Category: Feature

William Faulkner invented Yoknapatawpha County as a place for his imagination to live, and every Southern writer knew where it was, even if it wasn’t on any map. Ernest Hemingway loaded his readers onto a double-decker bus and transported them to a fiesta in Pamplona, Spain, with its wine skins and dusty plaza de toros. Allan Gurganus created the fictional small town of Falls, North Carolina. In the hands of a fine craftsman, a sense of place in a piece of fiction can be so compelling it almost becomes its own character in the narrative. In our Summer Reading Issue three of North Carolina’s greatest writers deliver on this promise, taking us to West Virginia coal country, the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, and the bottom of a freshly dug grave. Our guides for these adventures are Lee Smith, Ron Rash and Clyde Edgerton.

— Jim Moriarty

 

Lee Smith is the author of 14 novels, including Fair and Tender Ladies, Oral History, Saving Grace and Guests on Earth, as well as four collections of short stories.  Her novel The Last Girls was a New York Times bestseller as well as co-winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. A retired professor of English at North Carolina State University, she has received an Academy Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the North Carolina Award for Literature,  and the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Literature. Her latest book, Silver Alert, will be available in the spring of 2023.

 

Ron Rash is the author of seven novels, seven collections of short stories and four volumes of poetry. He has been honored with The Sherwood Anderson Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for his collection Chemistry and Other Stories, and for his New York Times bestselling novel Serena. His other novels include Saints at the River, Above the Waterfall and The Risen. He is the Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University, where he teaches poetry and fiction writing.

 

Clyde Edgerton is the author of 10 novels and two books of non-fiction. His novels include Raney, Walking Across Egypt, The Floatplane Notebooks, Killer Diller and Lunch at the Piccadilly. Both Walking Across Egypt and Killer Diller were adapted for the screen. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and has also received the North Carolina Award for Literature. He is the Thomas S. Kenan III Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Soaring above Pinehurst in 1911

By Bill Case
Photographs by Ellsworth Eddy from the Tufts Archives

The Sandhills was abuzz with excitement after the Pinehurst Outlook reported on March 11, 1911, that within the week, an airplane would be aloft over the town. “Pinehurst,” declared the paper, “is soon to enjoy the novel sight of seeing man vie with the buzzard in its majestic journey through the clouds.”

The community had been chosen by the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company (now Curtiss-Wright Corporation) to host a “school of aviation instruction” from March 18 to April 5. The acknowledged goal of the school was promotion of the company’s two-winged biplane, designed by aviation pioneer and company owner Glenn Curtiss.

In addition to providing lessons to would-be pilots, curious onlookers were going to be offered “the delights of a ‘fly’” in the biplane with the “daring aviator” in charge of the school, 24-year-old Lincoln Beachey. Though he had flown planes for just over a year, Beachey’s breathtaking aerial exploits were already gaining him cult-like status among flight enthusiasts.

The native San Franciscan broke into the flight game in September 1905 when Capt. Thomas Baldwin hired the mechanically inclined, but aeronautically inexperienced, teenager to fly a dirigible at the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland, Oregon. Beachey, piloting from a flimsy wooden undercarriage beneath the balloon, skillfully maneuvered the craft while thousands below marveled at the spectacle. According to Frank Marrero’s biography Lincoln Beachey — The Man Who Owned the Sky, Lincoln received “high-profile press coverage by landing, message in hand, on top of ‘The Oregonian’ newspaper company and City Hall, thus initiating air mail.”

Beachey revelled in this first taste of public acclaim. In pursuit of further headlines, he, along with brother Hillery, conjured up an outlandish scheme. On June 14, 1906, Lincoln ascended in a dirigible from a Washington, D.C., park, the first flight of any kind to occur in the nation’s capital. Gobsmacked by the sight of the airship as it floated high above the Mall and the Washington Monument, citizens were in an uproar. Then Beachey turned the lumbering airship in the direction of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. As he descended to the White House lawn, presidential guards sprinted toward the dirigible with mean intentions. But Beachey was in luck.

President Theodore Roosevelt’s wife also saw him arriving and chose to intervene. She restrained the guards and greeted the daring pilot.

“Congratulations, young man!” exclaimed Edith Roosevelt. “This is certainly the most novel call ever made on the White House.”

Beachey next paid a visit to a joint session of Congress, landing on the steps of the Capitol, then spending the following hour discussing the future of air travel with fascinated lawmakers. He would become an outspoken advocate for governmental investment in aviation.

Beachey’s airship histrionics brought him considerably more than his requisite 15 minutes of fame, but dirigibles became old news when public attention turned to winged aircraft and the daredevils who piloted them. Not wanting to be left behind, Beachey knocked on the door of the Wright Brothers, imploring them to train him to fly in their behalf. Orville and Wilbur, however, wanted Beachey to pay them $500 for the opportunity — a sum that was out of the question for the penurious Beachey. Hat in hand, he accepted a less desirable position as a mechanic with Glenn Curtiss’ outfit. Eventually, he cajoled Curtiss into letting him practice flying a biplane during off hours.

By his own admission, Beachey was inept at first. Though one might not think of flying as a skill best learned by trial and error, according to Marrero’s book, Beachey spent considerable time repairing gears damaged by hard landings. Months passed before his aerial proficiency improved.

When Curtiss’ top pilot, Charlie Hamilton, was seriously injured during a December 1910 flying exposition in Los Angeles, Curtiss reluctantly tapped Beachey to finish out the meet. Blustery conditions made flying difficult for the nervous Beachey, though he relaxed after discovering the plane’s natural stability tended to even out the rough ride.

That sense of stability didn’t last long. After climbing to 3,000 feet, the plane’s engine stalled out and an eerie silence ensued. In the early days of flight, this scenario rarely ended well for the pilot. Beachey began plummeting toward the Earth, his craft spiraling out of control. The natural, though often futile, reaction for pilots faced with this predicament was to try to wrestle the plane up and out of the spin, causing the plane to spin even faster. Beachey sensed he could avoid a crash by nosing the plane completely into the dive. This counterintuitive move provided sufficient power for Beachey to regain control. He landed with the exultant roars of the crowd ringing in his ears.

Afterward, Curtiss said to him, “Linc, that was as fine a demonstration of flying as I’ve ever seen. Thank God, you’re alive.”

The flight was something of an epiphany for the young pilot, too. “Mr. Curtiss,” he said, “in the silence I could finally feel the whole machine for the first time. I think I know how to fly now.”

On the heels of this sensational debut, Beachey entered a January 1911 air exhibition held in his hometown of San Francisco. The show featured competitions in racing, take-offs, altitude, landing and showmanship. Lincoln blew away all challengers, winning several contests including “shortest take-off,” for which he earned $1,000.

As he was emerging as an aviation rock star, more than 17 million people would witness his flying feats in over 100 cities during 1911. His derring-do, newfound fame and money brought him attention from admiring females. Though Beachey had married North Carolinian May (Minnie) Wyatt during his dirigible days, those vows didn’t seem to deter the flyer from accepting the company of other young women during his wanderings around the country. To persuade the objects of his affection to join him in a fling, he would offer them diamond engagement rings, which he purchased by the dozen. He made a practice of keeping one at the ready in his vest pocket and is said to have had fiancées awaiting nuptials in cities across the U.S.

The dalliances, however, did not distract Beachey from formulating new and more dangerous aerial maneuvers. Now widely referred to as the “Birdman,” or “The Man who Owns the Sky,” he practiced longer and steeper dives, producing breathtaking close calls. Beachey claimed he was no daredevil and that his extraordinary stunts simply underscored the fact that the normal flying of an airplane was a safe activity. His feats, however, had the opposite effect on public perception, since an alarming number of less-skilled aviators perished in attempts to emulate his maneuvers. The frequency of horrific accidents led to ghoulish betting activity at airshows regarding the likelihood of a fatality.

Notwithstanding this gladiators’ arena-like gruesomeness, aerial shows were beginning to emerge as a bona-fide American sport. The article in The Outlook trumpeting Beachey’s arrival said as much. “Several pupils and a big gallery of ‘fans’ come with Mr. Beachey to enjoy the sport, (for that is what it is rapidly developing into).” The paper offered the view that “as an entertainment novelty, the school promises to be the biggest feature in the history of the Village.” The Outlook even predicted that golf would, for the moment, be “back grounded by interest in the ‘Bird Man.’”

In 1911, no airfields existed in the Sandhills, so the Curtiss representatives needed to locate a Pinehurst property with dimensions sufficient to accommodate the taking off and landing of the biplane. They selected a large field on high ground west of the Aberdeen, Carolina and Western railroad track in the vicinity of what is now Linden Road.

Beachey and wife Minnie arrived in Pinehurst on March 18 and bunked at the Berkshire Hotel. The following morning, he made his way to the makeshift airfield and personally took charge of assembling the biplane. By noon, he had the engine whirring with (as The Outlook described it) a “resonant roar.” In short order, Beachey was soaring over Pinehurst, accompanied by the biplane’s mechanic.

Next, he treated R.B. Middleton to his maiden airplane ride. Middleton, a race car driver from New York, aspired to be an ace aviator under Beachey’s tutelage. Another noteworthy passenger was Commander (later vice-admiral) Shichigoro Saito of the Royal Japanese Navy. According to The Outlook, Saito “left bubbling over with enthusiasm, convinced of (an airplane’s) practicability for Army and Navy uses.”

Minnie also hitched a flight with her husband, though her presence in Pinehurst may not have entirely inhibited Lincoln’s roving eye. The Outlook reported that Miss E. Marie Sinclair, “an accomplished and daring sportswoman,” was “favored with a long and high flight.”

Another first-time passenger was acclaimed amateur golfer Chick Evans, in town for the United North and South Amateur, which he won. If Evans wasn’t the best American golfer in the era immediately prior to the emergence of Walter Hagen and Bobby Jones, he was close. He defeated all the top pros in the 1910 Western Open (then considered a major championship), and later won both the U.S. Open and U.S. Amateur in 1916.

Evans would confess to pre-flight jitters. “Before my ascent,” wrote the golfer, “I imagined the most acute feeling on leaving my old friend the Earth, would be fear; the shuddering, awesome, sort of fear which assails a boy when passing a cemetery on a dark night.” But Evans’ anxiety was allayed once above the pinewoods, where “a profound sensation of security came over me, and while the rush of air was tremendous and the revolutions of the high-power motor deafening, I felt as safe as if sitting upon a sheltered balcony.”

Evans’ observations of flight painted a vivid picture. “The world we were leaving became very small — a strange little boy world. The great Carolina Hotel was the Noah’s Ark of my childhood.” To Evans, the people gathered on the ground resembled “a regiment of toy soldiers.” He marveled at the sight of “the golf links, a beautiful stretch of soft green, with strange square inserts to mark the putting greens, and the winding roads, silver ribbons; with the surrounding landscape stretching on and on, like the ocean, to infinity.”

When the Pinehurst resort’s lead photographer, Edmund L. Merrow, got wind of the fact that the Curtiss team was offering rides to intrepid passengers, he inquired whether the team would permit a photographer to snap pictures of Pinehurst from the air. The taking of photographs from an airplane was a nearly unheard of activity. No passenger, let alone one schlepping a camera, boarded a plane until 1908. The first such picture-taking occurred in 1909 when a passenger on a plane flown in Italy by Wilbur Wright filmed a three-minute motion picture. It appears that the first aerial photos from a plane in American skies occurred above San Diego in January 1911, just two months before the Curtiss biplane’s flights over Pinehurst.

Merrow convinced the Curtiss team to allow someone to tag along as Beachey’s passenger and take aerial pictures, but the 51-year-old elected not to undertake the project himself, delegating it to his 29-year-old assistant, Ellsworth C. Eddy. The two men had been associated since around 1900, when Merrow hired the young Eddy to assist him at his photography shop in Bethlehem, New Hampshire. During the winter months, Merrow would migrate south to Pinehurst, where he photographed dances, sporting activities and various goings-on at the resort. In 1907, he persuaded Eddy to join him in the Sandhills. During the ensuing four years, the two men were a photographic team, rotating between New Hampshire and Pinehurst, depending on the season.

For Eddy, camera work in Pinehurst had been an enjoyable, though not especially profitable, gig. It allowed him an opportunity to hobnob with celebrities like bandleader John Philip Sousa and sharpshooter Annie Oakley, and now Beachey, Saito and Evans. Flying was not something Eddy was eager to experience, but his assignment required it. As he approached the biplane on March 25, 1911, Eddy presumably wondered whether his $17 per week paycheck was worth it. Would he ever see his wife and children again?

Eddy was greeted at the Curtiss tent on March 25 by the confident Beachey, garbed in coat, vest, white shirt and tie with hat turned backward. Eddy’s diary reveals his trepidation. “I was scared at first when the pilot said before he would take me up, I would have to sign a release absolving him of any liability.”

Despite misgivings, Eddy signed the exculpatory document, and after being outfitted “in a leather jacket, goggles and hat tied on,” he found himself aloft with Beachey over Pinehurst. Buffeted by the wind, his vision impaired by goggles, and struggling to maintain his balance sans seat belt while hoisting the camera, the picture-taking was cumbersome if not downright harrowing. But Eddy managed to snap six pictures of the town and airfield below.

The images clearly depict early Pinehurst, then 16 years in existence, and still in the nascent stages of development. No longer a denuded pine barrens, hundreds of newly planted trees and other ornamental plantings created a boulevard affect along Carolina Vista, Magnolia and Ritter roads. In 1911, the latter road, unlike today, passed directly in front of the Carolina Hotel. The “Music Room,” shown at the right of the hotel, would later be razed and replaced by another structure that currently houses the hotel’s spa. While a substantial number of homes are visible, housing density is low. The tented Curtiss airfield is depicted with onlooking spectators. 

His nerve-racking camerawork made young Eddy something of a trailblazer. He may have just missed being the first aerial photographer shooting from an airplane in the United States, but Steve Massengill’s book, Around Southern Pines, A Sandhills Album, confirms Ellsworth’s photos were the first such taken in North Carolina.

From their studio on the corner of Chinquapin and Magnolia roads, Merrow and Eddy immediately converted the unique images into postcards, and by early April they were on the market. According to local historian Larry Koster, “Pinehurst postcards were a cheap, easy way for the many tourists to convey both the beauty and attractions of this area to the folks back home.”  They also provided wonderful advertising for the resort.

Koster, who authored the 2009 publication The Photographers of Moore County and Their Postcards, has been searching for and collecting vintage Pinehurst postcards for 25 years. He eventually acquired examples of all six postcards depicting the aerial images taken by Eddy and, in recognition of their historical significance, has donated them to the Tufts Archives.

On Thursday, April 7, 1911, Beachey, according to The Outlook, “took the big bird apart, packed it in its snug cage and left for Fayetteville, the first point of many which lie before him.” Waxing eloquently, the article noted that residents would miss the plane’s “weird notes at dawn, twilight or high noon, its presence in the sky, the grotesque, fleeting shadow.”

The writer compared the sight of Beachey’s jaw-dropping flights to “the grandeur of Niagara — the spectrum in the spray and the roar of the waters.” The reference proved a precursor to Beachey’s incredible exhibition at Niagara Falls less than three months later, on June 26, 1911. For the stupendous sum of $4,000, he dove his Curtiss Pusher straight for the center of Horseshoe Falls, his aircraft suddenly vanishing in the mist. Many spectators swooned at what they perceived was the pilot’s certain demise. With spray stinging the Birdman’s face, his plane suddenly shot out “like a cannonball” from the bottom of the mist, after plunging to within inches of the raging river. Having been offered an additional bonus of $1,000 for flying beneath the arch of Honeymoon Bridge, Beachey promptly tacked on that daunting stunt. One newspaper declared him “the eighth wonder of the world, and his dive into the Falls, the greatest aerial feat of all time.”

In August, Beachey performed more amazing exploits at a Chicago aerial competition. He shattered the world record for altitude, attaining 11,642 feet, but it was his crowd-pleasing stunts that would be remembered best. Eyeing a locomotive headed into the city, he dropped down to brush his wheels atop the train, then passed within spitting distance on both sides of the passenger cars while waving to those inside. Then, Beachey hopped his plane from one car to the next.

In a subsequent flight, dressed as a woman for dramatic effect, he frightened the spectators with a seemingly out of control dive directly at the grandstand. Beachey pulled the plane up just 8 feet from mayhem. He turned and headed toward the central city, where he ducked under power lines, bounced off tops of cars and buildings, then landed to a 10-minute standing ovation after pulling off his wig revealing his true identity. In a rather somber note, two pilots attempting similar dives crashed and died at the meet.

Over the next three years, Beachey’s aerial acrobatics would further cement his fame. Even Orville Wright acknowledged his aerial mastery. “Beachey is more magnificent than I had imagined,” proclaimed Wright. “I have watched him closely with my glasses and have never seen him make an error or falter. An aeroplane in the hands of Lincoln Beachey is poetry . . . He is the most wonderful flyer of all.” Thomas Edison paid similar tribute.

His numerous affairs ultimately undermined Beachey’s marriage. Minnie divorced him in 1913. In the court proceeding, she claimed her husband had conducted illicit affairs in 32 cities. One headline read, “Aviator’s Conquest Not of Air Alone.” He also received increasing press criticism because so many pilots perished in attempts to duplicate his various stunts. A San Diego Union editorial, noting his “wild performances,” opined that “there is serious doubt as to whether Beachey should be allowed to continue.” The barrage took its toll on the flier, who announced on May 13, 1913, “You could not make me enter an aeroplane at the point of a revolver. I am done.” In his statement, Beachey castigated the attendees at his exhibitions, saying they “paid to see me die.” 

His retirement, however, was short-lived. Four months later, he was flying in exhibitions again. Instead of throttling back his theatrics, the Birdman presented an array of new tricks in his comeback: flying both upside down and backward, inside and through a San Francisco building. He raced his plane around a track against the country’s top race car driver, Barney Oldfield. At times during a race, Beachey would cause the front wheel of his plane to graze Oldfield’s head.

Then, in November 1913, Beachey debuted a maneuver which would become his signature stunt: the loop-the-loop, in which he would dive, pull back on the controls at 1,000 feet, then climb until the nose of the airplane would fall back beyond the vertical. Then he would repeat the stunt — again and again. He conceded he was pushing the limits. “I do not intend to let the margin of safety and disaster be any wider than I can help. Beachey never cheats the crowds, that is, excepting those who come to see me die.”

His acrobatics drew the attention of America’s top military brass, who were starting to realize that the maneuvers Beachey had mastered could have application in warfare. In September 1914, the secretaries of the Army and Navy invited him to Washington, D.C., for a demonstration. Beachey was intent on making an impactful splash. At one point, he aimed his biplane toward the Oval Office of the White House, where an aghast President Woodrow Wilson saw him coming. The Birdman pulled up and away at the last instant.

Similar acrobatics were directed at the Capitol Building. Congress was then in session, but promptly adjourned so that the members could view Beachey’s theatrics. If any legislator present harbored doubts regarding the usefulness of airplanes in wartime, Beachey’s performance erased them. When subsequently huddled with assembled Congressmen, he remarked, “If I had had a bomb, you would be dead. You were defenseless. It is time to put a force in the air.”

In March 1915, Beachey came home to San Francisco to perform at the Panama Pacific International Exhibition. As he strolled around the fairgrounds arm-in-arm with his new 23-year-old fiancée Merced Wallace, his star was at its zenith. In the four years since his Pinehurst visit, he had become an aviation legend and an A-list celebrity. To honor their hometown hero, the organizers had proclaimed March 14 “Beachey Day.” 

There had also been significant changes in the life of Ellsworth Eddy since his flight with the Birdman. He had left Merrow’s employ in the fall of 1911 because his salary was insufficient to support a family. To make ends meet, he worked at the Carolina Hotel for a year, renting out horses to guests. In the spring of 1913, he opened his own photography studio on Pennsylvania Avenue in Southern Pines and became the town’s go-to photographer until he and his wife retired to Florida in 1946. He passed away in 1973, at age 91.

Lincoln Beachey was not destined to approach the photographer’s lifespan. His demise was especially ironic. It came after he said he would give the 50,000 Beachey Day spectators, “a show they’ll never forget.” While flying his new monoplane, Beachey launched into one of his patented dives. The right wing of the plane suddenly failed, breaking under the pressure. Then the left wing followed suit. As the enormous San Francisco crowd watched in horror, he crashed into the bay at 210 miles per hour. Though surviving the initial impact, he was unable to get free from his restraints and drowned. Lincoln Beachey was just 28.

Tributes to the “Man who Owned the Sky” came from all over the country. There were plans for a permanent memorial in San Francisco, and money was contributed for that purpose though the funds were subsequently repurposed toward America’s efforts in World War I.

As new aviation heroes like Eddie Rickenbacker and Charles Lindbergh took the national stage, memories of Beachey and his incredible early achievements faded into obscurity. He was elected to the Aviation Hall of Fame in 1966 and the International Acrobatics Hall of Fame in 1990. And a small band of aviation devotees still honor the flyer every March 14 — Beachey Day — by dropping pink roses into San Francisco Bay.

In Pinehurst, a town that venerates its storied history, the whirr of his biplane’s engine is a distant memory preserved only in a picture postcard captured by a reluctant cameraman.  PS

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

Fiction by Ashley Walshe

Photograph by Julianne Ziebell

Here’s something they don’t warn you about time travel: all the bubbles.

Big deal, you might think. You’re surrounded by floating orbs of ever-changing color and light. Yes, they can be pretty spectacular. But until you’ve lived through this kind of high magic — and a precious few have — you cannot know what a psychedelic trip these iridescent spheres are capable of inducing, especially when you’re off dipping through time and space.

And in the summer of 1892, that is precisely what The Tiger Sisters were doing. Time traveling. Or preparing for it, rather. Why? Because they’d pretty much mastered everything else.

The Tiger Sisters were perhaps the most legendary circus performers of their day. No, they weren’t slinking around in the cage with the exotic cats. They were acrobats, most famous for their high-wire and flying trapeze performances, although you should have seen them on horseback. They got their name because of their propensity for wearing matching stripes, which was part of their cutesy act. It worked. Most people had no clue that they were actually in their mid-30s — and spacetime pioneers to boot. 

So why were these three brilliant explorers living the carnie life? The money was good, for one thing. They also really loved feeding the elephants. And do you know what kind of physical shape you’ve got to be in to do a forward flip on the back of a galloping horse? The circus arts kept them spry. If they were going to time travel — yes, the culmination of their life’s work — then they were going to need to stay pretty limber.

The Tiger Sisters made a pact on the summer evening of their maiden voyage: Wherever they landed, past or future, as long as it was summer, they would be OK. Because summer, as every seasoned circus artist knows, is the most magical time of the year. And where there is magic, all is well.

What happened next is a mystery to all but three. There were bubbles, sure. So many bubbles. They could never have prepared for so many.

Some say the sisters never returned — just, poof! — vanished without a trace, erasing themselves from the very fabric of existence. Think about it. Have you ever heard of The Tiger Sisters? Ever seen their likeness on a vintage circus poster? Only the elephants seemed to notice their absence.

Others say they’re still floating around out there in the dreamy light of an endless summer. Still in their matching striped outfits. Showing up in this century and that. Still a bit woozy from the riot of bubbles.  PS

Ashley Walshe lives in Asheville and is dreaming up her next grand adventure. 

Julianne Ziebell is a mother, a military spouse, an anthropologist by training, and a photographer by passion. You can find more of her work at www.julianneziebellphotography.com.

Fiction by Ron Rash

Illustrations by Lyudmila Tomova

 

St. Louis Globe-Democrat, March 25, 1904

Horace Kephart Is Held for Observation

FORMER LIBRARIAN ARRESTED AS HE WAS WALKING TOWARD EADS BRIDGE

Horace Kephart, aged 42 years, residing at 1821 Kennett place, who was succeeded on February 1 last as librarian of the Mercantile library by William L. R. Gifford, after he had held the position for fourteen years, was arrested at 2 o’clock yesterday afternoon and placed in the observation ward at the city hospital, pending an investigation into his mental condition.

His arrest was brought about by his peculiar actions in Marre’s saloon, 518 Washington avenue. After buying a glass of beer there yesterday, it is said, he engaged the bartender, Edward Wasen, in conversation, during the course of which he placed in Wasen’s hands a lengthy letter, written in pencil on rough wrapping paper, in which he expressed an intention of committing suicide. Police Officer Mannion was at once notified. After following Kephart a block or so along Washington avenue toward Eads bridge the officer stopped him and called an ambulance.

Kephart is a well-known magazine writer. He is a graduate of both Yale and Cornell universities

 

In his insanity, he’d believed two of his closest friends were diabolical enemies. They had hired cutthroats from docks and dim alleys to come in the night and murder him. He heard them pry at his window sill, test the doorknob as they searched for a way inside. He stayed up until dawn, talking aloud, sometimes shouting so they knew he wasn’t sleeping. Only a policeman’s intervention prevented his ending the torment himself. An overwrought brain. That had been a doctor’s diagnosis. When he had finally been allowed to leave the hospital, all the promise he’d shown in college and graduate school, his time at the Yale library before coming to Saint Louis, were meaningless. He was forty-two years old, his life reduced to prurient fodder for newspapers.

♣

He had first visited wild places as a teenager, camping and hiking in the Adirondacks of upper New York state. When he’d taken a head librarian position in Saint Louis, there had been camping trips to nearby forests. He’d become proficient enough in woodcraft to write articles for outdoor magazines. He’d needed these respites from the library work, the rush and clamor of city life, a marriage that had begun to fall apart. But mere respites had finally not been enough.

To find himself, he had to go where he could not be found. Later, when he led the fight to create the Smoky Mountains National Park, he’d write, I wanted to save these mountains because they saved me. But that would be later. When they let him out of the hospital, he sought the solitude of forests. He’d studied a topographical map of the eastern United States, searching for the blank spaces and contour lines that revealed the least inhabited region, the Smoky Mountains of western North Carolina and east Tennessee. He went by train to Dillsboro, North Carolina. Then onward, first by roads, then by trails, and finally following only a narrowing stream into deeper woods. All that he’d brought with him was his tent and an ox sled of supplies. He made a campsite beside the creek, pitched his tent.

For three months, he stayed there. Next to his campsite the stream slowed and deepened. He had never seen water so pure and clear. He’d read that in India those with afflicted minds were set beside rivers so that the sound of the water’s passage could restore their sanity. He fell asleep and waked to the rhythms of the water. The insomnia that had tormented him for years lessened. All the wilderness asked of him was to listen.

And to see. When he gazed into the pools, he could make out the individual pebbles in the sandy beds. When the midday sun shone on the water, flakes of mica made the white sand spark. The clarity of the water entered his mind. The hallucinations ceased; the melancholy began to lift. One early afternoon he saw his own face in the water. Not a reflection but instead a merging, becoming one with the stream, the forests, the mountains. Sometimes he would see speckled trout. They were the most beautiful of fish — their flanks spotted green, red, and gold, their orange fins wavering. They were small, fragile, unable to live anywhere except the purest water. He wondered what it felt like to live inside such weightlessness.

Days passed, then weeks. He grew stronger, both in body and mind. As he explored and observed, the woods became so familiar he no longer needed a compass. Instead of a watch, sunlight and shadows showed him when he needed to turn around, make his way back to his campsite before darkness fell. Unlike in the world he’d fled, seconds and minutes no longer mattered. Wasn’t the awareness of time so much a part of what he’d fled, the way it so often directed his mind to obsess on past regrets or future fears? Wasn’t the numbness he’d sought with alcohol an attempt to escape such awareness? In the daylight, he could believe he was shedding the past as a snake sheds its skin.

But some nights the old torments came. The sound of the water was not enough. The cold light of the moon, the hoot of an owl, became ominous. On such nights, he felt a deep loneliness; he could not completely rid himself of such a deep-rooted human need. Daylight would come and despair, like the dew, evaporated, but he found himself seeking the companionship of others. He came to know some of the scattered families who also lived in these mountains. He occasionally made his way to the village, even had visitors at his campsite. But only occasionally.

As the days passed, senses he had not known within himself awakened. One afternoon he was walking through the woods when a fallen tree lay in his path. He was about to step over it, had raised his foot to do so, when some atavistic impulse made him stop. For a few moments he’d simply stood there, unsure what had happened. What had halted him was nothing seen or heard. For a few moments longer he listened, heard nothing, saw nothing. He walked around, not over, the fallen tree to see what lay where his foot would have stepped. He saw it then, the coiled, satin-black body, the arrow-shaped head, the blunted tail that rattled once, stilled. The snake uncoiled itself and vanished into the underbrush.

Another afternoon while he passed beneath a rocky cliff, he felt he was being watched. As with the rattlesnake, he paused, saw and heard nothing. He’d walked on, but the sense of being observed would not leave him. Twice more he stopped and looked behind him. The third time he looked up, not back, and saw the mountain lion on a ledge. The cat swished its black-tipped tail three times, then turned away. How much had we lost, he’d wondered after such moments — not just knowledge but an expansiveness of being? What more might we discover within ourselves if fully attentive to the world?

After three months, colder weather came. He moved into an abandoned cabin even deeper into the wilderness. The cabin would be his home for three years. He left for days at a time, made the long journey down Hazel Creek to the nearby village. He wrote and published articles about the wilderness that surrounded him. Other times he shared his cabin with visitors. He had never thought of himself as a hermit, but most days and nights he was alone. The hallucinations did not return, but there were still periods of melancholy, and not always at night.

One autumn morning a soft rain fell; fog wreathed the trees. He had not been here long enough to find, as he later would, solace in such weather. The grayness had turned his mind inward, resurfacing the vexations he had come here to escape. Despite the weather, he left his cabin to walk along the stream, hoping movement might help ease his mind. Then the rain lessened, stopped. The fog unknit itself and the strands drifted away. He was passing through a stand of poplar trees when, like a lamp wick being turned up, the yellow leaves brightened and the world shimmered in a golden light. The air was charged, and he felt his heart lift, a sensation beyond words, awe the only word proximate. But that morning it had seemed any attempt to define the sensation with language was such a puny, human thing. Though he would eventually write a whole book about these mountains, describe the plant and animal life in detail, extol the landscape’s pristine beauty, there were moments like this that he would never put on paper.

His detractors, then and now, called him a romantic, which was true. He had read Petrarch, Wordsworth, and Thoreau, learned from and been inspired by them. But he did not believe himself a sentimentalist. A part of what had brought him here was to abide in a world without sham. Arrogance and bluster did not impress nature. It did not suffer fools. A heedless step above a waterfall would send the rich and poor, the powerful and the powerless, to their deaths. No bribe or petition would make it otherwise. Wilderness could not be corrupted by humans, but humans often destroyed what they could not corrupt.

One summer afternoon he followed the stream beside the cabin to its source, then went farther up the mountain until nothing rose above him but the sky. He looked out at the surrounding mountains and valleys, the virid green of the nearer ridges, the hazy blue of the farther mountains. But he also saw something else, smoke rising from a lumber camp. He knew what would come next, the sound of axes and saws, then the clamor of a train engine bringing more men and axes and saws — a wilderness chained to flat cars and hauled away. Whole mountains scalped, the stumps of felled trees like gravestones. Streams fouled, dead fish clotting the shallows.

He had already witnessed such devastation in the nearby Black Mountains, nothing left but a wasteland of stumps and silt. It would soon happen here too if not stopped, was happening. When logging began on Hazel Creek, he was forced to abandon the cabin and move to a boardinghouse on the wilderness’s eastern flank. So he joined others who understood what was being lost. Following the example of John Muir, who’d garnered nationwide support to establish Yosemite National Park, the coalition sought allies both in and outside the Smokies.

For a quarter-century, he and his compatriots fought against the timber companies to create the Smoky Mountains National Park. Though he continued to disappear into the woods, sometimes camping for weeks, most of his energy was focused on helping save the East’s last great forest.

He wrote letters and articles, made trips to Washington. What he and others could not accomplish with words, his friend George Masa did with photographs depicting both the forests that had been destroyed and the ones that might soon be. Wilderness advocates across the nation joined the fight. Newspapers in North Carolina and Tennessee furthered the cause.

But the timber companies had their advocates too. The attacks against the park’s best-known supporters became personal. He found himself denounced publicly as a Bolshevik, an opium addict, a drunk, a man who’d been deserted by his own wife and family. Because of his Japanese ancestry, Masa was denounced as a foreigner. Attempts were made to deport him. The timber companies tried to bribe and threaten politicians who supported the park, and sometimes they succeeded. There were death threats too. Public meetings brimmed with potential violence. Again and again, it appeared the timber companies had won. By 1920, he wrote a friend that there was no hope. At such times the melancholy deepened. He feared the insanity might return.

But each time all had appeared lost, crucial support came. Children gave pennies at school. John D. Rockefeller donated five-million dollars. George Masa’s photographs convinced Grace Coolidge, the First Lady, to join the cause. The governors of Tennessee and North Carolina advocated for the park in their states and in Washington. Newspaper editors in Knoxville and Asheville wrote more editorials. Public opinion became solidly pro-park, even after the stock market crashed, plunging the country into depression.

Now it is April 2, 1931. Two months ago, he went to Washington with Governor Horton and Governor Gardner to hand over to the Secretary of the Interior the deeds to the purchased land. It was only 150,000 acres, three-hundred thousand short of officially being a national park, but enough to satisfy the National Park Service. It will happen, he believes, though it may take another year or two to complete the final deeds and sales.

♣

A light knock at his door breaks his reverie.

Mr. Kephart, his landlady says. Your friend is waiting in the parlor.

Tell Mr. Tarleton I’ll join him shortly, he replies.

Earlier today Tarleton congratulated him, believing the park now an inevitability. But the envelope in his hand, which came in the afternoon mail, makes clear not everyone agrees. Kephart, Go back to St. Louis and your asylum or you will be killed, the enclosed note threatens. A newspaper clipping accompanies the note, dated March 25, 1904. Horace Kephart Is Held for Observation, the headline proclaims. The timber companies and their minions have not yet given up. He places the clipping and the note back in the envelope. In Saint Louis, a diseased mind had convinced him of all sorts of plots to take his life; now sanity argues not to dismiss this threat. But advocating for the park has brought death threats before, to him and others.

In September he will be sixty-nine. He never imagined that he might live this long. Yet his wrinkles and gray hair confirm it. He feels the rheumatism in his knees and back, no doubt in part from decades of hiking and camping. Though still able to hike farther than many men half his age, he knows these ailments may soon force him to spend less time in the forests than he’d wish. But if the time comes when he is confined in this room, he will be able to look out his window and see the mountains, one of which has been named Mount Kephart.

He thinks of the cabin on Hazel Creek. Once the park is complete, neither he nor anyone will live there again. It pleases him to imagine the wilderness slowly reclaiming the cabin. There will come a time when the land itself will have forgotten the cabin’s once-presence. By then the scars left by the timber companies will have healed. Even the railroad tracks will rust away. The envelope with the newspaper clipping and threat is still in his hand. He tears it in half, drops it into the trash can.

I wanted to save these mountains because they saved me, he’d written. It was a grandiose statement. They had indeed saved him, but others had paid a cost, most of all his wife. As for his children, they are all but strangers. Altruism is invariably a means to conceal one’s personal failures. The spouse of a timber baron had told him that three years ago at a public meeting. The statement haunts him. And for all of his words about the healing aspects of nature, his desire for liquor has never been quelled. There continue to be times he drinks himself into unconsciousness.

Perhaps tonight as well. He takes out his pocket watch, checks it. It is almost time to meet his friend Tarleton. They have hired a driver to take them to a bootlegger. They will drink tonight. If, as is his wont, he will be no good in the morning, he will lie in bed most of the day to recover. But even so, by this weekend he will be revived enough to join George Masa for a hike. He has a surprise for George. Last spring as he was hiking alone, he discovered a patch of Oconee Bells. They are found nowhere else in the world except here and a few neighboring counties. Even here they are extremely rare. In all of his years wandering these mountains, he had never come upon them until last spring. Now it is their bloom time once more, the white flowers rising from the dark-green glabrous leaves. This late in life, what wonder to have finally seen them.

He rises from the chair, fetches the key he will lock his door with, and will never need again.  PS

♣

Coda: Horace Kephart and his friend Fiswoode Tarleton died in a car wreck on the night of April 2, 1931. The driver survived but gave contradictory answers as to what happened. Kephart’s body was discovered forty feet from the car, the cause of death a broken neck. On September 2, 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated The Great Smoky Mountains National Park “for the permanent enjoyment of the people.”