Cornbread & Sushi on the Road Again

When you read this I'll be in the middle of driving around the upper South for ten days with my colleague Deno Trakas and 12 students in two rental vans. At Wofford we call January "Interim," and it's a chance to be innovative, a chance to focus, to explore one subject in depth for an entire month.

Not everybody leaves campus for Interim. While we're traveling through the rural South, two of my colleagues will be looking into the complex collision of the ideas of science and religion, and another is putting on a musical called "Into the Woods." Students will be learning the art of pottery and exploring the culinary culture of Italy. One group will be working with an accomplished screenwriter to show them how to write (and even sell) screenplays. Another professor is teaching a course called "Drawing from Nature: Writing the Landscape" with local artist Helen Correll.

Generous funding from the Watson-Brown Foundation allows us in the "Cornbread and Sushi class" to continue our two-year exploration of the changing rural South in the best way possible: with our feet on the ground. The vans are paid for, as is our food and lodging. It's as if 12 of our students have a full adventure scholarship for 10 days.  

For this year's road trip we've scheduled stops in Chapel Hill, Roanoke, Charlottesville, Manteo, Wilmington, Charleston, Daufuskie Island, and Savannah before we'll finally make the big turn for home on the 18th.

Along the way we'll eat sushi in Carrboro with writers Hal Crowther and Jill McCorkle, walk Virginia's Tinker Creek with Hollins University poet Thorpe Moeckel, learn about preserving the rural nature of Monticello with Dan Jordan, explore the dunes of the Outer Banks with nature writer Jan DeBlieu, visit Clyde Edgerton in Wilmington, eat tamales on John's Island with Jo Humphries, tour Daufuskie Island in pick-up trucks with Roger Pinkney, and climb onto Civil War batteries at Wormsloe Plantation with Craig Barrow.

Along the way our 12 students will get a chance to ask these writers questions about their relationship to place. What do they write about? How do they live in the South? What matters to them? What should change about this region? What should stay the same?

They'll hear the answers, and maybe it will call their own ideas about the South into question. I hope they will come up with their own answers and more questions.

Isn't that what education is all about? Shouldn't we find our encounters with ideas and actions challenging? Isn't that what liberal arts majors at small colleges pay the big bucks for?

For me the answer is yes. If college seniors are seeing the world exactly as they did as freshmen, I believe they should ask the college for their money back. Somebody failed them along the way. Education is not only about skills and job training. It's about change.  

Our trip through the South will be a rolling lab for all these things and more. What I like best about traveling with students and colleagues is that you never know when you leave where exactly the exploration is going to take you. There will always be that one van discussion, that chance encounter on the road with somebody you didn't schedule ahead of time. It will be what you remember from the trip, what I call the "perfect moment." Once we're home we'll begin to sort through what we heard and saw in all these places since travel is the gift that keeps on giving.

Every day we'll roll into a different town. We'll see new places and hear new people tell us about their South. At the end of the trip we'll take the vans back, but what we'll be left with will be something we hope we'll all never forget-a road trip for the ages, an out-and-back pilgrimage to the edge of the South and the edge of our own ideas about it. All I've got to do this morning is pack and then I'll be ready to hit the road.