March 24, 2005
Virginia, just the bottom edge of it heading back to Chapel Hill
6:45pm on a small road, our favorite kind, the kind that make America so kind, toward Mt. Airy, Maundy Thursday, Spring making long and lingering of the light, still blue and suffused through these easy rolling Appalachians as if it mighten’d get dark at all. A young white calf breaks into a run towards its mother, that stiff high assing cow’s canter.
From Floyd in the last of the cool and butter warmed sun before the sun goes lower in the fine haired trees like the trees that you might find in Robert Penn Warren’s mind when he conjures up Cass Mastern’s time beneath them, quietly at his journals at night after war “by the dying campfire in some bivouac while the forms of men lay stretched on the ground in the night around and the night was filled with a slow, sad, susurrous rustle, like the wind fingering the pines, which was not, however, the sound of wind in the pines but the breath of thousands of sleeping men.” And we follow along through all these trees southward toward the N. Carolina boarder where instantly things want to be farmed and pushed down flatter and then at a bend you come across the most impossible lawn ornament acre, a sloping hillside parcel rising up to the horizon and the trees with gray sculptures waiting for homes and finishing. You can buy any genus of creature from griffin to gargoyle to mermaid birdbath or even a life-sized baby elephant; and if you accord the vendors any influence over’n yer aesthetic you’d paint that big mother pink. And as we descend through this flattening canyon toward Flat Rock there must be something to the rock in the soil here – everywhere, different species of rock, like India with its regional cows and sanctities – because, though none as fantastic and choked as that high country plantation of lawn fancy, there seem to be more of these types of awkward and front yard littering cottage industries using the goods of the earth for their kitsch quaint wares. And why not? It’s more and more like the Far East here with its homey and regional redundancy of commerce, whole villages given over to batiking…. Only there is a massive dearth of cottages here. Mostly it’s box homes with siding, and oftener an old beautiful place that’s crumbling to sod while a single-wide sits idylly by as the frontage anchor to a vortex of all life’s broken litter, just trash strewn everywhere in the post plastic era when the effluents will outlast the cultures that spat them out. The funny thing about all the pottery-esque lawn decoratives is that there are none to be found on any of the lawns of any of the homes anywhere for miles. How, in this regard, do they know any better?
Then just as the dark completely falls it’s Mt. Airy, the mythical Mayberry. Andy Griffith has a playhouse here, a parkway, several waterworks and an electric utility. It is in actuality the place where all things come to be reborn after death. Wherever they may die, they have hope of resurrection here in one of the two thousand thrift shops in the town of 500 people. Ilse and I make a pact to come back the two hours on the 52 some time soon for treasure hunting.
