Nights, like days, were a ritual of jaunts in pickup trucks as soon as the adults were off work. Maybe to a movie store after an authentic Mexican restaurant, maybe to a minor league baseball game after scooping up friends, maybe to a game shop after charting a new fishing hole, but always returning to the farmhouse by the tobacco fields, friends in tow, by 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 still 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. 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 what it’s like to be inside of a light bulb when the power is turned back 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 would 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 – so that it wouldn’t turn red like the clay. Tobacco sap dripped and turned to darkened tar each time the fields were “topped off” by hand, encouraging growth. Late in the season, the trendy 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 pine’s golden pollen.
After the storms, the roads and beds of pickup trucks would dry quickly. As a kid with at least three friends sleeping over each night, high speeds in the bed of a trucks was exhilarating. We flew. The wind was an inverse sauna; speeding at seventy on an unmarked rural byway was a bellows into our breathing. Our skin would tingle for a while after each trip. 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. Despite the humidity that felt like a constant dew, the smell of wildflowers was a welcome sequel to the thickest waves of the pine pollen’s never-ending haze.
One summer, I refused to use shoes to “see if my heels would become covered in tar.” I knew I could get away with this stunt as a teenager, but I also knew the origin of the term “tar heel.” 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.
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,” which shocked me. Having never worked with pine pitch or in shipyards over centuries past, they seemed to regard asphalt roads as an ancient invention that predated the written language of their land deeds.
Long after the sun set, the adults would leave us to hours of spirit-charging laughter before bed. Sixteen-bit RPGs, inside jokes, peach or cherry cobbler à la mode, and box fans – before reruns of 1960’s classics via one of five snow-distorted analog broadcast television channels could lull us past our hypnogogic states. Dreams were never covered with kudzu, storms, tobacco, or pitch, just the veil-piercing pixie dream dust of the pine pollen forever encroaching.
Neogeneses 