summer of sixteen, The

Southern Living, Jun 1999 by Brown, Ben

The summer of my 16th year was to be a campaign, a coming-of-age tour. We-my buddy Butch Wiley and I-had jobs in a boys camp in western North Carolina, our first jobs away from our Florida homes. And we had a car, Butch's car. Or more to the point, Butch's dad's car on loan to Butch-though Mr. Wiley surely would have reneged had he heard our plans.

The car was glorious, a new Chevy convertible, gleaming white with red interior, the ultimate of Detroit's venture into production hot-rodding before gas prices and environmental sanity restrained our demons. "Super Sport," the logo said. And that would be us, Super Sports on tour, roaring top down across the Southeast, piercing momentarily the orbits of envious small-town toughs and their dreamy girlfriends, who would try (unsuccessfully) to conceal peeks at us through the upturned collars of their boyfriends' letter jackets. Then, we'd be gone.

We planned a route from South Florida to the Smoky Mountains on back roads and state highways where we could open up the Chevy and soak in the local color. For a determined driver, it was an easy two-day trip. We'd stretch it to four, since the only thing waiting for us at the other end was work.

Florida, as Southerners are fond of saying, stands on its head. The farther south you go, the more northern the influence from New York and New Jersey retirees. The farther north, the more the accents and traditions resemble those of South Georgia and Alabama.

So we descended into the Southern summer, heading north on Old 441 and onto deserted country roads. We roared alongside fenced pastures and pecan groves. We rumbled into towns exactly as we had pictured-except for the deputy sheriffs that seemed to come out of nowhere just before we pulled into the local teen hangout.

"Now, boys," they would say after a professional appraisal of two 16-year-old kids in somebody's father's car. "We know you're not looking for trouble in that car. . " And we would mumble our yes sirs and no sirs and watch them in the rearview mirror as they followed us to the edges of their jurisdiction. This put us back on another country road and into the rushing air crammed with an amalgam of summer, with all the loamy scents of things growing green and the whiffs of rain just passed or about to come. And pretty soon, we skipped the Dairy Queens and burger shacks altogether, opting for the highways that so readily accommodated our imaginations.

Which is why, after all these years, what I remember most about that road trip is not the mission powered by cheap gas and hormones. It is the consolation of summer days and nights on country roads.

Our region's air, even in the mountains, is thick w ith the season It can be oppressive trapped in a shadeless spot, but get it moving and sense how dense with life it is.

I live now in a rural area only a few miles off one of the highways that Butch and I cruised on the Super Sport tour. I don't have a convertible, but my car windows are never up in the summer. I make up excuses to take the long way home, to cruise the back roads and let the air that blew through the hardwoods and the pasture grass fill the car. Sometimes, alone on a gravel road by the river or far into the mountain valley, I lean my head out of the window like a dog, grateful that I'm among the creatures that can breathe a season in. Ben Brown

Ben lives, writes, and drives in North Carolina.