Southern Ruin: A Photo Post

In the weeks preceding the birth of my son I began traveling with my wife each day to the college at which she teaches so that, in case she went into labor, I would be with her to take her to the hospital.  I was no longer employed as a high school teacher and was able to be as flexible and as available as she needed me to be.

Though I spent some of my time on the campus milking the open wireless network and researching genealogy I felt a need to go explore some of the surrounding countryside of Bladen County, where the college is located.

I am a North Carolina native.  Six of my direct ancestors fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War along with at least six great-grand uncles.  My mother's family hails from Aiken County, South Carolina and my father's from Stokes and Surry Counties in North Carolina.  Add to my heritage the fact that I am also a far left-leaning liberal, an agnostic-atheist, etc, and you have with me, like with much of the South, a quiet mess of contradictions.

Still, I make no secret of the fact that I have a particular and irrational love for the South, similar perhaps to the way someone might love a stray mutt - a mutt who may howl, scratch itself obscenely, and be rather a nuisance but a mutt who is also comfort and a symbol of home, even a symbol of one's own true self, if thoughts are allowed to wander so far.

In any case, and before I wander too far into the absurd intricacies and fallacies of at once hesitant and strong regional devotion, here are photographs I took as I traveled around Bladen County, North Carolina.  These are the scenes which struck me most: