November 19th, 2007 - Pembroke, North Carolina

It's a warm, sultry night in Pembroke, North Carolina, the tribal seat of the Lumbee indians and the McDonald's PlayPlace, where 40% of the population lives below the poverty line and the other 60% walk on it like a tightrope, where homemade signs promise to pray the troops home*, and women in crumbling Ford Escorts bump rattling gangster rap and scream along while their kids hold their ears.

A train blows its whistle in the steamy distance and then rumbles past on the tracks that lead behind the Waffle House, in front of a dense row of red maple and white ash trees, still alive with the vibrant autumn colors I've been seeing from Ohio, through New England, and down the coast, which I am desensitized to and can no longer come up with interesting ways to describe.

Dogs tethered by long ropes stand barking in yards surrounded by chain link fences, ceasing when the train finally passes, then skulking back to their beds underneath the corrugated eaves of the trailers. Baptist churches stand on seemingly every corner, like Starbucks' or your mom (face), all of them with banners touting the bluegrass gospel jam** going on this Sunday night, which you can attend as soon as you've had a nice family dinner down at:


Just across the street from the student center of the University of North Carolina, Pembroke, stands a baby blue clapboard church with a pine cross made of rough-cut two-by-fours sticking out of the ground at the sidewalk. A long wheelchair ramp leads to the doors of the church, and inside hangs a velvet banner exalting the joys of Christ Jesus, right next to the small Hostelling International placard and the list of bed prices.

When I walked in - at around five, with the sun just starting to go down outside - and saw the banner and the admission fees, it made me think of all the derelicts over the years who have had to endure a sermon at the mission before they were given anything to eat, who sat through it, payed the price of spiritual access, and were finally handed the plate of casserole they'd come for, feeling slightly swindled as they took the first bite. Of course, their plight was not mine, since I was paying a small fee to write off the preaching, but I thought of them, at least - and in this, the holiday season, it's the thought that counts.

After a few minutes of milling about the anteroom, a door to opened to reveal a smiling Japanese girl, who showed me around the building - into the huge common room with a wooden stage at the head, still decorated with foam pillars and a few scattered props from some erstwhile performance, the kitchen, and the laundry room (a godsend, I'm thinking, as I sit here in three day-old underwear) - and then led me to my room, a small private bunk room with a television and, what do you know? Free wifi.

I thanked her, paid the awesome $12 for the room, then hit the road, for a walk around the town before it got dark.
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I had planned to stay in DC for a few days, at least, but after my short, tubercular walk around the National Mall and the night spent nursing myself back to relative health in the Motel 6, I woke up unenthusiastic about the nation's capitol - yet another city with traffic, enormous parking fees, and, in DC's case, the stoic Roman architecture of the government buildings -, and decided that I wanted to hit the road and drive for hours. I was conflicted at first, and it took me a few minutes of foggy, early morning (11am) pondering to make the decision to leave DC, because I had had such high hopes for it. Fuck it, I finally decided. This is the best part of what I'm doing, this trip - when I'm not feeling a place anymore, I don't have to stick around and punch the damn clock, I can just get in my car and peace out, leave it as far behind as I want it.

So that's what I did.

I never fall out of love with driving, and since I've spent the past two weeks making only small, fifty-to-a-hundred mile jaunts, I wanted to drive for hours. I picked an arbitrary and not-so-well-thought-out point on the map - Wytheville, Virginia - and headed for it.

Wytheville is located in the Blue Ridge Mountains, close to the western tip of Virginia, and when I arrived there five hours later and looked at my map, I realized I'd driven 300 miles west, just to head 300 miles back east to Wilmington over the next two days.

It didn't matter, though. I spent the drive amped on delicious Dunkin' Donuts coffee, blasting the new Aesop Rock CD, Sabrepulse, and Owen, feeling fantastic. I was finally out of the cities, into the rolling hills of Virginia, where the accents became more and more southern with every inch I progressed, and the idea of heading south and soon, west, made me extremely happy. I've got my whole damn life ahead of me, I kept thinking. Hooray! And soon I'd be driving straight for the sunset, with California at the end of it!

I spent last night at a motel in Wytheville, after the finding the campsite I was heading to completely vacant of staff or fellow bedouins, with neither the sound of a motorhome generator nor a girl scout troop singing anywhere in the vicinity. I considered driving in and setting up a tent anyway, risking being ejected by some night security guard or a cougar (the animal, not an older woman who fucks young dudes), but it was all just a show, really. The lack of campground personnel was the excuse I needed to feel justified in getting a motel with Cartoon Network.
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It was a comfortable 70 degrees for most of the day today. I can feel it, with all of this warmth - I'm getting closer and closer to the distance from the equator that I'm used to.

At one point, I happened through Hamlet, North Carolina, off of Highway 74 on the way to Pembroke. Hamlet lies at the bottom of one of the cow-strewn pasture hills that roll through western North Carolina, and introduces itself with a few open-air produce stands - selling peaches and apples and zucchini and jars of jam and honey -, which reside just outside of the town proper. The haze of the humidity hangs lightly in the air, giving the fruit stands the warm, diffuse glow of soft-core porn.

Hamlet, I came to find out, is not only the home of John Coltrane, but the third worst industrial accident in American history, a grease fire at a chicken plant that fried 25 people into bite-size chunks. The fire department arrived just in time to douse the tragedy in honey-mustard dressing, and the mayor of Hamlet, with fat dripping from his chin, declared it to be a delicious disaster.

Ooh, shit. The fire was in 1991. Too soon?
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Anyway, I'm in the church for tonight. And with free wifi, lord knows what kind of debauchery I will conjure as the witching hours come down.



*Let me know how mumbling to yourself works towards changing American foreign policy, fuckos.

** Man, that does sound fun, though. I've got to hit one of those up.