Spring has fled from us here in Burlington, or more accurately, spring was never here to begin with. The season's simply missing from our collective experience of 2013, a blacked-out section of a classified report or an abductee's period of missing, haunted time. Winter's raw chill dissolved in a single medium-length fade into the sticky, sweltering fragrance of summer sprung early, of the lingering traces of last night's cookouts on the tepid breeze, of barely-open windows in old houses and the green, bursting fervor of plant life growing wildly. Here in Burlington, the air grows heavy and languid, a solid object to swim through, bleeding into the car like a flood while you're helplessly marooned in city traffic. The heat shimmers in its wave-like, electric haze from the power stations and the tarmac highway surfaces, lends a dream-lit quality to those void-like spaces behind the abandoned, collapsing mills, the littered vacant lots. I expect that in a similar blink, all of this will be entombed in gray autumn once more, but for now we watch the reflections of lights dance across our watermarked ceilings and try to stay cool. Half of town seems to be on vacation already, a mass evacuation though it's only May.
Last night, I took a long walk with a friend who's recent personal crises greatly required the company. He lives in Graham, the smaller but much more affluent neighboring city to Burlington and a shadow image of what this place might've been, had different choices been made. As I paced in the liquid heat through sturdy brick-ranch neighborhoods, past neatly-trimmed lawns, I realized how very distant Graham seemed from Burlington, more in a matter of stark degrees than the sum of the very few miles between them. Burlington is still unlike anywhere else I've ever been. The closest approximation I can consider, strangely, is Los Angeles. While the two cities of course couldn't be more different than, well, winter and summer, only in LA have I also felt that surreal, edge-of-the-world quality found in such abundance in central Alamance County. The difference is here, we're on the edge of nothing. We're simply quarantined, isolated. To paraphrase Jeffrey Eugenides, we're mapped by what surrounds us. The rest of the Triangle and the Triad both seem like far-off stars glimpsed from the cold surface of a dying planet. As I've said before (in interviews for the band mostly), the surface of Burlington is a thin shell covering something stranger and much more elemental beneath, a mood that's been described by some of my visiting friends as "Lynchian". You'll turn a corner here and know you've crossed that border, that threshold, and I've realized that this 'Other Burlington' has informed so much of my musical and film work that it's becoming a defining aspect of my experiences here. Denny, escaping into the placid environs of Chapel Hill for work each day, is less acclimated to Burlington's quaintly unusual atmosphere. This is a 'thin place' in every sense of the word. Sometimes you can see behind the veil here, and sometimes it's only the faintest negative glimpsed, a double exposure in warped glass.
In summer, the furious eruption of green in this city, with its cornucopia of oaks and maples, tends to hide what seems more evident in the frozen months, with the trees black and bare and the grass dead in the lots behind the railroad rights of way and in the yards of the boarded-up Victorian mansions. But one glance at the history of this place, from the heyday of the Burlington Coffin Company, to the bizarre goings-on in the monster-cursed myths of Goat Island, to the serial killer Blanche Taylor Moore and her sweet, subtle poisonings, and it's readily apparent that things are a bit different here. There's multiple levels of perception to Burlington, all of them unusual. One can miss the subtleties, or choose to overlook them in the name of more logical rationale, but you can't deny that the mood here is odd, to say the least. Underneath Burlington's mask of an ordinary Southern town are the deepest fathoms.
So, am I simply investing something unique where only another dying North Carolina mill town exists, as would be expected of any artistic nature? I don't think so. Simply, nowhere else I've known has precisely felt like this, and in a way, that's why Burlington has come to feel so much like home even in just the two busy years we've spent here. You see, I've always been the caretaker. I've been here for years, without knowing it. It existed as a shade in my mind that had yet to be lifted, and I was always fated to come here. My music's destiny, my own destiny, lies within the eerie borders of this forgotten little city. I am sure unlocking its myriad secrets will prove fascinating all throughout the years to come.
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.
