Category: Feature

Poem April 2024

Penumbra

My father taught me a civil trick.

If you get caught during a rainstorm

at a downtown restaurant, just ask

the bartender if someone left a black umbrella. They will present you with

a cardboard box chock full of them.

It is not a lie: Someone really has left behind each one. You have left many. Part of the loophole is to make sure to give that umbrella to someone who needs it, or at the very least, leave it

in a shady vestibule, on the coat rack next to that sad windbreaker. Otherwise it doesn’t count. Now they could call this all a life hack, but I consider that lacking. The process of inheritance is about so much more than getting what you need.

— Maura Way

Maura Way’s second collection of poetry, Mummery,
was published in November 2023 by Press 53.

Divine Downtown Digs

Life on Another Level

By Deborah Salomon

Photographs by John Gessner

Back in the 1920s, a fella named Herb Beck decided, given the growing popularity of motor cars, to convert his buggy repair shop in downtown Southern Pines to an auto service center. The one-story brick corner location already had drive-through bays. Later, a second story was added that, according to a diagram provided by the Moore County Historical Association, became the Boy Scouts clubhouse.

Those grease monkeys and energetic boys should see it now. Industrial remnants — gone. Instead, Holly Floyd and husband Tyler Horney have created a “loft” living space rivaling anything Robert De Niro, Beyoncé and the late John Kennedy Jr. called home when factories became million-dollar condos in the SoHo, Tribeca and Meatpacking District of Manhattan.

“I wanted to create a gallery for my art,” Holly explains. Since her art includes enormous pottery urns, sparkling crystal vases and paintings ranging from Victorian portraits to Picasso-esque Cubism, the loft needed display cases, pedestals, spot lighting and angled walls which create the 4,000-square-foot maze.

Parisian lofts inhabited by starving artists it’s not. Rather, the door at the top of a long, steep staircase opens onto a Technicolor world strewn with eye candy. This loft is edgy-chic, with a surprise around each corner. Take the rooster motif. “I like chickens,” Holly admits. They are everywhere, from an enormous, stylized portrait to a thumbnail glass strutter in a wall-mounted shadowbox filled with other fascinating miniatures brought back from Europe and elsewhere.

This is a space choreographed by a woman secure in her tastes, with designer Awena Hurst to help realize them.

Holly, who is Texas born, Lumberton raised, and Tyler, a Moore County native, purchased the downtown building in 2009 with the intention of converting the ground floor to retail space. “Why not live upstairs?” within walking distance of the Sunrise Theater and fine dining, she thought. In the past, Holly had lived at Loblolly, a quasi-Tudor Weymouth estate designed by Aymar Embury II, and also at The Roost, a Cape Cod cottage near Campbell House, home to the Arts Council galleries. Roost? Rooster?

Holly wanted their new home to vibrate with color and originality, starting at the front door, which opens into a hallway lined with showcases, ending at the living room, where the principal color is a hunter/leafy green accented by a green velveteen chair, pale green walls, and additional shades woven into settee upholstery. On the floor, a custom-hooked wool rug patterned with symbols: Holly’s monogram, butterflies representing her children, sunbursts, alpha and omega and, of course, roosters. Windows are covered with shutters and Roman shades decorated with birds.

The fireplace is faux, but the deck overlooking downtown has been outfitted for grilling. Watches can be set by Amtrak arrivals, surely less startling than police sirens punctuating SoHo nights.

In an era of kitchen extravaganzas, hers is modestly sized; one counter doubles as a minibar, with sink and refrigerator. Cupboards are gray-stained wormy maple with painted brick backsplash and a soffit display case filled with . . . roosters.

“This is a one-person kitchen,” Holly says: ample, simple and functional. It opens into the living room on one side and on the other, a small dining room with an expandable birdseye maple table. The sideboard is no-nonsense Welsh, while a dainty asymmetric crystal chandelier is shaped like palm fronds. Angled walls throughout the midsection pit turquoise against pale yellow.

Now look down. Most of the heavily knotted pine flooring is original to the building. Once considered inferior grade, a century later these imperfections add character. Wooden doors of assorted sizes from an antique door dealer in Virginia provide texture, although wall openings had to be tailored to their individual, sometimes irregular sizes.

The star of the living area has to be the pottery Holly has collected from Seagrove and elsewhere. Smaller pieces, like a Noah’s Ark crammed with animals or the familiar “ugly jugs,” are displayed in built-in cabinets. Enormous urns — one a 4-foot scarlet Christmas gift from Tyler — stand on pedestals separated by window seats.

A gentler green continues into the master suite, with a small sofa occupying a bay. Teddy bears on a mini chair were made from fur coats, one belonging to Holly’s mother, whose presence is felt throughout.

Something’s missing: multiple wall-mounted TV screens. A small screen on a swinging arm is tucked between the kitchen and living room. “Never the bedroom!” Holly exclaims. But she allowed one in the master bathroom “so I could see what’s happening in the world while I get ready.” Their only big screen dominates the man cave, originally a second apartment, with daring terra-cotta-hued walls and heavy antique case pieces. There’s a small office for Tyler and two guest bedrooms for children and grandchildren, where Holly’s palette veers uncharacteristically into blue. Birds perch on branches over one bed, a trompe l’oeil effect accomplished by decals Holly found online.

“I’m all about whimsy,” she admits, further illustrated by a powder room where the basin sits on a stained artist’s worktable. Globs of “paint” — decals again — appear to have been splashed against the wall.

After a year-long renovation, Holly and Tyler moved in last November. The only thing Holly misses is having a dog.

Repurposing commercial and industrial buildings, barns and carriage houses played out across North Carolina as cotton mills and tobacco warehouses became upscale residences. Occasionally, space “over the store” was available, saving its occupants a tedious commute. Downtown Southern Pines has several iterations, including a new-construction all-loft building and, on Broad Street, a legendary bordello over a bowling alley, reconfigured for a family with young children as a loft with roof garden near the park.

However, living day-to-day with fine art and museum-quality crafts requires a particular mindset. Holly Floyd has it, for her glorious, decorative “stuff.”

“I find it comforting,” she says. “Like memories brought back by Christmas tree ornaments.” PS

2024 Feature story of a house

Poem March 2024

Julian

In christening gown and bonnet,

he is white and stoic as the moon,

unflinching as the sun burns

through yellow puffs of pine

pollen gathered at his crown

while I pour onto his forehead

from a tiny blue Chinese rice cup

holy water blessed

by John Paul II himself

and say, “I baptize you, Julian Joseph,

in the name of the Father, and of the Son,

and of the Holy Spirit.”

Nor does he stir when the monarchs

and swallowtails,

in ecclesiastical vestments,

lift from the purple brushes

of the butterfly bush

and light upon him.

— Joseph Bathanti

Joseph Bathanti was the North Carolina poet laureate from 2012-2014. He will be inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in October.

2024 Feature Poem

First in Flight

A lifetime in the company of birds

Story and Photographs
by Todd Pusser

Feature Photo: Swallow-tailed Kite, Mississippi

The western slope of Mauna Kea, on the Big Island of Hawaii, does not immediately scream tropical paradise. At 7,000 feet above sea level, it is dry and arid. Scattered shrubs and small trees dot the landscape as far as the eye can see. The scenery contrasts sharply with the lush, flower-filled rainforests and pristine sandy beaches that most people picture when they hear the word Hawaii. But these dry forests hold a treasure, something found nowhere else on the planet.

A distinct bell-like whistle echoes across the blue sky, nearby. As I am slowly walking toward an odd-looking tree with branches draped in clusters of seed pods reminiscent of green beans, a flash of yellow catches my eye. I stop. A few seconds later, a small, finch-like bird sporting yellow, grey and white feathers emerges from a tight cluster of branches and snips off one of the strange, beany-looking seed pods. With surgical precision, the bird pries open the pod with its thick beak and scarfs down the protein-rich seeds nestled inside. Framing its bright yellow head in my camera’s viewfinder, I press the shutter.

The bird, commonly known as the palila, or Loxioides bailleui by its scientific lexicon, is among the most critically endangered birds on the planet. Current estimates suggest fewer than 1,000 adults survive on the western slopes of Mauna Kea. The palila is a specialist, feeding almost exclusively on the alkaloid-rich seeds (which are toxic to most other animals) of the māmane tree, another Hawaiian endemic. Māmanes are long-lived, capable of reaching 500 years in age, but are slow to mature, taking 25 years or more for seedlings to grow into a tree capable of producing a food resource for the birds. So intertwined are the lives of the palila and the māmane tree that some have likened their bond to that of a mother and child.

Islands are arks of incredible biodiversity. Hawaii, as the most isolated island chain on the planet, is especially so. Before humans reached its shores, Hawaii was once home to an incredibly rich assemblage of plants, flowers, trees, insects and birds. Being stuck out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the islands were never settled by any frog, snake, ant or mosquito. It was paradise, the quintessential tropical Eden — or in the words of Mark Twain, “the loveliest fleet of islands that lie anchored in any ocean.”

Things changed with the arrival of Polynesians and their canoes on Hawaii’s shores around 1,000 A.D. The arrival of Europeans in 1778 only accelerated the process. Cats, dogs, pigs, invasive plants, mosquitoes and viruses were introduced — some intentionally, some unintentionally — to the islands. Natural resources were consumed, and the land was terraformed to meet the demands of an ever-growing human population. The extreme mega-diversity that had long characterized the Hawaiian Islands soon whittled down to a tiny fraction of its former self. The state now bears the depressing moniker of “the extinction capital of the world.” As recently as the end of 2023, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service declared eight species of Hawaiian birds officially extinct.

Eagle Springs is just about as far away from Hawaii as one can get. Yet, it is in this tiny enclave, surrounded by longleaf pines and turkey oaks, where my fascination with birds began. I don’t know how to explain it, but I have always been obsessed by wild creatures. The fascination is most assuredly innate, for my parents never showed more than a passing interest in the wildlife outside our back door.

I still recall with vivid clarity, as a kid, watching hummingbirds hover in front of feeders filled with sugar water at a family friend’s house and listening to the incessant calls of whip-poor-wills echoing through the pines on humid summer evenings while swimming in our backyard pool.

Left: Anhinga in Florida’s Everglades

Middle: Palila from the Big Island of Hawaii

Right: Snow Geese Flock in late afternoon light, North Carolina

Later — nerd alert — I won my high school’s science fair by collecting and examining the regurgitated pellets (yuck, I know), full of undigested bone and fur, from a pair of red-tailed hawks that nested in a tall longleaf pine near our house. The project was born from no school assignment. I was simply curious as to what the birds of prey were eating. See, I told you it was innate.

It was around this time that I picked up a camera in an effort to try to document the amazing wildlife I was seeing. Through trial and error — mostly error — I learned the ins and outs of apertures, shutter speeds and film type to best record animals in the field. For all the Gen Z’ers that might be reading, this was back in the stone age of analog, well before the instant feedback of an LCD screen. Did I mention I had to walk uphill, both ways, to collect those hawk pellets?

Birds were, and still are, a subject I find infinitely fascinating, both as a naturalist and as a photographer. Their variety in color, form and behavior is endless. With over 10,000 species (and new ones being discovered every year), birds are among the most diverse vertebrates on the planet. From the Arctic to the Antarctic, and throughout every continent and ocean in between, birds are taking flight right now.

Many people obsessively keep a detailed list of all of the birds they observe in their yard, county, state and country. Millions upon millions of dollars are spent each year on binoculars, spotting scopes and travel to places, both near and far, just to add new species to life lists. Millions more are spent on birdseed and backyard nest boxes. Indeed, birds are among the most popular of animals. Even my grandmother enjoyed watching bluebirds outside her kitchen window each spring.

Though I keep no life lists of my own, I do maintain field notebooks filled with interesting wildlife observations encountered during my travels. Over the years I have had the good fortune of seeing some extraordinary birds in some extraordinary places.

Left: Flamingo Takeoff, Yucatan, Mexico

Left, middle: Ruby-throated Hummingbird Chicks, Pinehurst, N.C.

Right, middle: Ruby-throated Hummingbird, Hoffman, N.C.

Right: Cedar Waxwing and holly berry, Virginia

On a remote island in Antarctica, I once sat on a hillside covered in tussock grass, watching a pair of courting wandering albatross, who possess the longest wingspan of any bird, dancing and weaving against a backdrop of rugged snow-covered mountains. I have laughed out loud watching the comical antics of tufted puffins on a foggy day in the middle of Alaska’s Bering Sea. During a golden-hued sunset in the Bahamas, I marveled as a flock of ground-nesting Abaco parrots flew high over stands of tall Caribbean pines. Along the rocky shores of New Zealand, I observed the smallest species of penguin, the little blue, leap from the ocean like a miniature dolphin. Another time in the Arizona desert, on a smoldering hot August day, I saw a roadrunner catch a lizard beneath a canopy of thorny cacti.

There is no denying the thrill of seeing amazing birds in exotic, far-off places, but my most memorable and cherished avian encounters have actually occurred right here in North Carolina, much closer to home.

Years back, a kind couple from Pinehurst allowed me to set up a tripod and camera in their guest bedroom, where I spent the day photographing the nest of a ruby-throated hummingbird that was perched precariously on a tiny branch just outside their second-floor window. It was the first, and only, time I have been able to observe, in intimate detail, the life history of a species that so captured my childhood imagination.

Once, while my partner, Jessica, and I walked our late, beloved dog, Dexter, down a trail at Merchants Millpond State Park on a bright spring afternoon, a barred owl flew silently over our heads and landed in a tree nearby. I have marveled at a kettle of Mississippi kites hunting dragonflies, in high, swooping arches, over the Pee Dee River near Rockingham. Most poignant of all, on a bitterly cold winter’s day in the heart of Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, I watched awestruck, with my father by my side, as tens of thousands of snow geese descended into a corn field, just yards away from where we stood. That feeling of joy and happiness, of being able to share such an incredible spectacle with my old man, is something I will carry for the rest of my life.

Left: Eastern Screech Owl Peekaboo, Pinehurst, N.C.

Left, middle: Red-winged Blackbirds, N.C.

Right, middle: Eastern Bluebird and cricket, N.C.

Right: Laysan Albatross mated pair, Hawaii

Sadly, many of the bird species I have photographed over the years are endangered. Consider the palila, mentioned earlier. There are a lot of things stacked against that species. Small population size, coupled with a very specialized diet and restricted home range, is a recipe for extinction in a human-dominated world. All it takes is one infectious disease or a large fire, like the recent one that destroyed the historic town of Lahaina on nearby Maui, to erase it from the planet.

Closer to home, take the iconic whip-poor-will, vocal denizen of our summer nights. Recent studies have shown its population to be in steep decline across much of its range. Scientists still do not have solid answers for why their numbers are dropping, though there are clues, such as the corresponding decline of a favored prey item — large moths — and an obvious loss of habitat. Likely it is a combination of many things, including some yet to be discovered.

But it’s not all gloom and doom. Populations of the iconic bald eagle have bounced back due to successful conservation action. Ditto for peregrine falcons. I never saw many wild turkeys growing up in Eagle Springs, but on a recent trip back home, I glimpsed one sneaking along the edge of the yard before disappearing into the pines, providing evidence that the restocking program of this important game bird by our state’s wildlife commission is paying off.

The fact remains, many, many populations of bird species continue to decline. For some, all that will be left in the future will be a few tattered museum specimens and photographs.

On my bookshelf, next to where I am typing, is a book titled Lost Animals: Extinction and the Photographic Record, by Errol Fuller. Nestled within its pages are image after image, most in black and white, of animals, including many birds, that are no longer with us on this planet. The one that strikes the biggest chord for me is of Martha, the last of the passenger pigeons, photographed around 1912 in her cage at the Cincinnati Zoo in Ohio.

At one time, the passenger pigeon was the most numerous bird species in North America. In 1813, while traveling near Louisville, Kentucky, John James Audubon recorded a flock of pigeons migrating south that he conservatively estimated to contain one billion individual birds. The immense flock passed overhead for three full days, completely blocking out the sky. It boggles the mind to think that in just 100 years from that remarkable observation, the passenger pigeon would be extinct, hunted to oblivion. If, as the saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” seeing that image of Martha, the very last of her kind, perched stoically in the corner of her cage, really drives home that sentiment and offers a sobering reminder that even the most common species can be wiped out in the relative blink of an eye.

Being outside, away from traffic and the computer screen, photographing birds is therapeutic. The images captured are little tokens of place and time that frequently remind me of family and friends who were standing next to me as I pressed the shutter. Today, I especially love showing pictures to my 4-year-old daughter. Nothing beats seeing her blue eyes sparkle with wonder at seeing a colorful bird for the first time.

Hopefully, the images will instill a sense of awe, respect, and appreciation, in her (and others) for all forms of life that call this remarkable planet home. PS

Naturalist and photographer Todd Pusser grew up in Eagle Springs. He works to document the extraordinary diversity of life both near and far. His images can be found at www.ToddPusser.com.

Left: Roseate Spoonbill, Florida

Left, middle: Carolina Chickadee and caterpillar, Virginia

Right, middle: Yellow-crowned Night Heron hunting, Florida

Right: Blackbird tornado, N.C.

2024 Feature

Sun-Raised Sheep

Farming at the bleating edge

By Jenna Biter

Photographs by John Gessner

Peafowl nap high in the rafters of a classic red barn. One bird, awakened by a buzz buzz buzzing, pecks a housefly out of the air like Mr. Miyagi with chopsticks. And the buzzing stops.

Now, the peacock is presumably less irritated, as well as less hungry, and the fly can’t buzz down to the wobbly-legged lambs, whose developing immune systems are better off without whatever infections the insect might be spreading.

The lambs’ young stomachs aren’t even strong enough to digest what will become their steady diet of grass. When they do grow strong enough, at a couple of months old, they’ll leave the red barn to join the flock munching its way across a quilt of pastures tucked down a gravel drive beside a flea market in Biscoe.

A few westward turns out of Moore County and into Montgomery, the 500-head Katahdin flock grazes beneath the shade of solar panels, where the Old World meets the Ewe, uh, New.

“They use this word ‘agrivoltaics,’” says Joel Olsen, a Charlotte native who owns the Montgomery Sheep Farm, with his wife, Tonje, “which doesn’t mean anything to most people.” That’s something the couple seems on a mission to change.

To people who do know, agrivoltaics is a techy sort of twofer: It’s when a solar farm moonlights as a traditional crop farm or, as with the Olsens, a livestock farm.

“The power here at the farm goes into the local grid, and this . . . ” Joel trails off in search of the right explanation. “Right now,” he says, “we’re powering all of Biscoe and Star — every single home, school, business, factory.”

He looks out at the gleaming fields of silvery tech, more than 100,000 solar panels in all.

“It’s a ton of power, 28 megawatts,” he says, delight warming his Carolina accent. While the solar panels stare up at the sun, quietly collecting golden rays to redistribute as green energy, the flock, unbeknownst to them, is on the clock.

With each happy chomp, the sheep mow the grass beneath and between the panel rows, so the greenery doesn’t shoot up and disrupt the solar harvest.

“When you get shade, it reduces your output, it reduces your income,” Joel says. Despite the clear cause and effect, during the early days of O2 — the name of his N.C. solar development company — he learned that solar farm groundskeeping was often overlooked, low budget, and the first thing to go wrong.

In 2012, the Olsens set out to change the status quo.

With a nostalgia for the lamb dishes of her childhood in Norway — where country sheep, geolocated by bells tinkling on their collars, foraged freely in the summertime — Tonje created Sun Raised Farms, a matchmaking agribusiness that pairs solar farms with ovine maintainers.

“We try to find the best sheep farmers in the area, so they can get free pasture for their lambs on the solar farm, and then we pay them to maintain it,” Tonje says. What can’t be grazed due to natural or technological terrain, Sun Raised Farms hires a human crew to care for.

“It’s kind of a win-win for the farmers,” Tonje says with a smile.

In the next instant, Joel flashes back in time to the beginning of their hike up agrivoltaics’ steep learning curve, a path that originally rejected them like Sisyphus.

“We had a local 21-year-old who bought 13 sheep to put on our first solar farm, and after two weeks, the neighbor’s hunting dogs got out, went right through a hole in the fence, and killed them all,” he says with a disapproving cluck. “That was step one.”

Joel guesstimates that now — with nearly two dozen solar parks under the management of Sun Raised Farms and more than a decade into the learning curve — the Olsens are about 17 steps into their agrivoltaics project. Since 2016, the endeavor has included the Montgomery Sheep Farm, what the Olsens view as a sort of research hub to establish best practices for their farming partners.

Cursed with what Joel characterizes as chalky, inhospitable soil, the century-old property began as a failed farm called the Tobacco Stick Ranch, and then transitioned into a hunting preserve. Its five minutes of fame came in 2006 when The Daily Show’s Nate Corddry used the name and the grounds in a sketch poking fun at then-Vice President Dick Cheney for blasting fellow quail hunter Harry Whittington with birdshot — an incident that actually happened in Texas.

Now the tobacco barn, workshop, farmhouse — all of the compound’s eight or so buildings — have been rehabilitated into a working farm wired into its own private solar microgrid, independent from the panels that feed the community grid.

Via a network of electrical boxes, a solar carport and four Tesla Powerwall 2 batteries hidden away in a mudroom, the farm powers itself most of the time.

“It’s one of the first off-grid farms in the country,” Joel says. “It demonstrates that farms can not only raise their own food, but also generate electricity for their own operations.”

In the distance, the techno-farm’s big power plant is a metallic patchwork that blankets 120 of the property’s 200 sprawling acres. Amidst the panels, inverters and breakers, a labyrinth of thigh-high electric fencing partitions the sheep into 28 micro-pastures, so they don’t overgraze any one section.

Though divided into smaller flocks, the sheep bleat back and forth in a never-ending game of barnyard Marco Polo. White-blond dogs stand watch nearby, wagging their tails. They don’t seem to speak sheep.

By day, the dogs live up to their gentle names like Elsa, Casper and Luna, politely asking for pats with their heads lowered in obeisance. By night, these Great Pyrenees protectors channel their pedigree to fend off coyotes and foxes lurking just beyond the chicken-wire fence.

Across a dirt road, back inside the red barn, the peafowl, some doves and a turkey dutifully continue their watch over the 100 young lambs. At the far end of the barn, a barrel-chested rooster seems preoccupied. He perches self-importantly on the back of a ewe, as if he’s directing a barnyard rehearsal for one of the farm tours that roll through every spring and fall.

Like the circle of life, the tours always end in dinner: a sun-powered, four-course, farm-to-table meal featuring the Montgomery Sheep Farm’s lamb by way of Sun Raised Foods, the Olsens’ avenue for bringing their farmers’ stock to market.

“A lot of the criticism solar farm developers received was because they took farmland away from the community,” Tonje says. “With this model, they kind of give back.” PS

Jenna Biter is a writer and military wife in the Sandhills. She can be reached at jennabiter@protonmail.com. You can purchase tickets for a Montgomery Sheep Farm tour and dinner at sunraisedfoods.com.

2024 Feature

The French Connection

The heroic life and death of James McConnell

By Bill Case

He was shot out of the sky over the French countryside more than a century ago, but for residents of Carthage, North Carolina, the presence of James Rogers McConnell endures. Memorials to the fallen World War I aviator can be found in nearly every corner of the Moore County seat. A highway marker on McReynolds Street explains that McConnell “flew for France in (the) Lafayette Escadrille,” a legendary unit of pilots serving under the French flag though hailing from America.

Fronting the Moore County courthouse is a Washington Monument-style obelisk. Its inscription says McConnell “fought for humanity, liberty and democracy, lighted the way for his countrymen, and showed all men how to dare nobly and die gloriously.”

Diners at the Pik N Pig restaurant adjacent to Carthage’s airport will find a massive bronze and granite plaque dedicated to McConnell near the barbecue’s front door. Gifted by a grateful government of France, its text is engraved in French. Alongside is another plaque translating the tribute into English. Planes landing in Carthage do so at the Gilliam-McConnell Airfield. The facility’s founder and owner, Roland Gilliam, jokes that his name is first only because “G comes before M in the alphabet.”

In September 2023, Gilliam paid further homage to Carthage’s favorite son by opening (together with curator Debby Campbell) the James Rogers McConnell Air Museum near the airfield. Among the treasured artifacts on display is a slightly smaller than full-scale replica of a similar model of the Nieuport biplane McConnell flew in dogfights against the Germans.

Motorists on N.C. 24 can’t miss the magnificent 20-foot-high mural painted by renowned North Carolina artist Scott Nurkin. It depicts a uniformed McConnell, his biplane and the phrase Flying for France, referring to the title of the aviator’s book, published by Doubleday, Page & Co. in 1917 — a stirring account of McConnell’s time with the Lafayette Escadrille. Visitors at the Carthage Museum on Rockingham Street view an exhibit honoring the flier that includes several of his personal items. A commemorative edition of Flying for France can be purchased there.

McConnell lived in Carthage for only two years before heading to France in 1915. Following his move to Carthage from New York City in 1912, he worked as the land and industrial agent for the local Randolph & Cumberland Railway — something of a family business since his father, Samuel Parsons McConnell, served as superintendent and part owner of the railroad after health concerns precipitated his move south.

In addition to his job with the railroad, James McConnell moonlighted with the Sandhill Board of Trade, an organization dedicated to the promotion of area agriculture and other business activities. As board secretary, he ingratiated himself with area farmers, wrote pamphlets and sought new uses of the Sandhills’ natural resources, including whether or not the smooth red clay underlying the Randolph & Cumberland railroad tracks might prove suitable for making bricks.

What motivated James McConnell to involve himself in World War I? Frank C. Page’s introduction to Flying for France provides a clue. In a chance meeting in January 1915 outside the county courthouse McConnell had surprising news. “Well, I’m all fixed up and am leaving on Wednesday,” he told Page.

“Wherefore?” asked Page.

“I’ve got a job driving an ambulance in France,” responded the 27-year-old.

World War I was raging across Europe, and the bloodbath was intense in the trenches of the French countryside. As a volunteer ambulance driver with the American Field Service, McConnell would transport wounded French soldiers from the front to the American Ambulance Hospital in Neuilly, France. It promised to be gruesome and dangerous work.

Privately funded, the AFS had no relationship with the American government. The U.S. was sitting on the sidelines, adhering to President Woodrow Wilson’s policy of strict neutrality toward the combatant nations. (Great Britain, France, Italy, Russia and Serbia were fighting Germany, Bulgaria, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire.) Employing the catchphrase “He kept us out of war,” Wilson had just been re-elected to a second presidential term. America would not declare war against Germany until April 1917.

With America steadfastly neutral, Page wondered why his friend was intent on risking his life in a foreign war, leaving behind his business career, his father and numerous friends. McConnell had an answer. Imagining The Great War as an event of historical importance, he felt he would be missing the opportunity of a lifetime if he failed to get involved. “These Sandhills will be here forever, but the war won’t, so I am going,” he told Page. Then he added, “And I’ll be of some use, too, not just a sightseer looking on; that wouldn’t be fair.”

McConnell was just one among many idealistic young men, often from affluent backgrounds, who volunteered their services as ambulance drivers during the war. The AFS targeted upscale undergrads and alumni of prestigious universities, including the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, McConnell’s alma mater. Though he never graduated, it is no exaggeration to say that he became as legendary a figure at UVA as he is today in Carthage. Enrolling in 1908, he studied two years at the College of Arts and Sciences, and then one year at the law school. One law professor, observing his pupil’s restlessness, remarked that McConnell exhibited “hatred of the humdrum, an abhorrence of the commonplace, and a passion for the picturesque.”

Left: McConnell and his mécanicien pose beside his Nieuport 11, bearing footprint that represented the University of Virginia’s ‘Hot Foot Society’

Middle: Nieuport 11 N1292 of Sgt. James R. McConnell

Right: James R. McConnell

McConnell thrust himself into UVA’s social whirl, joining a plethora of campus organizations, fraternities and secret societies. He became a cheerleader, editor-in-chief of the campus yearbook and, presaging later activities, founded the Aero Club. Clad in Highland clan finery, McConnell played bagpipes to entertain well-lubricated friends. Named king of the outrageous “Hot Foot Society” (both the king and queen were males), he led a procession of raucous fellow jesters in medieval dress throughout the campus.

McConnell’s most spectacular prank was the furtive attachment of a chamber pot atop the head of a statue of Thomas Jefferson, about to be unveiled in a public ceremony attended by President William Howard Taft. A plumber discovered the pot barely in time to save UVA embarrassment and probably McConnell’s expulsion.

Practical jokes were in McConnell’s rear-view mirror by the time he joined Section 2 of the AFS at Pont-a-Mousson in northeastern France on Feb. 11, 1915. “Tomorrow, I am going to the front with our squad and 12 ambulances,” he wrote a friend. “I am having a glorious experience.” He quickly made his presence felt, bravely rescuing wounded French soldiers while under fire. The French military awarded him the Croix de Guerre.

McConnell also impressed his AFS ambulance team members, including Henry Sydnor Harrison, a writer for Collier’s magazine. “I took note of my driver (McConnell),” recalled Harrison. “He gave me at once a sense of mature responsibleness above his years and inspired confidence.” McConnell, he wrote, was “boyishly delighted by the discovery I was a writer” and thereafter, the two men’s conversations centered around books.

Harrison left the AFS after four months service but continued to correspond with McConnell. “There came a long letter from him written in the first flush of his contact with the front,” reported the Collier’s scribe, “and I had not gone far with it before it came over me like a discovery: Why, hang it, the fellow can write!”

Yes, he could. And when New York-based publishers got wind of McConnell’s talent, they sought firsthand accounts of his experiences at the front. He wrote vividly. A piece in the September 1915 issue of Outlook transports the reader into McConnell’s rattling Daimler ambulance: “The work at night is quite eerie, and on moonless nights quite difficult. It is only in the dazzling light of the illuminating rockets that shoot into the air and sink slowly over the trenches that one can see to proceed with any speed. It is night, too, that our hardest work comes, for that is usually the time when attacks and counterattacks are made and great numbers of men are wounded . . . men with legs and arms shot away, mangled faces, and hideous body wounds. It is a time when men die in the ambulances before they reach the hospital.”

Driving an ambulance in a war zone not only provided writing grist for McConnell but other literary talents too. An extraordinary cadre of famed writers attended to wounded soldiers during World War I , including Ernest Hemmingway, John Dos Passos, W. Somerset Maugham, Dashiell Hammett, Southern Pines’ own James Boyd, E.E. Cummings, Louis Bromfield, Archibald MacLeish, Gertrude Stein and Robert W. Service.

During his time with the AFS, McConnell, who never married, befriended a young nurse at the hospital, Mademoiselle Marcelle Guérin. Their relationship appears to have been a passionate one, at least at first. Writing Guérin from the field, he proclaimed, “You are everything to me over here or elsewhere, for that matter.” Later correspondence, though always amicable, suggests the romance had cooled. Marcelle commenced a romance with a Russian while McConnell chattily enlightened her about his flirtations with a beautiful barmaid named Rosa.

After 10 months transporting the wounded, McConnell got directly into the fight. “All along I had been convinced that the United States ought to aid in the struggle against Germany,” he explained in Flying for France. “With that conviction, it was plainly up to me to do more than drive an ambulance. The more I saw the splendor of the fight the French were fighting, the more I felt like an ‘embusque’ — what the British call a ‘shirker.’ So, I made up my mind to go into aviation.” He quit the AFS.

McConnell joined the French Foreign Legion on Oct. 1, 1915, plunging into flight training in Pau, France. “My elation at arriving there was second only to my satisfaction at being a French soldier,” McConnell wrote. “It was a vast improvement, I thought, to the American ambulance.”

By the spring of 1916, McConnell had achieved proficiency in piloting a Nieuport biplane. He described the aircraft as the “smallest, fastest rising biplane in the French service. It can travel 110 miles an hour and is a one-man apparatus with a machine gun mounted on its roof and fired by the pilot with one hand while with the other and his feet he operates the controls.”

France was in the midst of forming an aviation squadron consisting of pilots from the United States. The French government hoped the exploits of the new unit would push the U.S. into taking up arms against Germany. On March 16, 1916, the director of French aeronautics announced the formation of the N-124 American Escadrille.

The Escadrille’s initial roster listed seven pilots: McConnell; William Thaw from Pittsburgh; Norman Prince from Boston; New Yorkers Elliott Cowdin and Victor Chapman; Texan Bert Hall; and, Kiffin Rockwell from Asheville, North Carolina. The majority came from well-educated and wealthy backgrounds. All except McConnell, Prince and Cowdin had fought in the trenches with the Foreign Legion before opting to join the Escadrille. French Capt. Georges Thenault was placed in charge of the group. Thirty-eight Americans and four Frenchmen would ultimately fly for the unit.

Germany protested that the name of the squadron, American Escadrille, violated America’s neutrality toward the belligerents. Thus, the unit was rechristened the Lafayette Escadrille, honoring the memory of Marquis de Lafayette, the Frenchman who nobly aided the patriots’ cause during the American Revolutionary War.

On April 16, 1916, the American aviators were ordered to join the Escadrille at Luxeuil in the Vosges Mountains. McConnell endured spartan conditions during his flight training, but facilities at the new location were grand. Each pilot had his own private quarters at a villa adjacent to the town’s hot baths. The men dined with the officers at the best hotel in town, and an automobile was available at their beck and call. McConnell felt like a “summer resorter rather than a soldier,” until reflecting on “the ancient custom of giving a man selected for the sacrifice a royal time of it before the appointed day.”

And the possibility of a fiery death for N-124 Lafayette Escadrille aviators was not remote. Missions (two-hour sorties, two to three times daily) were seldom routine. William Sydnor Harrison pointed this out in his tribute to McConnell: “The pilots of N-124 are not ordered for routine observation work; they are not asked to carry messages or take photographs, or regulate artillery fire, or bring up planes from Paris,” he wrote in the Sandhill Citizen. “They are fighters pure and simple, and their place in the air is where the danger is thickest.”

While romance and adventure were attached to being a World War I aviator, flight in an open cockpit could be a harrowing experience. “Mere words are difficult to describe the pure agony of mind and body,” wrote Escsadrille member Laurence Rumsey. “The sub-zero temperature permeated the very marrow of your bones. Despite three or four pairs of gloves, fingers coiled around the stick would be paralyzed in five minutes.”

McConnell’s first sortie on May 13, 1916, produced anxious moments along with his aerial “baptism of fire.” Having never previously flown above 7,000 feet and shivering in the cold, he climbed in his Nieuport up over a cloudbank to an altitude of 14,000 feet, losing contact with his fellow pilots. “Not a single plane was visible anywhere, and I was growing very uncertain about my position,” he recounted in Flying for France. “My splendid isolation had become oppressive, when, one by one, the others began bobbing up above the cloud level, and I had company again.”

On the heels of that scare, enemy shrapnel suddenly enveloped McConnell’s biplane. “It was interesting to watch the flash of the bursting shells, and the attendant smoke puffs — black, white, or yellow, depending on the shrapnel used . . . Strangely enough, my feelings about it were wholly impersonal.”

Four days later, McConnell’s fellow North Carolinian Kiffin Rockwell scored the Escadrille’s first aerial victory, shooting down a German LVG two-seater. According to McConnell, Rockwell closed within 30 yards, “pressed on the release of his machine gun, and saw the enemy gunner fall backward and the pilot crumple up sideways in his seat,” before their plane crashed to the earth.

The Escadrille and everyone in Luxeuil, “particularly the girls” (according to McConnell), celebrated Rockwell’s accomplishment. According to Jon Guttman, author of SPA 124 Lafayette Escradrille, Kiffin’s brother Paul, “who was in Paris when he heard the news, rushed to Luxeuil with an 80-year-old bottle of bourbon whiskey. After drinking a shot, Rockwell offered one to (Victor) Chapman, but he declined, suggesting that each pilot be entitled to one slug of the ‘Bottle of Death’ every time he shot down an enemy aeroplane.”

Other squadron aviators would achieve victories, including Chapman, Thaw, Cowdin, Prince, Hall, and the incomparable Raoul Lufbery, whose 16 kills would make him one of the Allies’ foremost aces. Despite once causing an enemy plane to careen hopelessly out of control McConnell was not credited with any confirmed victories, since no one observed the near-certain crash.

Soon after Rockwell’s victory, the Escadrille was ordered to the Verdun sector. “A commodious villa halfway between the town of Bar-le-Duc and the aviation field had been assigned to us,” wrote McConnell, “and comforts were as plentiful as at Luxeuil.” But he sensed a “gigantic battle” in the offing, given “the endless convoys of motor trucks, the fast-flowing stream of troops, and the distressing number of ambulances.”

Left: The pilots of N124 pose at Luxeuil in May 1916. From left to right: Cpls. Chapman and Cowdin, Sgt. W. Bert Hall, Sous-Lt. Thaw, Capitaine Georges Thenault, Lt. Alfred de Laage de Meux, Sgt. Prince and Cpls. Rockwell and McConnell. Sitting before Thenault and de Laage is Thenault’s dog Fram.

Right: Mural of James McConnell in downtown Carthage

The Battle of Verdun was the longest and bloodiest of the war. Combined Allied and German casualties tallied over 700,000. The Escadrille was not immune from the carnage. Clyde Balsey suffered a severe wound to his thigh from an explosive bullet. He managed to land his plane in a meadow and was taken to a field hospital, where he lingered for an extended period before dying.

While hospitalized, Balsey developed an intense thirst. To quench it, Victor Chapman commandeered two bags of oranges he intended to deliver to the hospital following his final sortie of the day. It would prove to be Chapman’s last flight. He was killed in a dogfight just after shooting down an enemy plane. McConnell described the Escadrille’s reaction in Flying for France: “We talked in lowered voices after that; we could read the pain in one another’s eyes. If only it could have been someone else, was what we all thought . . . I kept thinking of him lying over there, and the oranges he was taking to Balsey.”

To cope with their grief, Escadrille aviators sought distractions. Consumption of alcohol topped the list. The squadron’s carousing while on leave in Paris reportedly reached epic proportions. McConnell wrote of other pastimes. “At the big table, several sportive souls start a poker game, while at a smaller one, two sedate spirits wrap themselves in the intricacies of chess. Captain Thenault labors away at the messroom piano, or in lighter mood plays with Fram, his police dog. A phonograph grinds out the ancient query, ‘Who Paid the Rent for Mrs. Rip Van Winkle,’ or some other ragtime ditty.” On a Paris sojourn, the flyers bought a lion cub, Whiskey, and adopted the feline as the squadron mascot.

Another diversion for the Americans was decorating their aircraft. All the Nieuports displayed the unit’s insignia — a Sioux warrior chief in full headdress. The pilots added their own personal touches. McConnell put the moniker “MAC” on his biplane. He later switched to a white “Hot Foot,” recalling his collegiate merrymaking.

McConnell avoided serious aerial mishaps until late August 1916, when a crash caused him a debilitating back injury. He initially denied being in pain, but Capt. Thenault saw through the ruse and ordered him to the hospital at Vitry-le-Francois. The flier spent most of his 45-day recuperation in the Paris home of Mrs. Alice Weeks, who had lost a son in the war. During his convalescence, McConnell worked on his writings for his publisher, Doubleday, Page & Company.

On Sept. 23^,1916, Kiffin Rockwell, one of McConnell’s best friends in the unit, was shot down and killed. A crestfallen McConnell wrote, “No greater blow could have befallen the Escadrille. Kiffin was its soul. He was loved and looked up to by not only every man in our flying corps but by everyone who knew him.”

In early October, Norman Prince, an original N-124 member, also perished. Seemingly on the road to recovery from an injury suffered in a landing accident, Prince expired after a blood clot developed on his brain. Four of N-124’s first nine pilots perished in six months.

On Oct. 16, 1916, N-124 was deployed to Cachy, France, to fight in the Battle of the Somme. McConnell, though still suffering from his injury, rejoined the unit. The new encampment was a rude awakening. “Instead of being quartered in villa or hotel, the pilots were directed to a portable barracks newly erected in a sea of mud,” wrote McConnell. Damp cold “penetrated through every crack.” Under-equipped in their new surroundings, the pilots begged for blankets from neighboring escadrilles.

McConnell’s gloomy ennui with the situation is evident in a Dec. 11, 1916, letter. “Have done little on the article. I’ve felt on the bum and Whiskey (the lion cub) chewed my fingers so it’s hard to hold a pen,” he confided. “Only flown once since my return.”

McConnell was not the only Escadrille member hurting. In a subsequent letter, he referred to N-124 as a “great aggregation of cripples.” In late January 1917, the Escadrille was redeployed to take part in a spring offensive. But another malady put McConnell back on the disabled list. In February, he wrote Mademoiselle Guérin to inform her he was back in the hospital due to “the itch,” a near-intractable form of dermatitis plaguing many in the Escadrille. McConnell would not exit the infirmary until early March.

He wrote Guérin numerous letters during this stay and following his return to duty with N-124. The correspondence suggests the rekindling of their dormant romance. He tells the young nurse that her letters are “like water to a man dying of thirst.” He acknowledges enjoying a visit with her more than any in his entire life.

McConnell’s final letter to Guérin, written March 16 , three days before his death, concludes, “Thank your mother for being so very nice to me, and give her my love, and keep some for yourself.” Decades later, Guérin would confide that McConnell was the great romance of her life.

On March 19, 1917, McConnell, together with fellow aviators Edmond Genet and Edwin Parsons, took off on patrol from an airfield in Sainte Juste, France. Still dogged with relentless back pain, McConnell had to be maneuvered by his mechanics into the bucket seat of his Nieuport 17. After the three aviators were aloft, a clogged oil line caused Parsons’ motor to malfunction, and he returned home.

Continuing the sortie, Genet and McConnell encountered two German two-seaters and separately attacked them. Jon Guttman’s book describes the dogfight: “The gunner of Genet’s opponent shot away his main upper wing support and wounded him in the left cheek. Recovering, (Genet) closed until the two aeroplanes nearly collided, but failed to bring down his quarry. He then searched for McConnell for 15 minutes, until enemy anti-aircraft fire and the increasing likelihood of losing his upper wing convinced him to head home. To his horror, he learned that McConnell had not returned.”

It was not until March 24 that McConnell’s death was confirmed. Two German planes that had been observed close on McConnell’s tail fired on him. After a “desperate fight,” McConnell had crashed. Several bullets were found in his body. His ailing back may have played a role in his death, since he could not turn to spot enemy aircraft to his rear. McConnell’s crumpled Nieuport was found in full throttle. He likely died before hitting the ground.

McConnell may have had a premonition of his impending death. He left the following instructions with the Escadrille: “My burial is of no import. Make it as easy as possible for yourselves. I have no religion and do not care for any service. If the omission would embarrass you, I presume I could stand the performance. Good luck to the rest of you. God damn Germany and vive la France.”

In the end, he did in fact “stand the performance.” Three women, all claiming to be McConnell’s fiancée, attended his memorial service at the Escadrille’s base. The French military awarded him a second Croix de Guerre. Initially buried in the meadow where he crashed in Flavy-le-Martel, France, at his father’s request McConnell was later reinterred at the Lafayette Escadrille memorial near Paris.

The U.S. Congress declared war against Germany 18 days after McConnell’s death. The Escadrille’s remaining American pilots were promptly transferred to a U.S. Army aviation unit. McConnell was the last American pilot killed in the conflict prior to the U.S. entry into the war.

The editor of the Sandhill Citizen, H.E. Foss, gave credit to McConnell for seeing what was at stake in the war long before the government and most Americans. “Democracy and autocracy were face-to-face on the soil of France, and Jim was a democrat,” Foss opined. “He saw early and clearly, what we have been slow to discover, that in this struggle our future is at stake scarcely less than that of England and France. Thus, he was not only ‘Flying for France,’ but for the land of his birth.”

Carthage held its own memorial service. It was announced at the ceremony that the new county hospital about to open 6 miles from Carthage would be named the James R. McConnell Hospital. Following its shipment from France to North Carolina, the French-language plaque honoring McConnell was displayed at that hospital. It would be the tablet’s first home but not its last. After that hospital closed, the plaque was moved in 1929 to the new Moore County Hospital in Pinehurst. Then, in 1940, the Carthage Chamber of Commerce persuaded the hospital to send the tablet to the county seat. Positioned near the old town hall, the plaque remained there until 2011, when Roland Gilliam convinced the city that it should be displayed at the airport.

Nor did UVA forget McConnell, its first alum killed in the war. The university commissioned Mt. Rushmore sculptor Gutzon Borglum to create a statue in memory of the flier. Dedicated in 1919, “The Aviator” depicts a winged and leather-helmeted McConnell soaring Icarus-like in the air. Today, the statue rests on the plaza of the university’s Clemons Library.

And despite the passage of a century, the French continue to venerate McConnell and the N-124 Lafayette Escadrille. In 2016, airport founder Roland Gilliam, and fellow Carthage fliers Jim Wiltjer and Felice Schillaci, received invitations from French officials to attend the 100th anniversary of the founding of N-124. An unforgettable part of their pilgrimage was attending a ceremony held at James McConnell’s original gravesite, still lovingly maintained and covered by flowers, alongside a Flavy-le-Martel cornfield. The tribute was not extravagant — about 25 attended and the French and American national anthems came from a boom box. It was precisely the sort of performance McConnell would be happy to stand. PS

Pinehurst resident Bill Case is PineStraw’s history man. He can be reached at Bill.Case@thompsonhine.com.

2024 Feature

Art at Heart

An invitation to Sandhills artists to get creative never goes unanswered. Here are a few special valentines from their imaginations.

A native of Dunkirk, New York, Jodi Ohl is a bestselling author and award-winning mixed media artist known for the distinctive texture and bold color combinations of her often whimsical or abstract compositions. She now resides in Aberdeen, N.C.

The sister team of Dominique Wilbur and Natalia Voitek curate elegant fine art stationary, bespoke calligraphy and art in their shop Thoughtfully Yours in Pinehurst, N.C., where the New Jersey natives now live.

Cara Mathis is a self-taught pen-and-ink line artist drawn to vintage illustrations and architectural sketch work. A resident of Pinehurst, N.C., she teaches plein air drawing through the Parks and Recreation department.

Before retiring to her home studio in Whispering Pines, Denise Baker taught art at Sandhills Community College for 25 years. She continues the labor-intensive art of printmaking, including creating valentines every year for her family and friends.

Captivated by the elegance of horses and the serene beauty of the natural world, Larissa Ann grew up in Pennsylvania and now lives in Vass with her husband and rescue dog. Last year she was the artist-in-residence at the Carolina International CCI & Horse Trial.

Julie Borshak is a native of Moore County. Her unique designs utilize vintage North Carolina-made furniture that is deconstructed and reimaged along with custom-designed stamping and hand stitching.

2024 Feature

A Walk on the Beach

Fiction by Daniel Wallace

We went out in the morning for one last walk together on the beach. I took his hand to steady him, to steady both of us, really. Knees are the first to go, they say, but the rest was not far behind. It was early, almost no one was there, and if you turned away from the rickety beach houses and sad hotels you could pretend you were on a deserted island.

“Isaac,” I said, jostling his hand to get his attention. “Do you remember you told me once that when you were a kid you always wanted to live on a deserted island because you thought that meant it was just chockfull of desserts?”

The sun was rising behind a sheet of thin clouds, but a ray slipped through and made our morning shadows. Even his face — the dried crevassed creases like a rain-starved plain — brightened into a darkness.

“Remember, honey?”

He was looking down at his bare feet for some reason, but I knew he had heard me and was thinking about it, trying so hard. There was always a lag now between a question and an answer, like the delay on a long-distance call. For 50 years he was the sharpest tack I ever knew. Now he needed me just to find his shoes in the morning, to explain to him the subtle differences between a fork and a spoon, to double-lock the doors at bedtime so he couldn’t escape into the night. It had become too much for me. Rather, he had become too much for me.

“I don’t remember that,” he said.

“It was nothing,” I said, giving his hand a little squeeze. “Just funny is all.”

“It does sound like something a kid would say, though.” He looked at me and smiled, friendly but guarded, as if we’d been talking just for the last few minutes instead of the last 50 years. “And I was never a good speller. I let other people do the spelling for me.”

“You hired the best spellers in the business.”

“That’s right.”

Now a laugh from him, and a laugh from me. I wanted to tell him how happy it made me that he’d kept his sense of humor, but then he would ask what I meant. Tell me about the things I’ve lost. So I didn’t say anything and just listened to our laughter carried away by the wind.

The water lapped at our ankles and so I led us a little ways away from the surf for more solid ground. Everything in the world conspired to knock you over.

He kept staring at his feet. They looked like blue-veined sea creatures, the kind that lived miles beneath the water, the kind that sometimes washed ashore and made you wonder how such a thing could ever even be in the world. And why.

“I could live in this town,” he said, “if it weren’t for the earthquakes and fires and floods, and pestilences.”

“You do live here, silly.”

“Well, then, wish me luck!”

“Oh, you’ve always been lucky.”

He snuck a shy glance at me. Tentative, searching.

“And you. You live here too?”

“I do,” I said.

“But we don’t live together.”

“No. Not anymore. Not like we used to. But I’ll be there so often you’ll think we did.”

He nodded, as if this were an acceptable answer.

We kept walking, and he looked down again and for some reason it irritated me.

“Why in the world do you keep looking at your feet?”

“My feet?” No pause this time. His fog was lifting. “Ha! I’m not looking at my feet. I’m looking for a shark’s tooth. I’ve been hoping to find a shark’s tooth every time I come to the beach for, I don’t know, 65 years? But I never have.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know that, for some reason. “Another regret?”

“No, no,” he said. “No. I’m glad I’ve never found one. Hoping is better. You know, because when you do find it — presto-change-o! — you’re hopeless.”

“Then you just have to hope for other things.”

“Like what?”

He was right. The list of things to hope for was getting shorter, almost every day.

A woman in an unfortunate bathing suit, a sunburned man with a beach chair on his back, two boys running into the surf screaming like Maori warriors attacking the whole ocean, a jogger and her snow-white poodle. Life was coming back to life. We had not walked far, but I didn’t know how much farther we should. Going out was the easy part, but then we’d have to go back and that was so much harder. My hip was throbbing already. I wish we had a limo following behind us at just a bit of a distance so that we could get into it when we wanted to. With a limo driver named Norman. That was something to hope for, I suppose.

“I don’t think there’s a God,” he said out of nowhere, “but if there were all I would want from him or her is just a little direction. Hints. Like, Warm, warmer, warmer – you’re burning up! Or, say you’re about to quit your job and he says, Cold! Cold! Just that, a couple of words. That would be nice, right?”

“That would be ideal,” I said.

He stopped and turned to me and took both of my hands in his, and if you were looking at us from a distance you’d swear this old man was about to propose.

“That place looks like an elementary school with a shitty cafeteria,” he said.

“I tried to get you a room in the Taj Mahal, but they were full up.”

“Don’t be a bitch,” he said. “Don’t be a real bitch.”

He loved that word now. I don’t know why. I had to just let it go.

“Do you have a cigarette?”

“Cold,” I said, shaking my head. “Really cold. You quit in 1995.”

“I never quit, I just stopped. I have pursued second-hand smoke for years.”

He winked at me. This man. We kept walking. I untwined my fingers from his to brush the hair from my face and it freaked him out, and he pulled my arm down until he found my hand again and held it like a vise.

“Marriage vows should be different than they are, I was thinking,” he said. His voice rose a bit and shook. “Not until death do us part. Just until the other loses his mind. Only then may you leave.”

These moments of perfect clarity, of understanding, they astonished me and made me sadder than almost anything else.

“I am not leaving you.”

“One of us is leaving the other. And it’s not me.”

No, I thought, a thought that was truer than I wanted it to be: It’s you, it’s definitely you. I didn’t say it. But there were so many things I couldn’t say anymore. I listened to the static of the frosted, frothy waves instead. He stopped and turned to the horizon, where there was nothing to see except the place where everything disappeared.

“I want a Viking funeral. Set me on a wooden raft, float me out to sea.”

“But you’re not dying, Richard. Not. Dying.” Sometimes he drove me insane. “You were a kind of Viking, though. Brave, strong, a good breadwinner, but also plundering and burning stuff down.”

“Plundering,” he said, and shook his head, as if it were a riddle he couldn’t figure out. “Are you sure? I don’t remember any plundering, Sara. Not a bit of it. I’m sorry.”

And then just like that we found ourselves stuck calf-deep in the stealthy rising tide. We couldn’t move for a second. He gripped my hand and he looked at me with such helplessness, his eyes as scared and wild as a child’s. Then the ocean disappeared, and we were free.

I felt the sun starting to burn. It was time. I led him back to the dunes where we’d left his shoes, but they weren’t there. I scanned the beach. All the dunes looked the same now, graves for ancient mariners with the sea oats waving in the wind.

“I can’t find your shoes,” I said.

“You can’t find my shoes? That’s new.”

“It’s just, I thought they were right here. But maybe they’re up the beach a little.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.”

His eyes were swimming, all the maybes and maybe-nots bouncing around in his brain.

“I guess this means we can’t go now,” he said, grinning at me like a little boy, my lifelong conspirator, my partner in crime.

But that’s not what it meant. I saw them down the way. PS

Daniel Wallace is the author of six novels. His memoir, This Isn’t Going to End Well, was published by Algonquin Books in April, 2023. He is the J. Ross MacDonald Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, his alma mater.

2024 Feature

Second Chance Manse

Rebirth of a historic landmark

By Deborah Salomon

Color Photography by John Gessner

Black & White Photography by Caroline Deese

Young family. Old house. The result: spectacular.

Consider this — the mansion was a wreck, with broken windows and busted walls, its 6,000 square feet strewn with trash and dusty furnishings. The most recent inhabitants were squatters, human and critter.

Creepy. A deep, dark money pit. Most house-hobbyists would run, not walk, in the other direction.

Not Abby and Trey Brothers, she from Mount Airy, he from Albemarle. Abby, a nurse, and Trey, military personnel, were living in Baltimore, preparing a move.

“It was sheer coincidence,” Abby recalls. “I was looking on Zillow for places near Fort Bragg (now Liberty). I found Cameron and zoomed out to Moore County. This was the first house listed. It was the ugliest pretty house I’d ever seen.”

Trey continues: “I saw her face light up, and I knew it was all over.”

That face lights up still at the memory. “It was the same feeling as when I knew I wanted to marry Trey,” says Abby. “You just know.”

That was 2017. Since then, they have begun to fill the six bedrooms with the arrival of William, 3, and Eloise, 8 months.

But first, a job as much period restoration as renovation, which sets this historic property apart from those with classic exteriors and magazine interiors. Its rooms have the ability to propel you back in time — but the trip is made in air-conditioned comfort.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in what became Aberdeen, Page was the name that opened doors. Allison Francis (Frank) Page, one of 10 children, saw the Sandhills as a source of naval supplies, mostly logging and turpentine. He bought land, diversified into railroads and commercial buildings, prospered, and in addition to establishing the town of Aberdeen, he and wife Catherine produced eight offspring. Several gained prominence in government, clergy and banking.

Frank Page died in 1899, after building homes for most of his children on Page Hill. Fourteen years after her father’s death, daughter Frances Page Wilder and her husband, lawyer Thomas Wilder, commissioned popular architect J.M. McMichael, who had designed the local Methodist church, to build a brick homestead outside the compound for their family of nine.

The Great Depression changed everything. The unoccupied house stood vacant for decades, smothered by vines and shrubs. Had it been clapboard rather than brick, story over.

A developer saw the house, which he christened Willow Oak Manor, as a venue for weddings. His plans proved financially impractical. The house appeared doomed.

However, beyond the shambles its aura captivated Abby and Trey. Their plan: obtain a Fannie Mae government loan and do the work themselves. Abby had helped her dad on mission trips, and Trey gained experience working construction. How-to videos and YouTube provided the rest.

“Whatever required a permit we let the contractor do,” Abby says. Which left ripping out 60 tons of plaster in the summer heat. And so much more.

Moving day, after nine months of sweat equity, came in May 2019.

At the outset, they decided to leave the layout mostly intact and keep flooring, paneling, door and window frames dark and wall colors quiet — pale olive, khaki, beige, ochre, grey.

Fronting the house, a porch with veranda proportions previews the spaciousness within, enhanced by tall windows and 12-foot ceilings.

Opposite the front door, the split staircase ornately carved and illuminated by a Phantom of the Opera-worthy chandelier elicits gasps, immediately delivering ancestral elegance, as does the triple-wide entrance hall with a parlor on one side and a study equipped with bookcases — previously kitchen cupboards — on the other.

In the parlor, a settee found in the house suggests the affluent 1920s, as do a massive wardrobe and side tables in the foyer, several dressers and the dining room buffet. Other furnishings lean modern-comfy, practical for a family raising children.

Unfortunately, chimneys had to be capped off. “We had an issue with bats,” Trey says.

Antiquity earns a bye in the main-floor master suite, where an adjoining sunporch has been converted to a spa bathroom; the glass wall wraps around a long bench facing three shower heads.

Upstairs, each child has a bed-playroom the size of master suites elsewhere. Narrow stairs lead to what was a sleeping porch, now a sitting room. Also on the third level is a small maid’s room and bath with original tub, sink and a stairway that leads directly to the kitchen, perfect for guests desiring privacy.

Ah, the kitchen, no place for old-timey anything. “I knew what I wanted — big, the open concept,” Abby says. It required removing walls to create one room from three. Now, the dining room, dominated by her grandmother’s table, is part of the kitchen. Another wall was added, creating a laundry room and pantry. New floors were required but no pricy granite, soapstone or marble countertops. Instead, Trey poured 3,000 pounds of concrete, creating a sturdy textured surface.

Outside, what was once overgrown brush has been cleared for a kiddie playground. A porte-cochère recalls times when guests arrived in elegant motor cars, long before the manor’s neighbors included businesses and tract housing.

Funny how life turns out. Abby grew up in what she calls a little brick rancher. “I never wanted to live in another brick house,” she says. Trey shared a bathroom with three sisters. Now, he has four choices. With grit and determination, Abby and Trey Brothers rescued a landmark from the wrecking ball.

Besides, Trey adds, “The house is a good conversation piece.” Like the time Abby found the initials MFP scrawled on a wall.

“A lady and her granddaughter rang the bell. She said she had lived here. I asked her if she knew who MFP was,” Abby explains.

“That’s me, Mary Frances Poe!” the lady exclaimed. “I stayed in the back bedroom.”

Mission accomplished, except for one detail. So far, Abby notes, no ghosts. PS

2024 Feature

A Day at the Races

Horsing around and around and around

By Jenna Biter

Photographs by Tim Sayer

It’s a brisk winter morning. A cloudless blue sky hangs over Pinehurst. Happy sunshine beams down, tricking villagers into leaving their coats inside while they shuffle out to fetch the paper. Just down Beulah Hill Road, in the shadow of Pinehurst’s famed golf courses, horse trainers at the harness track know better. They climb into jackets, pull on gloves and hike up neck gaiters, then slide into their two-wheeled jog carts behind the rears of standardbred horses.

From dawn until a little before noon, sometimes a little after, the trainers rotate through the barns filled with horses, driving them around and around the tracks at the historic harness racing training facility.

Roland “Polie” Mallar and his second trainer, Billy Cole, are two of them. Both men drive laps in red carts, reclined with their legs straight out and gloved hands ready at the lines.

Ruddy, wind-whipped cheeks sneak out from beneath a neck warmer. Mallar is ahead, wearing a relaxed but stony look of concentration, track pants and a faded ball cap. He’s never been one for protective headgear. Following closely behind, Cole sports the same composed stare, but out from under a cream helmet and with a shield of black facial scruff.

Mallar grew up in Maine in the shadow of his grandfather — the original Roland nicknamed Polie — who trained harness racers. When Polie the younger was still in high school, he already owned horses and ran them in summer fairs.

Cole, on the other hand, grew up in Wagram, where he still lives, and knew nothing about horses until 1985. That changed when a friend who worked at the harness track offered to teach him, hoping to fill a job opening at the training ground.

“I’ve been here ever since,” Cole says.

Right: Roland “Polie” Mallar

“Here” is the Pinehurst Harness Track, the oldest continuously operating horse track in North Carolina. It was built as an amenity for resort guests in 1915, converted to a winter training center for breaking standardbreds in the late 1920s, and bought by the village of Pinehurst in 1992 so the proving ground wouldn’t be steamrolled and developed into something more commercial but far less utilitarian and picturesque.

That same year, the equestrian training center was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

For the past seven or eight years, Cole has worked at the harness track with Mallar, owner of the eponymous Polie Mallar Stable, who has been wintering horses at the facility for something around three decades.

“We were here one year, and then we went to Florida one year,” Mallar says, remembering a brief stint at Spring Garden Ranch, a 148-acre training track half an hour from a different, faster kind of racetrack — the Daytona International Speedway.

“I liked it here in Pinehurst better,” he adds, despite, or maybe even because of, the smaller sprawl and harsher winter weather.

The Moore County training center sits on 111 acres and has three tracks. The first is a half-mile clay oval surrounded by a second oval, a 5/8-mile sand border good for strengthening a horse’s leg muscles. Tucked down a short dirt road, the third track is a 1-mile clay loop used for going fast and qualifying for big harness races up north.

There are no palm trees trackside in Pinehurst, a good thing in Mallar’s view. Pinehurst’s winter chill is a training aid.

“When you leave here to go north and race in the spring, you’re not going into 75- or 80-degree weather,” Mallar says. North American harness races run in four-season regions like the Midwest and Northeast and are also popular in Canada.

Tracy Cormier, owner of the Pinehurst Track Restaurant, a legendary local institution serving breakfast and lunch in the unassuming white-block building looking out at the track, was married to Quebecois horseman Real “CoCo” Cormier.

“He started when he was a kid in Canada,” Cormier says of her late husband of 36 years. “He just loved horses. It was a big French Canadian group of guys, very famous drivers, and they just kept it going.

“Then he came to Pinehurst and just loved it.”

At first, CoCo spent summers at big-purse races in New York and winters training in Pinehurst at the harness track. Then in the ’90s, he, Tracy and their daughter, Danielle, permanently moved to the Sandhills. That’s when the Cormiers bought the restaurant.

For 27 years, Tracy has run the more-than-a-century-old eatery that attracts mostly golfers visiting from across the country and around the globe in search of a good meal and a little local color. After snarfing down a stack of famous blueberry pancakes and draining a mug of black coffee, diners pay in cash, then leave to play golf. Outside, they’re greeted by the clomp clomp clomping of hooves.

That rhythmic sound is how Scott Freeman, the harness track’s superintendent, or “Track Man,” has been diagnosing surface conditions and prescribing daily maintenance during his five years on the job.

“The racetrack talks to me,” Freeman says. “If horses are going by and it sounds like they’re knocking on the door, the surface is too hard. That hurts bone. If they go by and it sounds like a washing machine, that means the surface is too loose. That hurts soft tissue. It causes a horse to strain more.

“So it’s a fine balance,” he adds. “What it’s got to sound like is a kitten wearing sneakers.”

Year after year, between October and May, trainers like Mallar, second trainers like Cole, and grooms and groundskeepers hurry in and out of barns, helping to prepare young horses for their racing debut.

Left: Billy Cole, Right: Tracy Cormier

There’s a quiet busyness to it all. People dressed in sun-faded knock-arounds are always moving something — water buckets, hoses, bags of feed — to somewhere while others brush down sweaty-backed horses after their morning miles. A russet-colored farm dog wanders out of one barn and into another, probably off on his morning rounds. An oddly welcoming smell of manure pervades the entire scene.

Not all the horses who train at Pinehurst are yearlings (horses between the ages of 1 and 2 years old) but most are. Here in the slow and easy South, the babies can acclimate to distractions — tractors, observers and other plucky young horses — one at a time.

“Right now, it’s mostly teaching them manners,” Mallar says. “It’s teaching them to go straight. You got to teach them to go straight before you can teach them to go fast.”

This year, Mallar has 13 horses to train, all of which are standardbreds, the only breed that competes in North American harness racing. The breed’s lineage traces back to a thoroughbred stallion named Messenger who was imported to Philadelphia from England in 1788. Descendants of Messenger’s great-great-grandson Hambletonian 10 dominate the breed. To this day, standardbreds still resemble thoroughbreds, although they are longer, lower and sturdier.

“Some of these top thoroughbreds, they race four or five times a year, and they think that’s a lot,” Mallar says. Some standardbreds can race every week. Thoroughbreds race full tilt, at a gallop with a jockey on their backs, while standardbreds race at a trot or pace, pulling drivers behind them in speedy carts called sulkies.

Trotters move like other horse breeds, with a diagonal gait. Their opposite front and hind legs strike the ground simultaneously. Pacers can trot, but when pushed for speed in second gear, they shift into a lateral gait. Their same-side legs move in tandem: front right with back right and front left with back left. Standardbred horses are among only a handful of animals, including giraffes and camels, that naturally pace.

Regardless of their preferred gait, standardbred yearlings require a solid winter of training to be race-ready come springtime.

“When the horses first get here, most of them, they’ve never had a harness on. They’ve never had a bridle on,” Cole says. “First thing I usually do, I just start brushing them down, let them get used to me.”

Right: Scott Freeman

The trainers slowly introduce young horses to harness and bridle, leg loops called hopples, to help them keep gait, and the jog cart. At that point, they drive each horse around the track daily. Between Mallar and Cole, they exercise all 13 horses throughout a morning, 3 to 3 1/2 miles each.

On this winter morning, a velvety, chocolate-colored horse from Mallar’s barn tosses its head and darts in the other direction when it comes face-to-face with a tractor grating the 1/2-mile clay track. Quietly Cole, still recumbent in the jog cart, flicks his steady, experienced hands and somehow transfers his composure down the lines. He pulls the horse into the central grass field, then turns it back to face its fear.

“Most of the time, if they are scared of the tractor, I get them out and around it to get used to it,” Cole says. “Sooner or later that tractor is going to be out there and coming, and you’ll have nowhere to go and be in trouble.” The next time around, Cole’s horse makes a successful lap, even when faced with the big, scary John Deere.

“Once I get a foundation under them, I’d say anywhere between 100 and 250 jog miles, then I’ll start rushing them up a little bit for something like an 1/8th of a mile, teaching them how to step,” Mallar says. “Then we’ll have them pass each other, get them used to other horses moving around.

“I won’t really start putting a watch on them until I get to times between 2:40 and 2:45,” he says. “Then I’ll start dropping them.”

After roughly half a year of training, the now-2-year-olds run in the Spring Matinee, the harness track’s annual exhibition races that introduce the horses to competition in front of a crowd before they ship north to gambling hotspots, such as the Poconos, Yonkers and harness racing’s mecca, the Meadowlands, in New Jersey.

If owners and trainers are lucky, their horses will relish the competition, just like Mallar’s 4-year-old Ken Hanover, who set a track record in the Little Brown Jug in Delaware, Ohio, last year, one of harness racing’s Triple Crown events. That’s because good things come around at the harness track . . . and around, and around. PS

Jenna Biter is a writer and military wife in the Sandhills. She can be reached at jennabiter@protonmail.com.

2024 Feature