Neogeneses

Nights, like days, were jaunts in pickup trucks, a ritual occurring after the adults were off work, always returning to the pine-barren’s farmhouse by the tobacco fields, friends in tow, near midnight.

Our nighttime distractions never suffered the lull of the oppressive summer heat. I’d be there only for a month or two, looking forward to leaving, but also looking forward to going back. Every year I returned, the setting was slightly different – yet somehow locked in time. Summer heat is a calming daze that always adds to the ethereal feel of a place – it doesn’t matter ‘where.’ There might be a new suburban housing development, or a chain supermarket opened to chase the threadbare-stocked county grocers out of business, but they’d always be enshrouded by the yellow ‘rouge’ of mother nature’s pine-pollen makeup just the same.

The summer heat was audible, creating mirages of hot distortion, the horizons shimmering, everything distanced. Sometimes the heat was louder than the breeze. During the dog days of summer, the breeze couldn’t be bothered to cool our drenched skin. The breeze sheltered in the shade like the rest of us, static. We were invisible to those currents and convections. Thunderheads, cumulonimbus clouds topped off like tobacco, ascended to the forceful sheers of the jet stream’s heights where they gathered and pronounced themselves almost every afternoon. If the thunderheads bonded and unified, tornadoes were feared. Supercells were the lightning strikes of the southern summer itself. Individual bolts ignited often during the yearly droughts, concentrating where they pleased. Strange – to have droughts and daily storms at the same time. All houses had lightning rods; lightning rods exist to illustrate to a home’s inhabitants exactly what it might feel like to be inside of a light bulb when the safety valve of a breaker box is tripped on for the third time in one week.

Heat parched the land almost as much as the kudzu. Kudzu is a parasite, an invasive vine that ‘they’ introduced ‘back when’ to ‘fill in the bare spots.’ It covers everything, kills all it can cover, and is tantamount itself to being unkillable. Even with a lightning strike, kudzu refuses death by fire. In rusting trucks, passing the square kudzu patches of formerly-arable land bordering the highways, kudzu was usually a conversational metaphor for mankind. Many of the locals thought they had figured out a fix for the kudzu. The wise ones resigned that there could be no simple cure.

The red clay of the tobacco fields would crumble under a bare foot like a sandcastle cured in the kiln of the sun. Well water was rationed when the water table fell to prevent showering in the churned-Earth ‘mineral water’ of a water-enriched clay. Tobacco sap dripped and turned to darkened tar each time the fields were “topped off” by hand, encouraging growth. Irrigation ran until fill ponds fell dry. Late in the season, the trendier foodie traditionalists would scour neighboring fields, alongside the impoverished, for root vegetables left after harvests. Seeing the overturned fields was the unspoken signal for free food. The pines were everywhere else that the tobacco, kudzu, and food crops were not. For roughly half the year, everything would be covered in the pines’ golden pollen.

After daily storms, the roads and beds of pickup trucks dried quickly. Gripping a truck’s window hatch whenever the roads were rough, then standing freely at life-threatening speeds was a terrestrial flight. The wind was an inverse sauna; speeding on an unmarked rural byway was a bellows into the lungs. After, skin tingled, half numb, massaged by the wind’s resistance to our surface. Nature was most open and thickest in these night airs. It smelled like a garden concentrated and saturated within a perfumery of dozens of notes – layered under a single top note of wildflowers. Honeysuckle’s scent would hang on clothing, a base note rarely present in vivo. Despite the humidity that felt like constant dew, the smell of wildflowers at night was a welcome sequel to the thickest waves of the pine pollen’s never-ending dry haze.

One summer, I refused to use shoes because, “I want to see if my heels will actually get covered in tar.” I knew I could get away with this stunt as a teenager and kept the known origin of the term “tar heel” tucked away. Clerks in country stores, who sleepily enjoyed their sixty-degree A.C., never bothered to look down at anything. I never troubled them about covering their own feet for that matter. Going from 110 to 60 degrees and back within 10 minutes was a cooling cycle used to invigorate. The clerks were sympathetic to anyone who needed to shelter from the sun. The push-pull of the heat and chilled air could create third and fourth winds of energy before late afternoon might otherwise sunbake any given mood.

Locals, when asked about tar heels, were convinced their ancestors didn’t have any shoes. One old fellow said, “it takes a lifetime for heels to -dye- black,” an implied pun which shocked me. That is in fact what he had meant, as the word ‘die’ is pronounced the same. As a child, it seemed Southern heritage and blind racism did still sadly coexist. Having never worked with pine pitch or in shipyards over centuries past, those with family lineages tied to the titles of Earth, there, all seemed to regard asphalt roads as an ancient invention that predated the written language of the entitlements of their original land deeds.

Long after the sun set, the adults would leave us to hours of spirit-charging laughter before bed. Role-playing video games, inside jokes, peach or cherry cobbler à la mode, box fans, and reruns of 1960’s television classics via one of five snow-distorted analog broadcast channels could lull us past hypnogogic states into deep forms of sleep. Dreams were never covered with kudzu, storms, tobacco, or pine, just the veil-piercing pixie dream dust of the pine pollen forever encroaching.