But the Gnat Line has been breached. West is creeping east, and east is creeping west, though not always in the smoothest of fashions. When a man had the temerity to open an eastern-style barbecue joint in Lexington last year, the newspapers called him "a heretic." He got fed up with the business and leased the place to an employee. The new guy got wise: He serves only western style now.
"People take this really seriously," Dockham said.
The eastern-style advocates can rightly stake a claim as North Carolina's original barbecue. They smoke an entire hog, or cook it over electrical coils, and slather the meat in a sauce made from vinegar -- usually apple cider -- black pepper and red pepper flakes.
The western style, according to legend, developed in the 1920s in Lexington, where cash-strapped country folk bought barbecue sold from tents outside the courthouse. The meat came from the cheapest part of the pig -- the shoulder. The sauce was sweeter, with heavy doses of sugar and ketchup, some black pepper and only a dash of vinegar. The kings of modern western-style barbecue almost all trace their bloodlines to those original tent-selling entrepreneurs, tracking their ancestry with the same attention as thoroughbred horse breeders.
Rogers and Bledsoe, happy to grouse about their shared obsession, picked at the offerings in Smithfield's, a small North Carolina chain, one recent afternoon. The restaurant is in a sort of demilitarized zone of barbecue, plopped down in Siler City, about as deep an encroachment for eastern-style as it gets in western territory. The denizens of the fictional Mayberry, N.C., were always talking about shopping in Siler City, and Frances Bavier, who played Aunt Bee, settled here after "The Andy Griffith Show" went off the air. Bledsoe figures "Andy Griffith" captured small-town North Carolina life better than almost anyone, with one glaring exception: "They didn't eat barbecue."
Bledsoe, who suggested Smithfield's as a meeting place for his barbecue arm-wrestling match with Rogers -- perhaps knowing the chain might not be the best example of eastern-style -- was able to counter his pal with "the mother church" of western barbecue, up in Greensboro.
Sweet hickory smoke announces the location of Stamey's in Greensboro, long before its wood-frame walls and peaked skylight -- evoking a sacred space -- come into view. Bledsoe eats his barbecue in the truck with his dog, Zoe, so he can take in the hickory aroma pouring from the smoker out back. Inside the furnace-hot brick smokehouse, sweaty men walk through a thick haze to pile trays holding dozens of pork shoulders into 10 brick ovens. There are no meat thermometers, only a poke of a long fork, to test whether 10 hours of smoking were enough, or just a few more minutes will be needed. "This is an art," Bledsoe said, almost reverently, and on this, even Rogers cannot argue.
Chip Stamey's grandfather sold barbecue out of a tent in Lexington before moving to the spot in Greensboro where his grandson now goes through 10,000 to 12,000 pounds of pork shoulders a week. The methods are mostly the same, but even an institution such as Stamey's can evolve: Its pork shoulders don't come from the pig-raising capital of North Carolina anymore, arriving instead from Pennsylvania.
Bledsoe and Rogers have evolved, too. They aren't so militant anymore -- except in print, of course. Rogers, the champion of eastern-style bluster, confesses that if he were limited to a single barbecue style, it wouldn't come from eastern North Carolina, it would come from Memphis. And Bledsoe, the blusterer-in-chief of the west, reveals that his favorite barbecue joint is in the east: the sublime Skylight Inn in little Ayden, N.C., where famous owner Pete Jones flecks his chopped barbecue with cracklin' and fries his irresistible corn bread to a decadent crisp in pork fat.
There's never a winner in their feud, but there's never a loser either. "There ain't no bad barbecue," Rogers admits. But that won't stop their battling. That's because just about everyone here can agree on one thing: Arguing barbecue is almost as good as eating it.
Special correspondent Jon Bloom contributed to this report.
