Brad Land's Ode to a Giant Indulgent Day-Glo Contradiction

Suggestions for the traveler who encounters South of the Border, the Dillon, South Carolina, theme-park way station, fixed just over the North Carolina line.)

Please, dear Northern traveler, though descent into a gutted country lies before you, though you are weary, and though your heart is broken, lift your heavy eyes, my comrade, and look now at what your brothers and sisters have made for you.

They’ve waited so very long, through years of flood and scorched earth, they’ve waited for this day of palms, expectant of the outlaw’s morning assassination, for these hours, and for these minutes, for this nudging darkness, in this dying March, for all the moments of your passing. Their hands bleed and do not cease. Their faces are sun blistered and will not heal. Yet for you they’ve waited, inside this interstate miracle, to show you something.

Here, nearly two hundred feet above the broken white lines that guide you, stands a tower of many-colored lights, a multitude unknowable as a field of cathedral votives lit for the countless departed; the one hundred and thirty-five acres below, a pastel maze of shops and hotel rooms and statues and light—all a gift, all an offered hand.

And please, my lost heart, though your Midwest is much farther than you think, over many hills and many wide rivers, though you’ve come so far already, and though your red Gulf Coast buildings are many days south behind you, in the distance ahead, amongst the miles left to your city beside the dark river, to your love and spring wedding, should you falter, remember, though I knew you long ago, that I am amongst the lights you may carry, that I am here, that you have my heart, that my love, dear you, lives inside this country, inside this passing brightness, permanent as the miles and years between us, when your face touched mine.

Dylan, Our Lady of the Vagabond Drifter, will sing, just then, for you only, Northern traveler, and for you only, my love, so far from your new South, and you both will listen, and you both will understand. Easter time is nigh, you are lost, the rain will begin, it will drive you away.

So look, then, and do not falter. Put your heart into your eyes. See how we are waving. See how we love you so.

Photographs by Matthew Land.