Circling Home

Driving the Circle with Fred

Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated. jean baudrillard, America Driving the Circle with Fred The first day of summer, June 21, Fred Parrish and I set out from my house to drive the circle. It’s 9 a.m. and still cool when he picks me up in his Jeep Cherokee, but the weather calls for a red-hot South Carolina high of ninety-five by midday. We’re out to drive the whole thing, to really circle—no more out and back exploring of one area or another. This is it—we’re finally putting what Terry would call some full ground-truthing into this narrative, some hard labor in time and space. The old topo is folded on my lap. Looking down, the first thing I notice is that our route is really no race course. There isn’t a single road that circles our house a mile out in all directions . There are only three or four segments of the perimeter line I’ve drawn where we can actually drive. We start west and then quickly turn back almost due north. We leave Tempo Court, turn left on Mustang Drive, a right on Starline Drive, across Fairlane Drive, another right and we’re on Lake Forest Drive, leaving the Ford products behind. 181 I sense the boundary of the circle’s edge arching ahead of me like the Berlin Wall or the Iron Curtain, but I know it’s all in my head. There’s no real boundary out there one mile from my house. It’s only a circle I drew on a map with a saucer, a literary trick I’ve played on myself for three years to help write this story. “The circle is abuilding,” Fred says as he accelerates through an alley of ranch houses approaching fifty years old. I tell him that by the time we get home at noon the circle will be “abuilt,” that this is the last, or next to last, chapter. If we were going to travel the whole circle we’d have to walk. Instead we’ll zig and zag in Fred’s Jeep from point to point on paved roads. I’ve carried this map around now for years, and it’s marked up and frayed on the seams from folding and refolding. I look down at it, and I ponder Pierce Acres intently, or at least I ponder its symbolic equivalent. The subdivision I’ve driven through once or twice daily shows up only as a patch of green filling the north of the circle, thick with a pattern of little black dots lining the streets. The map’s not much help in real space like this. What do these little black dots representing houses really have to do with the ranch houses and the families inside we’re passing? What does ink on a map have to do with their yards? Besides that, this map was first drawn in 1927, compiled again from aerial photographs taken in 1976, field-checked in 1977, and then edited again in 1983. So what’s on the topo is really what was here almost thirty years ago. I tell Fred, and he looks around, says that the next time they edit it they’ll have to print it green for all the trees planted by new homeowners in the past thirty years. After we turn onto Lake Forest there’s a half-mile straight shot to the top of the ridge where we will actually slide along the circle for a while. Lake Forest Drive connects Woodburn Road with Fernwood-Glendale Road, and it’s the central artery through the circle. The Lake Forest crossing of Lawson’s Fork 182 ° Driving the Circle with Fred below us is one of only two auto bridges in the circle, and through most of the 1970s the other half of it down there was known as Snake Road because of its curves. “Tom Pierce sure saw something way out here. He developed this east end of Lake Forest first, all these woods, and he left the glory land of the dairy and west Lake Forest for much much later,” Fred says, looking around at the old split-levels and ranches as we pass. “When Lake Forest finally opened up on that other end across the creek it was high...