Blue Highways: Greenville, North Carolina

Click on Thumbnail for MapUnfolding the Map

William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) drops in on Greenville, North Carolina and reflects on weather and what he must listen to in order to get a shower.  I won't say that we will shower with him, but we will reflect on weather and on religion.  To see where we are, click on the map.  Comments always welcome and encouraged.

Book Quote

"At Greenville, I stopped for the night on the campus of East Carolina University.  Out of the west, with suddenness, a nimbo-stratus cloudbank like a precipice obscured the sun, and a ferocious wind pulled the fine sandy soil into a corrosive blast.  Then the wind ceased, raindrops pelted the sand back into place, the temperature dropped from eighty degrees to sixty-five, the clouds blew on toward the sea, and the low sun shone again.  The whole demonstration lasted twenty minutes.

"That evening, I bought a hot shower in a dormitory.  It cost a dollar contribution and a thirty-minute I FOUND IT bumper-sticker talk intended to drive the infidel from my red heart and bring me safely unto the Great White Bosom.  Take the land, take the old ways, Christian soldiers, but please, goddamnit, leave me my soul."

Blue Highways: Part 2, Chapter 5

Downtown Greenville, North Carolina in sunny times

Greenville, North Carolina

Weather and religion subtly and forcefully influence how we look at life, and their effects on us sometimes aren't too far apart, in my experience.  For example, I wake up in the morning and look outside.  If the sky is blue and the day is temperate, it immediately affects my mood and I make choices based on what I might be able to do.  I can ride my bike to work instead of taking the car.  I might schedule more outdoor activities for myself.  If it's a work day, I can eat my lunch outside.  If not, my activities on my day off can be focused more on the outdoors.  A sunny day can certainly affect my mood as well.  Usually I will feel more buoyant and alive. 

But if the day is dark and stormy, or even overcast, my mood will be much different.  I might be put in a more reflective mood, or perhaps even if I am in some kind of emotional distress or despair, the weather can amplify my feelings.  Activities might be confined indoors.

Religion can leave me with similar feelings and reflections.  I am nominally a Catholic, though I am pretty open to all religious views (except maybe for the ones that try to make me out to be somehow misguided or even evil because I don't accept their particular narrow focus).  There are days when I feel that my individual spirituality is a great boon and support in my life.  The effects on me can be pretty noticeable, especially on my mood and on my outlook for myself and how I feel about those arouund me.

There are times, however, when I can feel that my religion and spirituality isn't helping me at all.  This is usually when I'm hurting for some reason.  I might wish that there was something or someone out there that would hear and see my pain and ease my troubles, but nothing happens and I continue to hurt.  I might question whether it is any use to even be religious.

I find that weather and religion can be very similar in that when times are good, and days are sunny, we take it for granted.  We don't think about the possibility that we might eventually hurt or that the clouds, wind and rain will roll in because we want to live in the moment and enjoy our blue skies and the peacefulness we feel in our hearts.

I'm focusing on these two things because LHM touches on both of these phenomenon in his back-to-back paragraphs set in Greenville.  He highlights how a storm roars through, blocking the sun and dropping rain along with the temperature.  Eventually the storm passes, and the sun shines again.  He then must endure a 30 minute talk on faith in order to get a shower.  I have to think that he intentionally placed these two passages about a storm and his experience together, but maybe not.

Once, when I lived in Milwaukee, I watched a sunny day with 80 degree weather turn into a cloudy, windy 40 degree day with snowflakes dotting the air, all in the space of 30 minutes.  The violence of the atmospheric turmoil that turned such a nice day into something so different made a huge impression on me.  Similarly, while driving up to Colorado from New Mexico, my wife and I passed beneath a storm front.  A huge wall of clouds loomed ahead of us, and it almost seemed like the "mother ship" from a different planet, sort of like those huge ships that hovered over major cities in Independence Day, had appeared to wreak devastation and destruction in the form of highly torrential rains.  We moved from New Orleans a year before Katrina hit, but hurricanes are the most bizarre form of violent weather I have ever seen.  One knows that the hurricane is out there, ready to slam ashore and wreak violence, yet while skies are blue and the wind is calm the radio and television are urging people to get out.  It's almost hard to be serious about it when the weather is so nice, even if the hurricane is only a day away.

Religion can also be violent and stormy.  In the U.S., we are currently in a great debate about religion, particularly Christianity, and its proper place in American society.  Is it pre-eminent, or one religion among many in a diverse country?  The debate has been particularly stormy, as thundering commentators send barbs at each other like lightning through the media.  While some, myself included, think that religion is a private matter that we can indulge in public with our particular religious communities, what you worship and how you worship has become a huge public debate.  Lately, the storm is over the proposed site of an Islamic community center in Manhattan. 

Of course, a great number of people have died fighting for, or defending, their religion and their beliefs.  Like the weather, religious and anti-religious sentiment can get whipped up and move through the landscape, and people can die just as in the aftermath of a particularly violent hurricane or a powerful tornado.  In my experience, I saw such stormy religious sentiment in Northern Ireland, when the Protestant Orangemen of Portadown and Belfast marched toward police and army barriers protecting the (nominally) Catholic areas.  The clash between Protestant traditions and Catholic fears and fortitude resembled a thunderstorm, with the Lambegh drums of the Orangemen providing the thunder.

More and more, I hope for calm skies and sunny weather, and peace in my heart and soul.  I want to try to live a life that keeps drama to a minimum, and satisfaction and happiness to a maximum.  If a sunny day will do that for me, I'm all for it.  If I can gather together with friends and acquaintances and enjoy their company and know they enjoy mine, then I don't care what they believe or don't believe.  In my particular religious tradition, acceptance and forgiveness are the tenets that should be followed.  I don't want to create storms, but I do want people, no matter what their religious convictions, to help me weather any that come my way.

If you want to know more about Greenville

Blog Greenville
City of Greenville
The Daily Reflector (newspaper)
Dine Greenville
East Carolina University
The East Carolinian (campus newspaper)
Greenville Convention and Visitors Bureau
Greenville Times (newspaper)
Wikipedia: Greenville

Next up: Plymouth, North Carolina

Blue Highways: Dunn, North Carolina

Unfolding the Map

We take a littlClick on Thumbnail for Mape bit of a dark turn in this post, with reflections on death and life.  It's the landscape the William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) is traveling through, and his thoughts are influencing our thoughts and reflections.  To see where we are physically on that landscape, click on the map thumbnail.  If you want to leave a comment or reflection of your own, be sure to click on the "Post a Comment" link at the bottom of this post.

Book Quote

"Highway 421 dropped out of the Piedmont hills onto the broad coastal plain where the pines were taller, the soil tan rather than orange, and black men rode tractors around and around square fields of tobacco and cotton as they plowed wavelets into the earth.  At the center of many fields were small, fenced cemeteries under a big pine.  All day farmers circled the acres, the white tombstones an axis for their planters, while tree roots reached into eye sockets and ribcages in the old boxes below.

"Near Dunn, North Carolina, I pulled up at a cemetery to eat lunch in the warm air.  Last names on the markers were Smith and Barefoot and Bumpass.  All around, the buds, no more than tiny fists, were beginning to break the tight bindings and unclench.  A woman of age and size, her white legs blue-veined like Italian marble columns, stooped to trowel a circle of sprouts growing in the hollow center of a large oak dead from heart rot."

Blue Highways: Part 2, Chapter 5

Downtown Dunn, North Carolina

Dunn, North Carolina

Cemeteries and death seem to be a focus of LHM's thoughts as he drives Ghost Dancing through North Carolina.  He looked for the grave of his ancestor and found the memorial next to a reservoir near Franklinville.  Now he's left with reflective thoughts as he travels through rural farming areas.  When one travels through the countryside, as LHM is doing, it is easy to contemplate death and life and its endless circle.  "Do not go gently into that good night," wrote Dylan Thomas, but the somnabulance of death quietly biding its time among the tobacco fields (themselves eventual purveyors of death) and cotton fields in the midst of winter quiet or summer malaise lies enshrouded in the gentle peacefulness of the rural landscape.  The dead sleep, and we erect memorials to remind us of their endless slumber.  I love the image of the farmers, coaxing new life out of the soil, even amidst the buried remains of men and women who have gone before.

As a young budding poet, I contemplated life and death in one of my first stabs at a sonnet.  I don't promise a work of Shakespearean elegance here, but I am proud that it won me a poetry prize at my university (and $250, a kingly sum in 1986).  I share it with you now not because I think that it will establish me among the great poets (it certainly won't!) and not because I am looking for your accolades, but because LHM's musings remind me of my own.

Gravestones and Grass
by Michael L. Hess 

Some grass grows through the cracks in marble stones,
And reaches toward the setting winter sun,
Against the shafts of tombstones, pale and dun,
That guard the finest men, reduced to bones.
These lonely blades that missed the reaper's eye,
Blaze forth, in midst of death, with marvelous life,
And over the remains of man and wife,
Defy the gloom, and reach out for the sky.
How did such wondrous seed invade this plot
That men established as their monument
To coldness, darkness and mortality?
Perhaps these plants will remain in permanance,
To root in mankind's past, which lies in rot,
And drown all thoughts of grief in greenery.

Other poets and writers have mused more eloquently than I about death and life.  As living beings that have the capacity to reflect and to look ahead, death is omnipresent in our lives.  We die, our friends and loved ones die.  I think that perhaps every day of my life, I am given some reminder of death.  It could be as small as my accidental crushing of a snail on a walk with my dog, to a story in the newspaper, to my mom telling me about an old classmate who has passed on.

But if most of us acknowledge death, we also try very hard to live in spite of it.  Certainly our lives have pain and loss that remind of death, but we live, laugh, love and create joy.  We come together in community around the world, we care enough to participate in politics and help those those who need our help, we gather in nice little towns and communities like Dunn, North Carolina and do our business and raise families.  We do this despite the fact that we will die, our sons and daughters will die, and that our time alive is just a brief flash, like the spark of a lighter in the darkness, in the eons of the existence of the universe.  We accept death as a natural part of the cycle of life, but we get what we can out of living.  "Death is terrifying because it is so ordinary. It happens all the time," wrote author Susan Cheever.  But Native American flautist Robert Cody answers "Have the courage to live.  Anyone can die."

If you want to know more about Dunn

City of Dunn visitor page
Dunn Area Tourism Authority
Dunn Daily Record (newspaper)
Wikipedia: Dunn

Next up: Greenville, North Carolina

Blue Highways: Siler City, North Carolina

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapWilliam Least Heat-Moon (LHM) stops in Siler City on his way to the Carolina coast to load up on supplies.  We go with him, but we're not buying healthy food for ourselves.  Normally I don't put links in the quote, but today I did because a lot of those chewing tobaccos don't exist anymore.  Check out where Siler City is located by clicking on the map.  Or make a comment about your experience with food on the road. 

Book Quote

"...You never feel better than when you start feeling good after you've been feeling bad.  In the truck I laid out a breakfast of bread, cheese, raisins, and tomato juice.

Then to the road.  I bought supplies at Siler City, where the grocery sold twenty-two kinds of chewing tobacco:   Blood Hound, Brown's Mule, Red Coon, Red Horse, Red Fox, Red Juice, Black Maria, Big Man, Cannonball, Bull's Eye ("Hits the Spot"); also fifteen brands of snuff in three sizes, the largest big enough to give the whole county a snort."

Blue Highways: Part 2, Chapter 5

Downtown Siler City, North Carolina

Siler City, North Carolina

Once on a road trip, a group of friends and I tried an experiment.  We had been used to getting road food for our trips.  Road food usually consisted of potato chips, sodas, cookies, salty crackers, peanuts, and lots of candy - everything from chocolate bars to Twizzlers to gum to Good N' Plenty's to Skittles to Spree to SweetTarts.  While driving, we would gorge on these things.  By the time we reached our destination, we felt sluggish and tired.  The air in the car would be stale with the odor of sugar-induced gas.  We usually weren't in much shape to enjoy the place to where we were traveling for that first day or night after we got there.

So we tried an experiment.  We got healthy food for this road trip.  Apples and oranges substituted for the cookies and chips.  Unsalted trail mix substituted for the salty peanuts.  Granola bars substituted for the candy, and fruit drinks and mineral water for the sodas.  While it wasn't completely satisfying like the candy and salty snacks and sodas, we took solace in that we were trying to be healthy.  When we got to our destination, we got out of the car and felt good, even energized!  The car air was fresh because we had no gastro-intestinal problems.  We weren't sluggish from sugar hangovers.  We could actually enjoy where we had gotten to, right from the very start!

It felt so wrong that we went back to our usual road food on the way home.

The convenience stores one encounters on the road just feed this addiction to salt and sugar.  You can't really find anything in them except for candy, chips and sodas.  Nowadays the selections in drinks also include high energy caffeine drinks, various flavored teas with sugars and artificial sweeteners, and of course alcohol which you have to wait to consume when you get home unless you have a serious problem.

The passage above reminded me of our failed attempt to instill healthy practices while traveling.  LHM lays out his breakfast, and how healthy is that?  Bread, cheese, raisins and tomato juice?  Where is the beef jerky at least?  It's too damn healthy.

The convenience stores are also full of other vices - including cigarettes and chewing tobacco.  Not being a chewer or a smoker, I don't usually pay attention to whether they stock up on the chewing tobacco or the types of cigarettes they sell, though I wrote a previous post reflecting on chewing tobacco.  But you have to admire places that twenty-two kinds of anything.  The fact that they stock them must mean that every kind of tobacco has its buyers.  In Siler City, which is tiny, so much chewing tobacco must mean that every single man (and maybe woman and child) did some dipping in the late 70s.

So, the moral of this post, and what I take from LHM's Siler City stop, is that if you go on a road trip, eat the cheesiest, saltiest and most sugary stuff available.  That's one of the guilty pleasures of being on the road.  You can always go back to your angelic self when you're back home.

If you want to know more about Siler City and surroundings

Chatham News (newspaper)
Pittsboro-Siler City Convention and Visitors Bureau
Siler City on Atlantic & Yadkin Railray Historical website
Town of Siler City
Wikipedia: Siler City

Next up: Dunn, North Carolina

Blue Highways: Franklinville, North Carolina

Click on Thumbnail for MapUnfolding the Map

Something spooky in the dark night bringing thoughts of death and demise?  In this post we take a scary walk in the woods with William Least Heat-Moon while he looks for...wait for it...a grave!  If you want to see where this creepy perambulation takes place, click on the map.  And feel free to comment, suggest or otherwise add your thoughts to this and any post you read on this site.  If you like it and want to share it, feel free to add our link to your own site or share us through your favorite social network.

Book Quote

"The smell in the pines was sweet, the spring peepers sang, and the trail over the first hill was easy.  Whippoorwills ceaselessly cut sharp calls against the early dark, and a screech owl shivered the night.  Then the trail disappeared in wiry brush.  I began imagining flared nostrils and eyed, coiled things.  Trying to step over whatever lay waiting, I took longer strides.  Suddenly the woods went silent as if something had muffled it.  I kept thinking about turning back, but the sense that the grave was just over the next hill drew me in deeper.  Springs trickled to the lake and turned bosky coves to mud and filled the air with a rank, pungent odor.  I had to walk around the water, then around the mud - three hundred yards to cross a twenty-foot inlet.  Something heavy and running from me mashed off through the brush.

"When I was a boy, my mother would try to show the reality of danger by making up newspaper headlines that described the outcome of foolhardy activity.  I could hear her:  REMAINS OF LONE HIKER FOUND.  She would give details from the story:  "...only the canteen was not eaten."

Blue Highways: Part 2, Chapter 3

Old mill in Franklinville, North Carolina

Franklinville, North Carolina

Walking through the woods as evening comes in brings up many memories for me.  If you couple it with searching for a grave, well, is it any wonder that LHM started seeing and hearing things in the dark?  While I touched on this a while back, when we were reading about LHM was driving through Tennessee, I would like to explore it some more.

The passage I quote above reminds me of walking in the woods both in my rural home in Northern California and at some property we use for a summer vacation place in a remote valley in the Coast Range about 35 miles from my house.  When I was a teenager one of the main ways I could bond with my father, who otherwise was both an alcoholic AND a workaholic, was by going hunting with him.  Our epic hunts often started about 3 or 4 a.m. and we walked sometimes 15 miles through the hills and mountains looking for a buck with 2 points or more.  Our more sedate hunts often took place in the evenings where we would leave at 3 or 4 p.m. and stay closer to our cabin, arriving back anywhere between 7 and 9 p.m.

I often noticed the difference in the types of darkness that I experienced while on these hunts.  The hunts in the early morning were much less creepy than those in the evening.  I believe it was simply perception and perspective.  In the early morning, the mind is set upon the coming of the new day.  I noticed the sky getting lighter and lighter as we traversed miles.  The darkness was more still, as if at 4 a.m. even the scary things had gone to sleep.  There was almost a magical quality to the air and the light, and as morning came and my eyes slowly adjusted to the increasing light, it seemed like the world was being born anew.  Even things that I saw at other times of the day seemed suffused with a wondrous newness.

In the evening, however, it could be downright scary.  Again, I think perspective played a part.  The light would slowly grow more dim, and as the sun set behind the mountains the shadows got thicker and the air seemed to crowd in closer.  As the light faded, things that were non-threatening during the day suddenly became things to fear.  Is that a bear standing by the side of the trail up ahead?  No, it's a burned out stump that looked like a bear from a distance.  Sounds magnified.  The noise of the evening insects picked up, and would provide some comfort, until all of a sudden they would completely stop and you wondered whether it was you or something else passing that caused them to go silent.  Distances seemed to lengthen, and a stretch of logging road or trail that seemed to pass by at an instant when we started our hunt seemed to take twice as long to traverse coming home.  Sometimes, especially as I got older and went out more often alone, I often would finish my hunts almost at a run, taking solace that there were the railroad tracks and around the next bend was our cabin and a warm fire.

I suppose there were dangers.  Mountain lions could be a menace, and an angry bear would also be a terrible thing to encounter.  But I never encountered either while hunting.  And I never worried about any dangers in the daytime when I was bird-dogging for my dad, high upon the hillside, tramping through the brush.  But at night, beyond the comforting arc of light where darkness got thick, my fears lay out there waiting.  That's all they were, - fears - but they felt real all the same.  LHM added the additional spooky element of looking for a grave, and reading further along this passage, one finds that he relates a murder story involving a young woman accidentally beating her baby to death, and the bloody sheet left hanging on a tree.  I'm sure he was thinking of ghosts and shades of ancestors past that roamed the dark woods.  In any case, his words remind me that most of us share those fears of things in the dark in unfamiliar places.

If you want to know more about Franklinville

There isn't really much to give you.  It's a small place.

Town of Franklinville
Wikipedia: Franklinville

Next up: Siler City, North Carolina

Blue Highways: Ramseur, North Carolina

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapSorry about the long time between posts.  I have been out at a hospital in Sebastopol, California tending to my mother who just had two major back surgeries.  I'm supposed to go back home and get back into my routine on Sunday.  But we can't leave William Least Heat-Moon hanging, so here's a post for you before the weekend.  Comments and suggestions welcome!

Book Quote

"The next morning I headed back toward Asheboro, past the roads to Snow Camp and Silk Hope, over the Haw River, into pine and deciduous hills of red soil, into Randolph County, past crumbling stone milldams, through fields of winter wheat.  Ramseur, a nineteenth-century cotton-mill village secluded in the valley of the Deep River, was the first town in the county I came to."

Blue Highways: Part 2, Chapter 1

Ramseur, North Carolina

Ramseur, North Carolina

Reading this passage, and going a little farther into William Least Heat-Moon's account of finding information about his namesake William Trogdon, a miller and patriot killed by Tories on the shores of Sandy Creek in North Carolina.  He discovers that there is a grave of his ancestor that was flooded when the county built a dam.  However, he learns that there is a monument on the shore of the reservoir.  In Ramseur, a local tells him about a guy who knows the area like the back of his hand, and who can help guide him to the spot.

Finding relatives in the mists of history often depends, to paraphrase Tennessee Williams, on "the kindness of strangers."  You can't be too proud, and you take up anyone who can help you find a lead.

In 2007, such a lead embarked me on a journey to find more about my birth parents.  I was trying to learn more about my adoptive father's father, and stumbled across an amateur genealogist named Ruth.  Ruth had a similar interest in my family because she was related to a half-sibling of my father's mother.  She had collected some information relating to my father's ancestry, and I discovered it online.  I contacted her, and soon she and I began collaborating in a search.  The search yielded much information about my adoptive grandfather and the family he left behind in Ohio.

However, Ruth, whom I have never met in person, also learned that I was adopted and offered me a deal.  She said she could help me find my birth family if I was willing.  I hadn't really considered it seriously before.  California law does not make it easy for adoptees to find their birth parents.  My wife had her doubts.  "What does Ruth want out of this?" she asked.  It turned out Ruth didn't want anything but the thrill of the search and the possibility of helping me find my own ancestry.

In a long story short, Ruth did what she said she would.  Today, I now know who my birth parents were and some of their story.  I have a newly discovered half-brother and half-sister on my birth mother's side. (I also have some half-siblings on my birth father's side, but their story is painful enough that they don't want to know about me.)  I also have cousins on both sides that want to know more about me.  I have been to the family reunion of my birth mother's kin, and I plan to go up to meet my birth father's only surviving brother, perhaps this year.

All of this wouldn't have happened without the assistance of Ruth.  Our online meeting was the equivalence of William Least Heat-Moon stopping in Ramseur and asking for help from a librarian, who directed him to Madge in the dry goods store, who was out of town but whose employee sent Heat-Moon to the Water Commissioner, who told him to go see Noel Jones in Franklinville (our next stop with Heat-Moon).

The kindness of strangers, whether it is in electronic cyberspace or in Ramseur in rural North Carolina, can lead us back to new understandings of ourselves and the history that made us what we are.

If you want to know more about Ramseur

Millstone Creek Orchards
Town of Ramseur
Wikipedia: Ramseur

Next up: Franklinville, North Carolina