellous topographies that I’d have needed a different lifetime’s experience to understand. I saw at once that the word ‘majestic’ could never be used in conjunction with the South -- or England for that matter.
Soon the plane would land in San Francisco, another America, a refreshing change to the friendly but Fox-itized culture on the other coast.
We checked into our rented Noe Valley apartment – so far, so California – opened the kitchen cabinets; there on the shelf, surrounded by nondescript glasses and mugs stood a Lighthouses of North Carolina coffee cup. One more sighting for the invisible album.
