We Dream In Our Waking Moments, And Walk In Our Sleep

Lately I've been re-reading 'The Scarlet Letter', that hated bane of so many teenaged American existences, for the first time in about a decade. As always, Hawthorne's work manages to both haunt and intrigue in equal measure. Imminently drier than my favorite works of old Nathaniel, 'The Scarlet Letter' still incandescently smolders with the delirium of its prose, a heady brew of paranoia, shameful secrets, and fear.

It's the terror that most lingers in my continuing fascination with the early settlers of Massachusetts. One can imagine how foreboding such a land must have seemed to them, those severe British cultists in their pitch-black clothes and dour expressions. The America of the age was an endless carpet of dark, unknowable forests and steeply climbing hillsides. As man is known to do, the Puritans set at once to creating their own demons when confronted with the void. Man must explain, to put into a frame of reference, what cannot be understood. There, balanced on an edge of this new, depthless oblivion, setting foot into a world utterly unknown, they populated those woods with demons and witches. It was either a precarious attempt to better understand their mysteries, or a realization that the truth of all that unknown land was much darker, indeed. They were so far from home, and behind their backs teemed a multitude of open-ended questions.

In such tense, unusual situations, men tend to turn on each other. Suspicion, conspiracy, and hidden lives are cast like shadows behind the chalk-white facade of every early settler. In 'The Scarlet Letter', every finger that points in Hester Prynne's direction is stained with the blood of its own sin. Only Hester's quarantine allows her to see this clearly, as one accursed, excluded. Freed from the bindings of a severely unhealthy repression, she sees behind the veil. America is a loss of innocence, a confrontation with the animal nature of our environs. The Puritans' growing pains were a part of becoming the first Americans. Their behaviors and reactions would shape what that word would later mean. We've all seen how such legacies resonate through the decades towards today.

I grew up shaded by dark and eerie hills in the western half of Massachusetts, but it's somehow still North Carolina that is conjured by re-reading these florid colonial works. Our state's first settlers disappeared without any trace, and it's as if they're still lingering here between the hazy pines, hovering aloft in the tall grasses of the fields. Hundreds of vanished families like ghosts drifting about in whispers, shadowing every step. This state is shrouded in its past in a way so unique, so peculiar, that I haven't yet seen its double elsewhere. For every Costco, every new lakeside McMansion development, every strip of blank-faced office buildings or desolate fast-food parking lots, you're still just moments away from a bottomless frontier. Just last week, ten minutes from home, Denny and I camped alone at Shallow Ford entirely surrounded by the abyss. Hundreds of years and nothing has changed. America is still a mystery, a void beyond a void, a thin fabric behind a carefully-constructed surface. America is still just a murky sea of trees and hills, masking spirits and devils and wretches casting spells much as it did in the early days. We've managed to put a mask on it, but we're all still huddled close against the campfire light, jumping nervously at every rustling noise deep within the forest.