Amidst the Ruins

Last Wednesday I cranked up “Born to Be Wild” and headed out onto the highway to reenact the Great American Road Trip with my designer and photographer friend Jim Newbury [1] and the CEO of Stuckey’s, Stephanie Stuckey. You might remember Stuckey’s for it’s blue-roofed roadside stores stocked with everything a backseat-bound kid could desire in the way of novelties and candy—particularly of the pecan-informed variety. Maybe you wonder what happened to it. Well, she’s working on that, so just sit tight.

Road tripping in the Era of Covid is a dicey proposition, but I was overjoyed to get an intermission, and I was proud of myself for catching a break without having to resort to kidnapping the governor of Michigan. To be completely honest, it wasn’t nearly as weird as I expected. We all got tested before we departed (yes, I know tests are not 100%, but given that we’ve all been careful we judged the risk of an erroneous test to be fairly low); we spent most of our time either in the car, outdoors, or alone in our hotel rooms; and we wore masks whenever we were indoors with other people. We didn’t go to any crowded bars or Trump rallies, so on balance our situation wasn’t that much different than it is on a day to day basis at home, except that the couch was moving much faster than usual.

I say it wasn’t as weird as I expected because I had worked up a goodly number of catastrophic scenarios in my quarantined mind. Jim had been lobbying me to do a road trip for quite some while, but as I was deeply involved in watching YouTube and solving jigsaw puzzles I didn’t feel I really had that kind of spare time. Moreover, I couldn’t quite picture it. The idea was that we’d link together a bunch of towns behind a common theme—we’d been leaning toward the Fall Line—and he’d take a slew of pictures and I’d write something intelligent or at least funny and we’d sell the results to… who exactly? Covid-19 Monthly? I pictured us rolling into ghost towns, tumbleweeds and PPE drifting across the streets and ghostly faces pressed against the windows like pickled eggs in jars of brine.

And so it went, until one day Jim suggested we should accompany Stephanie on a tour of her empire.

Some background is in order. Stephanie Stuckey is the scion of a family of business moguls and politicians. Her grandfather started Stuckey’s in 1931 as a single roadside stand selling pecans and pecan-related candy. By the time I was a kid, rolling around the United States like a marble, Stuckey’s was at its pinnacle, with over 350 stores. If you’re older than me you might remember her father Bill, who was a U.S. Congressman for Georgia’s 8th district through the late 60s and 70s. Stephanie herself was a state representative for 14 years and later worked on environmental and sustainability issues with GreenLaw and then under Mayor Kasim Reed in Atlanta. So, Stephanie is good folks, if I may be so biased. 

I got to know her a bit during her GreenLaw days, when I undertook the quixotic task of visiting every coal-fired power plant in Georgia and writing an unpublishable 12,000 word tome on the subject, which, if you’re lucky, you’ll read when I’m dead and all my unpublished garbage gets dumped into the waterways like so much toxic sludge. At the time I was unaware of her connection to the pecan log roll operation which factored so large in my youth, and I was therefore understandably surprised and delighted to hear the news that she’d taken over as potentate of the company late last year. 

Our patron and compatriot, Stephanie Stuckey

Now, Stuckey’s is iconic to me. The yellow signs with the stylized script logo, the characteristic blue roofs, and of course the stores chock full of candy and all manner of kitschy but fascinating little odds and ends—this was Shangri-La to me as a boy, trapped in the back seat of our green Ford LTD Country Squire station wagon [2], hurtling from one end of the country to another. We always stopped at Stuckey’s at least once every trip, and I always got one of those invisible ink activity books in which you can play hangman or tic-tac-toe by yourself, which was ideal because I sure as hell wasn’t going to play with my sister. We were too busy patrolling the demilitarized zone in the middle of the seat to engage in something as frivolous as play, but that’s not a good basis for avoiding boredom on a 2,000 mile car ride. So an announcement from the car’s headquarters that a Stuckey’s visit was imminent was tantamount to finding an Atari 2600 under the Christmas tree.

The problem for Stephanie is that those 350 stores have dwindled down to around 20. In at least one sense this is an opportunity, as she has made it her mission to visit them in order to gauge their relative health. This would be understandably harder if there were hundreds of them, though I’m sure she’d prefer that problem. The ones we visited (three of which were not actually standalone stores but rather small stores-within-stores) left no doubt as to the work that needs doing. 

I wish her the best of luck with all that; she seems to be making lots of good moves. But Stephanie and her company will be the subject of future writing. For now, let’s talk about where we went: South Carolina.

Every state in the U.S. is crazy in its own particular way. Texans are apparently obsessed with the size of things. Georgia is run by a man who points guns at teenagers and hasn’t got the sense God gave a watermelon. Florida’s population consists entirely of Floridians. Even states without the stink of Confederacy on them manage to get into the game: everyone in Washington is high, for example, and people in Massachusetts can’t talk right. And so forth. 

Yet even amid all of these potential alternate license plate slogans, South Carolina is a standout. It’s not just that the state was the first to secede in 1860, but apparently they never got the message that they lost the war and have since been readmitted to the Union. South Carolinians are understandably proud of their strong military traditions: Parris Island, the Marine Corps boot camp facility, is located in the state (though there is some dispute about how much longer this will remain the case) and South Carolina hosted some top notch Revolutionary battles. This fixation on military prowess is a little out of hand, though. I only discovered recently that that’s not a crescent moon on the South Carolina flag—it’s a gorget. Think about it: the flag of a state that can boast of beautiful beaches, gorgeous rivers and lakes, and thriving agriculture bears—instead of, say, a guy hooking a fish—the image of a historical device equivalent to a bullet-proof vest. I guess we should be thankful it’s not a Saturday night special on a field of red, but in any event, proclivity for violence is something South Carolina might want to play down given that the state ranks fifth nationwide in the number of women murdered by men each year.

Furthermore, like most states with large Black populations (South Carolina is tied with Alabama for fifth highest percentage), the government of the Palmetto state looks like a meeting of plantation owners, Jim Clyburn and his viciously gerrymandered 6th district notwithstanding. Most of the regions through which we passed were majority Black and emphatically Democratic. From our perspective it seemed like there should be greater Black representation in the state. We could perhaps be excused for thinking that Jaime Harrison is a shoe-in to unseat the hilariously pugilistic Chihuahua Lindsey Graham, but the truth is that there are two South Carolinas. The one we traveled through is largely Black, largely powerless, and deeply mired in poverty. The other consists primarily of men in white seersucker suits sipping mint juleps on the veranda and taking humorous photos of each other on the slave auction block in Charleston. 

This is just my somewhat biased perception of the place of course; I’m no scholar, just a guy with a giant chip on his shoulder who drove around the state for a few days and talked to some people. Two things, however, are manifestly tangible: South Carolina’s natural beauty is beyond compare, and that beauty is marred by a shameful inequality in the distribution of wealth. It just is.

Flying down Highway 278 just north of the village of Kline, Stephanie suddenly shouted at us from the back seat, exhorting us to turn around. She explained that we had to see a yard we had just passed. I’ll admit I was skeptical—the highway was flanked by wide empty fields of sandy soil and stubby grass and occasional pine woods. The few houses were low, crumbling boxes with dark windows and maybe a shabby car in the driveway; old rusty swingsets, sun-bleached plastic toys, unidentifiable trash. I won’t say it wasn’t interesting—from the window of a speeding vehicle. But to stop and stare seemed rude and possibly even dangerous.

Fortunately I’d chosen at the outset to defer to Jim and Stephanie as to the itinerary and pretty much any choices beyond which window I would look out of. We turned around and pulled into the short drive at the end of the yard farthest from the house. The yard was indeed a sight. It was, in fact, literally full of trash. But carefully organized trash. The whole acre or so was cut up into paths and chambers by bits of bed frames, rusty old metal shelving, cinder blocks, chair legs, and countless other items. Each path was lined with decorative bric-a-brac—mirrors, plastic vases, cups, jars, old lamps, signs. We even spotted a Doritos-branded display shelf that had been discarded from some convenience store who knows how long before. Many of the items were fragmentary, almost all were pale from years under the merciless sun, and everything that could hold soil was spilling over with soleirolia soleirolii—baby’s tears.

A triumphal arch in Julia Moten’s art garden

Stephanie was eager to speak to the artist, but the house looked unoccupied in to me. Weeds poked through the cracks between the paving stones of the front walk. The screen door to the porch was locked but the screen hung loose. Stephanie pushed her way through it, igniting a small conflagration of terror in my mind, and knocked on the door. Nobody answered. A second knock and again no response. But as we walked away, the property owner abruptly emerged,  greeting us with a smile rather than the birdshot I was expecting. I’ll admit it, I’m much less charitable and trusting than either of my road partners.

Julia Moten is a cheerful and open-hearted Black woman, a former Honeywell employee who abandoned tech to make a life in the South Carolina countryside. She explained to us that her art was not just for show, but that everything in the yard had a purpose. She showed us a fire pit covered by the amputated hood of a car; a fish-cleaning station constructed from a child’s slide; bins fashioned from stacked car tires where she deposited compost and a plastic basket of old Ball jars containing compost samples so that she could determine the state of decay without having to go digging in the bins; a skee-ball range and mini-golf course for her nephews, made from an assortment of oddments including a foot-deep ring cut from the top of a trash can and strips of blown tire from an 18-wheeler, which she called “alligator backs;” and the open-air workshop where she made all this stuff using mostly reclaimed and improvised tools. 

Julia’s prayer room in back of the garden

Julia told us that the region was a poverty bowl, and that there was only very little in the way of material goods available locally; that it was a 35 mile drive—one way—to the nearest hardware store. Imagine, she explained, the disappointment if you drove all the way there and back only to find you’d bought the wrong size widget or tool. So, she made her own. 

The last stop on Julia’s yard tour was the dining area—a few chairs cobbled together from cinder blocks and trash can lids, a table made from stacked plastic pallets. She told us, “Lots of people like to dine at four-star restaurants. Well this is a galaxy, because you’re eating under the stars.”

I don’t know if Julia intended to make a point about poverty and the ceaseless torrent of trash raining down from the supposedly civilized world, but the point has been made, eloquently. 

Of course, the “civilized” world is the world I inhabit. It’s the world of Stuckey’s and it’s various knick-knacks, and it’s the world of both Lindsey Graham and Jaime Harrison. It consists of the nodes on the electrical and road network—the large ones, primarily—while in between, along the sides of the highways and within the cells bordered and bypassed by the Interstate system, much of our detritus settles like dust. 

I like to think of towns and cities and nations in biological terms—not because I’m deep; just because it’s fun to observe the parallels. These entities take in nutrients. The nutrients circulate. The nutrients are used to maintain and grow. Waste is excreted. The same is true from the smallest hamlet on up to the huge bio-electro-mechanical systems with names like “China” or “India.” It’s not surprising that human agglomerations should mimic the human body; towns and cities and countries are, in a sense, simply a machines for scaling up human physical processes. We all gotta eat, and we all gotta go number two. We may as well be efficient about it.

In this model, what do we make of a place like South of the Border?

The author as tourist

We arrived on Friday afternoon, in a manner contrary to that which the proprietors of the place would probably prefer. Drivers on I-95 will see South of the Border first as a colossal statue of Pedro, an undeniably racist caricature of a Mexican gentleman in a sombrero and sirape, straddling the road as if in preparation for a number two of his own, to be deposited atop the car of of some road tripping family on their way to the beach at Hilton Head. We came in on the highway instead, passing first the saddest red light district I’ve ever seen—four or five squat rectangular buildings, each with its own highly optimistic parking lot and each with a sign advertising topless dancers or “girls girls girls.” None of them looked like going concerns, though one, hilariously named “Winner’s World” at least sported a small assortment of downscale automobiles parked out front. At the very least this lachrymose scene set our expectations to the proper level.

South of the Border is a phantasmagoria. Take an amusement park, a reptile zoo packed with crocodiles and venomous snakes, a couple of restaurants specializing in fried everything, a couple dilapidated motels, a truck stop, a beach shop, and two massive gift shops packed to the gills with all manner of injection-molded flotsam; jumble it all up and drop it on either side of a four-lane highway. Coat it all liberally with cartoon Mexicans and fiberglass animals—gorillas mostly, plus a dinosaur, a giraffe, and oddly, a dachshund the size of a sofa. And there you have it: South of the Border, established in 1949 as a shrine to the Great American Road Trip. So obviously we couldn’t miss it. 

You could be eating fried dough here right now.

I’ll admit I enjoyed SOB, if only because there’s something fascinating about watching American capitalism in its most crass manifestations. And the snakes were pretty cool too. But definitely there’s a sense that this place does not fit into the biological model of civilization, except maybe as a tumor. The gift shops were especially concerning: less like a store than a pair of orifices, one taking in money and the other excreting material for Julia’s garden. Except that one storeload of goods would blanket Julia’s garden in a layer of plastic a foot deep.

Many of the towns we passed through consisted entirely of antique stores—a late stage of civilizational cancer in which the host trades off everything of any remaining value in a desperate bid to stay alive. Other towns had nothing but empty storefronts. We joked that America was great again. It’s funny because it’s so very not true. 

Coat of paint’ll fix that right up.

At Jim’s behest, we stopped at a lot of fireworks stores. Not to buy fireworks, but because he was interested in photographing the naive graphics that appear on the sides of the stores—exploding firecrackers with the fuses inexplicably still burning; fountains of sparks like dandelions dispersing seeds; incompetent, warped reproductions of the famous Black Cat logo. Rummaging through the stores while Jim collected his images, I noticed a couple things: First, almost all fireworks are made in China, and second, a huge percentage are emblazoned with imagery evoking a very heavy-handed American patriotism—American flags, weapons of war, eagles, government buildings (one box of rockets was inexplicably wrapped in a photo of the Supreme Court), that sort of thing. The irony of this can’t be overstated. We consume foreign-made patriotism, literally—we actually buy this shit and set it on fire.

I don’t know how to remedy America’s ills, especially because there’s a lot more wrong with our country than just our out-of-kilter manufacturing and consuming patterns. But that would be a good place to start. We should be making things, because that’s what humans do. And moreover, we should be making things we actually care about, rather than simply stamping out an endless stream of keychains merely because each one nets us a penny of profit, because that’s what tumors do.

Give me liberty or give me bedbugs.

William Gibson famously said that the future is already here, but that it's just not very evenly distributed. He meant, presumably, that only some of us have high-speed internet and smart speakers and video game systems and all that other high tech folderol, but his remark can be taken another way. By 410 A.D. the Romans had left Britain, and for hundreds of years after their departure the British continued to use their roads and buildings and aqueducts without ever possessing the resources necessary to repair or extend them. They simply lived like ghosts in the ruins of a great civilization.

If ruin is our future, South Carolina is way ahead of the rest of us.

[1] All photos courtesy of Jim Newbury.

[2] Because my mom will be reading this I feel compelled to note that it might not have been the Ford LTD Country Squire station wagon, but that was the funniest model name I could find.