Just South of Heaven

We drove toward the development at nine in the morning on a beautiful spring day in Wilmington, North Carolina. My family had arrived earlier that week to tour houses and to investigate different communities in the city, so we could better choose a location once we moved there. We approached the development cautiously, hesitating at the tall black fence with barbed wire that stood before layers of dense trees. Two gates marked the entrance where security guards waved Mercedes SUVs and BMWs into the gated community. My brother balked at the community’s security: “It looks like they have prepared for the zombie apocalypse”. The real estate agent, who sat with us in the car, laughed as the security guards waved her through the gates and she welcomed us to the community just south of Heaven—Landfall. As she drove down the well-manicured lane to the welcome center, she reminded us of Landfall’s heavenly facilities: two golf courses, a country club, personal docks, and an Olympic size swimming pool. Feigning enthusiasm, my family left the car and hopped onto a golf cart to begin the tour.  The real estate agent drove incredibly slowly, probably to encourage us to relish this sheltered utopia. Brick houses seemingly smiled at us and the multiple landscapers waved as we continued down the street.  Women who had already showered and applied their makeup wearing designer clothes walked out to retrieve the morning paper while waving away. My mother scoffed in hushed tones: “These women have definitely had work done. Why do these people keep waving?” I shrugged as I too felt confused, but I waved back to a gaggle of women strutting down the street while calling to their neighbors to join them for brunch at the Country Club. As I sat in the golf cart, waving uncharacteristically, I could not help but wonder if when I had entered Landfall, I had left the real world.  Looking back on my encounter with this rare community, I cannot help but compare it to the two Eggs in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Like the islands, Landfall does not sit atop perfect land as lakes and forests wind through it; nature misshapes the land which the community attempts to perfect (5). The people themselves live fantastically in their palaces with their BMW cars and other material possessions. But, more so than anything, I find myself “perpetually confused” when observing Landfall (5).  Do the residents truly care when they wave incessantly? Does knowing the business of every neighbor truly make them happy? How much does the plastic surgeon of Landfall make? Have the people in the community ever actually ventured past the ten-foot-tall gates to realize true reality? I suppose, to them, they live in the real world, in their own strange slice of Heaven, or at least, just south of it.  As for the answers to rest the questions, I will let you know, as we may move there this summer.