American impressions: life in the North Carolina Piedmont
Reflections on my time as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Elon University, North Carolina.
1. Elon University · 2. Flora and fauna · 3. Teaching technology ethics · 4. The sport · 5. Being a Fulbrighter · 6. Life in the North Carolina Piedmont · 7. The national future.
‘It is easy to fall in love with the beauty of a place, harder to accept and ultimately forgive its flaws.’ —Jan Deblieu
North Carolina is sliced in three. To the west, the Appalachian mountains, the high country of Asheville and waterfalls. To the east, the Coastal Plains beachfronts, native home to the Venus flytrap. In the middle, the Piedmont. Rolling farmland and tobacco fields; universities and difficult golf courses. My home for six months.
Elon NC is a small town, with most of its 11,000 residents being students or university staff. Its contiguous sister Burlington, technically a city, comprises a couple of downtown blocks and a few restaurants that close at like 4pm on Sundays. Central Burlington’s a 5km hike anyway, and walking distance is a thwarted concept here thanks to five-lane intersections and sidewalks that end abruptly in ditches. For someone used to the convenient density of London life, small-town America’s interminable planning is depressing: this is a 15-minute drive away, Walmart can ship that by Wednesday, but for that you’ve got to head upstate.
Thankfully one commodity is abundant. The brewing gods have landed me opposite craft beer store and bar Beer Republic, and oh boy does North Carolina have great beer: gloopy sours from Hopfly, rich and balanced hazies from DSSOLVR and Heist. Even the lime-green novelty St Paddy’s weissbeer (brewery withheld for reasons of decency) is drinkable. Being a quiet man I initially keep to myself, making lecture notes or solving chess puzzles at the bar, but an accent is eventually both an introvert’s blessing and curse. In time, I’m a regular. I find it’s easiest to say I’m from London until folks eventually indulge my explanations of the complex nesting of Welsh and British identities.
We chat about sports, local restaurants, and of course the beer, but where there’s beer there’s eventually politics. North Carolina’s democratic hue is magenta, let’s say, with the familiar split between rural conservatism and university town liberalism. Alamance County leans Republican, as do most NC counties thanks in part to outrageous gerrymandering. Having lived my adult years entirely in left-leaning communities – studenty Nottingham, Brighton, east London – it’s my first time as a political minority.
I suspect the trait North Carolinians value most is authenticity. The state is nothing if not genuine, per its motto esse quam videri: ‘to be, rather than to seem’. This is the Tar Heel state, founded on honest work and straight talk, and no place for the multilayered ironies of global cities. To be clear though, I want to recoil from the patronising stereotype of ‘simple country folk’. The regulars I befriend are complex and flawed like everyone else. True, most tell me they’ve not left the US – a prospect that would horrify most Europeans – but remember this nation contains multitudes. Fly from Phoenix to Madison or take I-10 eastbound from the Louisiana bayous towards the art deco of Miami Beach and it’s hard to believe it’s only state borders you’re crossing.
In other words, while my neighbours are warm and welcoming they’re also observant and direct. A quick way to lose friends would be to take the emissary Fulbright sentiment too far, to see my community as some kind of project. I’m lucky to have travelled widely but I know this doesn’t grant me a right to proselytise my worldview. People here can spot a crusader. So third-pint politics chat requires nimble footwork as I try to balance personal integrity and affability. My political get-out – ‘If these are the two best candidates America can offer, something’s desperately wrong’ – lands well, but no doubt in time people can taste my dread of Trump’s second term. I skip out of the gun chat but explain when pressed that the rest of the world finds the gun thing kind of unhinged and repellent. I gently put forward a case for European travel, encouraging the ‘I’ve always wanted to…’ crowd to be braver and get it booked.
Perhaps that’s our best option when outnumbered: to state our case respectfully but sincerely and try to offer a z-axis to the caricatures we all paint of our opponents. And – of course, since this goes both ways – to listen. I’m no political scientist but I think I get a better grasp on what motivates people (QAnon fringers aside, q.v. below) to support Trump. Patriotism for sure; loyalty and respect too, and the cost of living has also hit the Piedmont hard. But above all I sense a loss of agency and a fear of decline. Many people confide in me they know Trump’s a despicable man but will vote for him regardless because they see in him a last chance to save some idealised America they cherish. I wish I could express how high-risk, how reckless I fear this strategy will be, but it wouldn’t change anything if I could.
I live near an Amtrak line, with one train crawling up the east coast to New York each day and four shuttling between Raleigh and Charlotte. Trains are simultaneously roomy and utterly oversold. The experience is weirdly airlineish. You check in with attendants and are shepherded towards specific seats. You are counted on and off. There’s none of the self-serve spontaneity I’m used to, the grab-and-go of UK rail. I learn that in Amtrakian corporate lingo ‘All doors will not open’ means ‘Not all doors will open’.
On one journey we actually hit and kill some poor guy on the tracks. It makes a single-paragraph story on local news sites. Once the police let us disembark an hour or two later we grab Ubers to town, there being no other transport available from Kannapolis. Our driver regales us with a checklist of far-right conspiracies. My visiting friend, a researcher of disinformation and I, by this point entirely immune to this crap, egg him on to see how deep the rabbit hole goes (a tip: the phrase you want is ‘Wow, that’s crazy’, which stokes further revelations while being no word of a lie). It’s a long journey so we reach the outer brain galaxies – ‘Oprah is a sex trafficker’ and ‘the WEF are about to genocide 90% of the human race’ – before pulling to a merciful halt. We decline to tip.
I spend a lot of time in Charlotte. Ignore the dreary city centre, dominated by banks and eyerollingly called not downtown but Uptown, and take advantage of that Southern rarity: light rail. The Lynx Blue Line, bisecting the city northeast to southwest, has attracted the usual mass transit symbiotes: great cafés, quirky stores, microbreweries. Sure, there are plenty of these elsewhere in the state too, but here you can walk to and between them, rather than driving to a haunted strip mall. Raleigh, at the other end of the line, is also charming, with good BBQ, chess meetups, the Hurricanes, and what seems to be the only place to buy excellent bread in the whole state. (Don’t get me started on American supermarket bread: $5.29 for a heavy, pre-sliced, cake-sweet brick.)
Perhaps I regret not seeing the state’s wider reaches. I’d have enjoying pushing paddles in the Asheville Pinball Museum or dipping an oceanic toe off the Outer Banks. But North Carolina is nearly twelve hours west to east and, as no fan of driving, I’m hemmed in by the railway to the heart of the state.
I’m happy to have returned now to the overflow of London life, but a small part of me yearns for the Piedmont. I walk into Sainsbury’s and am disappointed it’s not Harris Teeter. I miss Biscuitville’s butter-flaked pastry and the sucrotic overload of Cheerwine soda. I need to find a UK importer of Texas Pete hot sauce. I’ve barely seen the sun in weeks, and I worry who’s feeding my backyard cardinals in my absence.
In an eccentric Greensboro book store I stumble across Amazing Place, a compendium of essays on why North Carolina seems to captivate so many writers. It’s not just me, then: there is something about this state, its lyrical appeal and its maddening contradictions, simultaneously lavish and rough, friendly but insular. Capturing North Carolina’s essence feels like trying to draw a bird in flight. Words fall short; maybe I should leave it to the professionals. But I know the Piedmont has put its claws in me.
