The Good Life

Seventeenth century England was much taken by Sir Walter Raleigh's description of an American demi-Eden where it was forever either spring or summer. This balmy land of the blest, he said, lay on the 35th parallel of north latitude--in present-day North Carolina. Rallying to Raleigh, for whom North Carolina named its capital, Southerners have ever since believed in their hearts that their region is kindlier, lovelier and more conducive to the good life than any other patch of earth this side of paradise, and not without reason.

The concept of an idyllic South has, of course, been inflated and distorted by the three-M--Magnolia, Mammy, Mockingbird--school of Dixifiction. But the South is far more than a state of mind (though it is that too). Despite urban and industrial encroachment, it remains a largely rural land of spectacular beauty and prolific resources for recreation and sentient delight. The people who inhabit the region are physically as well as psychically bound close to its mountains and woods, lakes and streams and shores. They cherish its abundant yields and convivially share them. If life in the South seems to move more slowly than it does elsewhere, it may be because Southerners take more time to enjoy it. As Poet-Novelist James Dickey (Deliverance) has written, "The South has a long tradition of slow-moving, of standing and watching, of having the time--of giving ourselves the time--to sit on country porches and courthouse Confederate monuments and on green benches in public parks and tell each other stories, gossip and use words." The conversation is richly spiced with humor in all its forms: tart, loving, irreverent and sometimes unprintable.

Good talk, whether in Charleston salon or Key West saloon, is a staple of Southern life--but only a reflection of it. Southerners actively stalk pleasure in all its forms with the avidity of a Yankee conglomerator bent on making billions. The gentle climate, only slightly exaggerated by Sir Walter, woos people from TV tube and typewriter to putter and put-put, field and stream. Southerners spend little time commuting to work, and recreation areas are almost everywhere close at hand. Nearly 30% of all the hunting and fishing licenses issued in the U.S. are bought by Southerners; hunters alone in eleven Southern states last year paid $31 million for licenses, the revenue going to state fish-and-wildlife agencies.

In the past ten years, some 1,150 golf courses have been built in the South, where some of the finest tournaments --including the Masters--are held every year. With a vast expanse of coastline (2,911 miles), an abundance of streams and a proliferation of man-made lakes, upcountry and coastal folk alike have as much access to water sports--fishing, boating, diving, skiing--as fabled Californians (about one-third of all the nation's outboard motors are owned by Southerners). Forest-product firms that have made loblolly pine a prime component of pulp and paper have also greened the South with new woodlands astir with game.

Americans have always, for sport or victuals, been eager hunters and fishermen. In the South, hunting and fishing are often as much a reconciliation with nature as a macho effort to meet the kill quota. A man may happily spend a day, like Pogo with cane rod upraised, and never get so much as a bite. Or, along the Florida coast, he may seek flounder with a flashlight all night and fill a pail of them before returning home to bathe and shave and drive off to the office. Or, sitting around a campfire with friends at night in Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi or Georgia, he may find his delight in the music of distant foxhounds baying after their elusive prey (the foxes get away 90% of the time). Or, hunting deer, boar, bear, quail, dove, duck, goose, snipe, squirrel, possum or raccoon, the Southerner may have between his sights an entire sideboard of culinary delights.

Southerners have an almost tactile empathy with the land. For ruffling streams stippled in spring with rhododendron and redbud, for sun-dappled hill-country roads that might have been brushed in place by Cezanne, for the Cumberlands' hazy-mazy ridge lines, for mist-smoked bayous and age-silvered tobacco barns. Even the sounds of the South seem more poignant than those of other climes: the music of distant foxhounds in Tennessee, the sandpiper's cry on a bleached Carolina beach, the lazy whirr of overhead fans in a New Orleans restaurant, the hooting, guitar-keening, foot-stomping ruckus of a Saturday-night dance in rural Georgia, Faulkner's memory of "the hot-still piney-winey silence of the August afternoon," and the "windless Mississippi December days which are a sort of Indian summer's Indian summer." The fragrances linger in nostril, redolent, in Thomas Wolfe's phrase, "of the thousand rich odors of tree and grass and flowers, of the opulent and seductive South." Of crabs simmering in open iron pots on the Gulf Coast, the coffee-laden morning air of Mobile, wood smoke in an Appalachian holler, Okefenokee's potpourri of aromas. And, yes, the aphrodisiac-soporific magnolia, more potent by far in midnight bloom than overblown fiction can convey.

The Southerner's gregariousness and his attachment to community have not, as history sorrowfully attests, made him either wiser or more benign than his Northern brother when matters like racial equality are at stake. Yet the cement of the good life in the South is a habit often neglected elsewhere in the U.S.--good manners, beginning in the family, chief among what Stephen Vincent Benet called "the broadsword virtues of the clan." Says Dickey: "Good manners and graciousness are a holdover from way on back, not just an aristocratic tradition but a Southern tradition. I've been in dirt farmers' homes where they've been as gracious as a grand duke."

For a dwindling few, the good life is still dictated by the exclusionary standards of an antebellum aristocracy. The great Mardi Gras balls of New Orleans are reserved for the private delectation of the old Creole coterie. Charleston's St. Cecilia Society demands stiffer credentials of a would-be member than the upper-crustiest men's club in London. But in most of the South, as one historian has observed, noblesse oblige has yielded to bourgeoisie oblige--even at the country club, traditionally the most closely guarded bastion of upper-class Southern Waspdom. Richmond's Country Club of Virginia, once a haven for FFVs (First Families of Virginia), now has 5,600 members (family membership is $5,000, plus annual dues starting at $660) and does not demand a blue-blood test of applicants. Nowadays, as the eminent Virginius Dabney, retired editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch (and a member of the club), puts it, "an interest in tennis, golf, swimming, bridge or fiscal solvency is a more valid qualification than one's birthplace or forebears."

Beyond the putting greens and polo grounds, the search for the good life has always been a pretty egalitarian affair in the South. Between good ole boys on a fishing, hunting, canoeing or camping weekend, distinctions of class or income are secondary to expertise or camaraderie. "Heaven help us," says Knoxville's Cas Walker, "if we are so obsessed with making money that we can't get together with old friends and enjoy a few simple pleasures."

Those pleasures are quite extraordinary in range. Beyond conventional horse and auto sports, golf, tennis, hang-gliding and rafting down rivers, they include elaborate re-creations of Civil War battles; tractor "pulls," in which contestants vie in hauling 30,000-lb. loads over a 300-ft. course; "plant digs," organized by state forestry commissions and environmentalist groups, in which families are encouraged to rescue trees, shrubs and wild flowers from soon-to-be-bulldozed sites; hunting Indian arrowheads and searching for old bottles (two of Jimmy Carter's favorite decompression pastimes) or turtle eggs.

Southerners also enjoy a legacy of shared celebration. From the epicurean crab feasts of Maryland's Eastern Shore to a catfish fry in Tennessee, from Texan barbecue orgies to the days-long shrimp or gumbo feasts of Louisiana's Cajun country, Southerners are united in their love of a party--and its morning-after reconstruction. An old New Orleans saying: "The rabbit says, 'Drink everything, eat everything, but don't tell everything.' "

Culturally, the South no longer is "the intellectual Gobi or Lapland" dismissed by Baltimorean H.L. Mencken in the '20s. The region boasts symphony orchestras, theaters and a number of enterprising museums. And even Mencken noted: "[In the South] some attention was also given to the art of living--that life got beyond and above the state of a mere infliction and became an exhilarating experience. A certain noble spaciousness was in the Southern scheme of things." That ideal has been translated into magnificent urban structures in Atlanta, Houston, Charlotte and smaller cities. Yet Southern urbanites are not captives of the city: they can swiftly dodge away to a country music festival, a fishing trip or an autumn dove shoot.

Despite the threats of urbanization, industrialization and pollution, Southerners have retained a vision of the good life, secular and spiritual, that may survive. They believe with Faulkner (again and again, Faulkner) in "this land, this South, for which He has done so much, with woods for game and streams for fish and deep rich soil for seed and lush springs to sprout it and long summers to mature it and serene falls to harvest it and short mild winters for men and animals ..." Is this so far from Walter Raleigh's dream?

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