North Carolina LGBTQ+ Literature
tell you ghost stories along the way. “Safe for families, thrilling for adults, and unforgettable for everyone,” the tour’s write-up boasts, with no mention of red tide or sea pollutants). I mention this story about the glowing ocean because it seems to be a perfect encapsulation of what readers can expect from Eubanks’s The Fabulous Ordinary – that is to say, a catalogue of nature’s beauty that is also devoid of naive sentimentality. Please do not be confused and assume that for every beautiful description there is a counterpart of despair; Eubanks is not out to pour cold water on wonderment for the sake of being gloomy alone. But she won’t shy away from being realistic when she needs to be, won’t shield her eyes to the realities of climate destruction and manmade pollutants. Readers should take comfort from this tact, because you know that when she tells you something, you can believe she’s shooting straight. The book, which also includes gorgeous full-color images from
ABOVE TOP AND RIGHT Examples of the
photography by Donna Campbell found throughout The Fabulous Ordinary
Eubanks’s longtime collaborator Donna Campbell (photographs which Eubanks endearingly calls “enticements”), can be seen as a counterpart to Eubanks’s previous book, Saving the Wild South, which chronicled the unique stories of individual plants in the American South that are now threatened by habitat loss and climate change. When reading that prior book,* I often got the feeling that I was reading about plants that were in the witness protection program; Eubanks was often cagey or deliberately withholding about their locations and how one could reach them (understandably so, given how fragile their continuing existence is). With this new book, she seems to want to offer a more overtly “useful” book by writing about natural wonders that any reader can go out and experience for themselves. Which begs the question: Is this an eco-tourism field guide? The answer is both yes and no. On one hand, readers who want to take their kids or grandkids out to experience the most
N C L R ONLINE
37
magnificent natural events the American South has to offer would do well to pick up a copy of The Fabulous Ordinary, for they will find ample examples of places to check out for themselves. To name just a handful, this book offers accounts of bald eagles in Alabama, firefly displays in the Smoky Mountains, alligators in Georgia, tundra swans and snow geese in North Carolina, river otters in Florida, and screech-owls in Virginia. While some of these events only occur at certain times of the year, they are all easily accessible to the average person looking to hop in the car and take a road trip. The book is full of fascinating nature facts. Did you know that male and female bald eagles flirt with one another by flying high up in the sky and then falling together at rapid speeds? Or that butterflies only evolved because a few brave moths decided to stay up during the day to sip from some of the nectar rich flowers that coevolved with bees? Or that there
* Read Evan Peter Smith's review of Eubanks's Saving the Wild South: The Fight for Native Plants on the Brink of Extinction (U of North Carolina P, 2021) in NCLR Online Winter 2025.