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Back Home Michael McFee I have split my life more or less in half between the mountains and the Piedmont of North Carolina. I was born in Asheville and raised ten miles south of town in Arden, where I lived until I was eighteen; I went off to college in the Research Triangle area (Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill) for a while, with frequent trips back home to the mountains; but since the mid-1970s, except for a few teaching sojourns in upstate New York and mid-Wisconsin, I've stayed put right here in the Piedmont, with my Piedmont wife and son. Yet I go back home to the mountains frequently in my poems, in my dreams. Why? Is it just a matter of being haunted by whatever imprints you at an early age, whether Blue Ridge or Brooklyn? Is there some essential quality about the mountains that keeps calling me back? What is it about the mountains that sets them apart from my adopted region, the place where I've chosen to live and work, my home now for many years, the Piedmont? The mountains would seem to have the upper hand from the start, in that the Piedmont is named in terms of them and not vice-versa. Piedmont: foot-mountain: foothills: any area near the base ofa mountain, whether northwest Italy or eastern United States. The irony of the term "Piedmont"—or at least, here in North Carolina, with its textbook division into three physiographic provinces: mountains, Piedmont, and coastal plain—is that much of the region is nowhere near the base of a mountain. There are no real mountains to be found in the vicinity ofDurham, where I live, though some local hills may get called that, to the great amusement of us Appalachians-in-exile. When I was in elementary school, North Carolina was described as stretching "from Murphy to Manteo"—i.e., from the westernmost mountains to the easternmost ocean. The Piedmont was left out of this alliterative sequence, this prepositional definition of our state. The implicit geography lesson was: The mountains are home, where we live; the coast is where we go for vacation (at least, those few of us who could afford it: I saw the Atlantic Ocean twice before I was twenty); Michael McFee ofDurham, North Carolina, has published his poetry and essays in his own five collections and in various journals such as Poetry, Hudson Review, TriQuarterly, Calloloo, and Southern Literary Journal. 13 the Piedmont is somewhere to get through, not linger in. Even our occasional descents to the upper Piedmont of South Carolina—to buy fireworks or liquor, to misbehave generally, even to get married (which, under certain conditions, could be a sort of rebellion)—were brief: who'd actually want to live down there? Even so, I've always capitalized "Piedmont," as a proper noun, in a way that I don't capitalize Mountains (unless attached to a name) or Coastal Plain. Which is particularly odd, given that the Piedmont is the state's least clearly defined region, its purgatory (between mountain heaven and beach hell), its in-between and not-quite either . . . By the time I finished high school, I was ready to leave the mountains: I felt walled-off from the Exciting Modern World Out There, and was thrilled to get to Raleigh and start college at North Carolina State. But almost immediately, an unexpected thing happened: I missed the mountains , the physical hills, both underfoot and at the periphery ofvision. I suffered elevation withdrawal. And once I transferred to Chapel Hill and started writing poems, the mountains were my first subject, trying to convert that native landscape into words: in the somewhat abstract opening words of the first poem I ever published, in the campus undergraduate literary magazine, they were "Gradations of green and blue, of green/into blue: a refining of each ridge/into sky, an intercession of mist/between successive ranges ..." One thing that alleviated my homesickness for the mountains, my need for perspective down here in the Piedmont: a plastic topographical relief map of my stretch of the Appalachians, with the Blue Ridge puckered up to a scale version of its actual...