Category: December 2017

A Carolina Classic

Revisiting Cold Mountain

 

By D.G. Martin

Charles Frazierís classic novel, Cold Mountain, was published 20 years ago and more than three million copies have been sold. The book inspired a popular epic film and an opera staged in Chapel Hill in September. As North Carolina’s most admired work of literary fiction since, perhaps, Look Homeward Angel, it should be on the bookshelf of every home in our state.

The book’s great success has made its story and its characters familiar and memorable. When the name of Inman is mentioned, we think of a tired, war-worn, wounded Civil War soldier walking across the Piedmont and foothills determined to make his way back home to Cold Mountain and to Ada, the lovely Charleston-reared Ada, whom he hardly knows, but deeply loves. She is out of place, struggling, and starving on a mountain farm. Ruby, an uneducated mountain girl, full of energy and grit, rescues and restores Ada and the farm, where the two women await Inman’s poignant return and the accompanying tragedy.

As in Homer’s Odyssey, the returning soldier’s travel toward home provides the framework for a series of adventures and contacts with a variety of compelling characters. The book opens with the battle-wounded Inman recovering in a Confederate hospital in Raleigh. Outside the hospital a blind man is selling boiled peanuts. When Inman asks what he would give for just a few minutes of sight, the peanut man replies, “Not an Indian head penny.” He explains there are things he would never want to see. Inman understands, because he remembers vividly the horrors of war and the battles he experienced and wishes he had never seen them.

As Inman’s condition improves, he resolves to desert, leave the hospital, and begin his walk toward Cold Mountain. Not long after his trek begins, in the woods near a river, he sees a fallen preacher bent on killing a woman he has impregnated. Inman rescues the woman and brutally punishes the preacher.

Soon afterwards, he encounters and angers some armed and dangerous locals. They follow him to a river crossing. As he canoes across the swollen river they fire a barrage of bullets that destroy the canoe and almost kill him.

After Inman’s escape, he meets a deceitful redneck named Junior, a farmer and bawdyhouse keeper, who drugs Inman and sells him out to the Home Guard. After marching its prisoners in chains for several days, the Home Guard loses patience and executes its captives. Inman survives miraculously and goes on the road again, but only after returning to extract vicious revenge on Junior, whom he finds salting ham in his smokehouse.

Frazier describes the brutal details. “Junior raised up his face and looked at him but seemed not to recognize him. Inman stepped to Junior and struck him across the ear with the barrel of the LeMat’s and then clubbed at him with the butt until he lay flat on his back. There was no movement out of him but for the bright flow of blood which ran from his nose and cuts to his head and the corners of his eyes. It gathered and pooled on the black earth of the smokehouse floor.”

The fight with Junior is only the beginning. Along the way to Cold Mountain are encounters at every stop, many of them bloody. Inman’s travel home, like the Civil War battlefields, is marked by violence and death.

Frazier writes, “He could not even make a start at reckoning up how many deaths he had witnessed of late. It would number, no doubt, in the thousands. Accomplished in every custom you could imagine, and some you couldn’t come up with if you thought at it for days. He had grown so used to seeing death, walking among the dead, sleeping among them, numbering himself calmly as among the near-dead, that it seemed no longer dark and mysterious.”

But Inman has another, softer side. He loves nature and carries with him Bartram’s Travels, William Bartram’s description of his travels in the American South in the 1770s. In Inman’s view, “the book stood nigh to holiness and was of such richness that one might dip into it at random and read only one sentence and yet be sure of finding instruction and delight.”

Bartram’s description of a mountain scene that reminded Inman of Cold Mountain was his favorite selection. “Having gained its summit, we enjoyed a most enchanting view; a vast expanse of green meadows and strawberry fields . . . companies of young, innocent Cherokee virgins, some busy gathering the rich fragrant fruit, others having already filled their baskets, lay reclined under the shade of floriferous and fragrant native bowers of Magnolia, Azalea, Philadelphus, perfumed Calycanthus, sweet Yellow Jessamine and cerulean Glycine frutescens, disclosing their beauties to the fluttering breeze, and bathing their limbs in the cool fleeting streams; whilst other parties, more gay and libertine, were yet collecting strawberries, or wantonly chasing their companions, tantalising them, staining their lips and cheeks with the rich fruit.”

When Inman read this passage aloud to Ada at their reunion, “he could not wait to reach its period for all it seemed to be about was sex, and it caused his voice to crack and threatened to flush his face.”

Alternating with the chapters describing Inman’s travels are reports of Ada’s and Ruby’s growing friendship and success in managing the farm together.

The superstitious Ruby gives us a picture of farm life 150 years ago. Frazier writes, “The crops were growing well, largely, Ruby claimed, because they had been planted, at her insistence, in strict accordance with the signs. In Ruby’s mind, everything — setting fence posts, making sauerkraut, killing hogs — fell under the rule of the heavens . . . November, will kill a hog in the growing of the moon, for if we don’t the meat will lack grease and pork chops will cup up in the pan.”

Inman finally makes his way back to Cold Mountain. His homecoming and reunion with Ada are joyful, but short lived, as Inman dies in a firefight with the Home Guard.

Giving away the closing is not a spoiler. After 20 years in print, the book’s ending is no secret. But people still ask Frazier, why didn’t you let Inman live and make a happy ending?

Frazier explained to me that the real Pinkney Inman died in a gunfight with the Home Guard. Therefore, he said, “having that knowledge in my mind, I wrote the character to go with that ending without really fully accepting it. But at that point, where I had to decide, then I realized, it’s going to feel fake if I come up with a way for him to survive this.”

Frazier continued, “I got to the point toward the end of the book where I had to decide. And I drove all the way from Raleigh up to Haywood County. There’s a cemetery there, in a little town called Clyde, where Pinkney Inman is buried, but there’s not a marker. And I just walked around, looked at the view, and I just thought, you know, there’s only one way to end this, that I knew what happened from the first page of writing this book, to the real character, and it’s built in.”

Frazier’s decision resulted in the classic that has stood the test of time. Reading it cover to cover is still a moving experience.

But also, like Bartram’s Travels for Inman, we can pick up Cold Mountain and “read only one sentence and yet be sure of finding instruction and delight.”  OH

Charles Frazier tells much more about Cold Mountain and his experiences writing the book in his interview on UNC-TV’s North Carolina Bookwatch at: https://video.unctv.org/video/3004954333/

D.G. Martin hosts North Carolina Bookwatch, which airs Sundays at noon and Thursdays at 5 p.m. on UNC-TV.

Caught in the Act

Methinks the fool’s a wit

 

By Maria Johnson

It’s a wonder
I didn’t cause a rubbernecking wreck when I first saw Terry Odom.

There I was, motoring through Guilford Courthouse National Military Park on a sunny Saturday afternoon, when I glimpsed something I’d never seen before: someone juggling while jogging.

I hit the brakes and did a double take.

Sure enough, there was a guy in a sweat-soaked T-shirt, huffing along while keeping three clubs aloft in the air ahead of him.

I turned around and found him in the parking lot, getting in his van to leave.

I said, “Hey! You were just juggling. And jogging. At the same time!”

This was not news to Terry Odom. He smiled and said yes, he’d been “joggling.”

“Can you do it again?” I asked. “So I can take your picture?”

And so he did. He joggled past me several times until I got a decent pic.

We chatted for a few minutes. Terry said he was training for a 5-K race in March in Wrightsville Beach, where he hopes to set a time record for jogglers who are 60 and older. Later, I sat down in a restaurant with him and his wife, Susan, and they explained how Terry, an ophthalmologist, became Doc Joggle.

Basically, it started when 64-year-old Terry, who lives here and practices medicine in Danville, was about 32. He’d been jogging to stay in shape, but running was incredibly boring to him.

“I thought I’d take up juggling for the fun of it,” he says.
I wondered if Terry had grown up in the circus.

Nope. He traced his interest back to med school at Wake Forest University, where a bunch of other future docs juggled for stress relief.

As I always say, who needs fiction?

At that time, Terry was not in the juggler vein, but the idea appealed to him later.

He bought a kit called “Juggling for the Complete Klutz,” which included a how-to book and three balls. Just to be clear, Terry, who by then was performing microsurgery on people’s eyes, did not consider himself a klutz.

He bought the kit because he thought it would make juggling simpler. It did, and Terry caught on. He joined the International Jugglers’ Association and became a devoted reader of Juggle magazine.

He started juggling random items around the house. Apples. Basketballs. Toilet plungers. Eggs. Yes, eggs.

“He limited the eggs to outside, which was very thoughtful,” says Susan.

Is it just me, or can you see a halo over Susan’s head?

Anyway, Terry was eaten up with juggling.

He performed at all three of his daughters’ birthday parties, at office parties, at fundraisers.

Then he read about a guy who set a world distance record for joggling.

Eureka! Terry Odom had found his passion. Joggling was the perfect hybrid of fun, fitness and skill.

“Joggling is for those of us who are pretty good jugglers, but not elite jugglers,” he says.

Terry challenged himself by joggling around the track at Danville High School. Then he entered races. He joggled through his first 5-kilometer race in Greensboro. He signed up for more races: 5-Ks; 10-Ks; half-marathons, even a full marathon.

He got better at joggling.

He also became a better athlete, he says. A native of tiny Robbinsville in Western North Carolina, he’d played football and basketball in high school. He was no star, but he was fairly coordinated.

Joggling sharpened his eye-hand coordination, he says.

“If I’d started juggling when I was 13 instead of 30, I’d be retired from the NFL by now,” he says, chuckling. “I guarantee it makes you a better athlete.”

Terry says that’s because joggling — which requires you to throw the clubs slightly ahead of your body with just enough spin so the skinny end of the club lands in your hand — pushes the body and the brain at the same time, multiplying neural connections. Researchers say an abundance of neural connections — especially those forged by learning something new — sharpens thinking and helps to fend off diseases like Alzheimer’s.

Here’s the other thing: Joggling has made Terry good medicine for everyone he meets.

It’s hard not to smile when you see him joggling, whether it’s in the park, on the road near his home, or at the Alex Spears YMCA in Greensboro, where he goes to joggle on the treadmill on foul-weather mornings.

People clap as they watch him. They shout “Way to go!” They whip out their cell phones to click-and-grin at his feat.

“Can you chew gum and do that?” some bystanders want to know.
Terry has taught one of his daughters — and two of his sons-in-law — to juggle. He and his daughter Kelly Walters delighted the guests at Kelly’s wedding reception. During the father-daughter dance, they started out swaying slowly to Donna Summer’s “Last Dance.” They broke into juggling act when the music quickened.

“It was totally her idea,” Terry says proudly.

I ask Terry if he ever fears looking silly while joggling.

He shakes his head.

“I don’t mind looking foolish,” he says. “I want to entertain people.”

Which brings us back to how I met Terry. It seems I’m not the only motorist who’s been captivated by his skill.

In 2011, Terry was joggling on a bike path in Sanibel Island, Florida, when he heard a crash on the road next to him. One car had rear-ended another. The driver of the car in back told Terry that he’d been watching him instead of the car ahead.

Terry, ever the good doctor, checked to make sure everyone was OK.

Then he skedaddled. With clubs churning.

“I didn’t hang around to hear what he told the police,” says Terry.  OH

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry. You can reach her at ohenrymaria@gmail.com

Greensboro’s Mighty Fairlanes

Built For Comfort

Since 1985, Mark “BuddyRo” Harrison’s vehicle of choice has been a Fairlane. But Harrison’s version didn’t have a cool stainless steel racing stripe down the side or a tinted transparent plastic roof like the ’55 Crown Vic Skyliner. The Greensboro-based guitarist didn’t opt for the drag racers’ ’64 427-cubic-inch Thunderbolt model either. His machine was more middle-of-the-road, built for cruising with top 40 tunes blowin’ in the breeze. His fellow drivers for that initial ’85 custom model were Harrison on guitar, Gary Collins on drums, Chris Carroll on bass and Kevin Wilson on keyboards.

The Fairlanes retooled in 1990, with Chip “Memphis” Click on drums and Ken Graham on bass. The engine’s sound changed as well, with covers becoming fewer and the vehicle now tuned up with some of Harrison’s originals. The current Fairlanes driver’s roster has Colby Jack replacing Graham on bass and the addition of Glenn Bickell on keys and vocals.

Some have tried to slap a blues label on his machine, but Harrison says it won’t stick. “It’s all the blues to me,” he says. “Even if I’m playing a Johnny Cash tune,” he explains. “I’m saying it from just a pure guitar standpoint. It’s all the same progressions, it’s just the spirit of the song and the vibe that you emit on it.”

Their latest, “The Longer I Live,” is a gumbo of ingredients  — rockabilly, outlaw country and rock. The record is dedicated to their former bassist Carroll, who passed away in August. “It’s hard losing so many of ’em, Harrison  says. “The longer I live,” he growls on the title cut, over a twangy rockabilly framework, “the more I think about dyin’./ So many gone/ seems like I never quit cryin’,” he laments, before taking on politicians in another song.

“Hypocrite,” sounds a bit like Bob Seger backed by the Allman brothers. “What I had in mind was a jam band feel. Once I got the melody going I said ‘OK, I see some hippies in tie-dyes boppin’ around,’” Harrison says, laughing. 

The record is all originals, but the band still does some obscure covers live. Tab Benoit’s  “Make Your Mind Up,” and Lightning  Hopkins’ “Got Love,” for instance. And then there’s a little tune The Band used to perform: “Ophelia,” Levon Helm’s poignant centerpiece in later years after he’d regained his voice following surgery for throat cancer. For Fairlanes fans it’s a favorite. “People are like, you gotta play it,” Harrison says.

Harrison is a meticulous mechanic, keeping the engine fine-tuned. Overall, he’s very pleased with the high performance his vehicle delivers. “The Fairlanes are very consistent, some nights better than others, but I never, not anymore, got to the place of sayin’, ‘Well, we sucked,’” Harrison says wryly. “Been many years since I’ve said that.”

The Fairlanes are an all-terrain vehicle, versatile enough for any challenges.“We do a big variety of gigs, old country club dinner type gigs where you’re playin’ really soft — fake jazz, is what I call it,” Harrison says. “Next night might be a hippie party, where it’s just wide-open. That’s fun ’cause it keeps the band on their toes.”

Harrison believes the secret to keeping his vehicle humming all these years  is selling the band on his songs. “If they ain’t on board, it ain’t gonna happen. They’ll move on. So they bought into these tunes on the record, and they enjoy playing ’em.” — Grant Britt

A Pre-Geezer Christmas List

By Jim Dodson

Earlier this month, my lovely grown-up daughter living in faraway Chicago phoned to ask what I want for Christmas.

“Can’t think of a thing, Honey,” I replied, then said what I say every year when we do this routine. “I don’t need a thing, Mugs. Just seeing all of you kids come home is my Christmas present. Oh, wait, I know — a pair of new white socks and a pen that doesn’t run out of ink.”

“Dad, be serious.”

I was being serious. For better or worse, come winter I go through white socks like tissues, and there’s nothing worse than a pen that runs out of ink when you’ve had a sudden brilliant thought.

The trick of living, I’ve discovered over three score years plus four is to know what’s enough and to need (and better yet desire) less and less of this world’s material stuff, whittling down life until you’re traveling light enough to someday join the dust from whence you came.

On this same note, it was a shock to discover the other day that I own 23 very nice sports coats. Where on Earth did they all come from? And more to the point, do I really need 23 sports coats in my life, only two or three of which I might wear over the course of a year? Ditto neckties, golf clubs, various hats and caps, even books I used to think I would someday read but never got around to.

So I had a brilliant idea. For the first time in decades, I made out a Christmas list, putting “give away at least half your very nice sports coats for Christmas” at the top of it. 

Like my working hero Thomas Jefferson — who claimed to be an “old man but a new gardener” —  I tend to make lists of things I mean to do on any given day. As any pre-geezer knows, the older you get, the better it is to write stuff down before you forget it. Unfortunately, I’m always finding old lists of things I meant to do stuffed in the pockets of my sports coats and gardening pants, things I somehow forgot to do. This is just another good reason to get rid of half my very nice sports coats. That way, I’ll probably only forget to do half the tasks I put on my daily list of things to do.

In this spirit, I decided to revisit making a Christmas list since I was about 11. That year my buddies and I used to ride our bikes to the downtown Sears and Roebuck store to check out toys we wanted to see under the Christmas tree. I wanted a new Alamo set that year and a Redskins football jersey. Also to kiss Della Hockaday who rode my bus and lived just around the corner. She wouldn’t give me the time of day. But that’s an old story of youthful yearning and unrequited love.

Back to my current pre-geezer Christmas List:

Time. Don’t tell anyone, least of all my literary agent, but I have at least three novels half-written that I just can’t find the time to finish. I don’t know if the world needs to read my unfinished novels or not. I just know I need to someday finish writing them — though “someday” really has a scary way of creeping up on you. Time is the one thing that always seems to be in short supply, running out like the ink in your pen when you least expect it. I’d also like enough time to see my children settled down and happy with how their lives are working out. While I’m on the subject, wouldn’t  mind being in the Grandpa Club some day. But no rush, Kids. Hopefully I still have a little time yet. Those new grandpas seem to have all the fun, though.

Something spicy and blue. Thanks to several careers in writing, I’ve been fortunate enough to travel abroard a great deal, exploring faraway places I only dreamed or read about as a kid. Most of my wanderlust has been spent. But there still are a few places I’d like to go before I’m scattered among the wildflowers. One is the spice market and Blue Mosque of Istanbul. I can’t really tell you why — maybe because on an attempt to see the wonders of the ancient world with my 10-year-old son many years ago, we failed to reach Constantinople or explore the Holy Land. In a nice development, next summer that grown-up son — now a reporter for a famous newspaper in northern Maine — plans to marry a beautiful Palestinian Christian girl from Jaffa, Israel. The sacred sights of the Holy Land await. And just maybe, on the return leg, something spicy and blue in old Constantinople.

Another rescue dog. Please don’t share this with my wife, but I’d love another rescue dog or two. Rescue dogs make the world a better place. They’re all about love and joy at finally having a home to call their own. Mine found me. Her name is Mulligan. Best dog ever. I’ll cry like a baby when she’s gone. Then I’ll go get myself another rescue dog or two.

A politician to admire. Frankly, I’m tired of the ones we have. All they do is bicker, call names and point nasty fingers at each other. If my mother were running this country, she’d send them all to their bedrooms without dessert until they could learn to speak with a civil tongue in their mouths.  If you can’t tweet something nice, she would add, don’t tweet anything at all. We could sure use a guy like Thomas Jefferson or my mom for president.

Tickle the ivories. Sure wish I could play the piano. Actually, I can play the piano. It just doesn’t sound like it. Looking back, I should have taken more than two weeks of lessons. You can probably put the blame directly on Della Hockaday. She was all I could think about the year my mom (see above) suggested I take piano lessons. The teacher smelled like moth balls so I quit and took up playing guitar, planning to become the next George Harrison. Sadly, Della wasn’t impressed.   

More Saturday mornings. Look, I could really use an extra Saturday morning.  That’s when I get my errands and garden work done. While the world sleeps in, I get down and dirty. Thus I hereby propose a constitutional amendment introducing the four-day work week and renaming Friday “First Saturday.” Just imagine what we could all do if we had two Saturday mornings! An extra day for golf, gardening, sleeping in, reading a book, meeting a friend for lunch, writing a letter by hand, taking a walk with the dogs in the park, or just doing nothing but noticing what a beautiful world we’re briefly inhabiting.

What’s Up, Doc? And since we’re on the subject, would someone please bring back those classic Bugs Bunny cartoons that once made Saturday mornings so sublime – Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig,  Foghorn Leghorn, Tweety and Sylvester, Yosemite Sam, Pepé Le Pew, the whole Looney Tunes gang. Sure loved those guys. They made the world a better place — or at least a whole lot funnier. We should all lighten up, especially the cartoon characters we’ve elected to public office. Besides, I have it on good authority that Tom Jefferson was a huge Rocky and Bullwinkle fan.

A Revised Eleventh Commandment. Here’s a final thing I wish we could do: learn to listen to each other with a closed mouth and an open mind. During the years I wrote about life in Washington, D.C., Ronald Reagan publicly embraced an Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of another republican.” I propose we update that to “Never speak ill of another American, even if they look or sound different from you.” We’re the most diverse nation on Earth, after all, made up of a polyglot of souls who mostly came from someplace else far, far away — yet a country constitutionally founded on the timeless principle of free exchange of ideas, civil discourse and respect for a neighbor’s opinions, even if we don’t agree. If we get to know that neighbor, we just might be reminded that far more unites than divides us.

So there it is, neighbors, eight modest items on my pre-geezer Christmas Wish List.  I can almost hear what you’re thinking — What a dreamer, pal. You must have sugar-plums dancing in your head.

I suppose that’s true. But the older I get, the more I dream about such things, not unlike the way, long ago and far away, I wished for a new Alamo set and a kiss from Della Hockaday. One of those things, I can safely report, Santa delivered.

In the mean time, can anyone use a very nice sports coat or two?  OH

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.