Day 30: Lobject’s highway mileage sign

As soon as we pulled onto 485 I’d light two cigarettes, passing one to the left and rolling down the window. We find a god song and turn it up, listening to music until the skyline was behind us.

These dark Sundays night all look the same now. We left Charlotte later than intended. Monica didn’t want to say goodbye. I’d worked third shift at the Waffle House and my sleep schedule was off. We were headed back to college—a five hour trip we once cut down to four hours after following an ambulance through most of the Greensboro to Raleigh stretch.

“Keep me awake. Tell me about your weekend.” She smiled excitedly. We went everywhere and at any time of day or night. I was always awake.  I slept once in the car with Monica when I was very sick.

There was always good Waffle House drama. We called 911 for various reasons. One night someone drove into the restaurant. Once, everyone in the store watched a car on fire speed down highway 51. Drunk assholes would try to stiff us on busy nights. Often, I knew before it happened. No eye contact and everyone ordering the same thing were giveaways. I’d always let them get in their car before calling with the make, model and direction headed. Fighting was common, too. Usually it was lots of yelling between tables. Occasionally there was a fight we (well, people stronger than me) pushed outside where the fight was no longer our problem and usually fizzled out. One night, though, a guy slammed another’s head into every window pane, jerking him around the building quite effortlessly. I remember admiring the speed in which he moved. He was not drunk. I assumed the guy getting beat up was a bad man. He cheated on the other’s sister or maybe assaulted his wife—something to warrant exact revenge.      

We timed out our cigarettes at first. One an hour. The later it got, the more frequent the cigarettes. My stories usually lasted until Greensboro or Raleigh. Monica went through her weekend’s activities, too. And then we saw the home-stretch sign: Greenville 77 miles. The sign woke us up, told us we were close, and gave us permission to be silly. I’m pretty sure there were more than 77 miles until Greenville from that sign, but we believed it nonetheless. That sign let us know we were close to home. When we saw the sign on ECU t-shirts mocking NC State fans, it was a way to keep the sign and show our pirate pride forever.  

Highway mileage sign

It had been a long weekend.  A Jimmy Buffett concert came to be jokingly referred to as “the double date from hell” as my college roommate Amy and I ended up attending it with our ex-boyfriends.  We were all friends.  We had bought the tickets months before, and when things ended on good enough terms, we decided we were mature enough to all have fun together. 

The concert turned into a thunderstorm, the stadium transformed into a giant mud puddle, and our “dates” morphed into drunken buffoons.  When my ex finally made his way back to the car hours after the thunderstorm and concert had ended, he was covered and caked in mud.  His only explanation was a slurred, “Some hippies threw me down a hill.” 

The night only got worse when our “dates” ended up taking off their clothes – mine because he couldn’t get in the car with all of that mud and Amy’s because “if he gets to be naked, then I want to be also.” Amy and I ended up in tears.  Who wants to be in a cold car after a lousy concert with two drunk, smelly, and unclothed college guys?  Our breaking point came when they refused to put their clothes back on.

The next day, on our way home from Raleigh to Greenville, Amy was determined to salvage some aspect of the weekend.  Always finding the sunny side of things, she said, “Let’s stop and take a picture with the highway mileage sign you always giggle at!”  I grumbled a non-reply, and she pulled the car over to the side of the road.

Day 20: Pobject's highway mileage sign

It took some time to get used to seeing signs pointing the way to places like Memphis, Chattanooga, and Birmingham. Such storied cities offered exotic enticement, as alien as they were to me. Before the move to Vanderbilt, I'd never been to the South aside from a stopover or two in the Miami airport. (Furthermore, as I know well now, Florida doesn't count.) I'd been no nearer to Nashville than the novels of Faulker or Harper Lee, and for all I knew you couldn't pass a day in the South without sipping a mint julep on the scuppernong arbor.

Ah do declare.

I had a lot to learn. Some of the "truths" were true: barbecue is big here, and many folks do say "y'all" (though just as many don't). Things here do move a bit more slowly, more leisurely. There's a bit of git 'er done, but there's not a whole lot of git 'er done this. very. second. "You make such a good Southerner," our old department assistant once told me. I'd come to her office five minutes before to ask her help on some administrative task or another, and it had taken me three or four minutes of small talk to get around to asking for my favor.

Not everyone adapts to this new pace equally well. One friend once told me, "when I stop in at Krispy Kreme I don't want to talk about the weather, and I sure as hell don't need to know about the clerk's grandson." She's since moved back north.

I like the pace, and I like the friendliness. We wave at each other as our cars pass on small side streets. "You know them?" a visiting Yankee friend once asked.

"Nope. Just thought I'd say hello."

Don't get me wrong: the South isn't perfect. But it's a damned sight less hellish than folks from up north will have you believe. We've got our share of hatemongers, but no more or less than anywhere else: when it comes to bigotry I'd put money on upstate New York over upstate South Carolina any day. Moreover, we've got plenty of our own charm and history down here, and there's unbelievable cultural richness. After all, some of the most authentically "American" literature, music, and cuisine calls the South its home.

I've lived in the South for eleven years now, all told. I can't defend all that she's done, and I can't defend all that she's stood for. And I do miss the snow, truth be told. But there's something about the forests and the foggy bottoms, about the old tobacco barns and towering kudzu-covered hills, and about the cicada songs and pawpaw trees that speaks to me. There's something, too, about the people, people who seem to know, though it goes unspoken, that they, all of them, white, black, brown, red, or yellow, have got a tougher row to hoe than folks from most anywhere else in this great country of ours. I love these people.

I can't call myself a native of the South, but I'm proud to say that I feel at home here.

The highway signs are insistent: we all have new roads to run.