woobiquity

cxxvii. Of forests that aren't what they were

A hollow log in the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest, in the Nantahala National Forest in North Carolina, today. The Joyce Kilmer is one of the last patches of virgin forest left in the eastern United States. (You may not realize it but almost every inch of woodland on the eastern seaboard has been violated.) So the giant poplars there are very rare and innocent indeed.

You may wonder why there's a piece of sawn-off log like this in a virgin forest. The answer is that trees that fall across walking trails in the forest are cut up and shifted to a less inconvenient position. But no motor-powered equipment, including chainsaws, is allowed, so the sawing is all done by hand. Those must be some kind of lumberjacks.

ccxxvi. Of remote lodges that are worth the trip

Imagine it’s the late 1930s and while much of the world is jittery from war you’re fixated on a more constructive pursuit – literally constructive. You’ve hiked, traipsed and waded across a deep part of the lower Appalachian Mountains, searching for the perfect place to build a luxury retreat.

Most of the country people in the area close their doors to you, “furriner” from Chicago that you are, but one local man offers to show you a potential property. Getting there isn’t easy, but when you do the view of the Snowbird Mountain range (unfurling like a theatre backdrop) is so astonishing that you know at once you have found the spot.

Getting from imagination to paper to structure takes two years. Roads must be built to transport supplies to the site (when you’re done the lodge will have a 16-mile gravel driveway). The trees that come down to make room for a building are sent to a mill to be cut then returned to be installed as paneling in the bedrooms. A Chicago designer works with two local craftsmen, brothers, to create Bauhaus-influenced furniture from rugged local materials at a time when Bauhaus is in full swing both in Chicago and at Black Mountain College, two hours east. A chef is hired. And the building that takes shape owes its soul to the view.

Now imagine you’re you, that the time and year are now and that you’re sitting in the swing – the original swing – of that same remote lodge. That the sun is rising over the mountains, slowly lifting some clouds that have snuggled there overnight. Tiny hummingbirds motor past, almost rearranging your hair with the wind from their wings. A foraging chipmunk scoots between your feet, then back again with its cheeks filled to the size of its body. Doves land nearby. You feel peace.

Where are you? Here.

Coincidentally, this is also a great place to begin a long road trip across the southern and southwestern United States. Except, of course, for the temptation to go nowhere.

ccxxv. Of twigs, branches and gourds

Detail of a sculpture outside the Hanes Art Center on the Chapel Hill, NC, campus, last week. Am I alone in seeing a puppy dog sniffing a curious object? Probably so.

cxxiv. Of reasons not to wait

Near Beaufort, NC, Friday. What are you waiting for?

cxxiii. Of reasons to go marsh kayaking

In the marshes of Back Sound this afternoon. Want to take the same excursion? Captain Chadwick will be happy to help.

cxxii. Of flying turtles in the back yard

Harkers Island, Saturday. Hand model: Wilhelm. Turtle: Eastern Box.

cxxi. Esse Quam Videri

To be rather than to seem? That is the answer to a question raised in a Raleigh News & Observer feature for and about newcomers to North Carolina. It’s also the state’s motto.

“I expected a Southern state to be loaded with charm and character and traditions, but it seems like North Carolina is still trying to scratch out some type of personality for itself. I realize it was a poor state, and that is part of the reason the traditions are not grand, but now that its fortunes have turned, I hope the old-timers can get together and better introduce and reinforce the customs of the state.” – Kathryn Estrada, homemaker, 40ish, Raleigh

Okay, so she phrased it as a statement. But North Carolina trying to scratch out some type of personality for itself? As a lapsed North Carolinian myself, I’ll admit that my gut reaction wasn’t hospitable, though I wouldn’t have gone so far as to have the sentiment stenciled onto the back of my vehicle like the owner of a pick-up truck I saw in Morehead City last week. (“Welcome to Carteret County,” it said. “Now leave.”)

Lady, have you been driving up and down Capital Boulevard since you arrived, looking at the strip-mined chainscape and thinking “Gee, Raleigh looks just like everywhere else” or what?

Touchy, I know. Thus I consult the wisdom that adorns The Great Seal of the State of North Carolina. (Note that it’s the seal, not the state, that’s proclaimed ‘great’.) To be rather than to seem. There you have it – from the mind of Cicero to you, via the NC General Assembly - an official and collective renouncement of showiness, a pledge to humility and an almost transcendental appreciation of all that is genuine or earned. So don’t come to North Carolina expecting high-swinging Dixie belles to descend from the ceiling with fairy lights in their hoop skirts. For that you’ll have to go to South Carolina.

Trailer park? At the Sneads Ferry Shrimp Festival. Okay, I'll admit this doesn't look good, but I can explain!

But don’t mistake the lack of spectacle for cultural extinction. It’s just that the charms you should look for here were never the kind with bells and whistles. Some barely still exist, like the ghost village on Portsmouth Island or the old fish camps and turkey shoots, but that doesn’t mean they are forsaken.

No character/s? Allow me to introduce you to my grandfather. And don’t even get me started on grandmothers. Mine would have taken that ‘poor’ remark, thrown in some wild dewberries and cooked up something that would win at the county fair “…again.” Personally I might refer you to the mansion-lined waterfronts at Wilmington, New Bern, Beaufort and Edenton, then to the bunch of eccentrics, coots, war heroes, daughers of traveling salesmen and keepers of the Southern flame who live in them (artistic license notwithstanding). Then again, you’d do just as well or better to go from ramshackle house to fisherman’s cottage on Harkers Island. The experience would be just as rich – providing, of course, that you didn’t get shot for trespassing (just kidding).

As Bill Friday, former UNC president and genial host of the PBS show North Carolina People, said in the N&O, “I don’t know a North Carolinian who doesn’t have a story, if you’ll listen.” That reads like a platitude at first, but read it again. Cicero couldn't have said it better. If he'd... ever been to North Carolina. Humble, yes. But dull? Never.

Or watch Junebug. See how at the film’s turning point Chicago-based gallery owner Madeleine fiddles nervously in her purse while the woman from across the street stands smiling, deeply satisfied, after they’ve both watched the car leave for the maternity ward? "Nobody ever taught her how to do," Madeleine's protective mother-in-law later complains, but in this scene we see that she hasn’t learned how to be.

Or read The Oxford American. There’s no better barometer of the South’s weird and wonderful cultures, and North Carolina authors, folk artists, restaurants, quirks and characters almost always feature prominently. Currently The Crab Shack at Salter Path comes in for high praise among other odes to the best of the South.

Go to The Crab Shack. At a glance, the place doesn’t look like much. The menu is simple. The lighting’s too bright, the air conditioning too cool, and the opportunity for premium dining on the waterfront porch ‘neath big letters spelling ‘R-E-S-T-U-R-A-N-T’ [sic] sadly overlooked. But people, locals and tourists both, line up for an hour to get in, and when the waitress puts down your plate of pan-fried local Mahi she says, “Looks good, doesn’t it.” I won’t start describing the hush puppies because I want to be able to see to finish writing this. Suffice it to say that when you partake of these particular foods in this particular place, where there's been a restaurant since the late 1800s, you dive into a cultural and culinary past so tasty and true that you won’t need William Faulkner to tell you it isn’t really past.

Or go to the Sneads Ferry Shrimp Festival. I was there yesterday, and yes the parade floats were a little barren, and two U.S. Marine tanks joined the sideline entertainment, and the tattered tents next to the stage looked like they predated the original 1971 festival by a few years, and the ice cream stand sported a large, vinyl ‘John 3:16’ flag.

In the cordoned-off beer and wine tent. They do it that way so all the real characters can find each other.

But everything about the occasion was true to the village’s traditions, and there were three, yes, three beauty queens in attendance – Miss Shrimp Queen, Junior Miss Shrimp Queen and Little Miss Shrimp Queen, the middle of whom I noticed had to wait in the line for shrimp service with the rest of us, crown or no crown, beneath the faded photographs of her predecessors dating back to the bouffant.

“In my time as Junior Miss,” her counterpart from last year’s festival wrote in the free program, “I have learned that if you ever feel like you have no clue what is going on around you, just give everyone a winning smile that says, 'I was meant to do this, this defines me. I don’t have to know anything else except that this is me.'” (Is it mean to report that in her photo the winning smile is covered in braces, or does that show a savvy for taking a strategy to its logical end?) It's not Esse Quam Videri to the letter, but it's certainly a story.

So come on down, up or over to North Carolina and spend some time looking and listening. If one hot July day you should walk into a produce shop in downtown Raleigh, where some old women are shelling crowder peas under a lazy ceiling fan and the field-grown tomatoes look as precious as jewels, and you feel, when the tanned and dignified-looking woman on the platform drawls “Would y’all like a bag?”, like you’ve just transcended this world, why, then you’ll know you’ve understood what in North Carolina it means to be.

And if none of that does it for you, I’m afraid the best I can offer you is a quote from the outgoing Miss Shrimp Queen, who caps her valedictory note about “wonderful memories and fabulous times from the moment we were crowned, to our television appearances” this way: “My last words as your 2005-2006 Miss Shrimp Queen is, ‘Thank you and Goodbye.’”

cxx. Of apocalyptic caravans on a stormy night

On the Ocracoke to Cedar Island ferry yesterday evening.

The storm clouds, with their electrifying show in the distance, forced an early dark. No daylight remained by 8.15pm as each of the 40 or so cars banged the metal ramp to announce its return to dry land.

But the land wasn't long dry, and the vehicles that had been penned in together for hours wouldn't soon go their separate ways. The rains we entered didn't fall, they swept with the industrial fury of an automatic car wash, suppressing our obedient column of blurry brake lights to a funeral crawl. Anyone sane would have pulled over, but with marsh water lapping the sides of the man-made road no one could. We had driven into the dark side of a natural habitat and nature was doing its thing regardless of the paying guests.

The tempest intensified, sucking bracken waters up from their beds. Fistfuls of swamp grass blew past, chunks of asphalt, a few peeved looking crabs, whole schools of fish, a featherless gull with its wings crossed to protect its innocence. Scores of frogs risked death by car tire and fled. Ancient cedar trees uprooted and speared the mushy earth in new formations while the sky lit up in a slow-motion slide show of brutal white until that whiteness was all that remained of the earth.

Strangely, the rental car doesn't have a scratch on it this morning. But boy is it clean.