Final Thoughts on the Trip that Was and the One that Was Not

The strange allure of a silent, still cypress swamp

The contemporary Southern poet Kelly Whiddon has a number of works that mix fairytale images with observations about the characters who people her life.  One such poem, “Riverbodies,” describes a woman she calls Aunt Ella with the following lines:

 And when waters rise, she wades through her kitchen,

skirts the snakes, and makes her breakfast of oatmeal

and tabasco.

 I just love these lines – the image they etch in my mind of an elderly woman, wading nonchalantly through a space that is both home and wilderness to make a meal that is both sustaining and sharp.  It is such a perfect metaphor for the South I encountered this trip defined by Hurricanes Helene and Milton.

I indeed watched the water rise and saw how the communities in its midst continued forward. I saw the marshes, the pine forests, the sand hills  and found them oddly comforting in their lack of grandeur.  But I also came to understand that this land, with its snakes, and spiders, and blade-edged palmettos, has a bite.

Perhaps, were it not for the devastation wrought by the storms, I might have finished this trip with a different impression of the South.  Rides by the grand mansions that skirt the Hitchcock Woods and through the manicured Biltmore gardens may have left me enchanted.  But that was not to be.  Instead, I’m left with the memory of cotton fields and dusty railroad crossings, of the whisper of wind through pines and the hiss of a wave as it fades back into the endless Atlantic.

My heart goes out to the people who have lost homes, businesses, lives to the devastation wrought by these storms.  But for myself, I’m satisfied that the trip I had – with its diversions from carefully made plans and hasty recalibrations, with its rides in the rain and through the mud of just past floods – was the trip I needed to have.

I’ll be back to see the exceptional grand South that was not available on this trip.  But I’ll see it through lenses a bit less rose -tinted.

I can’t claim to know the South with its complexity of fairytale Tara and reality Ashburn. But I believe the true South is more sand than clipped lawn, more denim than satin, more oatmeal than beignet. And I thank Helene and Milton for showing me that.

To me, sand — more than the red clay of every country song — will define the South.