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.

Simple Life

Confessions of a Happy Old Guy

And the joys of life in the slow lane

By Jim Dodson

A close colleague needed to speak in confidence the other day. She looked so serious.

“I don’t know how to tell you this,” she said, “but I have to tell you something important.”

I feared she might be quitting her job to join a kazoo band or something even worse, appear on a reality show. So I braced for impact.

“I was behind you in traffic yesterday. You drive like an old man!”

She burst out laughing.

I laughed, too — and agreed with her. She wasn’t the first to point out my maddening old-fashioned driving habits, or as I prefer to simply call them, careful. For the record I haven’t had a moving violation in 40 years, something one can accomplish only by moving slowly through the busy intersections of life. Knock wood.

A year ago, however, I turned 65. In the eyes of my government, my insurance agent and my beloved colleague, this apparently means I’ve achieved official Old Man status. So essentially, my driving habits are finally catching up to my age.

Over this year, in fact, since word has spread like kudzu on a redneck barn, I’ve received several “special dinner” invitations from companies eager to tell me all about their exciting products and services designed to “make your senior years happier, safer and more fulfilling.”

One was from a lawyer pointing out the dangers of failing to update my final will and testament, presumably so craven heirs don’t rob me blind. Another was from a financial firm eager to feed me at the Olive Garden in order to convince me that I should try a reverse mortgage that would allow me to sell my house piece-by-piece in order to finance a speedboat or buy a timeshare in Cabo San Lucas. Not long after that, two dinner invites from local funeral homes offered a fancy last supper with small talk of coffins over coffee.

The truth is, I’m perfectly fine officially being an Old Guy. I’ve never felt happier or more fulfilled than at this very moment, even without a speedboat. My health is good, the important parts all seem to work, I love what I do every day and look forward to many years of doing it as I chug along in the slow lane of life.

I never plan to retire or even slow down because I’ve always moved at more or less the same modest speed. Slow and steady wins the race, as the moral goes, assuming you even care about winning the rat race. Never hurry, never worry was the personal motto of the late great Walter Hagen, a dapper fellow who walked slow and lived large while winning 45 golf tournaments, a total that included 11 major championships and four British Opens. Successful living, said the late great Leroy Robert Paige, a.k.a. “Satchel,” — hall-of-fame Major League pitcher who played his last game for the Peninsula Grays of the Carolina League at age 60 in 1966 — is really a question of mind over matter. “If you don’t mind,” he counseled, “it don’t matter.”

Besides, the evidence is pretty compelling that I’ve been an old man since the day I was born.

A small chronological sampling:

It’s February, 1953, and I am born. My mother thinks I’m the cutest baby ever. My father jokes that I look like Dwight D. Eisenhower. My mother doesn’t think this is funny, doesn’t speak to my father for a week. Years later, whenever she’s annoyed with me, she’ll sigh and say, “I guess you were just born an old man, Sugar Pie.”

It’s 12 years later, 1965. My favorite Beatle is George Harrison, the “quiet one” whose guitar gently weeps. I teach myself guitar and spend endless solitary hours learning to play like George. Paul McCartney tells the Associated Press that “George is the old man of the group.” In tribute, I try growing a beard like George. It goes nowhere. Then again, I’m only in fifth grade.

Now we’re in the early avocado-colored ’70s. The music, the cars, the groovy way college girls look — it’s all quite wonderful. I grow my hair long and spend an entire summer at college smoking pot, which only puts me to sleep. So I quit smoking pot, buy a Dr. Grabow pipe and a corduroy sports coat with leather elbow patches. My hippie girlfriend jokes that she’s dating William F. Buckley and is shocked when I admit digging the music of Burt Bacharach. I am the only guy in my dorm who watches the Watergate Hearings from beginning to end — and enjoys it.

Now it’s the 1980s and I’m an investigative reporter for a magazine in Atlanta, engaged to a beautiful TV anchorwoman who works late on weekends. Way past my normal bedtime, she likes to unwind from her job by dragging me to glamorous late-night parties where everyone is buzzing from funny white powder inhaled off the bathroom counter. More than once I sneak off to a stranger’s bedroom to grab a quick nap or watch reruns of Hee Haw with a Falstaff beer. The engagement is predictably short.

In the late 1990s, I become a father of two, the happiest thing that’s ever happened to me. I build my own house and a faux English garden deep in a beech forest near the coast of Maine. I love reading books to our little ones and normally fall asleep before they do. We like the same G-rated movies and yellow food group. They grow way too soon. Apparently I never did. But at least I am fully trained for grandparenthood.

Two summers ago, while driving my vintage Buick Roadmaster in crazy rush hour traffic outside Philadelphia, a snarky young dude in a BMW opened his window and yelled, “Hey, Chevy, wanna drag race me to Wallyworld?” He howled at his own wit. I smiled politely back. When the light changed, however, I opened up my Roadmaster’s massive 350-hp, eight-cylinder Corvette engine and taught that little twerp never to mess with an old man driving his old man’s Buick.

For the record, old guys like shirts with roomy pockets. This is a known fact and I’m no different. I want a shirt with pockets large enough for car keys, screwdrivers, grocery store lists, directions to the party, a sandwich for later, a tape measure, various auto parts, mysterious things you find in the yard and so forth. Pocket protectors, however, are ridiculous. What do you take me for, a complete old geek?

Also, long ago, I decided that certain essentials in life should primarily be basic white. This includes, but is not limited to, golf balls, toilet paper, underwear, snow, vanilla ice cream, dress shirts, and the look on any idiot BMW owner’s face who thinks he can beat my Buick to Wallyworld. (By the way, genius, Chevy’s wagon was a Ford).

If you’re going to jabber during the movie, please do us both a big favor and sit elsewhere, preferably in another county. I have a hard enough time hearing what’s going on in the movie without having to listen to your witless commentary. And if you speak to me in a crowded party, don’t be surprised if I just smile at you like a drooling village idiot because I can’t understand a blessed word anyone says to me in noisy, crowded places.

Ditto if I forget your name. Please don’t take it personally. Next time just wear your name tag — preferably written in LARGE EASILY DISCERNIBLE LETTERS. For the record, I forget lots of names of things these days, including those of movie stars, old flames, neighbors, song titles, state capitals, sports stars, candidates I voted for, candidates I wish I voted for and so on. On the other hand, I can name every dog I ever owned, just one of many reasons a dog really is an old man’s best friend. You never forget them.

Finally, I love going to the grocery store without a shopping list. Talk about free-range fun for Old Guys! Roaming the aisles like a man on a mission who can’t remember what he’s looking for, I just grab whatever catches my fancy on the oft chance it might include whatever item my wife specifically asked me to bring home. True, this often means a quick return to the store to get the correct item but, hey, that just means you can repeat the process and double your fun, taking home other great stuff that captures your fancy.

Frankly, I could rattle on forever about the simple pleasures of finally being a certified Old Guy — going to bed early and rising before the chickens, reading poetry, biographies and histories in my tree house office, long walks with the dogs and road trips with my bride, small suppers with friends, stargazing, classical music, lonely back roads, rainy Sundays, weekend gardening, watching birds, early church, late afternoon naps, Kate Hepburn movies, historic battlegrounds, old houses, Scottish golf courses, expensive bourbon, bumping into old friends I actually remember, and other stuff I invariably forget how much I enjoy.

Whew, just the thought of all that activity exhausts me.

I’d better go grab a quick nap before I run to the store to fetch supper items I probably won’t remember to get.

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

Simple Life

Letter From an Enchanted Hill

And life-changing leaps of faith

By Jim Dodson

For Christmas, my clever wife gave me a pair of expensive boxer shorts that claimed to be “nothing short of life-changing.”

The gift was the result of a running joke between us. During the consumer melee that is the holiday shopping season, you see, she was amused by my reaction to half a dozen TV spots and radio commercials that claimed their products were “life-changing.”

My short list of disbelief included a magical face cream that can allegedly make you look 30 years younger in less than two minutes, an expensive brain supplement that can supposedly restore failing memory to youthful vigor, and a luxury mattress so “smart” it can cure snoring and calculate your annual earned income credit.

Funny how times have changed. And here I thought it took things like falling in love, surviving a crisis, awakening to nature, taking the cure, making a friend, finding faith or discovering a mentor to change a life. Anytime I hear an ambulance or happy news of a baby being born, I think “someone’s life is changing.”

Looking back, my life has been changed — I prefer to say shaped — by a host of people, events and moments both large and small.

One example that stands out early was my old man’s passion for history and the lessons of nature, which probably explains why both my older brother and I became history nuts as well as Eagle scouts. History and nature, Dad believed, were life’s finest teachers, the reason he brought along a small satchel of classic books on our early camping and fishing trips in order to share bits of timeless wisdom from his favorite poets and philosophers by a blazing fire. This was his version of the Athens School, a campfire Chautauqua. It’s also why I took to calling him “Opti the Mystic.”

“All history is personal,” Opti liked to say, “because someone’s life is being changed. We grow by learning to pay attention because everything in nature is connected — including people and events.”

He illustrated both points powerfully on a cold February day in 1960 when Opti unexpectedly turned up at our new elementary school to spring my brother and me from class. We’d only been in town since the week before Christmas, barely enough time to acquire public library cards and reconnoiter the neighborhood on bikes. But we sensed that one of his entertaining field trips was in the offing, possibly a romp through the nearby battlefield where General Greene’s ragtag army gave Lord Cornwallis and his redcoat army all they could handle.

Instead, a short time later, we wound up standing near the “colored” entrance of the Center Theatre across the street from the F.W. Woolworth building in downtown Greensboro, where four brave young men from A&T State University were attempting to peacefully integrate the all-white lunch counter, an event regarded today as a defining moment in the birth of the nonviolent American Civil Rights movement.

“Boys,” he told us, “this is living history. This isn’t just going to change the South. It’s going to change America.”

The date was February 2, my seventh birthday as it happens, and Opti was right — though that change has yet to be fully realized more than half a century later.

A few days before my birthday this month, my daughter Maggie turned 30. She’s a senior copywriter for a major Chicago advertising firm and a gem of a writer with a bright future, a chip off her granddaddy’s block.

The summer after Mugs (as I call her) turned 7 in the aftermath of a divorce neither of us had seen coming, she and I and our elderly golden retriever took a two-month road trip around America, a fly-fishing and camping odyssey to the great trout rivers of the West. We rode horses, frightened a few stunning cutthroat trout, met a host of colorful oddballs and characters, lost the dog briefly in Yellowstone, blew up the truck in Oklahoma and generally had the time of our lives. I eventually put these adventures in a little book called Faithful Travelers that is still in print two decades later and closest of my books to my heart.

One night, sitting by a campfire on a remote mesa near Chaco Canyon, in a state that calls itself the Land of Enchantment, my precocious companion wondered why her old man had never bothered to write her a letter offering thoughts and advice the way she knew Opti had done for me many times in life. Just days before, she’d written me a letter thanking me for taking her on the trip.

When she and Amos the dog turned in, I tossed another log on our signal fire, sending up a spiral of embers to the gods of Enchantment, reached for a pen and paper bag and jotted the following letter from the heart to my wise and faithful fellow traveler. Every year around our shared birthdays, I take out that letter and read it just to remind myself how all history is personal and everything really is connected in nature.

Dear Maggie,

I’m sorry I’ve never written you a letter before. Guess I goofed, parents do that from time to time. I know you’re sad about the divorce. Your mom and I are sad too. But I have faith that with God’s help and a little patience and understanding on our parts, we’ll all come through this just fine. Being with you like this has helped me laugh again and figure out some important things. That’s what families do, you know — help each other laugh and figure out problems that sometimes seem to have no answer.

Perhaps I should give you some free advice. That’s what fathers are supposed to do in letters to their children. Always remember that free advice is usually worth about as much as the paper it’s written on and this is written on a used paper bag. Even so, I thought I would tell you a few things I’ve learned since I was about your age. Some food for thought, as your grandfather would say.

Anyway, Mugs, here goes:

Always be kind to your brother and never hit. The good news is, he’ll always be younger and look up to you. The bad news is, he’ll probably be bigger.

Travel a lot. Some wise person said travel broadens the mind. Someone wiser said TV broadens the butt.

Listen to your head but follow your heart. Trust your own judgment. Vote early. Change your oil regularly. Always say thank you. Look both ways before crossing. When in doubt, wash your hands.

Remember you are what you eat, say, think, do. Put good things in your mind and your stomach and you won’t have to worry about what comes out.

Learn to love weeding, waiting in line, ignoring jerks like Randy Farmer.

Always take the scenic route. You’Il get there soon enough. You’ll get old soon enough, too. Enjoy being a kid. Learn patience, which comes in handy when you’re weeding, waiting in line, or trying to ignore a jerk like Randy Farmer.

Play hard but fair. When you fall, get up and brush yourself off. When you fail, and you will, don’t blame anyone else. When you succeed, and you will, don’t take all the credit.

On both counts, you’ll be wiser.

By the way, do other things that make you happy as well. Only you will know what they are. Take pleasure in small things. Keep writing letters — the world needs more letters. Smile a lot. Your smile makes angels dance.

Memorize the lyrics to as many Beatles songs as possible in case life’s one big Beatle challenge. Be flexible. Your favorite Beatles song will probably always change.

Never stop believing in Santa or the tooth fairy. They really do exist. God does too. A poet I like says God is always waiting for us in the darkness and you’ll find God when it’s time. Or God will find you.

Pray. I can’t tell you why praying works any more than I can tell you why breathing works. Praying won’t make God feel any better, but you will. Trust me. Better yet, trust God. Breathe and pray.

Always leave your campsite better than you found it. Measure twice, cut once. If all else fails, put Duct tape on it.

Don’t lie. Your memory isn’t good enough. Don’t cheat. Because you’ll remember.

Save the world if you want to. At least turn it upside down a bit if you can’t. While you’re at it, save the penny, too.

When you get to college, call your mother every Sunday night.

Realize it’s okay to cry but better to laugh. Especially at yourself. If and when you get married, realize it’s okay if I cry.

Read everything you can get your hands on and listen to what people tell you. Count on having to figure it out for yourself, though.

Never bungee-jump. If you do, don’t tell your father.

Make a major fool of yourself at least once in life, preferably several times. Being a fool is good for what ails you. We live in a serious time. Don’t take yourself’ too seriously. Always wear your seat belt even if I don’t.

Remember that what you choose to forget may be at least as important as what you choose to remember. Someone very wise once said this to me — but I can’t remember who it was or exactly what it means.

Admit your mistakes. Forgive everybody else’s.

Notice the stars but don’t try to be one. Always paint the underside first. Be kind to old people and creatures great and small.

Learn to fight but don’t fight unless the other guy throws the first punch.

Don’t tell your mother about this last piece of advice.

Learn when it’s time to open your mind and close your mouth. (I’m still working on this one.) Lose your heart. But keep your wits.

Be at least as grateful for your life as I am.

Despite what you hear, no mistake is permanent, and nothing goes unforgiven. God grades on a curve.

One more thing: Take care of your teeth and don’t worry about how you look. You 1ook just fine. That’s two things, I guess.

Finally, there’s a story I like about an Indian boy at his time of initiation. “As you climb to the mountaintop,” the old chief tells his son, “you’ll come to a great chasm — a deep split in the Earth. It will frighten you. Your heart will pause.

“Jump,” says the chief. “It’s not as far as you think.”

This is excellent advice for girls, too. Life is wonderful, but it will frighten you deeply at times.

Jump, my love.

You’ll make it.

Love, Dad

For the record, my fancy new boxers didn’t change my life. They are quite comfortable, in fact.  OH

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

 

Simple Life

Letting Go

Until then, hang on to dear, sweet life

 

By Jim Dodson

On a glorious end-of-spring afternoon, my friend Keith Bowman took me to see his farm, 15 miles southeast of town, a forested  tract of land to which he has devoted the last 35 years so as to turn it into a peaceable kingdom for people who love nature.

We met when I wrote about Keith and three college buddies who’ve attended every Masters Tournament together since 1960, a friendship still going strong 60 years later. During our conversations about Augusta National, Keith let on that he once took a sprig of the famous Augusta azaleas hoping to root and grow the same plant here in North Carolina on his farm where he and a cousin cultivated more than 600 azaleas and rhododendron.

When he learned I was an addicted gardener, he invited me to ride out someday and see his “garden that’s gone a little wild.”

Before that, however, was the matter of an old tree.

“There it is,” he said, pulling to the side on a quiet lane that turned off the Company Mill Road. “What do you think of that?”

The tree was an ancient poplar, rising from a small forested vale below the road bed, massive and very mystical-looking, knotted and gnarly as a giant’s index finger rising to a deep blue sky, at least 13 feet or so in circumference. The monster looked like something out of a children’s story, the home of a Druid king or hermit wizard.

“One day when I was about 13, my father brought me here to see this tree and told me how his grandfather hid in it to avoid being conscripted by the Confederate army.” On his next birthday, Keith Bowman will be 85. “The tree was probably close to 100 years old back then.”

“What amazes me is how it has survived everything from rough weather to changes here in the countryside,” said Keith. “Its top was sheared off long ago but it’s still putting out limbs and leaves. It just won’t let go, comes back year after year.”

Keith’s farm, which is named Ironwood and sits near the village of Climax, was pretty amazing in its own right. Though there are fields he leases to neighbors for raising crops, most of the 120-acre property is covered by a gorgeous forest of hardwoods. There is a handsome unpainted farmhouse and a large barn well off the road, both of which suffered significant damage from the great ice storm of 2014, when large trees toppled onto their roofs.  Other trees fell onto the spectacular octagonal gazebo built by Keith and his late father, Ross, beside the acre-and-a-half pond Keith had built at the heart of his earthly paradise.

The gazebo and pond were designed for swimming and fishing. The structure features hand-cut wooden shingles from the mountains and is bunkered by the aforementioned red and white azaleas.

“Because of the ice storms, the place doesn’t look as nice as it used to,” Keith needlessly apologized. “But this has certainly been a source of a lot of joy to me, friends and neighbors,” he allowed as we walked through the woods to see the remains of a large nursery where rhododendron and large azaleas were returning to a wild state. 

In the farm’s glory days, Keith invited school groups and neighbors from nearby Climax to use the property for “a getaway in nature,” and once threw a party for neighbors from the crossroads with barbecue and a bluegrass band.

Ironwood visitors fished, had picnics, hiked and swam. There is even a fancy paneled outhouse with a cathedral roof, skylight, electric lights, running water and a chandelier.  “It’s kind of the Cadillac of outhouses,” Keith joked.

Across the pond, he installed an orchard with 81 fruit trees and a large grape arbor of Concord, scuppernong and muscadine varieties. “For years I had so much fruit I couldn’t give it away,” he told me as we strolled around the pond.

It was late in the day and the surrounding woods were stirring with life, full of birdsong. The light was almost ethereal, the serenity complete in the seclusion of Keith Bowman’s Peaceable Kingdom.   

“You wouldn’t believe all the wildlife around us,” he was moved to say as we walked, pausing to marvel as a trio of honking Canada geese zoomed over the pond and our heads, heading north with spring. “That’s why it means so much to me to keep this place the way it is — to pass it along to someone who will properly care for it and allow others to use it for relaxation and spiritual renewal.”

As a kid, Keith dreamed of becoming a test pilot, and nearly achieved that dream by training as a fighter pilot during the Cold War. After that, he worked as an engineer on the Nike missile for Western Electric in Burlington. A long career with the Small Business Administration followed — he was in charge of both Carolinas for a time — introducing him to good friends he keeps up with to this day. For a decade, he performed with a traveling gospel group. Though he never married  (“a couple of near-misses,” he says with a wistful laugh, “that just didn’t work out”), he has enjoyed a full life of faith and friendship, belonging to several different churches.

It’s the uncertain fate of Ironwood that chews at him. Since the death of a neighbor who did most of the heavy maintenance work on the property, Keith can’t possibly keep up with all that needs to be done.

“I don’t have any relations left to give it to,” he admitted, as we started back to his car. “That’s a problem I think a lot of older Americans face these days. As we get older out in the country, younger folks aren’t replacing us. They want to live in the city. You can’t blame them. But connections will be lost.”

For this reason, Keith has spent decades photographing nature and creating documents to show what was done, filling several meticulously organized scrapbooks.

When I suggested that he might consider giving the farm to a local church for a retreat or youth camp, given his strong connections to local congregations, he smiled and shook his head. “I know people who have done just that. Most churches would sell the property for other purposes.”

On the drive back to town, he showed me the historic Tabernacle Methodist Church, where generations of his family are buried. The interior of the church was a handmade gem. Keith has photographed all of its stained-glass windows.   

“I think about a line I heard from the film Life of Pi,” he mused as we drove back into town. “All of life seems to be about letting go of things you love. Truthfully, I’m the worst person in the world at letting things go,” he said with a laugh. “But you’ve got to eventually let it go. I know that.”

Keith and his personal nature preserve were still on my mind a few days later when I phoned my friend Joe who is an experienced forester who helps people just like Keith figure out what to do with their land when the time arrives to let it go. Joe, as I knew he would, agreed to give his perspective and advice.

I even looked up the quote from Life of Pi, which goes, “I suppose in the end, the whole of life becomes an act of letting go, but what always hurts the most is not taking a moment to say goodbye.”

Keith, at least, is taking his own sweet time to say goodbye. 

Out in my half-finished Japanese garden, meanwhile, which has shown great improvement over the course of a cool and rainy spring, I couldn’t help but think about the things of this world I treasure but will someday have to let go.

As it happened, I was planting a pair of Red Slipper azaleas and a Christmas fern mixed with the ashes of the three well-loved golden retrievers that brought our family incalculable joy over the years. My garden will be the final resting places for dear old Amos, Bailey and Riley the Rooster, as we called him — and, with a little luck, perhaps the head gardener as well.

A rusted iron sign that stood forever in the peonies of my late mother’s garden read: Dig in the soil, delve in the soul. No place better than one’s garden to do that. Thomas Jefferson always made lists that he kept in his back pocket, especially when in his garden.

Keith and his farm were still on my mind, and I couldn’t help but make my own mental list of the people and things of this world I shall someday have to let go.

Naturally, my adorable wife and four great kids top the list — though with luck they’ll have to let go of me first.

As I dug, my simple list grew: my dog Mulligan, old friends, golf with buddies, quiet time in my garden, a house that finally feels like home, early church, arboretums, old hymns, my wife’s caramel cake, histories and spy novels, birds at the feeder, the glory of spring, the spice of autumn, the silence of snowy nights, film scores, dawn walks, rainy Sundays, supper on the porch, the blue of dusk, garden catalogs, my new rubber boots, my old guitar, blue limericks, roses in June, freshly baked bread, driving back roads, all of Scotland, half of England, the poems of Billy Collins and Mary Oliver, and a few other things I shall surely miss and think of later.

Leave it to Mary Oliver to offer the best advice to Keith and me and others like us.

“To live in this world,” she said, “you must be able to do three things. To love what is mortal and hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and then, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.”  OH

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

Simple Life

By Jim Dodson

As you read this, I’m sitting by a trout stream in an undisclosed location somewhere deep in the North Carolina mountains. If I was wrapped in hickory smoked bacon, Lassie probably couldn’t find me.

But fear not, friends, I’ve left behind a few well-chosen words from my dear old friend Ogden Nash, who always has something timely to say.

To Donald on his way to Cleveland:

Love is a word that is constantly heard,

Hate is a word that’s not.

Love, I’m told, is more precious than gold,

Love, I have read, is hot.

But hate is the verb that to me is superb,

And love is a drug on the mart.

Any kiddie in school can love like a fool,

But hating, my boy, is an art.

   *

The danger of a hole in the porch screen:

God in his wisdom made the fly

And then forgot to tell us why.

   *

An ode to poison ivy:

One bliss for which there is no match,

Is, when you itch,

To up and scratch.

   *

Song of the Interstate:

I think I shall never see

A billboard lovely as a tree.

Indeed, unless the billboards fall

I’ll never see a tree at all.

   *

Wish you weren’t here:

Some hate broccoli, some hate bacon,

Some hate having their picture taken.

How can your family claim to love you

And then demand a picture of you?

   *

  *

To the family at the start of the week:

How pleasant to sit on the beach

On the beach, on the sand, in the sun

With ocean galore within reach,

And nothing at all to be done!

No letters to answer,

No bills to be burned,

No work to be shirked,

No cash to be earned.

It is pleasant to sit on the beach,

With nothing at all to be done.

     *

To the same family at the end of the week:

One would be in less danger

From the wiles of the stranger

If one’s own kin and kith

Were more fun to be with.

     *

And finally, a few original Ogden-inspired lines jotted down by a
pristine stream where the trout are laughing at my hand-made flies:

A gal at the beach paints her toes,

To catch the attention of beaus;

But a guy at the beach will just scratch his feet,

And wonder if anything good’s left to eat.

     *

Gardener’s lament:

To a gardener  in the heat of late summer,

Oh, my, what a seasonal bummer,

With hydrangeas so wilted, you feel almost jilted,

It’s a wonder you bother to rose.

     *

Politics as use-you-all:

I suppose I’m the Average American,

Tho I can’t say  just how the hellican,

Vote for these two, either one of which who

Make me wish I was just a mere skeleton.

     *

A brief escape:

So here I sit by a stream,

Dreaming the American dream,

I might not come home, just pick up and roam,

At least till I find some ice cream.  OH

Contact editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

Treasures From a Vanishing World

By Jim Dodson

Not long ago, while taking a back road home from the coast, I rounded a curve and saw a handsome old farmhouse sitting in an overgrown field, clearly abandoned, with wild roses claiming one end of its sagging porch.

Ignoring a rapidly approaching thunderstorm, I pulled off the road to sit and look at the house, wondering about the people who once called such a beautiful old place home. I saw birds — swifts or starlings, I think — flying in and out of its flower-wreathed porch and thought of a recent conversation with a friend who roams the rural landscape of this state salvaging architectural pieces and forgotten artifacts from abandoned houses and farms, everything from doorknobs to bathtubs, barn doors to family Bibles, broken gates to foundation stones.

He calls his finds “treasures from a vanishing world,”provocatively insisting that these ordinary objects and pieces of abandoned habitats not only bear the spiritual imprint of their former human associations, but also deep ancestral memories.

“You can see them everywhere,” he says, “old houses sitting off in the woods, barns abandoned to make way for housing developments or wider highways for a society that can’t get there fast enough.

“Such sights should haunt us,” he adds with the fervor of an evangelical preacher. “We’re throwing away our nation’s natural history, destroying our heritage piece by piece, forgetting who we are and where we come from. It’s a tragedy, something everyone who is truly patriotic ought to care about.”

He showed me a beautiful bell salvaged from an abandoned schoolhouse near the town I regularly pass through. The craftsmanship was superb.

“The schoolhouse was made from the finest red brick, built by real craftsmen in a time when that meant something special, pride of hand, probably from the early 1930s, the heart of the Great Depression. It had charming wooden windows and handmade doors and an actual cupola. You could almost hear the voices coming from that empty schoolhouse — the place where kids learned to read and do their multiplication tables, memorized the fifty states and Pledge of Allegiance and fell in love with a girl or boy seated near them. Today saplings are growing through the floor of that beautiful old building, the wind whistling through its busted-out windows.”

Like my friend Rick, I spend a lot of time driving the back roads of this state, looking at the land and noticing abandoned fields and places where someone once raised a family, birthed a child, waited for the passing of a loved one, or simply sat on a summer porch snapping beans in the long summer dusk the way my grandmother Taylor loved to do.

My reverence for small-town values and winding back roads — the slow way home, as I call it — is unapologetically romantic and lately seems almost as endangered as Rick’s old schoolhouse bell, somehow connected to the soul of our collective patriotism.

What we worship, a wise man once told me sitting on his sagging porch in Vermont, we become. (But more on him in a slow lane moment.)

Every road I travel nowadays seems to be in a state of constant construction, half-built and ever widening to obliterate nature and anything that happens to be in in its path, reminding me of my own vanished heritage.

Four generations back the patriarch of my family operated a vital gristmill on the banks of the Haw River and worked as a contract surveyor for the state, plotting out the boundaries of several central counties just after the Civil War. This man somehow found time to also serve as an itinerate Methodist preacher traveling from one rural parish to another, Piedmont to western hills, preaching the Gospel.

One winter afternoon a few years ago, my wife and I found George Washington Tate’s headstone in the burying ground of a small Alamance County church. It was simple, dignified, garnished only by moss and time. He and his wife lay side by side.

It would have pleased me to show my Yankee wife the remains of G.W. Tate’s once thriving gristmill on the banks of the Haw, but it was no longer there or simply hidden from view.

As a kid, I saw it several times and even fished from the stones of its original millrace, feeling as connected to that place as if it were consecrated earth. Today, you cannot find this spot because the Interstate was doubled in size two decades ago, swallowing my great-great-grandfather’s gristmill whole.

As I sat on the shoulder of the roadside feeling the wind rise from the approaching storm and pondering the fate of that elegant old farmhouse that’s now a home to birds and wild roses, fancifully wishing I could find a way to magically save it, perhaps by starting an Old Farmhouse Rescue League, another voice popped into my head — the one warning that what we worship, we become.

It belonged to Reverend William Sloan Coffin, the former CIA man, Yale chaplain, firebrand preacher and longtime civil rights and peace activist.

On a spring day in 1991 I found my way to his rural Vermont farmhouse door for a conversation about patriotism.

He poured me a cup of coffee and we sat down at a table in his kitchen. Lying between was the latest copy of Time magazine, its cover proclaiming “A Time to Savor.” Just days before, the First Gulf War had officially ended and flags were flying from porches along the main street of his tidy Vermont town. Coming on the heels of the end of the so-called Cold War, America was in the grip of patriotic fever, eager to start spending what some called the country’s hard-earned “Peace Dividend” on much-needed domestic issues.

Time once called Rev. Bill Coffin “America’s Last Peacenik.” I asked him if he savored this time in America.

Coffin smiled and pointed out that the Japanese had actually won the Cold War and insisted that the much-publicized “peace dividend” was mostly being spent to develop new and better ways of obliterating any future enemies at the expense of America’s working poor and homeless. He added that pollution was destroying our rivers and other natural resources and mentioned mindless urban sprawl that was killing small towns and obliterating the night stars.

I joked that he didn’t sound much like a true patriot — more like a grumpy uncle.

The famous preacher grinned and boomed back, “On the contrary! I’m an incurable patriot! True patriots are those who carry on not a grudge fight but a lover’s quarrel with their country — a reflection, if you will, of Gods’ eternal lover’s quarrel with the human race. The two things you must not be, as a true patriot, are a loveless critic and an uncritical lover.”

He added that our history was his source of hope and patriotism. “Plato said, ‘Whatever is honored in a country will be cultivated there.’ My version of that is, whatever we worship we become. Unfortunately, our society worships professional athletes and better highways.

“But if you look at when this country got started as a nation, with something like just three million people, we managed to turn out Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin and Adams — a list of great thinkers as long as your arm. Now, with a population eighty times as large, you have to ask yourself why we can’t turn out one statesman of that caliber.”

Before I could pose another question, he sipped his coffee and added, “American democracy is such a precious thing. For the moment I fear it’s in grave condition. Half the population feels it’s useless to vote — they feel their voices don’t matter, and they’re probably right. Every night 100,000 children sleep on the streets of this nation, the wealthiest in the history of the world. And 37 million Americans go to bed with no more health insurance than a fervent prayer that they will awaken in decent health in the morning.”

He shook his head as we walked back out to his porch. “The gaps between the classes are widening dangerously — the very rich and the very poor are effectively seceding from America, I fear.”

“So, I gather you’re not really optimistic about the next twenty-five years,” I prodded.

Coffin laughed. “On the contrary! I’m always an optimist. Hope is a distinctly Christian idea and America is a place founded by farming optimists! Optimism is in our DNA — and so is diversity. Patriotism should not be based on agreement. It’s based on mutual concern. When hearts are one, all minds don’t need to be. In a democracy, God help us if all minds are one.

“Tell you what,” he declared, “come back and see me in twenty-five years and we’ll both see if anything has changed for the better. What year will that be?”

“Two thousand sixteen,” I said, hurriedly working out the math in my head. At that moment the year 2016 seemed light years away.

He gave me a final robust grin. “Right. This house is 200 years old and I’ll only be 92. Hopefully we’ll both still be here. I’ll wager the roads in Vermont will be whole lot better, too.”

We laughed and said goodbye.

Sadly, I never got back to Bill Coffin’s farmhouse. Like a treasure from a vanishing world, America’s last peacenik passed away in 2006, the year my wife and I officially moved home to North Carolina.

But I never forgot the things he told me that spring afternoon.

As I sat in a kind of reflective daze by the side of the road, a bolt of lightning hit a tree in the distance and the rain came down with a Biblical vengeance. The birds flew away and I drove on, passing a roadside notice that said the road was scheduled for widening sometime later this summer.  

Contact editor Jim Dodson at jim@ohenrymag.com.