went to it and asked for help,’ said Nancy. ‘It taught me to make paper from its leaves.’ Kudzu should get a teaching certificate: Nancy makes a lovely, deeply textured paper from the stuff, which she stains with natural Cherokee dyes. She presented me with a kudzu collage depicting a bunch of carrots. On the back it told me that in Asia kudzu roots are ground into a powder that’s used as a thickener in cooking, the vines exported as grass-cloth wallpaper, and the purple flowers – which incidentally smell like grape bubble gum – used in jelly-making.
My little gift in no way prepared me for the glory of Nancy’s kudzu barn. Raised up on short stilts and cinder blocks and sagging slightly at the sides so that it arched in the middle, with exterior walls of bundled straw, like a castaway’s palm hut, it was homely and exotic at the same time: a cross between homes I’d seen along the Chaophraya River in Thailand and the covered bridges of New England.
‘See,’ said Nancy, poking the roughage on the exterior walls, ‘it’s made of bales of kudzu. Each wall is one bale wide. It’s great insulation. When I’m finished I plan to stucco over both the outside and inside walls, but I’m going to leave a square inside exposed, that I’ll cover with plexiglass, so you can see how it’s constructed.’
The interior looked like the nest of a big, tidy bird – the dried bales were still exposed behind the wall studs – divided into neat rooms by walls made of antique windows that Nancy had scavenged. ‘It had been a livery stable,’ she said, ‘belonging to the house next door, when it was an old coaching inn. But I’m going to use it as a paper studio.’
We stood in admiring silence. When the wind blew, the dried kudzu rustled in the walls, whispering, I guess, about fecund youth and topiary animals, and the romance of purple bubble-gum flowers.
Walhalla was a thriving little place, with more than its fair share of antique shops, and brochures advertising upcoming events like the annual Oktoberfest. A gas station attendant told me the area had been heavily settled by Germans.
The most surprising thing in town was a Mexican-Salvadorean restaurant, a bit of a dive decorated with big, old-fashioned Christmas lights, where I stopped to pick up some take-out. It was an off hour, around four in the afternoon, and as I pulled open the door a premonition flashed across my mind of a bunch of beery guys hanging out around a pool table. I steeled myself, but as it turned out I couldn’t have been more wrong. It was empty but for three Puerto Rican women – mother, daughter, granddaughter – who were eating at the bar, each pursuing her own version of a seated salsa to the piped backbeat. They told me to order the vegetable quesadilla and join them while I waited, so I climbed into one of the high, twisty swivel chairs at the bar and began to spin it with my foot. We looked like a quartet of exhausted Motown backing singers.
In 1986, they said, the local quilting and textile factory began hiring Hispanic workers; now there is a fledgling community of about five hundred or so Spanish speakers around Walhalla. They were thinking of organizing a Fifteenth of September Party to compete with the Oktoberfest. ‘Not compete, really,’ said the grandmother, ‘just, you know, add to it.’
‘What happened on September 15th?’ I asked.
‘That’s the real Mexican Independence Day. Cinco de Mayo was just independence from the French, you see.’
I commented on her lack of accent in English.
‘Oh, I grew up on Long Island,’ she said. ‘We moved here because the cost of living is so much better for retired people. You can buy a nice house for $30,000.’
I asked if the Hispanic community ever felt vulnerable here, being such a small minority. No, she said, they didn’t really have any problems. A few seconds later she added, as an afterthought, ‘People just see us as different, and that’s OK. As long as different is just different, not bad or threatening in any way.’
At that moment, if Grandfather had tapped me on the shoulder and passed me Snake’s long-overdue feet, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Those were the woman’s words. I asked her if she had ever heard of Nancy Basket, the storyteller. She shook her head ‘No.’ Nancy hadn’t recommended any restaurants in town either, but I no longer doubted her ability to hear the drums sound from the depths. Occasionally a take-out quesadilla helps the medicine go down.
I was fast exchanging the culture of heat for the culture of hills. My route now was due north, destination Asheville, North Carolina, just about an hour and a half’s drive from Walhalla. I was supposed to meet a storyteller named David Holt at his home near Asheville in two days’ time, and had a daring plan for the intervening day.
As I approached North Carolina I felt as if I were leaving one version of the South behind, a process already begun in northern Georgia and Appalachian South Carolina. There were fewer farmsteads, fewer smallholdings, fewer modest, Fifties-style ranch houses and sagging shacks. Instead forests claimed the land almost without exception. I missed what had become my favorite icons of rural living: unpainted barns that sat expectant but stoic in flat fields like aging beasts of burden, their vertical gray boards softened and mottled by weather into velvety, strokeable hides.
The omnipresent greens of the Southern landscape were clustered vertically now rather than spread across the earth in plantings, and were less sun-faded; the rising land grew darker, rearing up before me into the Great Smoky Mountains and the blues of highland distances. The conifers and kelly-green deciduous trees had a Northern look, as if I were on the cusp of a world better known to me (a heart-sinking disappointment), where autumn and its candle-flame leaves make an impact undreamt-of in southern Georgia. My ears crackled in the clean air. Even the sunlight in the hills was different, more matter-of-fact, sharper; gone was the easy-going, late afternoon haze the color of whipped sweet butter, spangled with free-floating dust mites.
But the signs of the South continued. I stopped at a gas station cunningly disguised as a log cabin, and found that I could still buy beer at highway-side convenience stores, even on Sundays (handy, but scandalous to the New England Puritan that occasionally wags her finger in my conscience). Mammoth lumber trucks still ruled the highways, barreling along laden with freshly cut timber in a convincing display that the country was being felled around me. Hot boiled peanuts remained the snack of choice. And everything from live bait to chicken livers to ice cream to twenty-four ounce soft drinks for 50 cents were hawked on portable electric signs that looked like debased offspring of old movie theatre marquees (the above quartet was all advertised on the same sign). These simple things are unknown to me at home in Rhode Island, but for the electric marquees, which only appear in the rural corners of the state, and rarely at that.
Things took an ill turn in Asheville. My devil-may-care approach to lodging – basically, drive until I came to a sign advertising a cheap chain motel – was thwarted by a nest of converging highways. Every time I glimpsed a likely sign, it was on a route that I was either passing over, under, or paralleling, never the route I was actually on. Nearly an hour of this put me in a fierce and rather desperate mood, and I resolved to simply exit and take whatever I found. Unfortunately, I exited on the city’s south side and wound up in the shadow of the Biltmore Estate: the largest private mansion in America, built by one of the Vanderbilt clan in imitation of a chateau from the Loire Valley. For a $30 entrance ticket I could ogle a handful of the two hundred and fifty rooms – names like Ming, Wedgewood, and several Roman numeralled Louis jumped from the furnishings brochure – and all seventy-five acres of formal gardens, if I so chose. I didn’t really want to do either, but lots of other people did, which meant rich tourists, smart hotels, and high prices. I picked one, blanching at the cost, but was so eager to eat my vegetable quesadilla and drink my convenience-store beer in comfort that I stayed.
That night I sent an e-mail to Vickie Vedder, reminding her that we’d talked so much the other day that neither
