Farms, Forests and Foothills

It was hard to return from vacation this year. We rented a cabin in the woods near Westminster, SC in Oconee County. At night there were no sounds but the barely audible passing of an occasional train or the distant complaints of a disturbed dog. The people of Westminster were polite, even kind. I have reached the age where the young women working at the grocery stores and the restaurants invariably address me as hun, honey, or darlin’ Everybody expects that you will be drinking sweet tea with your meal and the pace of life is just a lot slower than the Washington, DC area. I like the Northwest corner of South Carolina. We lived there for 9 years, leaving for Columbia in 1978. Somehow this area feels a lot like home.

Although the unemployment rate is a little above the national average in Greenville, Pickens, and Oconee County, it doesn’t have that bad feeling one gets from too many empty store fronts, battered cars, and that desperate depressed expression of too many bills and not enough month. The Dollar General Stores and Walmart are booming. Curiously, I saw a lot of expensive pickup trucks and not a few new cars in the parking lots of these establishments. It appears the locals are not interested in wasting their money on brand name consumables but are not going to give up their new F150 truck. There is a lot of light industry a few miles further North in Anderson and Greenville. There are even a few small plants near Westminster. I am not exactly sure why there is a discrepancy between the numbers (like average wage and unemployment rate) and a general feeling of well being. Perhaps, it is a combination of a low cost of living, low taxes, and a low crime rate. Perhaps, it is because much of the area is rural. People own farms and small independent logging operations seem to employ a lot of folks. I imagine that unemployment insurance plus an extended family with farms or an off the record part time job cutting trees makes for a better life during hard times.

Greenville, the largest city in the area is remarkable. When we left the area in 1978, Greenville was a dying textile center with a decaying downtown. The crime rate was climbing and property values were heading down. Thanks to Mayor Max Heller, something of a local hero, Greenville has been reborn. Main Street is now an attractive upscale food court. There are new office buildings in the downtown skyline that house regional banking centers and insurance companies. The city government built a new cultural center and a very nice river park with interesting walking paths, transforming one of the worst sections of the old city into a magnet for both locals and visitors. Some of the old textile mills have been reborn as condos, restaurants, or offices. BMW, Michelin, and small auto part factories have provided a new generation of factory jobs. It is a changed city. My wife, along with several groups of young girls spent a Saturday morning looking for 9 small bronze mice hidden along Main Street. By the way, she found them all.

One of the things that surprised me was the number of large Baptist and Pentecostal/Charismatic churches in the three Northern counties. It is hard to understand how the population could support so many large, fairly prosperous looking churches. It is not unusual to spot a large brick church complex with a sizable parking lot located in what appears to be the middle of nowhere. There is a Presbyterian church in Westminster and I spotted a number of Mennonites in the local grocery store but no evidence of Episcopalians or Catholics in Oconee County.

The poets tell us, “You can’t go home again.” To a degree that is true. My wife and I visited Furman University, our first college, after a 25 year absence. It was unrecognizable. There were so many new buildings on the same campus it felt claustrophobic. We still have friends and family in the area. Our relationships, the fields, and the forest are older, but they all still feel like home.