Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina. The name always reminded me of dog food. The divided highway spread extra wide and never really went through the town. The lore back in Durham was that some wealthy egotist by the name of Fuquay gave money to the town with the condition that they rename it for him. [Some people objected: they liked the old name] Peace was made between the boosters and the traditionalists. A hyphen was inserted. The town surrounded by green could keep its sense of history and meet the practicalities of the 20th century. Towns needed money to survive and Fuquay-Varina wasn’t close enough to either Raleigh or Durham to be a suburb. Folks in North Carolina just didn’t drive as far as Californians or New Yorkers. The distance wasn’t much more than that from El Monte to downtown to Los Angeles, but people back there just didn’t drive it, except to sell some of the tobacco crop or make a pilgrimage to the shrines of conspicuous consumption in the bigger cities — malls, which were usually located on the farther end of the cities because the owners/promoters just didn’t think that Fuquay-Varina had enough magnetisim to merit pushing their property development sights in that direction.

I don’t remember much [about the place]. It had the usual brick buildings and white-walled wooden houses that you saw all over North Carolina. More brick than wood because this was tornado country where Class Threes hit every other spring, sucking up the delicately built and leaving the sturdy brick. Natural selection was at work all over [the state]. Only the brick and the concrete survived the bashing storms and brick was prettier than concrete.


Tourists came for the brick and the matching autumn leaves. Fuquay Varina, however, wasn’t old enough or pretty enough to merit even a single bed and breakfast then, though that could have changed by now. I think it more likely that rather becoming a tourist draw, the edges of the cities to the north have crossed the loblolly pine lots and tobacco fields and crept up to the town limits.


Tobacco allotments, I learned, were movable. Many years ago I used to visit a Trappist monaster that lay in the opposite direction from Fuquay-Varine. A cluster of cabins was all that it was, really; just cabins, a main house with a kitchen and a library, a weaving studio, a small chapel, and a field that the monks rented out to a neighbor. They had a tobacco allotment and they sold it for reasons of conscience. How could a crew of nonviolent monks sleep knowing that their land produced warring cancer cells in the lungs? So they sold it and after they did, I went up for a visit and was surprised that the land was still there, uncultivated. [The allotment had moved to a different parcel.] I flew kites there and chatted with the brothers in the field which they let grow a crop of ragweed because it took a few years for the tobacco poison to leach out of the soil. So, to this day, as far as I know, it still grows ragweed and pokeweed and the other native wildflowers that mot of us allergy sufferers and tamed garden lovers call “weeds”.


And I still see my kites flying up there, blue and purple sleds in the sky, a dark growth of loblolly pines squaring it off at all ends, a wall to be watched because. as Charlie Brown knew all too well, kites eat trees. Big child that I was, I cried whenever I lost a kite or experimental balloon. I was only twenty four, you see, and catching up, playing in the ways that I had always wanted to play. For the first time in my life, I was keeping a journal because the Piedmont was a strange and alien place where incessant trees blocked the horizon lines and there were no hills to speak of. Flat. Almost pure flatland except now and then a high hill reared up and the locals called it a mountain, which made me laugh. It made me cry, too. because this kind of terrain went on for miles and there was no desert or rocky ocean shore or mountains to break the monotony of the loblollies and and the tobacco fields. I cried sometimes because I missed the chaparral. When I dreamed of California, I dreamed of live oaks in golden meadows. Here, dammit, everything was green, except for blue grey rivers and the brick warehouses and homes.