sprawl

This past week a $100 million redevelopment plan was announced for the Lan Yair golf course on Spartanburg's Halfway Branch, one of the largest tributaries of Lawson's Fork Creek. Halfway Branch rises just north of East Main Street. The unassuming creek and several bold streams that feed it were dammed long ago to form the old ponds of the golf course.

My writer/activist friend Janisse Ray has recently written an essay called "Bleeding Fields," all about rural exodus in the South. Janisse grew up in Baxley, a small farming town in south Georgia. Though she wasn't raised on a farm (her father ran a junk yard), her grandparents were still on the land just outside of town all through her girlhood. She grew up eating home-grown okra and tomatoes. She knew the smell of tilled fields, could recognize a chicken shack and a mule. She grew up believing in small communities like Baxley and the surrounding rural culture that supported them.

Last weekend I was asked to attend a conference at the University of South Carolina on the 10th anniversary of James Dickey's death. Acclaimed poet, author of Deliverance, and mentor to hundreds, Dickey taught in Columbia for nearly thirty years. Along with Pat Conroy, James Dickey is one of the two great literary figures South Carolina has produced since World War II. Their poetry and prose form gigantic rocky peaks still looming over all aspiring writers wanting to float their voices out on South Carolina's literary waters.

We set out on our Cornbread and Sushi road trip to look for the changing South, and driving through Charlotte, Chapel Hill, Roanoke, and Charlottesville we found it-towns changed to edge-cities, farmland changed to suburbs, two-lanes changed to four-lanes, small-scale farming changed to corporate agriculture, mom-and-pop businesses changed to chain stores.

This week we drove U.S. Highway 176 north to Landrum three days in a row to watch our son play in a basketball tournament at the new District 1 high school. We could have driven faster, more sterile I-26, but taking the old highway has its advantages and insights.

(Appeared in Blue Ridge Syndicate, 1/8/2001)

With a $1 billion project on the line, South Carolina developer Burroughs & Chapin in late December filed the last of an extraordinary volley of documents aimed at persuading the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to revise the floodplain map of the Congaree River.