A 7-Eleven came to my rescue with a sandwich and coffee. I turned the car round and passed the Barnes & Noble again while filling my face. I couldn’t resist it; I parked up, ditched the coffee and finished off the chicken sandwich as I fed another meter.
I went straight to the reference section and pulled out a small-scale atlas of North Carolina. I found Falls Lake and Little Lick Creek. It sounded like a commune for oral-sex fans.
North Carolina was only a short flight away. I could get down there maybe tonight, and if it turned out to be a fuck-up I’d be back by tomorrow night. I got out my phone and started to make some enquiries.
I drove back to the apartment with a ticket for the 0700 from Dulles. I would still check out her bedroom and kitchen, though, just in case.
7
I took the slip road off Airport Boulevard, following the signs for Interstate 40. According to the map, if I kept on this highway heading east I would hit the Cliff Benson Beltline, which would take me north through Raleigh and on to the lake.
The weather was a lot warmer here than in DC and the clouds were dark and brooding, almost tropical. It had been raining quite heavily by the look of the large puddles that lined the road, and the sandy soil was dark with moisture.
The whole area was going through a massive rebuild. The airport itself had been having a makeover, and a new highway, not yet on the map, was under construction. On each side of me as I drove east, yellow bulldozers were going apeshit, flattening everything in sight to make way for the steel skeletons of yet more buildings. From reading the local information magazine on the flight, I knew that the area was fast becoming ‘science city USA’, with the largest concentration of biochemical, computer and technical research establishments, and Ph.D.s per capita, in the entire USA. It’s amazing the stuff you’ll read when you’re bored shitless on a plane.
Rows of pristine, glistening, black or silver glass-fronted buildings sat in acres of manicured gardens with lakes and fountains – not at all what I had in mind for the American South after all the redneck jokes I’d heard over the years.
It took about fifteen minutes to get onto the beltline. I drove clockwise heading north around the city, keeping my eyes peeled for signs for exit ten towards Falls Lake. The new money that this transformation had sucked in was impossible to miss, with grand houses and new business fighting hand-to-hand with the old, and demonstrably winning. Smart new office blocks looked down on decrepit trailer parks strewn with abandoned cars and kids, both black and white, whose arses hung out of their dirty jeans, their parents fucked without the skills needed to take advantage of the new opportunity.
I got to exit ten in another ten minutes or so and headed north on Forest Road. From the map, I knew that the Falls Lake area covered about 200 square miles. It was a very long and winding waterway, with hundreds of inlets, like the coastline of Norway, just the kind of place you could disappear into.
After seven miles the road became a single carriageway. Tall firs interspersed with smaller seasonal trees looming on either side. Four more miles and I reached the Falls of Neuse and entered forest proper. The Falls was a small collection of neat little homes made of natural wood or painted white on the eastern side of the lake area. Even here, the new was winning out over the old and rubbing its nose in it. Tracts of land were being carved out of the woods to make way for ‘communities’ of enormous mansions to house the middle classes who were streaming in for the new Gold Rush of high-tech jobs. At the entry point into each community was a twee, shiny sign announcing ‘Carriageways’ or ‘Fairways’, and at each junction a barrage of estate agents’ signs directed buyers to even more land which was up for grabs.
I headed west on Raven Ridge, driving deeper into the forest. The new was gradually less and less evident, until it was the old that prevailed once more: dilapidated shacks with car wrecks for garden furniture, and rundown stores built of bare breeze-block, with peeling signs advertising bait and beer. I passed trailer homes that looked as if they’d just been dumped twenty or thirty metres off the road, with no paved access, just trampled ground, and no fences to mark their territory, just corrugated iron leaning around the bottom of the trailers to make them look as if they belonged. Outside, washing hung on lines getting even wetter. Inside, probably, were the stars of the
Ricki Lake
or
Jerry Springer
shows. Fuck knows what the future held for them, but one thing was for sure: new carriageways would be scything through here within a year or two.
The only buildings that weren’t falling down or apart were the churches, of which there seemed to be one every mile along the roadside, standing very clean, bright and white. Each projected a different recruiting message on the sort of signboard that cinemas use to advertise their movies. ‘You can’t even write Christmas without Christ’ one said, which was true but strange to see in April. Maybe they liked to think ahead.
I drove for another twenty minutes past trailers and churches, and now and then the occasional neatly tended graveyard right on the side of the road. I came across a small green sign to Little Lick Creek. It wasn’t the creek itself I was after, but the point at which it entered the lake, and where one of the spurs had the same name. Going by the waterproof hunting map I’d bought, there were two buildings in that area which weren’t accounted for by a symbol on the map legend, so they were probably private houses.
I turned off the tarmac and headed down a gravel road that was just wide enough for two cars to pass. There was a steep gradient each side, and the forest seemed to be closing in, the trees here even higher and more densely packed.
A sign chiselled into a slab of grey-painted wood warned, ‘Firearms Strictly Prohibited’. Fifty metres further on, another said, ‘No Alcoholic Beverages’. Soon more friendly signs welcomed me to Falls Lake, and directed me to the carparks and recreational areas and hoped I enjoyed myself – but only if I kept my speed to 25 mph.
Up ahead, a motorhome as big as a juggernaut was bearing down on me. I noticed a small track that obviously took wheeled traffic, because there were tyre grooves worn down on each side of a wet grassy central strip, but I didn’t have time to get in there. I slowed and pulled over to the side of the road, my car leaning drunkenly to the right. The Winnebago was a massive vehicle, with enough canoes and mountain bikes strapped onto its exterior to equip the US Olympic team, and the family hatchback towed along behind. A wall of spray splashed onto my windscreen as it passed. I didn’t even get a wave of acknowledgement.
I drove for another kilometre or so through the forest before I came to a large carpark. Crunching and squelching across a mixture of gravel and mud, I pulled up next to a big map in a wooden frame. Pictures around the edge displayed various indigenous birds, turtles, trees and plants, as well as the tariff for the camp site and the inevitable: ‘Enjoy your stay – take only pictures, leave only footprints’. It was possible that I would be taking pictures, but I hoped I would leave no footprints whatsoever.
Driving on for another hundred metres or so, I caught my first glimpse of Little Lick Creek. It wasn’t quite the picture postcard scene I’d been expecting. Tall ranks of firs seemed to have marched right to the lake’s edge. The water was smooth and as dark as the clouds it mirrored, like the smoked glass of a Raleigh office block. Maybe when the sun was out the area was idyllic, but just now, especially with the trees so claustrophobically close to the water, the atmosphere was more like the brooding menace of a penitentiary.
Over on the other side, 500 metres away and on higher, more undulating ground, sat two houses. They were the ones I wanted to have a look at.
A dozen or so vehicles were already in the carpark, mostly clustered around a wooden boat shed on the lake’s edge which had been designed to look like a fort. Canoes and rowing boats were lined up near it in the water, plus the statutory Coke machine and another selling chocolate bars. I’d watched a documentary once which claimed that the Coca-Cola company was so powerful in the US that it had even got a president into power in the 1960s. I wondered how their mission statement compared with Ronald McDonald’s. It certainly seems that no matter where you are in the world you will always be able to get a Coke; I’d even been offered one by a six-year-old on a mountainside in Nepal. Out trekking with Sarah in the middle of nowhere, a kid no older than eight came along the track with a tin bucket filled with water and about six battered cans of Coke inside, trying to sell them to the walkers as they made their way up the mountain. Sarah gave him some money but refused the Coke. She had this hang-up about cultures being contaminated by the West and spent the next hour bumping her gums about it. Me? I was thirsty and just wished he’d had Diet instead of Regular.
As I drove past the fort I could see that it was manned by two young lads lounging in the shadows, who didn’t look as if they were coming out unless they had to.
At the far end of the carpark was a picnic area with built-in grills and a wooden canopy covering the seating. A family barbecue was underway; a bit early in the season, but they were having fun anyway. Granny and Grandad, sons, daughters and grandchildren all filling their faces.
Beyond it I could see the tops of brightly coloured, family-sized tents. It looked as if each pitch was surrounded by its own individual little coppice. I turned the car through a 180, so I was facing back the way I’d come, and drove towards the toilet block. I nosey-parked between two other cars, front against the toilet block wall, back to the lake.
Picking up the binos and bird book I’d bought at the tourist shop along with my maps, I got out of the car and locked up. Straight away I was hit by the humidity; having air-conditioning in a car almost makes you forget the reason you turned it on in the first place.
Everyone seemed to be having a giggle in the barbecue area. A boom-box was playing some Latino rap, and even Granny was dancing rapper style with the kids. In the car to my right were a couple of senior citizens who’d no doubt driven for hours to get here, parked up at the lake and stayed in the car to eat sandwiches with the air-conditioning going full blast and their hats still on.
I wandered down towards the boat shed, keeping an eye on the spur at the other side of the creek. The larger house of the two was on the left, with a gap of maybe 100 to 120 metres between them. There was no movement around either.
I went to the Coke machine and threw in a handful of coins. I didn’t really want a drink, certainly not at a dollar a go, but it gave me a chance to look around.
The two teenage lads were probably doing a school vacation job. I didn’t know whether they were stoned or just bored shitless. Both were barefoot but wearing the company uniform: blue shorts and red polo shirt. I nodded at them through the small swing doors; they’d obviously been told to be pleasant and said they hoped I had a nice day. I wasn’t sure that I would.
I sat down on the wooden jetty and immediately felt the dampness soak into my jeans. To my right were a father and son, with dad trying to get his boy sparked up about fishing: ‘We’ll only catch something if you sit very still and watch the float.’ The kid, in his Disney poncho, was as uninterested as the two in the boat shed – as you would be if you’d much rather be eating ice cream and playing computer games.
I was very overtly carrying the binoculars and bird book; today I was the dickhead tourist with his feet dangling over the side of the jetty, taking in the magnificent view over the water.
Half a dozen boats were moored at various points around the lake. Through the binoculars I could see that each one held two or three very fat, middle-aged men who were dressed for trapping bears in the Yukon, their hunting waistcoats festooned with fishing flies, their pockets bulging with all sorts of kit, and fearsome knives hanging in sheaths from their belts.
I panned with the binos along the opposite side of the spur, starting from the far right-hand side. I made out a track cutting though the trees just short of the lake on the higher ground, the one I’d stopped by to let the motorhome past. It looked as if it should lead to the houses. I followed it along and, sure enough, it passed the smaller of the two. I couldn’t see anything about the building that gave me any information; it was just a square, two-storey, flat-roofed structure, built into the hill and with stilts holding the forward two thirds. There was a boat and a 4x4 vehicle underneath the stilted area, but no movement. Then two kids came running round from the front of the house followed by a man. They were laughing and throwing a football at each other. Happy families; I’d give that one a miss.
I put the binos down for a while, and had a look at the book. This part is all about third-party awareness, because you never know who is looking at you; they might not be saying, ‘Is he doing a recce of those houses over there?’ but if all I did was bino at the house and didn’t move or do other things, it would look pretty strange. The trick is to give the impression that whatever reason you have for being there is so straightforward no-one gives you a second glance. I just hoped a fellow anorak didn’t come up to me and start on some serious bird talk.
I put the book down, much more intimately acquainted with the lesser-spotted something or other, and started to look at the other target. By now enough humidity had condensed on my head for droplets to run down my face, and I was starting to feel sticky and damp all over.