pantoum's Diaryland Diary

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HIGHWAY 90. THE JOBS ARE GONE.

273.

Hoky-dokyness notwithstanding, he also included a line that captures perfectly my response to driving through rural North and South Carolina this past week:

Carolina I knew you before the highways got to you.

It�s impossible for me to drive those rural roads now without hearing Nanci Griffith singing Highway 90. The jobs are gone.

Lights in farmhouse windows set way out in the middle of nowhere highlight the couple inside, getting by on their Social Security checks and what they can grow in the garden now that the mills and the factories have moved overseas. And their children have moved on to Raleigh or Atlanta or Chapel Hill or Memphis or Charleston, but will one day inherit this dusty land.

The rural roads of my childhood were beautiful, with Spanish moss hanging off knuckles of gnarled old oak trees and the winding roads set between trees made music when the wind blew through the tree branches just right.

They smelled of wisteria and honeysuckle and manure and sometimes camellias, depending on the time of year, and the few businesses you encountered were mom-and-pop places: a country store selling Nehi�s and Mountain Dews and pickles or a peach stand run by a large black toothless woman with a paper church fan in her hand or a fruit stand run by a toothless old gnarly white man who wants to talk about Jesus or a drive-up Sno-Cone with the best milkshakes ever.

Now they've all been replaced by Arby�s and Subways and Wendy�s and CVS pharmacies and Walgreens and Citgos and Exxons, just like on ugly northern highways.

But how can I begin to describe the tackiness that is Myrtle Beach? Imagine pristine white sandscape that barfed up giant plastic waterslides and brightly painted concrete structures with the jaws of giant sharks affixed to them and the ubiquitous Hooter�s or XXX �gentlemen�s clubs� or colorful putt-putt golf courses. off to the side and you're beginning to get the picture. Toss in a few glass-paned insurance agencies and roadside yard sales, the random post office or two, and the occasional locally owned Calabash-style (fried) seafood restaurant and hand-painted FRESH SEAFOOD HERE signs and you�ve nailed the place.

Pottergrrl and I took local roads past all those places as we traveled to the Meher Baba Spiritual Retreat Center and, let me tell you, it felt like we had returned to paradise when we turned off the main drag and into those woods.

The retreat is on 500 acres of virgin forest with lagoons and lakes and wetlands and, of course, a long, mostly abandoned beach.

I joked earlier about pretending to have some interest in Meher Baba for the cheap rates, but his message�that you must go inside yourself and find silence in order to grow spiritually and you can get there through any number of different spiritual paths�does appeal to me, even if I don't believe anyone is a highly evolved avatar.

(Hey. We're all avatars if you pay attention.)

And being there allowed me to see glimpses of myself again.

We had a lakefront cabin with a screened-in porch across the front and our bedroom door opened onto the porch, so we saw sunrises over the lake when we opened our sleepy eyes. (See photo blog.)

And the place was QUIET. Very few people on the land and most of them were gentle souls trying to live authentically in our plastic, throwaway culture, trying to emulate their avatar by maintaining silence (which is not o easy to do when you're in a lakefront cabin with all the doors and windows open having really fantastic sex).

And I have to admit that returning to civilization after an um healing weekend there was more than a little jarring.

11:21 p.m. - 2005-11-12

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