Way down south

It was at a Waffle House in North Carolina when I realized the South is a foreign country.

Now, lest the Dixies among you feel like chucking boiled peanuts at my head, I should note that I don’t say this disparagingly. It was actually an endearing dose of Southern hospitality that threw the region’s relative strangeness into stark relief; most service industries in the North are dripping with the kind of weary cynicism that could kill a litter of kittens on impact. Beyond the Mason-Dixon line, not so much.

A friend of mine who lives in Asheville insisted I make a stop at the iconic breakfast eatery, since it’s a deeply-embedded Southern institution, like peach pie and racism. Our server, Scott, had an accent dripping in drawl, such that I envision his abode awash in the smell of pig farts.

“Welcome to the Waaaaafle Hooouuuuuse,” said Scott, placing our menus before us. “Tell all your friends: Best foooood, best serrrrrver!”

Any Northerner who’s plopped into a booth at an analogous eatery knows how starkly different this interaction is from the typical Yankee greeting: “Welcome to Joe’s Grease Pit. Whatya want?”
It was my first intimation that I had ventured into a vastly different land, one of cheeriness and aw-shucks affability. This isn’t news to some, and on some level, I guess I should have been expecting it; whether Southern friendliness is a cliché or not, it’s a trait they seem to have gladly adopted as their identity. I promptly ordered a dish involving grits, partly to do in Rome as the Romans do, and partly because it seemed wise to vary my food intake from the usual diet of Raisin Bran and Pabst Blue Ribbon.

On that first creamy bite, I knew the trip was a good move.

And really, any kind of trip is a good idea, if we can finagle it. This is the part where I spout off a bunch of trite bromides about expanding vistas and broadening horizons, which, while sickening, are absolutely true; sometimes the only way we gain a cohesive view of the world is by getting the heck out of Dodge and seeing it for ourselves. How else would I have discovered that North Carolina is home to a tiny town called Bat Cave? For a guy who grew up reading Batman comics, visiting an actual place called Bat Cave ranks up there as one of life’s more bizarrely cool experiences. It’s like a history buff visiting the birthplace of Jefferson, only Jefferson never roundhouse-kicked The Riddler in his solar plexus.

At this point, I had already visited Florida on several occasions, mostly to see family, who long ago decided there weren’t enough hurricanes and Disney characters in their lives. But as interesting as those experiences were, Florida doesn’t really qualify as the South. Crammed to its sandbars with cold-weather refugees, Florida is a Northern state that took a vacation to Georgia once and then just stayed there. It’s an odd mix of young Latinos and old white people from Connecticut, which doesn’t exactly constitute an accurate cross-section of Southern culture; it’s more like a reality show in which disparate groups are forced to live together in a tiny house so the home audience can make bets on which faction snaps the soonest.

The little town of Bat Cave, by contrast, was a mircocosm of all that I had hoped to see. Driving through it on our way back from a state park, a friend and I noticed a man sitting on the front porch of a lonely house by the side of the road, sandwiched someplace between East and West Nowhere. Flanked by a prominently-placed Conferedate flag (of course), the man was hunched over in his rocking chair, busily re-stringing a rustic-looking banjo. On his front lawn, placed by the side of the road, was a large sign proclaiming, “Meet Jim, the original North Carolina hillbilly! Have your picture taken!” Legend has it, said my friend, that Jim the Hillbilly spends all of his waking hours on that very porch, engaged in various Southern-type activities, which I took to mean pastimes involving shotguns and tobacco. Sure enough, as we made a second pass to get a glimpse of this living tourist attraction, Hillbilly Jim flashed a tooth-bereft smile at us, and filled his mouth with a wad of dip that could have patched a hole in the International Space Station. It was kind of awesome, unless you were his lone incisor, in which case it was the equivalent of getting your face pounded by a mafia thug with lardy beef hands.

We toil to fill our vacations with grand, sweeping crescendos, but it’s oftentimes those smaller happenings that make a trip worth it; glimpses of lives lived elsewhere, of micro moments in a macro world. Somehow, in the midst of a whirlwind week, I found what I was looking for in the seemingly insignificant (and admittedly gross) personage of Hillbilly Jim, in the charm of a restaurant server, and in a ridiculous amount of peach pie, which made me walk like a man who just sat the wrong way on a fence post.

A stranger in a foreign land, I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d ever be there again, or what moments may await.

Tell you what, though: My first stop’ll be at a Waffle House.