Wizened After the Fall: Holding Ground in the Tar Heel State

I thought I could make some money selling the stamps I collected as a kid when the American Philatelic Society National Exhibition came to Chicago in 2006. I just knew my American and British Colonial stamps that had been safely tucked away in wax envelopes for years had appreciated in value. They hadn’t. What appreciated on the spot at the exhibit was my rekindled interest in collecting stamps again.

First Day Cover of Scott 797 with hand- colored cachet by Torkel Gundel

Sticking out of the stamps I failed to sell was a canceled souvenir sheet with a facsimile of the 1934 National Parks ten cent issue, reprinted to celebrate the Society’s convention held in Asheville, NC in 1937. Staring at the vignette of Smoky Mountain National Park brought to mind life and times in the Tar Heel State of North Carolina.

First Day Cover of Scott 765 with hand- made cachet by Georges Laffert

The handmade map by Georges Laffert on my rare first day cover of the Smoky Mountains stamps, part of the Farley imperforate National Parks special printing of 1935, provides me with a visual cue for my wanderings around the state. North Carolina gets its nickname from those resistance fighters during the Revolutionary War who held their ground, aided by tar and pitch from the state’s expansive pine forests that they applied to their heels. The rich diversity of geographical landscapes is well worth defending. They include the coastal Outer Banks and their barrier islands, eastern Gulf Coastal Plain, central Piedmont Plateau, and western Appalachian Mountains.

The summer I graduated from a high school in Norfolk, Virginia, my brother and I went car camping on Cape Hatteras National Seashore. This landscape spends half its time in the air. Picket fences strung along the barrier islands to control the wind-blown sand still can’t keep meandering dunes from burying telephone poles up to their necks. Grit in our camp meals testified to winds believed to have ship- wrecked many a Spanish fleet off the coast. The light beam that pours out of the second oldest lighthouse in the U.S. on Ocracoke Island has to be as yellow as Spanish doubloons that still lie spilled all over the continental shelf.

A freshly minted college graduate, I returned to the state explicitly to backpack the Smokies on my way to Florida to visit my brother, then a lieutenant in the Navy, stationed in Jacksonville. It was June, and the summer rains were pumping trillions of fresh green plant cells plump with osmotic pressure. My degree in botany made the climb through numerous ecological zones to the summits a taxonomic thrill ride, because countless plant species had been cornered here by the last ice age’s walls of advancing glaciers. The biodiversity index is off the charts, and every ten paces required stopping to marvel with my ten-power lens at some new, exotic inflorescence.

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The night before ascending the green-cloaked hills I was enchanted outside my tent by a silent, blinking Disney dance of dainty dervishes. This Tinker Bell firefly display sent my mind into a rhapsody that hopelessly distracted me from my reading Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life’s Way in the light of my Hope candle lantern.

The Eckerd Foundation of Clearwater, FL hired me to counsel kids with emotional difficulties in special therapeutic wilderness camps, and I jumped at the opportunity six months later to help open new ones in North Carolina. The first, near Hendersonville below the Smokies, opened in the dead of winter. Since I was slated to help prepare the next one near Candor in the Piedmont, I wasn’t put into a therapy group; rather was sent on errands such as driving a Kubota tractor down to Candor and returning with supplies.

Time off when your residence is your workplace and your room and board is your primary pay can be challenging in winter. An $8 room with a water heater the size of a pumpkin limited one weekend’s relaxation to an episode of the Donnie and Marie Show, accompanied by pretzels and a quart bottle of beer. Finding college campuses more affordable and more interesting places to crash, I got out of my sleeping bag in the snowy graveyard behind the chapel at Warren Wilson College near Asheville one Sunday morning and wandered into the service. Students were leading the liturgy, and an absolutely gorgeous girl gave the sermon. Using the need to patch my backpack where a squirrel had gnawed a hole in the side, I set up a repair service next to the table in the student lounge where I found her later with friends. The gnarly guy with the adventure stories and romantic employment eventually got the girl, well, almost. Her romance with another student was a nuisance, but for the next year and a half, she put me up in her apartment on time off days in exchange for serving as court raconteur, regaling her with tales from the outback.

I felt bad for those kid’s first taste of camp life, waking up in their hand-made tents in frigid subzero chill. We were trained to recognize, however, how much kids cared for their tents, which they never vandalized, because they built them themselves, learning basic math and writing according to the curriculum that lay subversively hidden behind the need to get the job done. Had they been told they “were in school,” they would not have been so cooperative. I felt quite proud of one made by Chimptas, one of my therapy groups, that was pentagon in shape, a first in Eckerd history. I heard that it confused the canvas cutter and sewer back in Clearwater due to the irregular specifications.

First order of business when the Candor camp opened that spring was getting the new campers out into their first month-long canoe trip. We chose the Haw River to put in, which fuses with the Cape Fear, the primary drainage channel into the Atlantic of that portion of the Piedmont Plateau. Kids lugged canoes and gear over an eighty foot-high coffer dam of strewn boulders, tumpted canoes in rapids, pitched tents in stinging nettle, and ate cold dinner out of cans due to spending twilight singing sleeping bags to get them dry in the campfire’s heat. Alleged therapeutic benefits justified the serial sets of ordeals. Then a severe spring storm blew in. The torrential downpour pelted our lean-to’s on an island all night long. In the first light we saw only the tips of the canoes jutting out of the water like miniature ice burgs, made vertical by their moorings twenty feet below the rising water. I stripped nude and, like a burlesque pirate with a buck knife blade in my teeth, dove down to cut the lines. The river was rising fast. Yanking everything in the campsite and dumping it into the canoes, we made it to high ground, where we waited days for the flood waters to recede.

Weeks later back in camp, stories after the chuck wagon meal lived up to their tall tail trappings. A roly poly eleven-year-old, infamous for running away from programs previous to ours by hot-wiring cars and making his get away while eying the road through the steering wheel, proudly recounted his group’s rescue off their river. They had hit five-foot standing waves after the storm, and all canoes tumpted. His pinned him to a tree, and no amount of yanking could dislodge it. Being years before cell phones, a counselor had to hitch to town to alert the sheriff’s department, who failed also in their attempt. The river was rising, and the other counselor, hospitalized later for acute hypothermia, was having trouble keeping the kid positioned so as not to drown. Finally a helicopter from the 82nd Airborne Division in Fort Bragg was called in to wrench the canoe free. The pudgy camper, insulated from the cold like a harp seal, was no worse for the wear.

Trips from the scooped out creek beds of E-Ku-Summee’s pine- wooded 800 acres in the rolling Piedmont to the UNC campus at Chapel Hill for furloughs took me through the heart of Tobacco Road. Every stage in tobacco’s labor-intensive growing season was visible at some point. I’d see migrant workers topping shucks, ridding them of suckers and pests, pulling their leaves, or binding them to hang in open-sided barns for curing. Chapel Hill was a major stop during my years as a college town crasher. I tried to pick up girls in cafes along Franklin Street, such as the Carolina Cafe, while looking the part of a Southern Ivy League intellectual. I’d be reading Chaim Potok’s novels about young Jews coming of age in modern society, or else investigations of sudden personality change in the then epidemic of religious cults, or especially Kierkegaard, and I would strike up conversations with them. Then I would offer to buy them a beer at Spanky’s. On the road back to camp, I’d make it as far as Chatham Mill’s embroidered patch factory in Pittsboro, once being let in to marvel at the intricate machinery needed to weave them. Before it closed in 1996, it was the largest producer of woven labels in the world. I would crash in my little Fiat with the driver’s seat flattened, with just enough time the next morning to relieve my fellow counselor so he could take his leave for a day and a half.

There would be further adventures on the trail and river with those kids before leaving the Tar Heel State. One trip took us down the Savannah River for a month in a makeshift raft, the Yellow Submarine. Another trip got us on huge Lake Murray behind the the 1.5 mile-long Saluda Dam in South Carolina, which was an engineering feat in its day. The dam, using the native red clay soil and bedrock, was the largest earthen dam in the world when it was completed in 1930. The lake behind was once the world's largest man-made reservoir. I must recount one critical decision I made one windy day in our canoes along the southern shoreline. The gale-force winds were blowing from the south, threatening to side swamp the canoes unless we did something. So at a critical point in camp time, I signaled to the other two canoes to head downwind north, which would send us zipping with the wind across the fourteen miles of the lake. I was breaking in a new counselor at the time, who sat cargo in a canoe. Devout, he was reading the Bible, probably the passage in which the disciples are entreating their Master to calm the winds over the Sea of Galilee. Surfing the whiteheads, we made the opposite shore in record time.

In camp, the primary order of business was tent building. Each group site required four sleeping tents, Chief's sleeping tent, chuck wagon large enough for ten campers plus chiefs to sit around a center table, tool tent, and latrine.

The time frame for constructing a complete set was about eighteen months, the average stay of a camper. Then tents would, one-by-one, be torn down and rebuilt. Each camper thus participated in a complete cycle of camp building.

I had earned the $1,500 stipend for sticking with Eckerd for at least two years by an August, but stayed on for awhile longer as the counselor for the transition group of camper graduates close to being discharged, who spent time in a camp learning resource center and at home with their families on weekends. It was November. The leaves were falling. My exit from the Tar Heel State was, again, by way of the Smoky Mountains. I had no idea what to do next with my life. A week solo in the mountains would be a retreat to gather clues.

I met no one else on the trail. I had the Smokies all to myself. I needed them. You see, there was this girl in Urbana, Illinois I had been chasing for three years. I had been just smitten with her. Unsure of my future and of her, I braced myself against the winds and huddled over campfires in the empty huts on the Appalachian Trail. I felt the solitude of a lone black bear rustling in the fallen leaves for food. A storm pelted me in a flimsy plastic tube tent. I stripped to ford a raging stream, swollen from the all night rain, pack held high over my head. I had to test my resolve one last time regarding her, but lingered in the mountains, not wanting to give ground in the Tar Heel State. My heart had been shaken to its foundations once before with her, and the years on the road had been, in part, a response to that experience. My odyssey had been in her name. With my letters to her recounting my adventures, I had wanted to impress her. Like Odysseus, I wanted her to be my Penelope, to whom I would come home to drive away the suitors. It was times like those when I learned that I wasn’t truly the master of my fate, the marcher to my own drum. The silence of those Smoky Mountain miles told me I had bidden her to share in molding my fate. Unbeknown to her, she was.