Quote of the Day | May 17, 2008: Grandfather Mountain, North Carolina, Part 2

Returning to Charles Kuralt's America for Grandfather Mountain, North Carolina in May:

Lunch in the mountains for me was almost always a barbecue sandwich. I have spent a good part of my life looking for the perfect barbecue. There is no point in looking in places like Texas, where they put some kind of ketchup on beef and call it barbecue. Barbecue is pork, which narrows the search to the South, and if it's really good pork barbecue you are looking for, to North Carolina. . . .

Barbecue is one of three highly subjective subjects in North Carolina, the other two being politics and religion. Some people prefer their barbecue chopped, some sliced, some shredded. Western North Carolina barbecue usually has tomato in the sauce. A little less tomato appears in the sauce in Piedmont, around Lexington, and in the vinegar-based sauce of eastern North Carolina, there is no tomato at all. All North Carolina cooks are contemptuous of South Carolina barbecue sauce, which contains mustard. One of them told me, "If French's went out of business, there'd be no such thing as South Carolina barbecue."

I hate to admit it, but the best barbecue I had in the mountains was at the little cafeteria at the Nature Museum on Grandfather Mountain, which buys it from somebody else, perhaps the Texaco station down in Currituck. It was the genuine shredded item of the whole hog variety, served in a soft hamburger roll with the usual barbecue accompaniments -- sweet iced tea, Brunswick stew, cornbread, and coleslaw. I like a few drops of Texas Pete hot sauce on my barbecue to heat it up, and then I like to put the coleslaw right in the sandwich to cool it down. Not everybody agrees. I have a friend who says Senator Jesse Helms is God's retribution to North Carolinians for eating coleslaw on their barbecue.

. . .

As we talked, it was clear to me that Cecil and Julie have intentionally chosen a simple life, close to nature, rich in music and reading and conversation with friends. I was impressed by their children, who are growing up to appreciate this way of living.

If two college-educated Americans can start a family and reach a very nearly perfect harmony in the United States, it occured to me, Cecil and Julie probably have done it. They have methodically turned their backs on everything that is facile and shallow and mass-produced and harmfully addictive about American life -- smoking, drinking, television, the urban rush, the acquisitive instinct.

I drove back along the lonely North Carolina mountain roads with the dark coming on, reflecting on this. The hunger for wordly success is what sends people into the commotion and flurry of the big city suburbs and puts them in neckties and cocktail dresses, and keeps them in their offices and commuter trains and country clubs for the rest of their lives. I tried to think of something Cecil and Julie and their children were missing by deliberately living so far off the beaten path.

But I couldn't think of anything.

Tags: Charles Kuralt, America, Grandfather Mountain, North Carolina, barbecue