The porch and the road
A chord, a riff is all it takes to conjure a lost world – a vinyl madeleine. In 1972, I went off to prep school at Woodberry Forest in Virginia, just as Steely Dan’s Reelin’ in the Years was hitting the airwaves. That opening solo was quickly tattooed on my brain.
It was most memorably blasted from the front of the Walker Building, the center piece of the campus, home to school’s administrators and four floors of dorms. A stately red brick structure, it was approached by a narrow two lane road that ran up the hill from the river. To enter, you ascended by a sweep of marble stairs to a columned porch with a double screen door flanked by benches that looked back down at the chapel and towards the fields. It had no air conditioning, so in the spring and and early fall the windows were thrown open and music rang out across the lawn. The Grateful Dead. B.B. King. The occasional Merle Haggard.
Fast forward to the Carolina Coffee Shop in Chapel Hill where I worked as a waiter for a post-grad year while living in a 19th century farmhouse in Chatham County with two friends, both still in school. It was a beautiful place back off the road with huge oaks in the yard. It was rumored to be haunted. One night my roommates and I were hunched over a bar on Rosemary Street with another friend, someone who had heard the stories. As we got up to leave, he grabbed me by the arm. “Remember,” he said, dropping his voice to a whisper. “When you see the dog, somebody’s going down.”
I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant by that. But then late one night back at the Plantation, as we styled it, I heard a noise outside and went down to investigate. It was around 3 o’clock on a warm, windless evening. I pulled back the latch on the front door and took a step outside. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a dark shadow coming on hard, panting, racing across the porch. It pushed past me in a rush of hot breath, then disappeared into the night. I went inside and hid under the covers until morning.
Whatever it was, I never saw it again, and the following spring, we left the house. I headed to the mountains to work for the summer as a raft guide on the Nantahala River. One roommate graduated and started up in the furniture business, the other went back to his home town in eastern North Carolina to sell real estate.
To the present: we keep a photo of a classic Southern porch on the wall of our New Jersey bedroom. It’s been there for as long as we’ve been in the house. I bought it from a store on Third Avenue in New York where it had hung for months in a dusty window. I had hoped to one day recreate it somewhere.
Porches look backward in time. The one we have under construction isn’t so grand as the one in the photo, but it’s close enough. Out front it will be 29′ x 11′ and there’s a second screened in porch on the west side, and another, smaller one in the back off what will eventually be the patio. Together, they’re a third again the size of the main floor. They look out over the fields, and to the red dirt lane that bends away through the trees in the direction of Chapel Hill.
If a porch looks behind, the road runs ahead, and we will eventually have a view of both. The truth is, Nora and I have never thought of this adventure as a nostalgia tour: we’re not reeling in the years, we’re trolling for something new.
500 miles 