I am deep in the throws of writing a memoir which means
much of my brain is living in the past and is making my
present musings a little bit loopy.
In particular, I keep running over this idea that
certain ground produces specific qualities in the
people who are born and raised there.
Like soil, water, air from your home town
seeps into the literal cells inside your body
and produces some type or maybe a few types of people.
It's some confluence of psychology, agriculture
and southern metaphor hyper-extension that
keeps trying to push itself around like a hoola-hoop in the hands of
a tired toddler.
I can't quite get it but I also refuse to let it go.
Consider this is your warning for the fever dream that might be
in the paragraphs below.
I can't make it make sense.
I also can't stop thinking about the vein of truth within it.
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| Delightful graphic t-shirt on display at Mast General Store |
Do you know what terroir is?
I learned about terroir back when I was still pretending
that my relationship with alcohol was sophisticated and benign.
Once I left the world of being a wino, I kept terroir as a vocabulary word
because it helps to add a layer of sweetness to so many aspects
of my personal (and sometimes professional) life of growing and eating.
I'd talk about it in real life more but
apparently I have a speech impediment in both French and Spanish.
Attempting to say the word out loud inevitably requires more explanation
and second-hand embarassment than is reasonable for my friends to endure
so most of my musing around terroir remains deeply seated inside my mind.
If you want an official, full blown definition, you can check out this link. My best summation is that terroir is the way
the environment seeps into growing things
and gives them a regional flavor.
It's most often discussed in relation to wine but
it also exists in the superlatives around most artisanal foodstuffs.
Cheese, pork, tomatoes, coffee and tobacco all have distinctive
flair based on the soil, water, air, and sunlight parameters that exist in
the environment where they reach their maturation.
Terroir distinctions are predictable and quantifiable but also elusive.
Think for just a second about how honey is labeled
based on the flowers that the bees forage through.
Honey created by bees primarily foraging on clover will taste
different than honey created by bees who foraged primarily on lavender.
Lavender honey doesn't taste exactly like lavender because the process of
mashing up the pollen, vomiting it out and then fermenting it
creates the most dominant flavor, that of honey.
Still, if you taste honey from lavender pollen, you will
wonder what that hint of something is until the label or your tongue
sorts it out for you.
This is sort of what terroir is but to really get it,
you need to take it a little bit further.
Honey with a particular terroir will have something that
can only really be produced by the entire region and won't be
easily linked to one factor like pollen type.
It is flavor that exists when several environmental factors
collude to produce a specific flavor or type that is only
present in that environment.
Take the bees out of the environment and they may still
make great honey but they will never quite make the same
honey that they make in that one place.
Bring in new bees from outside the environment
and the unique flavor will be found in their honey too.
It's a cool thing to geek out on how these
things come together, which of them are essential for
the flavor and which are optional.
It is not really a problem to be solved
as much as a game to play with like-minded geeks.
Another thing that people obsessed with terroir
do is pair different organisms from the same region
to fully taste and understand the place.
You may have seen or experienced a hyper-local meal
with an avante-garde chef where the field and producer
of every food, wine, animal, cheese or vegetable
is listed on the menu or highlighted by the misty eyed waitstaff.
My mouth is watering as I remember some of these meals
I've eaten, including some I've made
for myself. There is some truth that the freshness of local
food enhances the experience but terroir is more than that.
The slow roasted pork with smoked peppers and sweet potatoes
that were raised in fields beside each other were made to be together.
The berries and peaches macerated and steeped
with bourbon, poured over buttermilk ice cream from cows down the way
will always transcend anything storebought or trucked from all over.
Shrimp pulled from the salty brine and served with tomatoes,
okra and field corn proclaim the angle of the sun and the
wind off the tide as shared experiences with each bite.
It's as real as it is ephemeral.
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| One week's haul from PBO farmer's market (remember those figs?) |
If you are still with me, God bless you.
Also, have a snack because I'm sure I made you super hungry
with all my food imagery.
The metaphor that my brain wants to stretch past all sense and
reason is the notion that maybe people have terroir as well.
What if I'm the way I am is because of genetics and environmental
factors and socio-economic conditioning AND
because of the red dirt my soles ran barefoot across AND
because of the hymns sung in an awkward key AND
because of the smell of cigarettes mixed with wood fires?
What if the things that I consider my unique personality are actually
a predictable outcome of being exposed to a certain environment?
That I'm not special in the sense that there are a lot of other
people like me that have been produced in this region for
generations and our flavor of person will continue to be
produced as long as the environment supports our creation?
What if once the environment shifts, our flavor shifts?
The people like me would cease to be produced anymore
because the factors that created those markers no longer exist.
Is your hard drive fried yet because mine definitely overheats here.
One of the reasons I can't quite shake this metaphor lately is because
of an experience I had last month.
I was sitting at a monthly meeting I attend with other people of faith
who are particularly concerned with how we can support
our LGBTQ+ siblings in ways that are actually loving.
We gather to share and learn about all sorts of things on this topic
and these conversations are some of the most fruitful and holy I've
ever participated in.
My affinity for finding community and learning from
those who have been marginalized is a lifelong effort.
I want us all to be free.
Here on earth as it is in heaven.
This group of like minded folks feels the same way
but we don't always know the next right thing to do
as individuals without some of the kind of growth that takes place together.
The speaker for the night was someone I admire on social media,
who is leading a church in Raleigh that is fully affirming. She introduced herself to me and insisted that she knew me from somewhere.
I chuckled and said...well, we follow each other on socials
but I think I just have one of those faces.
As she started her presentation, she gave us a brief bio
which highlighted the likely reason I seem so familiar to her.
We're from the same county, the same town, and
grew up in the same religious denomination.
We were seperated by a few miles and twenty years of timeline.
After the meeting was over,
we tried to compare last names, family trees,
and potential places or times where our paths or our DNA crossed.
We couldn't pinpoint anything closer than the Quaker settlement
that our common ancestors started in Snow Camp in the 1700's so we have to conclude, we didn't actually know each other beforehand.
On the surface, we share a few similarities but no one passing
us on the street would think we're closely aligned or related.
We have no shared schools, work experience or facebook friends.
But there is something deeply similar between how
we move and operate in the world,
the things we chose to focus on, and the
values that we express.
Are there ways to know each other that transcend time?
Do we have the ability to share experience with someone
outside of things like books, music, movies, art?
It kept bugging me.
Until I remembered terroir.
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| Neon signs from the universe found at The Stock Room on Ocracoke Island. |
I am twenty years older than this person but I know
so much about her creation and maturation because the soil that seeped
into her bones is the same soil that seeped into mine.
Our shared flavoring also includes the air we pulled into our lungs,
the humidity that rung sweat from our bodies,
and the musical cadence of our particular location's accent.
I mean, none of this is sounds unique to our home town right?
You grow up where you grow up, you take on the lens of your people
and then probably work hard to unlearn it as you settle into maturity.
Everyone does this kind of thing.
It's called growing up.
The thing about us is, our home county is a pressure cooker
that has churned out extremes for over 250 years.
From the 1969 race riots in Burlington to the almost constant presence
of demonstrations around the Graham courthouse, evil is alive and well
and arguing with good in front of our faces.
On the one hand, there are always residents who want freedom
and egalitarianism, probably some radical acceptance and whatever
this decades version of shared community with a growth mindset looks like.
On the other hand, there are active, organized groups of racists,
using fear, prejudice and violence to enforce their world view.
Both are homegrown products of our county.
Both are consistently present in material amounts.
I would love for anyone who is inclined to believe that we are living in a post-racial society to live for a year in any neighborhood in my home county.
soldier erected where the county's first black lawman was murdered,
they will pass a colorguard of giant traitor flags
(Trump or Confederate flavors are welcomed in equal measure).
While eating at a local BBQ joint, fish house, or grill
they will likely overhear a host of jokes that
contain problematic slurs or tropes that many of us wish
had been left behind post-segragation or post-women's lib
or just post-Elton John.
If you look like you fit in even slightly here,
you will hear the quiet part said out loud
and then you'll hear it followed by either a chuckle or
'you got that right'.
The resentment at the loss of
the good old days where everyone knew their place is palpable.
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| Delivered via the bathroom at Creative Tattoo Studio in Durham |
Before my whole three family members who read this
get up in arms, I KNOW it's not everyone.
I KNOW.
But don't try and ignore that Uncle So-and-so still drops the N-word
if he thinks he can get away with it
or that our churches, funeral homes and restaurants aren't
still largely segregated.
Don't try to pretend that you want to minimize the
KKK activity or the deep anxiety you still feel
when interracial or homosexual couples hold hands in public.
This evil is not dead but is actually thriving more than ever.
I also KNOW that there's a long history of activism that keeps
our county moving foward.
I KNOW that there have been, are right now and will be
many people deeply committed to justice and transformation
who originate in this spot.
I KNOW.
I'm grateful.
I'm one of them.
I love my home county.
I love my home state.
All of it.
To take away any of it changes
the character of the people who are formed by it's
persistent dichotomies and pressures.
We need the honeysuckle and the poison ivy,
the copperheads and the cardinals,
the hurricanes and the droughts.
Which brings me back to terroir.
How did the place that produced me and
my newly met twelfth cousin
also produce a sheriff so racist he shakes hands
with the local white supremacists in front of the courthouse?
What do we have in common?
How do we go together?
Are we complementary flavors?
Do we bring out the best in each other
or in some way highlight the essence of creation?
Are we the cure or the relief for what ails us?
Is my home county a training ground for subversive
minded people?
What factors make you a wanna-be-nazi and which
make you a rainbow lover?
Can we tweak it one way or the other?
I like imagining that part of why I am the way I am
is the result of some semi-magical creation process.
It's probably bullshit of the most self-centered kind.
I still can't stop turning it over again and again.
My therapist has really helped me accept that
not everything needs to have a resolution.
Life is teaching me that the trip along the way
is usually more satisfying than the destination.
Like the meaning of life or the search for TRUTH
I am never going to really understand whether or not
people have a terroir.
I'm just going to keep turning this idea over
for as long as it entertains me and sparks my imagination.
