Solstice in a Strange Land

I have some western habits. Artifacts of growing up in a world like the American southwest. One of those habits is going for a drive. Not a drive to get anywhere, just a drive to drive. People don’t seem to do that as much here in the east. Roads are all the same here, a furrow cut through the trees. Out west I think it’s harder to locate yourself in space because there’s so much of it. You drive to find out where you are.

Aimless driving is not the most ecologically sustainable thing you can do, but I do miss it sometimes. Driving is a kind of meditation, especially in the wide open empty spaces of the southwest where I grew up going for drives, where there’s nothing but clouds and sky and road.

It was a sunny winter day when I decided to go for a drive. There’s no endless sky here. Where we are in South Carolina I have tree-lined country roads overgrown with huge, heavy old oaks, their bare, twiggy arms stretching toward the winter sky. The dappled light of afternoon sun flickers like a strobe light across the windshield at 50 miles an hour.

I drifted aimlessly, taking random left turns but trying to keep the sun on my right, so I knew I was heading south.

I wound up in a town called Abbeville, which has the slogan “pretty near perfect.”

You have to be careful with overly-optimistic slogans, lest they become ironic. I have no idea what life is like in Abbeville, but if the old broken windows theory is correct, things are probably headed in a direction that you might charitably call, not good. I know that’s the case in Iva, the closest town to our woods. It’s not a social problem. It’s an economic problem. The jobs left when the mill shut down.

That last sentence applies to any number of a hundred small towns we’ve driven through in the course of our travels around America. Whatever social problems may exist in this country, they pale next to the economic reality that most of us live with.

I wandered around downtown Abbeville for a while, trying to decide if it was anywhere near perfect.

I stumbled across a beautiful old hose, the Quay-Wardlaw house, built in 1786.

It wasn’t open to visitors, in fact it seemed to me like someone still lived in it, which is a refreshing change from the usual “historic” building in the U.S. For reasons I’ve never understood, in America old things need to be set aside and not used as they were intended. They are historic, which here means not used. They are locked up, consigned to the past.

I suspect this need to keep the past frozen and remote is an artifact of our civil religion as it were, the myth of progress. That is, the idea that history is a progression, always moving toward something better. If things were still used exactly as they always had been it would undercut this narrative. See, things are getting better, we don’t have to live in 18th century buildings anymore.

The Quay-Wardlaw house though seems to have some heretics living in it, a living debunking of the myth that history has a direction. It looked to still be what it once was: a house people live in. I think Quay, whomever he may have been, would be happy to know his house is still fulfilling it’s function 230 odd years later.

I stood there a while, looking at the house, envious of Quay. I seriously doubt anything I’ve built will last a fraction of that long. I’d actually bet Quay’s work has a better chance of lasting another 200 years than mine does of lasting its first 200.

Eventually the chill of the wind drove me back to my car and I left Abbeville behind. I reversed the choices that had taken me to Abbeville, turning right at every opportunity, keeping the sun to the left. I didn’t pay much attention to where I was headed. Lest I forget where I was, there were always face slapping clues like the Gulla Gulla gas station.

I meandered through farm country on my way home, thin roads winding through the maze of property lines. I watched the long shadows of lonely oak trees race away from the sun. Cows standing in front of crumbling gray barns looked up curiously as I passed. Towns like Due West and Level Land went by in a blur until I saw a sign for Iva.

That’s where we are right now. I would not say it’s anywhere near perfect. Nor would it apparently. The Mill is gone, so are most of the people. But it’s still here for now. I turned off the main road in the fading light and drove back down to the river bottom and into the woods we call home.