Countin’ Churches

We’ve been in the southeast for a week now. A trip to Cape Hatteras and two boat trips, a quick trip to Kitty Hawk, a quick trip to Floyd, a quick trip to Greensboro (John Neal Books), and HUNDREDS of churches later….

Going out on the boat into the Gulf Stream to see unusual seabirds yielded four life birds for both of us: black-capped petrel, Audubon’s shearwater, band-rumped storm-petrel, and bridled tern. There were many Wilson’s storm-petrels and a few Leach’s and a good, close look at two sperm whales, a longer look at Cuvier’s beaked whales. Huge manta rays. The deck hands caught several mahi-mahi and a huge blue marlin.

Numenius had the idea to play a new road game: guess the denomination of the next church. The problem with this is that there are so many, and we quickly realized we had seen more protestant denominations than bird species. So we started to make a list, driving from Cape Hatteras north into Virginia and then basically heading due west; a pretty solid transect. You can do a convincing cultural geography of a place by noticing where, for instance, a presbyterian church makes a sudden entry into the landscape coincidental with well-kept lawns versus a preponderance of churches with the words “apostolic” or “gospel” in their names that tend to concentrate around poor quality bottomland and decaying cars abandoned on overgrown patches of land that is no longer farmed.

We have been so plagued with spam during this past week we’ve had to shut down comments (the server’s been brought down several times, apparently). Sorry. We’ll work to fix this when we get home.