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.
