A few miles from the small town of Wilson, in the Eastern Tobacco Flats of North Carolina, five roads come together by field dominated by huge whirligigs Volis Simpson has assembled from found objects. Simpson, who had a company that moved houses before he retired, uses his house moving machinery and mechanical expertise to build structures as high as thirty feet and with elaborate moving motifs--bicyclists that pedal, mules that pull a cart, sawyers who saw while a dog wags its tail. After viewing the whirligigs by day, informed visitors go eat Bar-B-Q in Wilson then return with their high beams on. Each whirligig, and surrounding fences, are covered with tiny reflectors, making for an immense, moving light show, not unlike forty neon-lined ferris wheels glimpsed from a distance, triwling in opposite directions. There are many theories about why Simpson made the whirligigs and what they represent, but my favorite (surely bogus) theory is that his only daughter died while on a LSD trip, and that this is his psychedelic memorial to her.
Once upon a time in a land far away, as far away as the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, Liz set out to find the fall colors, accompanied by her Barnacle Boy. Now, this Barnacle had earned his name by clinging very hard to Liz, so hard that if she turned her eyes from him he panicked, and fretted, and sulked. So Liz went along, torn between the sulking barnacle and the mountains on fire, until she saw the luminous sign of the Stack's Roan Mountain Motel. There she found a room where Elvis had stayed, and where the old Deadhead who owned the place (Mr. Stack himself) had kept the memory of the King sacred through the years. Liz and Barnacle Boy stayed in the room that Elvis stayed in, and Liz worshiped his picture in the room. And not long after that she was able to pry off the barnacle, and the next year Liz and her new boy Warren made a pilgrimage to give thanks to Elvis, but the old Deadhead was gone, and Elvis had left the building, because his work was done.
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