Thoughts on North Carolina (and Florida)

I recently spent some “meet the family” time down south with my boyfriend and his parents. They live in North Carolina.

Carolina is a green state, but not so green that it compensates for the sprawl of highways and housing tracts gouged into its surface. Where some places the fingerprints of human progress seem an almost sheepish incursion, North Carolina holds no such self-monitoring inclination. What I see here is more of what I’ve decided to call the “floridization” of American culture. Right or wrong, I take Florida as something of a bellwether for American trend, like California, only more their attention deficit disordered redneck cousin who makes cheap internet porn, wears camouflage recreationally, and doesn’t floss. The state serves as a nexus of eccentric if not bizarre energies that are propelled across the country whenever God wakes up with a hangover, grabs the panhandle, and flips whatever is in the skillet onto the rest of the country’s plate without taking a sober look at what’s cooking.

Case in point: strip malls. My experience of traveling through Florida is peppered by an endless variety of these indictements of sprawl and poor city planning. Clubs, restaurants, coffee shops, business offices, and product vendors of every variety….they all find a home in these ugly beasts that creep from under the ocean and across every mile of Florida’s watery border, groaning across the sand with just enough energy to collapse on the coast, settling close enough to one other to reproduce and slowly spread their mutation deep into the heart of the state, a virus meeting at a dedicated site where they continue to evolve as a species, ascending upward, creating the plastic hell on earth we know of as Orlando. In North Carolina, I had my first experience with what I can only call the next Floridian stage in strip mall evolution. Three times in two days I've traveled deep into the cradle of what I ascertain to be a shopping center complex of endless consumer possibility—a strip mall that has mutated and closed in around itself like a cocoon. Like Conrad drifting into the Congo, I've felt myself go mad. Not from heat or natives, but from an artificial sense of created community, an urban suburb without homes that implies you can turn a corner and visit a friend, yet beyond that corner are only more stores, more services. At the center of it beats a heart of darkness that when faced, looks suspiciously like a Starbucks franchise. I’d bet some developer went to Florida and found this obscenity in Jacksonville and thought it would be a good idea to recreate it in Raleigh. I’m holding to my prejudice until someone tells me different.

Modernization and sprawl takes its toll on every state, but it’s rare I drive through one where I don’t leave it without experiencing that one zen moment, maybe as brief as a single breath, but clarifying in a way that clears the mind to make way for a single ripple of awareness that contextualizes and explains, viscerally, a unique shade of that state’s personality. It could be driving through the winding hills of North Alabama in the early fall, visiting hot springs or counting the endless chicken farms amid the red clay hills of Arkansas, gorging on a cheese steak at a neighborhood dive during a sunny Sunday afternoon in south Philly, staring at a sunset from the ridge of a Shenandoah mountain in Virginia, watching a drag show on a humid summer night in Savannah, or driving through an endless dream of corn fields in central Indiana. For me those moments strip away the assimilation of modernity and leave me with a distinct rhythm, a heartbeat that make intimates of nameless strangers. Maybe it’s just my romantic predilections, but I feel them, and they help me sink into a place, classify it, taste it, appreciate it, and maybe even love it. In North Carolina, I experience no such moment.

When I travel to a state I search for its essence, the thing that makes it fundamentally different and unique from its 49 brothers and sisters. I also try to figure out if they are a brother, or a sister. Gut instinct tells me North Carolina is male. It’s just a feeling. South Carolina seems the more feminine of the two, and not just because North Carolina is on top. One of the two cities in North Carolina that I visited was Raleigh, one of the three cities that make up the research triangle, which is the most progressive area of the state and home to industry lured by the carrot of low tax rates, as well as four grand universities: North Carolina, NC State, Wake Forest, and Duke. The power of industry, elite educational schools, brutal suburbia, as well as the patriarchal old south vibe of downtown Raleigh leaves a decidedly masculine impression of the place. I hear South Carolina, besides its stark poverty, which is all that I’ve experienced of the place, has some very lovely old towns and beaches and is known for its palmettos, which strike me as feminine. However, I could be wrong. I drove through South Carolina once, many years ago, and all I remember are a million signs for South of the Border and an old woman with half rolled panty hose and varicose veins as big as big as catheter tubes who waited tables at the Waffle House where I had breakfast. I’m still depressed about that one.

I eat lunch at an Asian place in old downtown Raleigh. My bf’s sister works there, and she tells our group a story about this guy who’s been playing football in the park across the street for the last year. He’s there for most of the day every day, running around, throwing the ball……to no one. We joke about it, then the guy shows up, so after dinner I walk over and ask him what the deal is. Borderline psychotic eccentricity is expected among the local color of old southern towns, so I don’t feel uncomfortable about investigating. He eyes us suspiciously and tells us that he’s not crazy. He’s a professional fighter who does this to train. It gets his "heart rate up." He tells us again that he’s not crazy, then my bf’s brother convinces the quarterback to throw him a long ball, which he does very well. We wish him well and walk away quickly, convinced that he is indeed crazy.

I spend two days at Cape Fear with my bf and his evangelical Christian family. This is after four days in DC of entertaining 15 members of his spirited family, which flew thousands of miles from several states for his graduation. By the time we arrive home in North Carolina the numbers have dwindled down to parents, siblings, and significant others, but it’s still challenging, particularly since I’ve never been in a situation where I’ve had to spend considerable time with the family of a lover. The entire affair is deeply meaningful to me yet foreign, almost as if I’m “playing straight.” Is this what normal feels like? I want to be liked, obviously, but there’s always a subtext to the conversation that we’re having, a conversation behind the conversation. This other conversation has my bf screaming at his parents over the phone, and it doesn’t like the fact that a few doors down I’m doing things to their little boy that a God varietal from every major world religion probably creates a hell for, yet the conversation I’m privy to has them laughing at my jokes, even when they’re not funny. It’s tough to feel comfortable when you don’t know where you stand. Regardless of the strain, after 4 days of family integration I begin to feel the regret and loneliness of being disconnected from my own family. I sit on a chair in my hotel room, kick off my shoes and stretch my toes, then call my brother while staring at the Atlantic Ocean. I haven’t talked to him in eight years, since I last saw him at the foot of my father’s freshly filled grave. It feels good, and I want more of it.

The men that I see surrounding the hotel look like John Edwards. At first I think its my imagination, but later the next day there’s a business meeting of some kind taking place on the first floor of the hotel, and it skews my perception of my once beloved candidate of choice. Everywhere I look I see the perfect hair, the close shave, the rounded yet fit build, even the clothes impervious to wrinkle. I’m surrounded by potential vice-presidential candidates. As I sit in the prim dining room, my boyfriend laughing at my unkempt appearance in stark contrast to the well-mannered southern gentility of our environment, I shovel biscuits and gravy in the direction of my face and watch these men interact and ambulate, uncertain if I like John Edwards a little less, or southern white men a little more.

Surprisingly, the people in Cape Fear seem fit (always running). Even more surprising, the beaches aren’t fun. Most of the people on the beach are kids, and they all look bored. I then realize I’m bored as well, and that I would rather be in DC.

And I call myself a southerner.