Simple Life

The Kindness of Strangers

And the strangeness of some kinds of people

By Jim Dodson

Illustration by Gerry O’Neill

The other afternoon I was making a pleasant run to the garden center during early rush hour when I saw something I’ve never seen on a busy North Carolina street.

While waiting for the light to change at one of the busiest intersections in the city, a woman next to me in a large, luxury SUV began edging out into the heavy stream of traffic crossing in front of us.

At first, I thought she might simply be unaware of her dangerous drift into moving traffic. She was, after all, visibly chatting on her phone and apparently oblivious to blaring horns of those who were forced to stop to avoid a collision. Within moments, however, traffic in both directions had halted. One man was actually yelling at her out his window, shaking a fist.

But on she merrily went, indifferent to the automotive mayhem left in her wake, the first red light I’ve ever seen run in slow motion.

For an instant, I wondered if I might have somehow been teleported to Italy or France where motorists seem to regard traffic lights and road signs as simple nuisances, a quaint if daunting European tradition of civil indifference to les autorités that evolved across the ages.

Having motored across all of Britain and most of France, Italy and Greece, I long ago concluded that driving there is both a blood sport and national pastime, an automotive funhouse to be both enjoyed and feared. When in Italy, for instance, my operational motto is: drive like the teenage Romeo with the pretty girl on the back of his Vespa who just cut you off in the roundabout with a rude gesture insulting your heritage. It’s all part of the cultural exchange.

But here in America, at least in theory, most of us grew up respecting traffic laws because we were force-fed driver’s education since early teen years, programs designed to make us thoughtful citizens of the public roadways. (Quick aside: I have a dear friend whose teenage son has failed his driver’s license test — God bless his heart — for the fifth time, which must be some kind of statewide record; I’ve helpfully suggested she immediately ship him off to Sorrento, Italy, where he’s bound to find true and lasting happiness, a pretty girl, a nice Vespa scooter and no annoying driver’s test to complicate his life, rude gestures optional.)

All fooling aside, in cities across America, officials report that traffic accidents and automobile fatalities are approaching record levels. Some blame the COVID pandemic that has had the world so bottled up and locked down, presumably entitling folks behind the wheel to make up for lost time by driving like there’s no tomorrow — or at least no traffic laws.

In my town and possibly yours, is it my imagination or do more folks than ever seem to be blithely running stop signs, ignoring speed limits and driving like Mad Max on Tuscan holiday. Running a red light in slow motion may be the least of our problems.

The armchair sociologist in me naturally wonders if America’s deteriorating driving habits and growing automotive brinksmanship might simply be a symptom of the times, part of a general decline of public civility and respect for others that fuels everything from our toxic politics to the plague of violence against Asians.

Whatever is fueling the road rage and social mayhem, the remedy is profound, timeless and maddeningly elusive.

I saw the fix written on a sign my neighbor planted in her yard the other day.

Spread Happiness, it said.

I found myself thinking about my old man, an ad-man with a poet’s heart who believed kindness is the greatest of human virtues, a sign of a truly civilized mind. My nickname for him was Opti the Mystic because he believed even the smallest acts of kindness — especially to strangers — are seeds from which everything good in life grows. “If you are nothing else in life,” he used to advise my older brother and me, “being kind will take you to wonderful places.”

This from a fellow who’d been in the middle of a World War and experienced first-hand the worst things human beings can do to each other. He became the kindest man I’ve ever known.

In any case, Opti would have loved how a timely reminder of his message came home to me during another challenging automotive moment.

On a recent Saturday morning, after setting up my baker wife’s tent at the weekend farmers’ market where she sells her sinfully delicious cakes and such, I set off in my vintage Buick Roadmaster wagon to a landscape nursery on the edge of town to buy hydrangeas for my Asian garden.

On the drive home, however, I blew a front tire and barely made it off the highway into a Great Stops gas station before the tire went completely flat. I had no spare. To make matters worse, my cell phone had only one percent of a charge left — just long enough to leave a quick desperate voicemail on my wife’s answering service before the dang thing went dead. The old Buick, of course, had no charger.

I walked into the service shop whispering dark oaths under my breath at such miserable timing, asking the personable young African American clerk if she could possibly give my phone a brief charge. I even offered to pay her for the help.

Her supervisor emerged from the office. When I explained that I was running errands for my wife when my day suddenly went flat, she gave me a big grin. “Bless your heart, child! Give me that phone!”

I handed it over. She shook her head and laughed. “You’re just like my husband. I can’t let that man go anywhere without him gettin’ into trouble! That’s husbands for you!”

Just like that, my good mood returned. Outside, a few minutes later, the tow truck arrived. The driver was named Danny Poindexter, a big burly white guy. He was having a long morning too. We dropped off my car at the auto service center and he graciously offered to drive me home to get my other car. It was the second surprising act of kindness from a stranger that morning. As we approached my street, I saw my neighbor’s pink Spread Happiness for the second time.

“What kind of cake do you like?” I asked Danny.

“Carrot cake,” Danny replied. “I love carrot cake.”

He dropped me off at home and I drove over to the farmers’ market and picked up a piece of my wife’s amazing carrot cake, phoned Danny and met him at a Wendy’s parking lot near his next job. He was deeply touched by the gesture. “This just makes my day,” he said, diving straight in.

I then drove back to the service station across town to pick up my phone — now fully charged — that I’d managed to forget in all the unexpected mayhem of the morning. I even offered to pay the ladies for their kindness to a stranger.

They simply laughed. “Oh, honey, that’s why we’re here!” said the manager. “I’m just glad you remembered to come back for your phone, so I didn’t have to chase your butt all over town!”

I drove home to plant my new hydrangeas in a happy state of mind, making a mental note to take the kind ladies of Great Stops my wife’s famous Southern-style caramel cake just to say thanks to strangers who are now friends.  OH

Jim Dodson is the founding editor of O.Henry.

Simple Life

The Cowboy in Me

Old Westerns are the cure for Yellowstone fever

By Jim Dodson

So, there we sat, three old ranch hands around a blazing fire as a lonesome doggie let loose a howl at the moon.

“Sounds like that dadgum dachshund down the street got loose again,” grunted Harry, the quick-draw artist sipping his Buffalo Trace.

“He’s pretty bad,” agreed Timmy the Kid, the tile-slinging merchant. “But that dang goldendoodle across the street ain’t much better. Got a howl on him like a stuck prairie dog.”

Counting women folk (cowboy-speak for “wives”) there actually were six of us gathered round the elegant Tuscan terrace fire pit in Tim and Sally’s beautiful backyard where our brides were drinking excellent white wine and chatting about whatever suburban wives talk about when their husbands are talking like dim-witted ranch hands who have watched too many episodes of Yellowstone, the hottest show on cable TV.

In case you’ve been livin’ under a flat rock in the woods, Yellowstone is the TV saga of rancher John Dutton and his proud but mentally unstable family, owners of the largest cattle ranch in Montana. They are in a perpetual war with an Indian reservation, the national park system and godless resort developers eager to turn their ranch into Club Med West. Think Dynasty with pump shotguns, F-bombs and luxury pickup trucks.

Whether you find Yellowstone appalling or hopelessly addictive, Yellowstone fever has spread like a case of terminal kudzu across the lower 48, turning ordinary dudes like Harry, Tim and briefly me into mini John Dutton wannabes.

As a result of the show’s surging ratings, there’s now even an official Yellowstone Merchandise TV Shop Collection peddling everything from home goods to coffee mugs for riding the urban range in your luxury pickup truck. Down at the auto mall, fancy rigs like the boys from Yellowstone drive can easily set you back 70K.

Back at Christmas, just for fun, I bought the little missus — a.k.a. my wife — an official Yellowstone ballcap and matching sweatshirt that reads, “Don’t Make Me Go Beth Dutton on You,” thinking she might ditch her daily green tea and morning yoga meditation in favor of going a little bit “Beth Dutton.” Every marriage needs a bit of spice.

In case you been watchin’ way too much CNN and worryin’ about stuff like the future of democracy and the free world, Beth Dutton is the smokin’ hot, potty-mouthed, always drunk, oversexed, mean-as-a-rattlesnake daughter of John Dutton, the stoical, monosyllabic, unnaturally stone-faced daddy-rancher with obvious deep inner conflicts, who every now and then shoots some dumb sumbitch who wants his land or wanders uninvited onto it. 

Unfortunately, while I was over at Tractor Supply one Saturday mornin’ trying to decide how many head of cattle I might be able to raise on a quarter acre suburban lot, the little lady dropped off her sexy new Beth Dutton duds to Goodwill — her way of saying the drunk and nasty lifestyle of the modern TV cowgirl just wasn’t her cup of green tea, with or without the Tito’s chaser.

For those of us who grew up in the 1960s idolizing cowboys like Gene Autry, Matt Dillon and Roy Rogers, not to mention the boys from Bonanza and the gals from The Big Valley, these Yellowstone folks aren’t exactly your polite, old-fashioned TV cowboy types who wear white hats, never seem to get dirty and always marry the pretty school mistress in the end.

Must admit, after binging three full seasons of Yellowstone, I suddenly began to miss those kinder and gentler Hollywood cowboys I grew up with and had every intention of someday becoming.

Sitting on a shelf in our library are a pair of small, well-worn cowboy boots, the only things on my feet for the first four years of my life. We lived in the rolling country north of Dallas, a neighborhood that shared a great big pasture full of horses and a burro named Oscar.

Oscar belonged to me — well, my folks. But I fed and talked to Oscar every morning and sometimes got to ride him in the afternoon. I always figured Oscar and I would someday ride off into the sunset together, meet the right gal and finally settle down. Instead, we moved to the city where I rode a bicycle instead of a burro and gave up my boots for a pair of Keds.

The old-style cowboy in me never died, though. He even still shows up from time to time, like when — in search of the Golf Channel or an update on Ukraine — I stumble across old episodes of The Virginian or Maverick on some remote cable channel and watch the entire episode, remembering exactly what happens. Give me a classic John Wayne western or John Ford epic on TCM and I’m also good for the count.

Several years ago, my wife surprised me with tickets to see Glen Campbell at an outdoor arena in Raleigh. Reportedly suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, Campbell was making his farewell musical tour.

Unfortunately, a thunderstorm broke right at showtime, and Campbell managed only a brief appearance to sing one song before the show was canceled. He passed on not long afterward.

I guess even rhinestone cowboys never die, though, as long as you have their complete hits on Spotify or Pandora radio. When folks drive like the Wild West in my town, I just sing along with Glen.

Twenty-five years ago, I took my daughter, Maggie, then a precocious 7, on an unforgettable, two-month road trip to fish and camp the great trout rivers of the West. We tented beneath glittering stars by the Shoshone River and attended the Friday night rodeo in Cody. We took a rocking McKenzie boat down the Snake and camped for two days in Yellowstone, saw buffalo and a gray wolf, hiked for miles, and drank our bodyweight in root beer. For a full week we rode horses in the Colorado high country around Durango and camped atop a star-strewn mesa in New Mexico. On the way home, we even bumped into the great-granddaughter of outlaw Jesse James near the Red River. She was a nice old lady with a killer smile.

Though I didn’t tell my daughter this for many years, the cowboy in me was actually scouting out places where I could start a new life following a divorce — somewhere in the wide-open, Western spaces where I could stake a new claim, hear the doggies sing and never look back. 

It didn’t quite work out that way, but the trip sure healed something in both of us and bonded us like saddle pals on the old Chisholm Trail. The little memoir I wrote about our journey of the heart is still in print all these years later — and even got made into a film. Maggie herself now lives in the Golden West.

I guess that’s why I was initially drawn to the saga of the Duttons of Yellowstone Ranch, hoping to find some comforting trace of the Western spirit — the inner cowboy — that lives in all of us.

But after three full seasons of Yellowstone, I simply had enough. I went back to old TV Westerns and John Ford movies that never fail to deliver.

My little missus — better known as my wife, Wendy — knew just the thing to perk me up. She brought me a nice big glass of milk and some Oreos as we settled in to watch a couple of my favorite episodes of The Big Valley.  OH

Jim Dodson is O.Henry’s founding editor and ambassador at large.

Simple Life

Where the Mild Things Are

By Jim Dodson

These midsummer mornings are the ones I like best, the last cool, wet mornings in my garden before dawn, when plants are at their peak and months of toil pay off with blooms and foliage that will surrender soon enough to the heat and drought of August.

Even if I didn’t rise unnaturally early by most of the world’s clock, I would be out poking and spading, weeding and watering plants before anyone groggily rises — all under the steady gaze of the garden’s most vigilant creature.

No one knows exactly how old Old Rufus really is. Or even where he came from.

He showed up one day many years ago at the college where my wife works, politely cadging food off the staff. “He was well-fed and very friendly, clearly belonged somewhere and to someone,” Wendy explained after finding no takers over the course of a week and finally hauling him home. “I think someone must have dumped him.”

None of our three dogs was initially impressed. Come to think of it, neither was I. The first time I tried to give the newcomer a friendly scratch on his rump, he spat at me and nearly took off my hand. I suggested we dump him at the college.

“Funny who he looks like,” my wife added with a wry smile.

The resemblance to a mellow old barn cat we had in Maine named Rufus was uncanny. He was a fluffy orange tabby with a pinch of Maine Coon cat in him, a gentle disposition and face like a miniature lion, born in the rafters of a 200-year-old barn with a rambunctious twin we named Wexel.

Both cats lived with us — or the other way around — for two decades, becoming my constant companions whenever I cut grass or worked in the flowerbeds. Rufus was particularly loyal in the garden. His favorite places to snooze on a summer day were either my prized Italian coneflowers which came indirectly from Katharine White’s Blue Hill garden or a patch of wild ferns by the edge of the woods. I nicknamed Rufus the Guardian of the Garden, even if he was no good at catching slugs and slept on the job much of the time. Others eventually called him the miracle cat.

One day Rufus the First disappeared and didn’t return for almost a week. I found him lying beneath a hydrangea bush by the side porch steps filthy and panting, barely alive. He’d been split open from throat to gut by some critter of the north woods, probably a coyote he mistook for a friendly dog. You could actually see his heart beating beneath his exposed ribs. Our vet gasped when she saw him, pointing out it would be a miracle if Rufus lasted the night. “But we can clean and sew him up and see what happens.” Two days later, Sue phoned with an update. “You won’t believe it, but I think he’s going to pull through. Cats will always surprise you.”

Ten days later, Rufus came home again, happy as ever, stitched up like a second-hand football — and lived another five years happily following me about the yard and garden before I simply found him on another late summer afternoon stretched out peacefully beneath the same hydrangea bush, having serenely departed on his own gentle terms.

I buried him in the wild ferns where he loved to nap, marked by a simple granite stone.

We decided to name the newcomer Rufus the Second. He gradually warmed up to me, though anytime I touched his back he turned into Psycho Cat. We decided someone must have abused him, perhaps explaining why he turned up as a refugee at the college. Within days of his arrival, though, he was following me around the house and soon outside where I was restoring a neglected terrace garden.

One evening as I was transplanting hostas, I saw him hop the fence and disappear into our neighbor’s vast overgrown yard. Rufus the Second was obviously a born traveler, perhaps happy to have a meal and keep moving.

But the next morning he was back, calmly waiting outside the terrace doors for his breakfast. I fed him outside and went to water my new rose plantings. Rufus Two followed and began licking the hose water off the leaves of the freshly watered plants.

This quickly became our morning and evening routines. By the light of dawn or dusk, I would spade and mulch and water; Rufus would follow closely behind, drinking from the leaves, monitoring my progress. Like his remarkable namesake, he clearly preferred to eat and sleep outdoors, coming inside only on the coldest nights or anytime there were houseguests or a dinner party going on, saving his rock star charm for strangers.

Many mornings he even left a token from his nighttime travels, a small mouse or mole at the back door. Unlike his gentle namesake, this Rufus was a killer, a true guardian of the grounds.

“Earning his keep,” suggested my wife, his savior.

People who like cats tend to love cats. Generally speaking, I’m not one of them, decidedly a dog-loving human, though beginning with our barn cat brothers in Maine, I’ve developed a grudging affection for a handful of cats.

A spiritual writer I admire insists that every philosopher needs a cat, a non-judging set of eyes to monitor your progress through this beautiful but challenging world.

For what it’s worth, I’ve learned — decided — every gardener could use a cat in the garden, too — a living companion who observes what you do without particular judgment and the calm detachment of a Buddhist elder.

A couple years after Rufus the Second arrived on the scene, we downsized to an arboreal cottage that felt like the first true home we’d had since leaving Maine. I wasn’t entirely sure if Rufus the Second would — or could — translate.

The new place was truly an overgrown arboretum of ancient pond pines and gorgeous mature gardenias and camellias, dogwoods and Japanese maples and wisteria vines run amok, a garden that had been allowed to grow on its own for almost a decade. More than anything else, it needed love and the attention of a full-time gardener, a task that gave me incalculable pleasure.

The new property was also home to a spectacular variety of birds, not exactly the place you want to introduce a known killer like Rufus the Second.

To be on the safe side, we put a bell on him, which he promptly ditched somewhere and — a day or so later — vanished.

He was gone for several days, prompting me to think maybe his wandering blood had just kicked in again.

By then I was busy constructing gates and fences and starting a new stone walkway framed by Russian sage, hydrangeas and Italian coneflowers, quietly hoping the guardian of the garden might eventually return.

I discovered he was spending time with the nice widow lady next door and charming an elderly couple who lived through the trees behind our saltwater swimming pool, perhaps auditioning for potential new owners.

“What a wonderful cat, so beautiful and friendly,” cooed my neighbor, the widow lady. “I call him Simba because he looks like a little lion.”

The next morning Rufus was back, reporting for duty in the garden.

With the help of a talented gardener named José, we dug out ancient dying shrubs and created new perennial beds and recovered a beautiful serpentine brick wall which I spent much of the late winter and early spring re-planting. As José went after banks of azaleas and camellias-gone-wild, I landscaped the pool area and hacked away at the murderous wisteria vines that make parts of the property still resemble Jurassic Park.

Throughout this ambitious process of restoration, the new Old Rufus settled into his familiar routine, never venturing farther than the pool (when people are in it) or the nice widow lady next door (when he needs a second meal), presumably having decided to call my garden his permanent home. Better yet, he’s grown too old to chase the birds — seems content to simply lie and merely watch them at the feeder.

There he presides to this day, faithfully waiting at the back door in the cool dawns of our second summer for his breakfast, or curled up in the heat of the summer afternoons in the cool thick tufts of liriope muscari near a stone Buddha head beneath the young Japanese maple, waiting for me to begin my evening weeding and watering. Before we start work, I always give him a nice scratch — on the head, mind you — to thank him for his faithful companionship.

He’s grown visibly thinner. Someday, I’m guessing, I’ll find him stretched out peacefully beneath a handsome garden plant, having finished his work and set off on a different kind of journey.

I plan to put him someplace nice in the garden — hoping someone will someday do the same thing for me — not discounting the possibility that all living things, including gardens and their guardians, have a lovely way of always returning.

Reprinted with permission from the July 2015 issue of Pinestraw Magazine.

Simple Life

Simple Gifts

The secret to a good life? Less is more

By Jim Dodson

A friend recently wondered why I named this column “Simple Life.”

I joked that it was better than the original name I came up with — “Frankly, My Name Escapes Me.”

In truth, the title is as aspirational as it is functional, a useful reminder that the longer I live, the more I grow to appreciate the value of simplifying my life.

In her recent column, “Simplicity: The Neglected Value,” author and communications coach Bruna Martinuzzi points out that we time-enslaved, stressed-out, overworking humans simply don’t know what’s good for us when it comes to where we place our focus in life.

“We read and hear enough about its benefits in just about every facet of our lives,” she writes, “yet we walk past it, every day, in pursuit of the more complex, complicated, tangled and sometimes puzzling. There is no glitter in simple, not enough buttons to play with. We fear that simple equates with easy, light, too basic — unsophisticated.”

Leonardo da Vinci, in fact, declared simplicity the ultimate form of sophistication. As did the likes of Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, Walt Whitman, Lao Tzu, Yogi Berra, Marcus Aurelius, Leo Tolstoy and Maya Angelou. Rumi called it the dust that hides the gold.

Whether planning a wedding or a war, simplicity is key to a successful outcome, knowing what’s not essential and eliminating it before things get out of hand.

A year ago, the combination of the pandemic and wedding plans that had grown far more complicated than expected prompted my daughter, Maggie, and her fiancé, Nate, to postpone and rethink how they wished to tie the knot. They’ve since envisioned an intimate gathering of close friends and family to celebrate their union when the moment is right, somewhere in nature, stress-free and away from the madding crowd.

One unexpected benefit of this strange year of distance and isolation, social scientists and trend-watchers report, is a broad refiguring of how we Americans live, work and appropriate our time.

While churches and bars — the yin and yang of modern cultural society — still struggle to stay open, life-enriching activities like meditation, Zoom yoga, home gardening, golf and bird-watching have mushroomed in popularity. According to more than one expert on the American workplace, mobile workspaces and home offices will be the engine that produces the next Industrial Revolution, spawning a vast new generation of home-grown entrepreneurs and inventive visionaries.

History holds some encouraging parallels. During the Great Depression and Second World War, an era of severe economic dislocation and public self-sacrifice, a generation of self-made engineers, tinkerers and inventors — many working in the isolation of their own garages and backyard sheds — managed to create everything from frozen foods to the first computers, color TV to dialysis machines, jet engines to Tupperware. That boom became the foundation for the consumer revolution and space age of the 1950s and ’60s. Your smart phone is the godchild of that time.

A couple years ago, while traveling the Great Wagon Road for my current book project about America’s original immigrant highway, I paid an afternoon call on a lovely Amish family, the Lapps, who live in the heart of Pennsylvania’s lush Lancaster County.

The “plain” ways of America’s Old Order Amish — such as their unadorned clothing, use of oil lamps instead of electricity and reliance on horses for transportation and farming — are an echo of our vanished agrarian past and a living reminder of the virtues of simplicity.

Amish and Mennonite farmers were the first European settlers to answer William Penn’s call to Lancaster County in the late 17th century, using their wise farming practices and love of the land and their animals to transform the county’s rich limestone soil into the most productive farmland in the nation. The so-called “Garden Spot of the Nation” is now regarded as the birthplace of American agriculture.

The Lapp family’s ancestors had been on their land since before the American Revolution, living as comfortably in accord with nature and the Divine as anyone I’ve ever met. After Mervyn showed me around his immaculate barns, we sat with his wife, Catharine, in the evening light, sipping delicious meadow tea — a drink made from boiling fresh mint gathered from surrounding fields — beneath a grove of old trees. They talked about their three grown sons, all of whom worked in the family’s masonry business, and how devotion to God, family and the pleasure of doing good work with their hands were the pillars of a rewarding life. It was one of the most pleasing interviews I’ve ever conducted.

For the record, there were even a few myth-busting surprises, including the fact that the Lapp men were all crazy about playing golf, and that Mervyn was a lifelong L.A. Dodgers fan who often watched games on his neighbor’s television.

“If you’re smart,” he told me during our walk through his beautiful stone barn, “you take stock of what’s really important in your life . . . and other things you can simply live without.” He paused and gave me a wry look. “Simple things are always best. That’s a key to happiness. But I do need my Dodgers.”

As I drove home to North Carolina on a winding backcountry road, I was reminded of my own aspirations of simplicity, beginning with my chosen route home. Getting anywhere fast is one thing I can do without.

In his 1939 classic, The Importance of Living, Lin Yutang points out that beyond the noble art of getting things done, there may be an even nobler art of leaving things undone. “The wisdom of life,” he writes, “consists in the elimination of nonessentials.” 

During this year of distance from friends and family, in place of going out to movies or dinner, an older couple I know took up reading to each other every morning from their favorite books, a practice they plan to continue indefinitely. “It’s been a wonderful discovery,” Harry reports. “A simple gift that’s brought us closer than ever. It’s now part of our lives.”

Over this same interlude, I began work on a large garden I have dreamed of making for many years, one that will probably take me many more years to complete. As any gardener knows, of course, a garden is never finished, so my education as a man of the soil — and my wonder at its constant gifts — will never cease, until I do.

Simply put, what a lovely thought.   OH

Jim Dodson can be reached at jim@thepilot.com

Simple Life

In the Sweet By and By

Until then, the dance of life continues

By Jim Dodson

The Great Pandemic Summer of 2020 is drawing to a close.

How have you coped?

As you read this, I am coping by being thigh-deep in a tumbling stream at the base of Mount Mitchell, deep in a national forest, amusing a few sleepy rainbow trout with my rusty fly-casting skills.

If ever there was a summer to get away to the wild, this is it. For me, fly fishing has long provided relaxation and unexpected answers to questions that seem to resist easy answers.

Twenty-five summers ago, during an unexpected family crisis, my daughter Maggie and I spent a glorious summer camping and fly-fishing our way across America. Maggie was 7 years old. Our old dog Amos was pushing 13. It was a summer to remember chasing trout  in some of the West’s most iconic rivers.

This summer, Maggie and her fiancé, Nate, and their two rescued pups are retracing portions of our route through the West as they head for new jobs in Los Angeles, camping and hiking. The other night, Maggie phoned from the banks of Shoshone River in Wyoming just to hear her old man rhapsodize about the summer night we spent camped by the swift blue river beneath a quilt of glittering stars. Such nights stay with you.  

Throughout this devastating pandemic and summer of social discontent, many of us have faithfully sheltered in place and adopted wearing face coverings in public. We have placed our trust in science, avoided crowds, dutifully washed hands and learned new phrases like “safe distancing” and “community spread.” We’ve also marveled at the human capacity for finding meaning, change and creativity in the midst of a crisis our children will probably tell their grandchildren about in tones of wonder and solemnity, and maybe even gratitude.

Change and history move in halting steps, stumbling before we who are living through them finally come to terms with the truth. To many in America, a racial awakening in the midst of a worldwide pandemic either seems like a cosmic piling on or a clear message from the universe that it’s time for America to face up to the sins of our collective past and finally take steps to end systemic racism, a reckoning long overdue. 

One man’s awakening, I suppose, is another’s End of Days.

For what it’s worth, a different metric on this time of trials comes from leading astrologers who point out that for the first time in thousands of years, half a dozen planets are simultaneously in retrograde and the rare success of three consecutive eclipses, two lunar, one solar, combined with the planet Pluto — the diminutive power broker of darkness and chaos — passing through America’s chart in almost the exact location at the time of our country’s founding, indicates a period of feeling “stuck” in a protracted time of intense disruption and bitter division. As the planets move forward, or so we are told, we may experience a vast spiritual awakening, possibly even a new age of enlightenment springing from lessons of the past.

Whether the problem lies in our stars or ourselves remains an open question.

In the meantime, lacking the gift of celestial prophecy, I stand in tumbling waters thinking how this year of chaos and change reminds me of valuable lessons learned at an early age in life in the racially bifurcated world where I grew up.

My father was a newspaperman with a poet’s heart who lost his dream in 1958 when his partner cleaned out the operating funds of their thriving weekly newspaper in coastal Mississippi, disappearing without a trace.

One day later, his only sister died in a car wreck on an icy road outside Washington, D.C., and my mother suffered her second late-term miscarriage in three years.

We left Mississippi with everything we owned in a Pontiac Star Chief and drove all night to Wilmington, where my dad worked for several months at the Star News before moving on to a better job in South Carolina.

I started first grade in Florence, a pretty Southern town of old houses and shady streets. I was the only kid in my class who could read chapter books and had perfect attendance at school.  At year’s end, Miss Patillo presented me with a small brass pin shaped like an open book with Perfect Attendance inscribed on its pages. I still have the pin.

For my parents, however — something I learned many years later — Florence was like a silent ordeal, a twilight world between the unyielding values of the Old South and a brave new world of tomorrow.

The summer before second grade, a lovely African-American woman named Miss Jesse came to help my mother get back on her feet. She was said to be a natural healer and a woman who knew how to take care of families like ours. My mother held strong views about race and resisted the notion of having a maid like other women in town. But her health was dangerously frail. So Miss Jesse came.

It is no longer the fashion to speak of having someone like Miss Jesse in your privileged white life.  I get that. But for one summer this kind woman took me everywhere with her to keep me out from under my mother’s feet — to the public library, to the Piggly Wiggly, to and from vacation Bible school at the Lutheran Church. I adored riding around town with Miss Jesse. The radio of her blue Dodge Dart was always tuned to a Southern gospel station. I can almost hear her singing “In the Sweet By and By” and “I’ll Fly Away.” I sang along, too.

She and my mom quickly became friends. Among other things, Miss Jesse introduced my mother-a former Maryland beauty queen-to flower gardening and turned her into quite a respectable Southern cook. Her beauty and vitality returned.

One evening while the two of them were cooking supper, a lively gospel tune came on the transistor radio and Miss Jesse invited me to hop on her strong feet, sashaying us both around the kitchen floor. She called this “feet dancing.”

One night that autumn of 1959, my father’s boss came to supper. He was a thin old man with loose change jingling in his pants pockets. Miss Jesse was cooking supper. The adults were all standing in the kitchen talking about “protests” that were suddenly happening across the Deep South. My father’s boss jingled his change and declared, “Fortunately, we don’t have that kind of trouble around here, do we Jesse? That’s because we have good nigras round these parts.”

“Jimmy,” my mother chimed instantly, “could you come with me, please?”

I was barely into the hallway when she took hold of my ear and perp-walked me to the bathroom, leading me in and shutting the door.  Over my protest, she ordered me to sit and hush up.

As I watched, she calmly opened a new bar of Ivory soap and held it inches from my face.

“If I ever hear that word come out of your mouth,” she said, restraining her Germanic fury, “you’ll be sitting on this toilet with this new bar of soap in your mouth for an hour. Is that clear?”

I knew exactly the word she meant. She explained that “nigra” was the way “supposedly educated white people in the South” said the word my brother and I were forbidden to ever use, though I heard it often used in those days.

For what it’s worth, I can’t stomach the smell of Ivory soap to this day.

Weeks later, shockingly, Miss Jesse went into the hospital and we went to visit her in its “colored wing.” She passed a few days later. We went to her funeral service at the little brick church she attended. The place was full of flowers and people, including a few white women who’d benefited from Miss Jesse’s healing presence. The music was pure gospel. My mother cried. I remember meeting Miss Jesse’s daughter, her pride and joy whom she called “Babygirl,” an art teacher from Atlanta.

A few weeks later, my dad took a new job and we finally moved home to Greensboro, where I started mid-way through the second grade.

Just days after my brother and I got our new library cards, our history-mad father mysteriously turned up at school to spring us for the afternoon. He drove us downtown to stand near the “colored” entrance of the Center Theater and watch as four brave students from A&T attempted to integrate the Woolworth’s lunch counter across Elm Street.

“Boys,” he said to us. “This isn’t just going to change life in Greensboro. It’s going to change America.”

That event is considered a watershed moment of the nonviolent Civil Rights Movement of America.

It was my 7th birthday, February 2, 1960.

Sixty years later, as statues of Confederate generals and segregationists topple and sweeping racial reckoning has finally commenced, I’ve been playing a lot of Southern gospel in my car, thinking about Miss Jesse and the first music I ever learned to sing. Embarrassing to admit, I’m having trouble remembering her last name. To me she was always Miss Jesse.

As I cast after slumbering trout in a gorgeous mountain stream, far away from that strained and vanishing South, I find myself humming “In the Sweet By and By” and wishing I could properly thank Miss Jesse for saving my mother’s life and unexpectedly shaping mine.

Maybe someday, if I’m lucky, I’ll get to feet dance with her again. And learn her whole name.  OH

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

Simple Life

The Winter Gardener

There’s plenty of life stirring beneath the season’s snows

By Jim Dodson

As you read this, the first winter of the new decade is drawing to a close.

Like a certain fabled snowman who danced with the village children until he began to melt away, I rather hate to see it go.

Winter, you see, is my favorite gardening season.

Perhaps this is because I am a son of winter, reportedly born during the height of a February snowstorm on Groundhog Day way back in 1953.

Or maybe my wintry affection stems from two decades of living on a forested hill in Maine, where the snow piled up before Christmas and I learned most of what I know about resourceful living and “making do” — as they say in the North Country — including the art of keeping the home fires burning and loved ones warm.

The light of winter is another of the season’s charms. Clear winter stars over our hilltop provided a dazzling show of celestial beauty, and the feel of the winter sun on your face on a cold, clear afternoon is like a benediction in Nature’s chapel.

Whenever I’m having difficulty falling asleep, I remember cold clear nights when I donned my red wool Elmer Fudd coat and toted a 50-pound bag of sorghum pellets to the spot at the forest’s edge. There, a family of whitetail deer waited patiently for their supper in the arctic moonlight during the hardest nights of year — a memory of fellowship with mythic creatures that never fails to ease me into sleep on my own winter nights.   

It’s possible that my fondness for what poet Christina Rossetti called the “bleak midwinter”  is simply written in the stars. Both my parents were Aquarians with midwinter birthdays just days before my own in early February. Ditto my firstborn child, a beautiful baby girl who appeared during a January blizzard that left the world quilted in white as the golden morning sun spread over Casco Bay, moments after young Maggie’s debut.

When we carried her home to Bailey Island, our unplowed lane lay so deep in snow we were forced to park at the village post office and slide down a steep hill to our back door just steps from the cobalt blue sea. The memory of my newly arrived Southern mother giddily whooping as she tobogganed down the hill on her bottom still makes me smile. Maggie made the trip all bundled into my arms — and claims to remember the journey to this day.

Winter’s other gifts included our annual winter solstice party where friends and neighbors came out of the frigid night to sing and dance for their supper and — because I married into a clan of real Glaswegian Scots — a Hogmanay celebration on New Year’s Eve that included dancing to fiddle reels and toasting with good Islay-made Scotch with Big Ben dialed up on the shortwave radio at 7 p.m. — and sing in bed by nine. The drunks in Times Square could never compete with that.

To some extent or another, of course, every one of these seasonable pleasures can be found in North Carolina winter as well, including cold nights, clear stars, holiday lights, good Scotch and fiddle reels and — despite global warming — the occasional surprise snowfall that stops a madding world in its tracks.

But winter here has one significant advantage over life on a snowy hilltop in Maine.

In the North Country, once the deep cold and snows arrived, I could only tend the fire, browse seed catalogs and picture the ambitious things I planned to do in my garden once the frozen ground thawed and was fully in view again — generally around Easter time, if we were lucky.

Thanks to kinder and gentler Southern winters, however, I am able to get to work planning and digging even before Hogmanay arrives. With Nature at parade rest and stripped to bare essentials, I not only can see the architecture of my garden, but also take stock of last summer’s botanical successes and bonehead miscues.

This year, for example, with the new decade just hours away, I spent five blessedly solitary hours getting gloriously dirty in my winter garden on New Year’s Eve. To briefly review my loves’ labors, I dug up and transplanted seven rose bushes and nine ornamental grasses; moved a mophead hydrangea to a shadier spot and six Russian sages to a sunnier one. I also planted a splendid Leland cypress, raked up the last of the autumn leaves and spread a dozen wheelbarrows worth of new hardwood mulch.

By the time I was finished — and the work finished me — the mistress of the estate required me to strip bare at the side door before entering her gleaming New Year’s kitchen, though she’ll flatly tell you that she never sees me happier than after a few well-spent hours digging in my winter garden, headed for a good soak in the tub or a hot shower.

Dig in the soil, goes the old gardener’s ditty — delve in the soul.

Even William Shakespeare seemed to find this time of year irresistible for contemplation of life’s passing seasons.

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

His theme, of course, is the brevity of life.

As February dawns, such wintry thoughts come naturally to my mind as well, for I reach my mid-60s this year and am both amused and astonished how quickly the notion of “old age” has arrived.

Save for a pair of dodgy knees that make gardening’s up and down a bit more challenging, I honestly don’t feel a day over 40 — yet I know I’m in the midwinter of my allotted visitation time, with scarce time to waste for being present in my own days, whatever the season.

“Tho’ I am an old man,” as Founding Father Thomas Jefferson wrote to his friend Thomas Willson Peale in August of 1811, “I am but a young gardener.”

Two and one-half decades ago, when I really was in my 40s, I spent the entire month of February by my own founding father’s bedside, serving as his caretaker as he slipped the bonds of Earth.

What a fine and joyful life he’d led — my nickname for him was “Opti the Mystic” — and what a privilege it was to simply sit by his bed talking about this and that, weather and wives, golf and grandchildren, nothing left unsaid, saying thank-you as his life gently ebbed away.

The end came a few days into March, after a night of sleet gave way to a stunning spring morning full of sunshine and birdsong.

My oldest friend Patrick turned up, seemingly unbidden, suggesting we go play the old goat farm golf course where we learned to play as kids.

I have no memory of how we scored or even what we talked about, though it was the perfect thing to do. Opti would surely have approved.

That afternoon, I dug up some of my mom’s peonies to take home to my snowbound perennial beds in Maine.

I planted them as the spring thaw finally arrived — sometime around Easter.  OH

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

Simple Life

The Road to Happiness

It’s an upward climb filled with twists and turns, but joy is in the journey

By Jim Dodson

A dear friend phoned the other day just to say hello, a gifted young poet I hired many years ago as our organization’s first staff writer, who went on to become the senior editor of this magazine. I always knew the time would come when Ashley would fly away to new horizons, which she did after many years of our working together, moving to the mountains where she became a teacher, artist and musician. Lucky for us, her soulful perspective continues to grace the magazine’s pages.

As old friends do, we spent a full half hour catching up on each other’s lives.

I was pleased to learn about her current boyfriend and their travels to art festivals across the Southeast, where they sell handmade crafts created from sea glass, answering the muse and enjoying life on the road.

“You sound pretty happy,” I ventured at one point.

“I am. Maybe never happier. How about you?”

I replied that I was happy at that moment because I was talking to her while sitting in a well-worn Adirondack chair on the lawn where I begin and end most of my day in quiet reflection, watching the dawn arrive and the day depart, usually with Mulligan the dog and Boo the cat by my side. When she called, my companions and I happened to be watching the first fireflies of the season dance in the dusk.

During our years working together, Ashley and I often fell into lengthy conversations about life, love, matters of faith and favorite poets. Among other things, we share an Aquarian sensibility about the future and how we must spiritually evolve in order to get there in one piece as a race of scattered and fractured human beings.

I wasn’t surprised when she asked what things make me happy these days.

I gave her my short and simple list: rainy Sundays, walks with my wife and our dogs, working in my garden, driving back roads, early church, books and movies that stir the heart, phone calls from my grown children and suppers on the porch with friends.

“What about writing?” she asked.

“Cheap therapy.”

She laughed.

“Maybe you should write a book about happiness.”

This notion made me laugh.

Somewhere I’d read that there are more than 500 books on the subject of happiness in print, proving happiness is purely in the eye — or soul — of the beholder.

Besides, I confessed, my kind of happiness was increasingly fueled by things I’d given up or simply no longer needed for the journey, a list that included, but was not limited to, late-night fears of failure, desires for wealth or fame, judging other flawed human beings, even my once all-consuming love of sports was practically gone.

True to the spirit of our talks, I turned the question around on her. Ashley didn’t hesitate.

“I think happiness comes when you are following your heart and doing good things for others.”

Her prescription reminded me of something I’d just read in commentator David Brooks’ outstanding new book The Second Mountain — The Quest for a Moral Life.

“Often,” Brooks writes, “we say a good life is a happy life. We live, as it says in our founding document, in pursuit of happiness. In all forms of happiness we feel good, elated, uplifted. But the word ‘happiness’ can mean a lot of different things.”

Brooks makes an important distinction, for instance, between things that make us happy — a good marriage, a successful career, a sense of material achievement — and the rarer experience of joy.

“Happiness involves a victory for the self, an expansion of self. Happiness comes when we move toward our goals, when things go our way. You get a big promotion. You graduate from college. Your team wins the Super Bowl. You have a delicious meal. Happiness often has to do with some success, some new ability, or some heightened sensual pleasure.”

Joy, on the other hand, he posits, has to do with some transcendence of self, comes almost unbidden when “the skin barrier between you and some other person or entity fades away and you feel fused together. Joy is present when mother and baby are gazing adoringly into each other’s eyes, when a hiker is overwhelmed by the beauty in the woods and feels at one with nature, when a gaggle of friends are dancing deliriously in union. Joy often involves self-forgetting.

”We can help create happiness,” Brooks concludes, “but we are seized by joy. We are pleased by happiness, but we are transformed by joy.”

The day after catching up with Ashley, I was on a winding road deep in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, chasing pieces of Wagon Road history and human stories for my next book — something that always makes me happy — unable to get our conversation about happiness out of my head.

The art of happiness, my version of it anyway, seems to be about an inward journey cultivated by intentionally making room in life for small restorative acts and daily rituals that invite you to step out of your hectic, overscheduled life into what Irish mystics called a thin space, a place where duty and obligation are put on hold and deeper mindfulness is possible. Without my early morning communion with the stars and the grateful prayers I send up like sparks from a signal fire to the gods, my day is curiously never fully complete.

For what it’s worth, I also agree with Ashley the poet and Brooks the wise counselor that service of the smallest order to others in a world where there is so much isolation, loneliness and suffering may be the truest pathway to a happier, more meaningful life, a true “Second Mountain” existence.

Since most of my days are spent in quiet working isolation — Hemingway, not a happy camper, called writing the “loneliest art” — I find myself these days almost unconsciously seeking out opportunities to commit some kind of tiny random act of kindness to a fellow stranger in need. The other day, I chased down a harried mother’s runaway grocery cart in the parking lot of Harris-Teeter. She had an infant on her hip and was struggling to unlock her SUV. Her grateful smile and warm thanks were like a liberating breeze to a weary brain that had been arm-wrestling words and sentences onto the page most of that day.

During our pre-dawn walks around the neighborhood each day, my wife began stopping by the house of an elderly shut-in lady to walk her newspaper from the curb to a chair by her front door. We’ve never seen our neighbor’s face. But the dogs insist on stopping to deliver her paper the final 50 feet. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis on prayer, this minuscule act of neighborliness may do nothing whatsoever for God, but it sure makes us all feel a tiny bit happier.

The 17th-century Buddhist monk Gensei wrote, “With the happiness held in one inch-square heart, you can fill the whole space between heaven and Earth.”

Sometimes, we need to be reminded of this fact. A friend who works with the homeless explained to me that perhaps the hardest things homeless people deal with on a daily basis is a feeling that they are not worthy of noticing or speaking to — are, in effect, invisible travelers in our midst.

This prompted a change a shift in my awareness and behavior, from that of feeling uneasy and even slightly resentful whenever I reach into my pocket to offer whatever modest sum may be there, to making a point of looking in the eyes and sharing a few words of ordinary greeting or simple recognition, maybe even learning a name and sharing mine. We are, after all, all traveling the same road between Earth and heaven.

It’s a lesson I seem destined to repeatedly learn. Watching Notre Dame cathedral in Paris burn live on CNN back in the spring, I was suddenly transported to a rainy July day 18 years ago when my son, Jack, then 10, and I were coming out of the famous cathedral in a thunderstorm. Surrounded by a swarm of tourist umbrellas dashing for cover, as we hurried past a lone ragged man with blind eyes standing in the downpour, simply holding out an upturned palm, a character straight from Victor Hugo, a dignified beggar for God.

No one was stopping. But when I saw my son glance back, something stopped me. I gave my son 100 francs and asked him to go and give it to the man. Without hesitation, he threaded back through the on-rushing umbrellas and placed the folded money into the man’s outstretched hand.

What happened next still gives me goose bumps of unexpected joy — the kind of self-forgetting transcendence David Brooks speaks of.

The blind man placed his free hand gently on Jack’s head, as if bestowing a blessing. Watching, my eyes filled with tears, or maybe simply rain. Or both. “What did he say to you?” I asked as we hurried off to find a dry lunch in a cozy Left Bank bistro.

“I don’t know,” he said with a happy smile. “But it was in French and it sounded nice.”

Last summer, at the end of a walking pilgrimage across Tuscany with my wife and 30 other pilgrims, I skipped the private tour of the Vatican’s famous Sistine Chapel in favor of climbing a leafy Roman hill to a small Greek Orthodox Church where I sat on a simple wooden pew for God knows how long listening to morning prayers being sung in Greek by three exquisite voices.

Save for an elderly woman manning a small stand at the rear entrance of the church, I was the only worshipper in the building, sitting beneath the tiny dome of a stunning blue ceiling painted with stars, angels and saints.

Time completely vanished, taking my weary feet with it.

Unexpectedly, it was the happiest moment of my long journey that week.

On the way out, the old woman smiled and waved me over to her stand, handing me a small gilt-framed portrait of an Eastern Saint. I’m still not sure which one.

When I reached into my pocket to pay, she gave me a gentle smile and nod, waving me on with gentle words.

I have no idea what she said to me. I believe it was in Greek and it sounded nice.  OH

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

Simple Life

Stormy Weather

After withstanding decades of hurricanes, Wilmington’s Blockade Runner is ready to defy the odds once more

By Jim Dodson

On October 10 of last year, Hurricane Michael made landfall on the panhandle of Florida packing sustained winds of 160 mph, a storm verging on Category 5 that entered the record books as the third strongest hurricane on record. After fully devastating Mexico Beach, Michael churned toward the Carolinas as a tropical storm over the next two days, claiming 54 lives from Florida to Virginia, causing $25 billion in property damage.

On the afternoon Michael arrived in North Carolina, I watched on my iPhone weather app as the storm spread its mayhem over Charlotte and took some comfort that the winds and rain were expected to diminish to 30 mph tropical gusts by the time the storm reached the Triad.

The winds and rain arrived on schedule around 3 p.m. Since we live in a neighborhood filled with century-old hardwoods, I stepped outside to see how our elderly trees were handling the winds after one of the wettest autumns on record.

The winds suddenly increased and something blew off my roof with a clatter. It turned out to be a chimney cap, airlifted halfway across our front yard. As I walked over to pick it up, keeping an eye on the churning treetops, things got even crazier. I heard what sounded remarkably like an oncoming freight train and turned around just in time to see the peak of our neighbor’s roof vanish beneath what appeared to be a madly swirling cloud.  Having once been dangerously close to a large tornado, I wasn’t anxious to repeat the experience.

I headed straight inside to chase wife and dogs to the basement but suddenly remembered that I’d left the door to my home office over the garage standing ajar. Like one of those Russian babushkas who insisted on sweeping her stoop before evacuating the Chernobyl nuclear site, I foolishly bolted out the back door even as my phone began shrieking a weather alarm to take shelter immediately.

Taking two steps at once, I reached the top of the garage steps just as the large wooden electrical pole at the rear of our property, bearing a major transformer and various cable lines, snapped like a twig and flew past me like the witch from The Wizard of Oz, crashing into our backyard with a vivid explosion of sparks. For several seconds, I stood there stunned by what I’d seen . . . until I had the good sense to turn around and bolt for the basement.

What turned out to be a microburst or tornado, spawned by the fury of Michael’s tropical remnants, knocked over half a dozen ancient trees along our street and plunged the neighborhood into darkness for more than a week. We were among the fortunate ones, though. Our generator came on, and chainsaws came out and neighbors began appearing outside to help assess the damage and begin the cleanup process. Several folks on the street suffered major damage from trees that toppled directly onto their houses, but fortunately there we no serious injuries on our side of town.

My thoughtful neighbor Ken, who lives across the street and had a massive oak take out his center chimney and new second-floor bathroom renovation, shook his head and said it best. “Incredible, isn’t it? Nature’s power always seems to have the final word.”

A few weeks ago, I mentioned this frightening scenario and Ken’s comment to Bill Baggett as we sat together in a newly renovated room on the top floor of the historic Blockade Runner Hotel at Wrightsville Beach. Baggett, 72, simply smiled.

“Nature’s fury has the only word,” he added.

With the first of June looming — the official start of the Atlantic hurricane season that lasts until November 30 —  Baggett and his sister Mary, who jointly own and operate arguably the most beloved and well-known hotel on the North Carolina coast, are something akin to experts on the fickle fury of hurricanes and the unpredictable damage they leave in their aftermath.

Since their family purchased the Blockade Runner from its original owner, Lawrence Lewis of Richmond, Virginia, in 1971, the Baggetts — who assumed operational management of the property in 1984 — have ridden out half a dozen major Atlantic hurricanes and several near misses while hunkered down inside their cozy seaside hotel. Their legacy began with Hurricane Diana in 1984 and continued through last September’s Hurricane Florence, the sea monster that preceded Michael and turned Wilmington and much of Eastern North Carolina into a vast world of water, marooning the Port City for weeks.

In 1984, Diana blew out the hotel’s old-style windows and flooded the ground floor of the hotel with wind-driven rain. “Structurally the hotel was fine. It’s made of reinforced industrial concrete.” Baggett recalled that the worst thing that happened was that the covering for the air vents blew off, allowing rain to flood rooms and public spaces, while destroying plaster walls and ceilings “The hotel was soaked, a real mess, physically and legally,” he said.

When the Baggetts declined to accept their insurance company’s insufficient payout of just $12,000 to cover the extensive damages, they took their case to court, enlisting an expert witness in the person of a retired meteorologist from the Miami Hurricane Center named Robert Simpson, for whom the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane scale is named. His testimony resulted in a more satisfactory settlement  — and a new insurance company going forward.

Three hurricanes in quick succession followed within a decade. Hurricanes Fran (September 1996; 27 fatalities, $5 billion total damage), Bonnie (August 1998, no fatalities but 950,000 people evacuated from the Carolinas, total damage: $1 billion) and Floyd (September 1999, extensive flooding, 76 fatalities, $6.5 billion in total damage) tested the moxie of the Baggetts and their stout lodging. In 1989, even Hurricane Hugo took a passing swipe that blew out Blockade Runner’s windows but otherwise left the property unscathed. 

“Fran was pretty bad,” Baggett recalled. “It took a typical path up the Cape Fear and right over the top, sucking up water from both sides of the hotel — the ocean on one side, the sound on the other. For a while, it was like being in an aquarium,” he allowed with a laugh. “There were six of us in the hotel that night — Mary and myself, one of our cooks and several maintenance folks. Around 11 p.m., the window wall blew out and the water came rushing in, ruining carpets and floors. It was a long night but really the damage in that instance was fortunately fairly minimal. The hotel itself was fine.”

In Fran’s aftermath, in fact, emergency crews from the Red Cross, power companies and relief agencies billeted at the Blockade Runner, which was up and running in a matter of days. “The real issue,” Baggett explained, “was that Fran did serious damage to docks along the sound — prompting fears that the annual Flotilla might be cancelled. Fortunately, everyone worked hard to get the island back in shape and the event came off.”

For her part, Hurricane Bonnie looked fearsome but passed over relatively quickly, moving so swiftly she only took a portion of the Blockade Runner’s roof.

Floyd, however, brought rain on a Biblical scale that flooded numerous towns across the Eastern portions of the state, killing livestock and damaging crops. But once again, with its new roof, the Blockade Runner was updated and “hurricane ready,” as Bill Baggett put it. When Hurricane Matthew banged along the entire east coast in early October of 2016, the hotel barely noticed its passing.

And then, last September, came Florence — a Cat-4 monster that brought new levels of devastation to Wilmington and surrounding region.

“We were a little concerned that she was predicted to come ashore as a Cat-4 hurricane, but we planned to stay in the hotel and ride it out regardless,” said Hurricane Bill Baggett. “I mean, where would we evacuate to — some stick-built motel on the mainland? This hotel is made from industrial reinforced concrete. Besides, by the time the hurricane was on top of us, the only real concern we had — besides water — was the wind.”

By the time Florence rolled over Wrightsville Beach early on Friday morning, September 14, wind shear had weakened the storm to Category 1, wind gusting to 105 mph, which was still sufficient to take out the roof of the Blockade Runner’s balcony and soak some of the hotel’s premium seaside suites.

The major problem with Florence was a record high storm surge of 10 to 13 feet at high tide and the volume of rain. Over two days the storm stalled and lingered over the region, dumping more than 45 inches of rain in places — including on top of the hotel — downing thousands of power lines and trees, making Florence the wettest tropical cyclone to ever hit the Carolinas.

“We lost vents again and had water in some of our tunnels,” Baggett told me, “but for the most part we were in better shape than most people around us.” Because of their working partnership with BELFOR, the property damage specialists who work across the country, response teams were on the site within a day, bringing emergency fuel that allowed the hotel to operate its three large cooling generators and drying machines.

In the aftermath of Florence, much of Wilmington was underwater for the next two weeks, as were numerous towns and cities across Eastern North Carolina.

Fifty-seven deaths were attributed to the storm, and $24 billion in damages to property in North Carolina alone, more than the cost of Matthew and Floyd combined.

As many have done in the wake of Florence, in the process of repairing the damage to their hotel balcony suites, the Baggetts decided to undertake a comprehensive renovation of their landmark hotel, enlisting designer Terry Allred to give the property a fresh new tropical look from top to bottom. The extensive $11 million redo, which includes makeovers of every guest room, dining room and public spaces, is ready to welcome longtime customers and perhaps a new generation of beachcombers to the hotel just as a new summer vacation season dawns.

“Hurricanes are amazingly unpredictable things,” Bill Baggett mused as he showed me through the bright new suites on the balcony floor. “It’s a new roll of the dice every time one of those storms comes out of the Caribbean. But with a jewel like this, Mary and I feel like we are stewards of the hotel. It’s been a pleasure to try and improve it over the years, regardless of whatever comes at us from the sea.” He paused and smiled. “One thing for sure. When the next one comes, we’ll still be here in the hotel.”  OH

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

Simple Life

Dirty Hands, Happy Heart

And other gifts from the universe

By Jim Dodson

When all else fails, Mulligan the dog and I head for the garden.

Possibly because I hail from a family of Carolina farmers and rabbit tobacco preachers, digging in the dirt is not only second nature and something that draws me closer to my maker, but also serves as a cheap and effective therapy in a world that seems increasingly shaped by the insatiable gods of work and money.

For many Americans, work has become something of its own secular religion. According to Gallup, Americans average more hours of work per year than any of our fellow developed nations, yet 87 percent of U.S employees don’t feel fulfilled by how they earn their living. That’s a staggering problem that helps contribute to rising depression and addiction across all sectors of society.

In 1919, as Fast Company recently noted, 4 million Americans went on strike to demand fairer wages and a five-day work week — the beginning, historians point out, of the so-called American leisure class. As a result, weekends became enshrined in the culture. The bad news? We’re losing ground to our obsession to work longer and harder with diminishing returns, the average American working a full day longer than the 40-hour work week fought for by our early 20th century ancestors.

Maybe you’re one of the fortunate ones who loves what you do. I certainly am, having enjoyed a varied journalism career and book-writing life that has taken me to places I only dreamed about as a kid. Today, I own the privilege of serving as editor of four robust arts-and-culture magazines staffed by a talented crew of folks across this state. We’re a merry band of storytellers and artists who love what we do and never take that gift from the gods for granted. How we spend our time away from the job says a lot about us, a lesson some of us had to learn the hard way.

At age 30, in 1983, I was the senior writer for the largest news magazine in the South, the Sunday Magazine of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a magazine where Margaret Mitchell once worked and the South’s finest writers appeared. Over my seven years in Atlanta, covering everything from Klan rallies to presidential candidacies, I took only two or three full weeks of vacation. When I finally received the summons to Washington, D.C., for the interview I’d grown up hoping for, I felt utterly empty, burned-out, ready to find a new way of earning my daily crust.

The unexpected epiphany came following my big interview in Washington when I phoned my father from the outer office of Vice President George H. W. Bush. I’d been one of the first reporters to travel with Bush during the 1980 presidential campaign and gotten to know him fairly well — sharing a love of baseball, beer and New England.

My dad asked how the job interview went. I told him it seemed to go well,  save for one small problem: I wasn’t sure I wanted the job — or even to be a journalist any more.

“I have an idea,” he said calmly. “Why don’t you change your flight plans back to Atlanta and stop off in North Carolina?”

The next morning, he picked me up at Raleigh’s airport and drove us to Pinehurst.

My Haig Ultra golf clubs were in the back seat of his car. They hadn’t been touched by me in years. For at that point, almost incomprehensibly I hadn’t played a full round of golf — the game I loved best — more than once or twice while living in the hometown of Bobby Jones. Instead, I’d worked myself into an early grave — or so I feared.

After our round on famed No. 2 we sat together on the porch of the Donald Ross Grill and talked over beers about what I feared might be a premature midlife crisis, or worse.

He could have laughed at my youthful angst. But he didn’t. My old man was one great fellow, a former newsman and advertising executive with a poet’s heart. My nickname for him was Opti the Mystic.

After listening to me pour out my tale of existential career woe, he smiled and remarked, “I wouldn’t give up on journalism just yet, sport. You have a God-given talent for stringing together words and telling stories of the heart. I do, however, have a small suggestion for you. You may laugh.”

“Try me,” I said, desperate for any guidance from Opti.

“Perhaps you should try writing about things you love instead of things you don’t.”

I looked at him and laughed.

“What kinds of things?” I asked.

He shrugged and sipped his beer. He was 66 years old, the age I am today.

“Only you can answer that. Use your imagination. What do you love? You’ll find the best answer there. It may sound ridiculously corny to you, but try telling the universe what you love and you may be surprised at the results. The path is never straight. But trust your gut. One thing leads to another, including people.”

Humoring him, I admitted that I loved golf and being in nature but didn’t know a soul in either of those worlds and couldn’t imagine how I would find my way into them. Once a single-handicap golfer, as I’d proven that day at No. 2, I couldn’t even break a hundred on the golf course anymore. Having grown up hiking and camping in the mountains and forests of my home state, it had been years since I’d been deep in the woods. I’d even loved mowing neihborhood lawns and working in my mom’s garden, but hadn’t done that in almost a decade.

Still, something got into my head. Or maybe it was my gut. 

A short time later, I withdrew my name from consideration for jobs in Washington, quit my gig in Atlanta and took a 2-month writing sabbatical at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts at Sweet Briar College.

It was springtime in Virginia. I wrote for three or four hours every morning, working on a novel about a Georgia farm family for a legendary editor at Harper & Row.

In the afternoons, I took long walks through the pasturelands, fields and woods of beautiful Amherst County, Patrick Henry country.

One afternoon I helped an elderly couple down the road weed their garden and took home a stunning bunch of peonies that reminded me of my mom’s garden back home in Greensboro.

The novel was a dud. My heart was never in it. But the legendary editor, pointing out that books would come when the timing was right, insisted that I call Judson Hale at Yankee Magazine in New Hampshire. I followed up on his advice and soon found myself working as the first Southerner and senior writer in Yankee Magazine’s history. I got myself a pup from a Vermont Humane Society, lived in a cottage by the Green River and taught myself to fly-fish. My heartbeat slowed. I even rediscovered my lost passion for golf on an old course where Rudyard Kipling once chased the game.

A few years after that, a story I wrote about a forgotten hero of women’s golf even landed me a sweet job at Golf Magazine and a decade’s service as the golf editor for American Express, a job that took me around the world and inspired me to take my dad back to England and Scotland where he learned to play golf as a soldier during the war. He was dying of cancer. It was our final journey. The little book I wrote about, Final Rounds, became a bestseller that’s still in print.

Opti had been right about all of it — the power of doing what you love, listening to heart and gut while expressing your desires and gratitude to a generous universe. Whatever else may be true, I am proof that one good thing — and more important, one good person — can invariably lead to another.

Over the next two decades, I built a house on a forested hill on the coast of Maine, fathered two wonderful children and basically invested their college funds into a massive English garden in the woods. A dozen books followed, including Arnold Palmer’s memoirs.

That job brought me home again thanks to a chance to teach writing at Hollins University in Virginia and simultaneously help my partners create distinctive arts-and-culture magazines that people in this state seem almost as passionate about as we are.

Today, I consciously belong to an intentionally slower world, taking time to do the work I love but never failing to spend time in the garden with my dog, Mulligan. A golf round with my childhood pal never hurts, either.

Perhaps I’ve just come full circle. In any case, friends tell me I’m more productive than ever. If so, that’s probably because dirty hands make for a happy heart, as an aging gardener once said to me.

That aging gardener was my mom, who had a magical way with peonies and roses.

May was her favorite month, the month where spring gardens reach their glory.

Mulligan agrees with me that our roses and peonies have never looked better. OH

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

Simple Life

Life and Limb

My cabins in the sky

By Jim Dodson

One of my secret pleasures is a mind-candy house program on Animal Planet called Treehouse Masters, in which an infectiously enthusiastic house designer and self-described “tree whisperer” named Pete Nelson and his merry band of workers create mind-boggling treehouse retreats for clients. His stated mission is to help customers get back to nature and in touch with their inner kid.

It’s a pure fantasy show that combines three of my favorite things — houses, trees and memories of climbing them during my childhood. It was probably inevitable for a kid who grew up on a diet of adventure books, and camping and hiking forests all over the western portions of this state and neighboring Virginia, that I would eventually get around to building a treehouse, especially after I saw Disney’s 1960 version of Swiss Family Robinson. The shipwrecked but enterprising Robinson clan lashed together a furnished treehouse palace that featured running water from a turning wheel, thatch-roofed bedrooms, a full-service kitchen and salvaged ship’s wheel that raised the ladder each evening to protect against wild animals or unwelcome visitors. They lived with a pair of large friendly dogs and a parrot, and even had a piano that somehow survived the shipwreck.

In my opinion, those lucky Robinsons had the perfect life.

Of course, I was only 7, a kid who’d had a happy but fairly solitary life building forts in the woods and reading adventure books, the son of a Southern newspaperman who hauled his young family across the Deep South to his various posts before coming permanently home to Greensboro in 1959 — shortly before the shipwrecked Robinsons showed up in Cinemascope on the big screen.

My first treehouse was a distinctly modest platform affair — more lookout stand that actual shelter. Perched in a patch of hardwoods in a public park across the street from the apartment we rented while our first house was being built in a rural subdivision, it was probably illegal. But so were the Robinsons. You reached the platform by inching up a thick-knotted rope. The platform was probably only 10 feet off the ground but it felt amazingly close to heaven in the trees, the ideal place for me to sit and read and keep an eye out for wild animals or unwanted visitors.

At the rear of our new property, my father knocked together an impressive one-room treehouse he furnished with a second-hand dining room table, four mismatched chairs and an old rickety bookcase. I spent a year furnishing that rustic pied-à-terre in the sky with my favorite childhood books and “interesting” stuff I found all over creation until one regrettable summer afternoon I found three girls from the neighborhood having an unauthorized tea party with their dolls in my cherished aerie. Without thinking of the consequences, I fetched a garden hose to cool off the party and quickly felt the wrath of several outraged mothers, hastening the demise of my beloved place on high.

That’s why, when I stumbled across Treehouse Masters, my inner child was set loose from detention.

The New Age treehouses Pete Nelson and his crew create are elaborate affairs that make the industrious Robinsons look like rank beginners. They typically include all the creature comforts of the modern Earth-bound home and then some: fancy woodstoves and electric lights; flush toilets and outdoor showers; kitted-out gourmet kitchens and decks with breathtaking views from high in the trees, rivaling anything you would find in a swanky vacation home.

My favorite segment of the show, however, is when the host calls on fellow treehouse nuts who have created their own unique handcrafted cabins in the sky, retreats that display incredible craftsmanship, artistry and ecological harmony.

One I particularly enjoyed involved a bearded chap who built himself a gorgeous treehouse that was more like a storybook chapel over a stony brook in the Connecticut woods. It was essentially a meditation and reading room with large windows, a simple desk, woodstove, small functioning kitchen and a room where he could sit for hours watching nature through the seasons, forgetting the rest of the world.

His was a slightly more elaborate version of the treehouse I fully intended to someday create above a vernal pool in the forest behind the post-and-beam house I helped build with my own hands on a forested hill in Maine.

The spot — on a beautiful hillside deep among hemlock and birch and proximate to geologic kettles left by the receding ice age — overlooked a seasonal stream and vernal pool dominated by a large lichen-covered stone that I named my “Thinking Rock.” This is where the transcendental kid in me often escaped with my dogs to read, think, smoke a pipe and get right with God and nature.

The bittersweet irony is that the forested retreat I long had in mind never got off the ground, so to speak, because, in the blink of an eye, my own kids were grown and heading off to college, and I was feeling an unexpected gravitational pull of my old Carolina home.

Impossible as it once seemed, I said goodbye to the rugged timbered house and English garden-in-the-woods that I spent nearly two decades building and cultivating, a place where I fully expected to end my days and eventually become part of the landscape when who I am moved on, leaving only a trail of ashes behind.

But life, to paraphrase Emerson, is full of compensations. A few years back, my wife and I purchased a lovely old bungalow that once upon a time was my favorite house in the heavily forested neighborhood where I grew up — two doors away, in fact, from the house where my family lived for almost 40 years.

I joke that I’ve all but completed the Sacred Redneck Circle of Life.

A large part of the place’s allure, I must admit, was the two-car and workshop garage in back that featured a funky little second-floor apartment you reach by climbing a set of rickety wooden steps that take you to rooftop height amidst century-old white oak trees.

Because the house sits on perhaps the highest point in the entire neighborhood, the first time I climbed those steps and turned around to check out the view, my heart leapt like a kid up a tree.

From just under the white oak canopy that reminded me of the arched ceiling of a Medieval cathedral — providing wonderful cooling shade all summer — I could see the world with a bird’s-eye-view: vaulting trees and rooftops across the neighborhood, not to mention birds and squirrels galore, passing clouds, a huge patch of sky by day, a glorious quilt of stars by night.

Suddenly I had the treehouse I’d always dreamed of owning, this one equipped with electric power and heat, small kitchenette and bathroom with fully functioning toilet and shower. The cheap dark-wood paneling gives it a perfect rustic air and a couple of overhead fans keeps the place cool in summer. If it isn’t quite worthy of Treehouse Masters, it fits me like lichens on a thinking rock.

Just outside the door, I hung a large set of Canterbury chimes from a stout limb of the massive white oak at the foot of the steps. When the wind blows a certain way, I swear I hear the first five notes of “Amazing Grace.”

These days, if you visit my “treehouse,” you will find a pair of comfortable reading chairs (one of which my dog Mulligan occupies when she’s officially on duty), several bookcases filled with favorite books, a French baker’s table where I write, a wicker daybed where I sometimes seek horizontal inspiration on late afternoons, various vintage posters and prints I’ve collected from four decades of journalism and travel, a cabinet case filled with some of my own books and a few awards, a second cabinet that holds “Uncle Jimmy’s Genuine Real Stuff Museum,” framed photos of my children and a pair of large rare portraits of Walter Hagen and young Fidel Castro, themed lamps (a blue coat soldier, a Bengali elephant, a monkey climbing a palm tree), several busts (Ben Franklin, Alexander the Great, a Templar knight), three sets of old golf clubs, a full golf library, several checkered golf flags, and a large replica of the first American flag with thirteen stars in a circle of blue.

Nobody in their right mind would want all this stuff in their real house. But like the Swiss Family Robinson, this oddball collection from a long journey home has finally found the perfect place in my cabin in the sky. OH

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.