Voyager: Travel Writings (19 page)

Later that afternoon and into the final hours of the night, there was a party and barbecue at Bob Brown’s farm a few miles south of town—Robert V. N. Brown, rasp-voiced activist and former editor of the radical quarterly
Reflections: The Free South Review
and later
The North Carolina Anvil,
a tough, physically ugly, in-your-face kind of weekly paper that somehow kept afloat until 1983, then perished as its left-wing, counterculture, university-based readership drifted away.

At the party Brown was, as always, an impresario, greeting people with embraces and old jokes as we ambled down his long dirt driveway from the field filled with parked cars. Brown steered
us on toward barrels packed with ice and beer and soft drinks and the food spread over tables and grills, where dozens of groups of people, ten and twenty to a clot, stood around yakking intently at one another. Peacocks screamed from trees or stalked the pathways of the elaborately designed flower gardens, and beyond the flowers several blond horses sniffed the air and edged along the corral toward the gate as dusk settled and the light softened and tinted everything in pale amber. Children of various ages picked their way through the crowd to the food, then retreated to where they could watch the horses and talk about the funny-looking grown-ups, many of the men bearded, with long hair tied back in ponytails, and women in peasant blouses and granny dresses.

It was a beer party, what you’d expect at a Lions picnic, except for the unusual abundance of soft drinks. Not exactly a heavy-drinking crowd. Not anymore. And there seemed to be no dope at all. No cocaine, certainly, but not once was a joint passed on to me. I couldn’t even pick up the sweet smell of it, which was somehow jarring, running against my visual sense of the event. The music, loud and endless, of course, was pure Woodstock—Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Doors, the Rolling Stones, Aretha, Dylan, the Band.

Harry and Sibyl Macklin, the owners and proprietors of the old Harry’s Deli, had come up from their retirement home in Margate, Florida. Wearing Bermuda shorts and drip-dries, tanned and looking very much like the elderly retirees they had become, Harry and Sibyl smiled and greeted the middle-aged men and women who treated the couple like a favorite uncle and aunt. It was Harry and Sibyl who’d supported the kids who kept getting busted by local and state cops for trying to convince Chapel Hill businesses to serve blacks alongside whites, the only grown-ups who would bail the kids out of jail, let them bus tables when they got broke, run a tab and work it off during the hours after midnight. Most parents were horrified by what was happening to their children over at Chapel Hill, and the university itself washed its hands of them, even though
officials knew exactly what was happening, tracked every sit-in, every demonstration, every arrest, with the kind of diligence and surveillance that made the FBI of that period notorious later.

Slowly, I started looking around for my fellow RV-riders. It was late, and I was exhausted, as much emotionally as physically, and I was starting to feel a strange, unexpected loneliness and frustration. The closer I got to this place, the more I realized that it was gone, it wasn’t here—all those young friends and all those rough farmhouses in the North Carolina pinewoods and those warm nights filled with music and delight and those bright flashes of moral clarity, all of it gone.

Saturday morning at breakfast in the Carolina Inn dining room, I ran into Ben Jones, the actor-politician, who had arrived late the day before after a day kissing babies at Fourth of July picnics in his rural Georgia district.

Ben looked good. In a way, he looked better than he did twenty years ago, before jogging, tanning salons, hair stylists, designer glasses, and stone-washed jeans, back when Jack Kennedy was the only politician who seemed to know how to look like an actor. Then as now Ben was tall, broad-shouldered, dark, and square-featured, but in college he had an off-center bulk and physical recklessness about him that made him seem strangely vulnerable. He’d lost that, which was no doubt to his cosmetic advantage—he probably looked better on TV now—but he was harder to reach in conversation, seemed distracted, as if looking for the camera, while we strolled down East Franklin Street onto the old campus.

Soon, however, the familiar beauty of the place cast its spell, and we both found ourselves listening to each other describe himself twenty years ago as a naive country kid with luck and pluck who was essentially faking it in a world that intimidated him. Ben and I both had been bright, talented poor boys, he from western North Carolina, me from the hills of New Hampshire, who through marriage had the great good fortune to be picked up along the way by wealthy benefactors. His story matched mine. I hadn’t known that
about him, had always thought of Ben as somehow well-off, and, of course, he had thought the same of me. We passed the famous Old Well and the half-dozen buildings dating back to the university’s founding in 1795, and strolled south across the wide Sargasso-green lawn toward Wilson Library, catching each other up on our marriages and divorces, our children, our failures and ambitions.

I asked Ben how he expected to have a political future with his ragged personal life, drug use, and activist political past. He looked his age to me now, was walking in his old off-centered way, a hillside lope, and his tinted designer glasses no longer hid the pain a man feels when he knows he’s hurt people he loved—people he would not hurt today if given the chance, but he knows he hurt them so badly they will never give him another chance, and he thinks about it every day.

“When it was first suggested to me that I run for Congress, I told them about everything, the wildness, the political activism, the drugs, the divorces. Everything, Russ. Even the parts I can’t remember. Took it all out of the closet and dumped it in front of them. They said fine. Down here folks understand a reformed sinner, and they deeply mistrust that feller throwing the first stone. A good thing, too,” he added.

Deep in the arboretum behind Morehead Planetarium, we came upon a small bridal party, girls in their pastel-colored dresses like huge wobbling chrysanthemums and big-boned sunburnt boys in tuxedoes looking like they were headed to a sports awards banquet. The group stood in a clearing among rosebushes with a wall of mountain laurel curving around behind, and in the center, under an arbor covered with yellow roses, the bride and groom were being photographed by the best man. Off to one side, the parents and the preacher and several other adults had gathered together, as if advising one another on how to live without the children now.

Ben and I moved quickly, silently, past, a pair of old soldiers, slightly grizzled, home briefly from the foreign wars and finding out that everyone they once knew and loved had died or moved on
or else had simply forgotten their names and faces. No one’s here now but strangers.

There were numerous informal, spontaneous get-togethers all over town that morning and afternoon. The only organized function was a combination Alcoholics Anonymous/Narcotics Anonymous/Overeaters Anonymous/Gamblers Anonymous meeting that turned out to be surprisingly well attended. Or maybe not so surprisingly. I talked afterward to three friends who were at the meeting, and they seemed oddly clear-eyed, relaxed, as if a great, protracted tension in their lives had been resolved. “It was an important meeting,” one told me. “Really important, Russ.” But he said it as if it had been the opposite of a meeting, a coming together; as if instead it had been the occurrence of a much-desired severance.

Later that afternoon, there was another bash, this time at Rachel Brousseau’s house, north of Chapel Hill in Carrboro, where redbrick bungalows and modular homes and trailers appeared out of the kudzu along the winding country road with open fields of corn and melons out behind and a black ridge of North Carolina pines at the horizon. Cars were parked on both sides of the road for a half mile.

“Not one stretch limo,” Ray sadly observed, as we squeezed past the rows of beat-up VWs and Hondas, secondhand station wagons, campers and pickups. It was hot—midafternoon, midsummer, Piedmont hot—but the air conditioner in the RV had come magically back to life again, so I eased the van around the sawhorses at the end of the long driveway and rolled past the strings of people walking in from the road like pilgrims making their way to a shrine, and when I arrived before the house begged Rachel Brousseau to let me park the thing on her lawn. She shrugged, Why not? I shut off the motor and switched on the generator and left the air conditioner running. Four or five bottles of the original case of chardonnay remained in the fridge.

A pair of pigs was roasting over a wood fire, and a huge para
chute tent had been set up in the pinewoods behind the white ranch-style house. Music blasted from speakers set on the ground among the trees, and an enormous crowd milled around the tables of food and iced barrels of beer and soft drinks. An American flag ten feet high and twenty feet long with the peace symbol superimposed over the stripes had been attached to the side of the house—a sad but still powerful, time-shattering image, like the music wailing across the fields all the way to the road and the sight of Paul Hutzler sitting cross-legged on the ground in front of a speaker zoned out by the thump-thump-thump of the Moody Blues and the hickory smoke and vinegary smell from the roasting pigs and the half-dozen couples slow-dancing on pine needles and the shirtless kids named America and Starr wandering around at the edges of the crowd—and suddenly I knew that I’d had enough. Whatever I came here to say and do couldn’t be said or done; whomever I came to see couldn’t be seen.

Lucius was laid out in the van working on his novel and a bottle of chardonnay, and Chris and Saundi were on the sofa talking about the future. Dale was reading her book, and Jerri was napping in the stateroom in back. Carey was off somewhere, last seen following an extraordinarily attractive dark-haired woman he said he was scared of, and Ray and Dave were being interviewed and videotaped by Elva Bishop for a local TV documentary. Kathy I hadn’t seen since last night at Bob Brown’s, when she went off with the Honigmanns to swim in their pond.

I said to Lucius, “Enough?”

He looked up for a second. “Plenty.”

It was Sunday morning, July 6. In New York they were sweeping up a million tons of trash. We’d checked out of our rooms at the Carolina Inn and were waiting around the lobby for Carey and Kathy to phone in and tell us where to pick them up. Then word came to the front desk that they’d meet us at noon at the picnic brunch at Ralph Macklin’s. We groaned—not another crowded
barbecue in the midsummer sun. We were thinking very seriously about Monday morning already, and it was an eleven-hour drive to New York.

Macklin’s was indeed just like the others, only hotter. But there was a lake, we were told, and “lots of folks” had gone down there swimming. The lake turned out to be a recently constructed Corps of Engineers basin with the skeletons of hundreds of drowned trees sticking up like ghosts and a wide, dark red, dried-mud aureole encircling it. A few people were actually swimming in the tepid water, but most stood in the sun along the shore, smoking cigarettes and talking in low voices. The party was truly over.

I rounded up my scattered passengers one by one, then said good-bye and walked back out to the road, where the van sat, cool and waiting, like the F train to Wall Street.

Everyone accounted for, I was about to join them, when I heard someone call, “Hey, Russ, wait a minute! Got something for you.” It was Tucker Clark, a man whose face, when we were both in our early twenties, so closely resembled mine that coeds who had spent the previous night with Tucker would come up to me on Franklin Street and bat their eyes and tell me what a great time they’d had. It was uncanny and often embarrassing, but I thought Tucker was a good-looking guy, so didn’t really mind. Today he looked less like me, but then so did I.

Tucker took me aside for a second and handed me a folder of photos, large black-and-whites. “I dug these out and meant to show them to you all weekend. There’s one I wanted you to have,” he said, poking the others out of the way, most of which seemed to be of old girlfriends of Tucker’s. “There, there she is,” he said proudly and plucked a five-by-seven from the group and handed it to me.

It was a black-and-white photograph of Christine, my ex-wife, standing alone and smiling in her tight-lipped, witty way, gazing directly into the camera. Instantly I recognized the place, the Union Grove Old Time Fiddlers’ Convention, and time, early summer, 1965. I stared at her face, and my hands started to tremble, and then
I felt myself falling helplessly into the picture. This was the face I came here to see, the one person I came back to meet and talk with. Christine was the person I needed to walk with across the campus greens and through the arboretum, to stop off at the Carolina Coffee Shop and reminisce with, to hang out at a party at Bob Brown’s farm in the dusky rose light watching the fawn-colored horses move nervously back and forth against the split-rail fence, while behind us the peacocks screamed from their perches on the dogwood trees. In the picture she was only a girl—a slim, open-faced girl, trusting and impish and smart—and all the things that truly, lastingly, hurt a person had yet to happen to her or to anyone she loved.

I handed the picture back to Tucker.

“Keep it,” he said, and I did. I turned and walked alone back down the dry, hot lane to the road, where Carey, Dave, Dale, Kathy, and Ray waited impatiently to return to New York.

And I thought, Good-bye. Good-bye, my darling. Good-bye.

PRIMAL DREAMS

W
hen you fly into Miami International Airport from Newark and drive south and west for two hours on Florida’s Turnpike, you travel through the early twenty-first century in North America. Condos and malls and housing developments like orange-capped mushrooms spring up from horizon to horizon. Fast-food outlets, trailer parks, used-car lots with banners crackling in the breeze, and, in Homestead, the lingering wreckage of last year’s hurricanes—stripped live oak trees, decapitated palms, boarded-up buildings, temporary housing—give way to tomato and sugarcane fields where migrant workers from Jamaica and Mexico toil under the subtropical sun. It’s the inescapable present.