The Twin Towers were still standing, in the late 90’s, when I arrived in ‘Merica for the first time. I spent a few days in upstate New York and then took the train down to Lynchburg, Virginia, to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. I arrived on a hot, humid July night and was picked up by a man driving a dodgy-looking Dodge from the darkened station. I woke the following morning to southern U.S. accents, turkey buzzards high in the sky and killer humidity. I overheard someone ask someone about going out to a bar that night.

            ‘I might could…’

 I loved the southern mixed modal verbs, straightaway. I spent that month mixing with the other writers and painters and poets and composers. Along with turkey buzzards, there were snakes (copperheads and black ones) and very large insects. The colony had a little swimming pool. Across the highway, in Sweet Briar, the women’s college. there was a much bigger pool and a lake. I swam a few times in the lake until the snapping turtles did for me. One day, I was sitting by the lake when a chance companion, a Vietnam vet, asked me casually

            ‘What do you think of that bum in the White House?’ (The incumbent bum was William J. Clinton). I muttered something harmless and went back to thinking about the snapping turtles.

            On another occasion, I was sitting in the computer lab of Sweet Briar typing, in the company of another writer and a postgrad student, when the roar of a jet engine approaching suddenly got louder and louder. When the roar crossed the subliminal ‘danger’ threshold, we glanced at one another for reassurance (I think they call it ‘referencing’) and dove to the floor as an airforce jet, miscalculating, passed over the building, almost ploughing through it. At the far side of the Amherst highway, Route 29, an artist landscape painting  glanced up to see the pilot’s face whoosh by him.

            There was dark talk of a serial killer working Route 29 that summer, as it happened, in those pre-interweb days. And it wasn’t entirely fiction. One dark, humid Virginian midnight, one of the women artists was working along in her studio when the face of a young man appeared at her window explaining to her, frantically, that he too wanted to be an artist.  The young woman fled back to the safety of the colony house. The next morning, the sheriff’s car was drawn up outside the building. It might have been the start of a tv thriller.

            But the best day of all, that first time in ‘Merica, was the service at a Baptist church, in the dusty backroads. It was ‘homecoming Sunday’ and many of the congregation had come down from D.C. for the service. The style was stunning. It was far from the rough world of the Washington suburbs. When the preacher preached, if it wasn’t quite hellfire, it was still fairly hot. His upbeat message ended with

            ‘Keep on keeping on…’

            When piano started up everyone turned around to the doors to watch the women choristers sashaying up the aisle. There was song after song, with the piano beating away in the background. This, I thought, is where it begins: blues, R+B, soul, gospel, rock. And after the praying and the singing, there was fried chicken in the basement of the chapel, not far from the giant total immersion tub.

            A few days before I left Virginia, I went for a drive with a friend to Appomattox (which I learned to pronounce correctly rather than like an exotic skin disease), the official site of the ending the civil war, in April 1865. It wasn’t hard to imagine the southern soldiery turning about to march back home to their towns and villages and farms. Or the officers (with their side-arms), trooping off on their horses. It was history. Now, lots of people say, unfairly, that Americans don’t do history: they do, it’s just Now history. Very now, it you compare it with Europe or the Middle East or the British Isles. But it’s still history.

After our dusty encounter with the ‘War of Northern Aggression’ (one of the more entertaining handles for the conflict), my friend said

            ‘Like to knock back a cool one?’

            ‘Might could.’

            I thought of something my grandmother wrote to a London relation once, the week after said relation returned to London.

            ‘Next time you come, leave your accent at the station.’

Mixed modal verbs just wouldn’t sound right in a Dublin bar. I would leave them in Virginia. They needed their natural environment to thrive: south of the Mason-Dixon Line. High humidity, turkey buzzards, copperhead snakes, snapping turtles and all.