For the Love of Nothing

An entire month devoted to . . . whatever

By Susan S.Kelly

I speak now for that silent minority who fear to voice, confess, or admit their glad anticipation for, their deep abiding love for, their eternal gratitude for . . .  January. Believe ye: there are those of us who crave every endless 31 days of a month so roundly dreaded by so many.

Bring it, baby.

For quad-A overachievers, list-makers, and borderline OCD peeps like myself, January is the season of somnolence, of letting go. For over-organized souls, nothing beats a full-on month of . . . nothing.

No holidays, and therefore no searching, purchasing, wrapping, hiding. No candy. No centerpieces. No costumes or cocktails. No (unspoken but acknowledged) competing for best dessert or coleslaw or fireworks or slalom or Easter basket or parade float. Personal bonus: no family birthdays.

No yard work. Everything is leafless, hideous, and charmless, and with any luck, will stay that way for six more weeks. The only outdoor chore is filling the feeder. No to-dos of raking, mowing — it’s too early to even prune. Nothing needs fertilizing, watering. Even kudzu is temporarily tamed to a crinkled, wrinkled weed. I’m so thankful it’s too early to force quince or forsythia; no sense of obligation there, and if you still force narcissus, I have a collection of lovely forcing vases and trays and even the rocks that you’re welcome to. Sorry, but I need to hold on to the gin that stiffens the stems. And I love my roses, but, boy, do I love when they’re whacked off and not producing, and therefore not accusing me of leaving them to grow blowsy and frowsy rather than cutting and delivering them to someone whose life, living room, and outlook would be improved by — oh, never mind. I may be the only person you know who gets depressed when the first bulbs begin blooming.

No fundraisers on PBS. This is huge.

Nothing at the farmer’s market equals absolution from waking early to haul yourself there, and trying to fairly spread your vegetable benevolence to several farmers with pleading eyes. Nothing edible locally means seasonal broccoli and citrus with unknown origins are just fine. As for other aspects of eating, in January it’s practically unpatriotic not to exist on semi-solid foodstuffs straight from your Crock-Pot. Go ahead, add another packet of taco mix to that pork butt, onion soup mix to that chuck roast, chili mix to that ground beef. Dow, Inc. knows: Better living through chemicals.

No campaigns, primaries, elections. No yard signs. No door-to-door, ’cause it’s too cold for solicitors, and if you haven’t gotten your subscriptions and wrapping paper by now, sorry. And altar guilds everywhere — Rejoice! and God rest ye merry gentlemen and women — no need for changing altar hangings and linens. Even at church, once you get past Epiphany, there’s a nice long stretch of nothing until the deprivations of Lent. As for resolutions, by mid-month they’re mostly moot, admit it.

Within the narrow demographic of January adorers, there’s an even smaller contingent: the snow lovers. For those of us dreamers, hopers, prayers and devotees of white stuff, January is the month during which those fervent desires are most likely to be fulfilled. For those who disloyally decamp for sunny Southern climes, desert isles, and ski slopes, all the better. Less car and foot traffic to mar the peaceful white perfection of a snowfall. Sorry, dear, I couldn’t get to the grocery store for supper supplies. Feel free to scrape whatever’s left in the . . . Crock-Pot.

It occurs to me that, were I ever to get a face-lift, January would be an opportune time.

Isn’t it divine to go to the movies and catch up on all those blockbusters you missed and get just the seat you want? Because no one else is there. Plus, you’re exonerated from even going to the movies: Everybody knows nothing Oscar-worthy is released between January and March.

Not that I encourage sloth, far from it. January is the month made for domestic industries, with the iPod blasting in your ears and no fear of anyone catching you atonally belting tunes with Justin Timberlake or Taylor Swift. Consolidate coupons, cull the catalogs, schedule your spanking, sparkling pristine new calendar with all the birthdays you forgot last year. Polish silver. Then, transfer your earbuds to your laptop, scoot your socked feet to the fire, and proceed to unabashedly binge Netflix, knowing you’ve earned and are entitled to The Right to Relax.

Oh, poor despised, derided month, that span of gloom and chill, so scorned and shunned by humanity, I’ll be there for you, bundled and content, cheering you on. Hermits, unite. We knew what Oscar Wilde really was referring to when he uttered, “the love that dare not speak its name” — we few, we happy few, who wallow, with glee, in January.  PS

Susan Kelly is a blithe spirit, author of several novels, and proud new grandmother.

Wrestling Prose

An iconic insider on the art of writing well

By Stephen E. Smith

In his latest book, Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process, John McPhee deconstructs the process he’s spent a lifetime perfecting: writing on obscure subjects and delighting a discerning readership with technical explanations, entertaining narratives, and meticulous description, all of it couched in impeccable prose.

He begins by analyzing the most complex component of the writing process: structure. Using as an example his New Yorker article on the Pine Barrens, McPhee admits to spending two weeks lying on a picnic table in his backyard staring up into the branches and leaves and “fighting fear and panic” because he couldn’t visualize a structure for the material he’d assembled. Years of extensive research — interviews, articles, books, personal observations, etc., all of it cataloged on coded note cards — had gone into the project, but he couldn’t overcome the dread of banging out that first sentence and arranging the material in a readable form. Eventually, he overcame his writer’s block and produced an article that morphed into the bestselling book, but the experience was painful — and instructive. In an attempt to convey the intricacies of the process, McPhee employs a series of drawings and diagrams that, unfortunately, do little to untangle the complexities of problems he’d confronted. But readers shouldn’t be deterred. As with many of McPhee’s books, there’s a preliminary learning curve to overcome before landing on the safe side of abstraction.

In “Editors and Publishers,” McPhee delves into the internal workings of The New Yorker and the publishing house of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. His insider anecdotes are informative and humorous and include character sketches of the editors and editorial staff, affectionately detailing their eccentricities. “Mr. Shawn [editor of The New Yorker] actually seemed philosophical about its [an obscenity] presence in the language, but not in his periodical. My young daughters, evidently, were in no sense burdened as he was.” He also contributes an anecdote concerning Shawn’s objection to writers turning in copy about locations that were cold, such as Alaska or Newfoundland: “If he had an aversion to cold places it was as nothing beside his squeamishness in the virtual or actual presence of uncommon food” — although Shawn approved a McPhee proposal to write about eating road kill in rural Georgia. 

In “Elicitation,” he dispenses useful advice on the art of interviewing, citing as an example his experience with comedian Jackie Gleason. His description of “The Great One,” bits and pieces of relevant detail — Gleason called everyone “pal” — creates a living and breathing facsimile of the comedian, and older readers will find themselves transported back to The Honeymooners and the loveable peccadilloes of the irascible Ralph Kramden. In a Time cover story on Sophia Loren, irony functions as description, succinctly capturing Loren’s appeal: “Her feet are too big. Her nose is too long. Her teeth are uneven. She has the neck, as one of her rivals has put it, of ‘a Neapolitan giraffe.’ Her waist seems to begin in the middle of her thighs, and she has big, half-bushel hips. She runs like a fullback. Her hands are huge. Her forehead is low. Her  mouth too large. And, mamma mia, she is absolutely gorgeous.”

Gleason and Loren notwithstanding, McPhee devotes an entire chapter to a discussion of “frame of reference,” pieces of common knowledge that a writer employs to enhance a subject’s comprehensibility. He cautions against using allusions that don’t possess durability, warning that writers should never assume that anyone has seen a movie that might be used as an allusion. “In the archives of ersatz reference,” he writes, “that one [movies] is among the fattest folders.” He notes that popular culture changes with such rapidity that it’s dangerous for a writer to conclude that any allusion carries the weight of meaning necessary to elucidate a subject. To prove his point, McPhee polled his Princeton students using references such as Paul Newman, Fort Knox, Cassius Clay, Rupert Murdoch and discovered that the majority of his undergrads registered a low degree of recognition — and when it came to identifying Peckham Rye, Churchill Downs, Jack Dempsey, George Plimpton, and Mort Sahl, his students were blissfully ignorant.

In his final chapter, McPhee again confronts writer’s block. In a note written to a frustrated student, he suggests a remedy: “Sometimes in a nervous frenzy I just fling words as if I were flinging mud at a wall. Blurt out, heave out, babble out something — anything — as a first draft. With that you’ve achieved a sort of nucleus. Then, as you work it over and alter it, you begin to shape sentences that score higher with eye and ear.”

If there’s a fault with McPhee’s writing, and it’s difficult to find even the smallest gaffe, it’s an occasional touch of the dictionary disease: demonym, multiguously, bibulation, horripilation, etc. — words that will force the reader to touch his index finger to the Kindle screen, or God forbid, crack open a dictionary.

McPhee is straightforward, practical, and illustrative, detailing the struggles serious writers endure on a daily basis and pointing out, finally, that creativity is the product of what the writer chooses to write about, how he approaches the subject and arranges the material, the skill he demonstrates in describing characters, the kinetic energy of the prose, and the extent to which the reader can visualize the characters and story. As always, he writes with grace and charm, and Draft No. 4 earns a niche on the bookshelf next to Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, the Harbrace College Handbook, Writing Down the Bones, Roget’s International Thesaurus, and the OED.   PS

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven books of poetry and prose. He’s the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry and four North Carolina Press awards.

By Any Other Name

It still feels like home

By Bill Fields

Not long ago, to go with an application and prove that I am who I said I am, I had to retrieve my birth certificate. There are no surprises on it, mind you. I was born at what was then called Moore Memorial
Hospital on a May morning much longer ago than seems possible. But my birth year isn’t as jarring as my footprints on the reverse side, which are so tiny they can’t possibly belong to someone who has gotten his money’s worth on shoe leather since high school.

Although the legal paperwork of my coming into the world clearly notes that it happened in Pinehurst, sometimes I don’t know where I’m from. 

Let me explain. I have lived nearly six decades telling folks:

“I was born in Pinehurst.”

“I was born in Pinehurst but grew up about five miles away.”

“I was born in Pinehurst and grew up in Southern Pines.”

“I grew up in Southern Pines.”

“I grew up around Pinehurst.”

“I come from a town about 70 miles south of Raleigh.”

“Moore County.”

“Between the mountains and the beach.”

I suspect I’m not the only person to go through this geographical twister because what is a hometown? Is it where you were born? Where you were raised? Where you currently live? The tagline for this monthly column states that I am a native of Southern Pines, but am I really? 

My first days were in the 28374 not the 28387 and, for six months after graduating from college, I rented above what is now Dugan’s Pub a small apartment with factory-office carpeting and radiators that hissed an angry song on cold nights. A few years later, I lived in a cottage in Aberdeen that was lovely notwithstanding the electrical fire that started late on a November Saturday night and made me nostalgic for the vocal — but safe — heat in my $150-a-month home above the bar. 

If I am talking to golfers about my roots, “Pinehurst” is my go-to because they know where it is. Occasionally I elaborate and say I was born a couple of par-5s away from Course No. 2. But until I entered my teens, Pinehurst might as well have been Pittsburgh, so rarely did I visit. The village was what we skirted en route to my grandmother’s house in Jackson Springs on Sunday afternoons, an opponent for the Southern Pines Blue Knights and a bit of a mystery to someone who rarely ventured farther west than Knollwood Fairways on Midland Road.   

Pinehurst felt a little less foreign when I found out about “Fields Road,” a street named for a family with some connections to my dad. The road sign would have been a great backdrop for a selfie if there had been such a thing back then, but discovering it didn’t shake my identity as a kid from Southern Pines.

Arriving at Pinecrest reinforced how cloistered each town in the southern part of the county was. In those early weeks of sophomore year, I met — and became friends with — students who lived only a handful of miles from me: farm-strong football players from West End; Pinehurst folks who knew the quiet of a locals-only summer; a boy who had been the “Red Devil” mascot for Aberdeen High. 

The way the area has grown over the last couple of decades, town-limit markers don’t mean much on the commercial strips as franchise yields to franchise where U.S. 1 turned the corner onto Highway 15-501 and so much development seemed to follow. The core areas of the distinct dots on a map remain, certainly changed but recognizable, like the passport photos over one’s lifetime. 

For the last three decades, during which New England has been home but not home, I have an out when it comes to an explanation: “I live in Connecticut but am originally from North Carolina.”

Many times, though, I can’t resist making the finer distinction as well, pointing out that where I was born is not where I was raised. I didn’t need my name on my street to know it was mine.   PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.

A Grave Conversation

Technically speaking, it’s a different world up there

By Clyde Edgerton

My parents were born in 1902 and 1904 into homes without electricity. That kind of describes a starting point regarding my relationship to modern technology.

I remember an old Model T truck we kept in our backyard when I was a child. To start the engine, you inserted a crank into a hole below the radiator in the front grill. Then with the ignition turned on (after you’d primed the engine with the choke) you turned the crank until the engine started.

Our truck was equipped with a wooden trough across the back end of the truck bed — where the tailgate goes. At the end of the trough was a circular saw. You could jack up the back of the truck, place a saw-belt around a tire or axle, the belt would turn the saw, and you could cut firewood from logs.

My grandfather (born 1870) used to cutting wood with an ax, thought the contraption was unnecessary. Once, when he saw a neighbor cooking on a grill, he said, “We used to cook inside and go to the bathroom outside. Now they’re turning that around.”

After automobile electric windows, air conditioning and automatic transmissions came along in the ’40s and ’50s, my father and mother would have nothing to do with them (until the ’70s).

Now, on many days, I think about sitting by my father’s grave in Durham and having a conversation with him. He died in 1980.

“Daddy, how’s it going?” I would say.

“Nothing much happening on my end. How’s it going up there?”

“Right much happening on the technology end,” I’d say.

“I figured that might be coming. What about on the morality end?”

“Not much there . . . that seems to stay kind of constant. But on the technology part, I was just thinking about how when you bought a car for the family you always wanted the windows that were rolled up with a handle, no air conditioning and a straight transmission.”

“Oh yeah, I didn’t like the extras. But go ahead and feed me some new facts about technology, maybe politics, economics.”

“Let’s stay with technology,” I’d say. “No, wait a minute. On the politics: Do you remember Garland Fushee? The man who lived next to Tee Rawlings, service station?”

“Of course. How could anybody forget Garland Fushee?”

“Well, think about Garland being president,” I’d say.

“Garland Fushee?”

“Yes sir. Remember about how much Garland loved golf, and how much he would have loved to tweet about people he didn’t like?”

“Garland wasn’t a bird,” Daddy would say.

“Oh, that’s right. Sorry. Tweeting is something people do now. It’s connected in a roundabout way to technology. Connected to advances since the computer.”

“Computer? I remember that computer on campus at Chapel Hill back in 1971. Remember when we went in that building for a drink of water and you showed it to me. It filled up a room.”

“I do remember that. By the way, here in Wilmington, we buy water now — those who can afford it.”

“You buy water? What in the world?” Daddy would say.

“Long story,” I’d say. “It gets us over into economics, always connected to politics. Turns out our water problems are good for business.”

“How so?”

“Bottled-water business is looking up. And an upriver business releases chemicals into the water and a bunch of downriver businesses benefit: funeral homes, cremation services, pharmacies, hospitals, tombstone makers, florists.”

“Oh, I see. Hmmmm. Sounds like they’re finally backing off on regulations.”

“That’s the idea.”

“All in all, looks like I may have checked out at about the right time.”

“You could say that, Daddy. We’ll chat again in a few years. See how things are going.”

“Let’s do that, Son. See you then.”

And then I’d hop in my car and drive it back to Wilmington. In less than a decade it may be driving me. A lot of technology in a couple of lifetimes. PS

Clyde Edgerton is the author of 10 novels, a memoir and most recently, Papadaddy’s Book for New Fathers. He is the Thomas S. Kenan III Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at UNCW.

Old Friends

And a shared passion for the outdoors

By Tom Bryant

Jim Dean passed away peacefully in his sleep right before last Thanksgiving. I wrote this column a couple of years after he retired from his job as editor of Wildlife in North Carolina. The piece was to appear in an outdoor-related supplement to Business North Carolina. The supplement never ran, and I’ve held the story until now. Jim was my good friend and fellow sportsman.

“Let’s see, Tom, favorite trip. Man, that’s going to be hard. There’ve been hundreds of ‘em.” Jim was standing in front of his antique oak filing cabinet when I asked him to tell me about what he thought was his favorite adventure.

“But there was one.”

He hesitated and his eyes glowed as he began talking in a low voice. You could hear the longing for those old friends and the excitement of the trip.

“It was 1970 and my first time fishing out west. We did it right, Henry’s Fork on the Snake River. A. J. Johnson, his son, Alvin, and Reid Bahnson were with me. I remember it like yesterday. I prayed for days before the trip that if the plane had to crash, it would crash on the way home, not on the way out there. You know, I still remember the price of that plane ticket; and ironically, it cost more then than it does now, $742 round trip. The last time I flew out to Yellowstone, the fare was around $500 or so.

“What a time we had. We’d fish till 10:00 in the evening and be back at ‘em by 5:30 the next morning. We were indeed fortunate because during the 10 days that we were there, the Feds opened Lewis River in Yellowstone Park for fishing. We motored in on the Madison River and then rowed for miles up the shallow Lewis to catch fish like never before.”

Jim was indeed in the heart of trout territory. The Madison provides some of the finest fishing for wild rainbow and large brown trout in the country. And the Lewis River that flows south out of Lewis Lake into the Snake also has trout in abundance. I can only imagine the fish that were caught on a fly-fishing adventure of a lifetime.

Jim Dean and I go way back. We both broke into the newspaper business at the same property, The Times-News in Burlington. Jim later moved to Raleigh, and after a time, took over the helm of Wildlife in North Carolina. During his tenure with the magazine, he also became famous for his articles in such magazines as Field & Stream, Sports Afield, and Gray’s Sporting Journal. 

We were in Jim’s den, which any outdoorsman would give his last bamboo rod to own, reminiscing. “I was real lucky when I started at the Times-News,” Jim said. “Bill Hunter hired me and I couldn’t even type.”

In those days, the newspaper industry was famous for its writers. Most were individuals who had their own little idiosyncrasies, to say the least, and Bill Hunter fit the mold.

“My first assignment was to cover, I think for a Sunday paper, a girls’ softball team. It took me all morning to write a 6-inch story. In the meantime, Bill had put together a feature, two pages of sports, wrote the heads and sent them up to composing without proofing. He was the consummate professional, and I was indeed lucky to work for him. But you know, Tom, that whole paper was full of pros. Howard White, the editor, what a prince. You see that old filing cabinet over there? That piece came out of the Times-News. There was a bank of them against a wall, and in a modernization effort, the paper bought all new metal cabinets. Howard asked the staff if anyone wanted to buy one. I think I made 80 dollars a week when I signed on, and it took about every cent from week to week. Although back then, you could buy a week’s groceries for $20.00; but man, I wanted that cabinet. I asked Howard if I could pay for it in a week or so, and he said take it on home.

“That was a different era. Howard; Jim Lasley; Conner Jones; Bill Hunter; Essie Norwood, the society editor; the composing room, remember that crowd? Reading lead type produced on linotype machines upside down and backwards. You know, Tom, I can remember those days easier than I can remember last week.”

I watched as Jim got up to make another cup of coffee.

“I’ve had a great life,” he said over his shoulder. “I’ve always seemed to be in the right place at the right time.”

Jim Dean had a varied and exciting life. He was born at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia in 1940. His father, William Dean was from Roanoke Rapids; and his mother, Margaret Geneva Brown Dean, was from Woodland, North Carolina. Jim lived at West Point as a youngster while his father, a West Point graduate, taught math there until he went overseas in 1943.

Jim graduated from Roanoke Rapids High School and received a B.A. in English from the Virginia Military Institute. He then attended the University of North Carolina as a special student in journalism.

“You know, while I was at Carolina, I gained what was the equivalent of a journalism degree in a couple of semesters. I don’t believe they have that program any longer.”

Early on, Jim joined the army and was stationed at the Pentagon in Washington and later at Ft. Holabird in Baltimore. It was while he was stationed in Baltimore that the fly-fishing bug bit and he began writing about his experiences.

“My hero was Joe Brooks, the fishing editor of Outdoor Life,” Jim said as he sat back down with a full cup of coffee. “I’ve probably read everything that gentleman has written.”

“When I was 20 years old, I called Joe and told him that I was interested in outdoor writing and wondered if he could give me some advice on how to get started. He invited me to his house!

“I spent the day with that gentleman, and he opened a lot of doors for me. He taught me a ton, and I kept up with him for years.”

All this experience worked for Jim. When he was named editor of Wildlife in North Carolina in 1978, he wrote regularly for the publication, collaborating with associate editor Larry Earley to produce a book titled Wildlife in North Carolina, which featured articles, photographs and artwork published during the magazine’s 50-year history. In 1995, UNC Press also published a collection of his “Our Natural Heritage” columns titled Dogs that Point, Fish That Bite. In 2000, Jim also published The Secret Lives of Fishermen, a second collection of columns.

Jim has been a regular contributor to various outdoor magazines. In 2001 he was named contributing editor to Field & Stream where he wrote a regular bimonthly column entitled “Out There.”

“Tom, I’ve learned a lot about writing for these magazines. When I got started, not many people were doing what I aspired to do and that was to be a regular writer for a national publication. With the help of my old buddy Joe from Outdoor Life, I soon figured out that most magazine editors live on the edge of desperation. They are looking for a story to fill space. It doesn’t have to be artsy, just good. And if the editor asks for 2500 words, give him 2500 words, not 2600. And better yet, give him art! I became an accomplished photographer pretty early in my career. If you send an editor a complete package, edit plus photos and it’s halfway good, he’ll use it. Come on back here and check out my office.”

Jim’s office was outfitted just like you would expect. Old girly calendars from the ‘60s hung on the walls.

“I got these calendars out of A.J. Johnson’s country store up in the mountains.” Jim said. “They were hanging in my cabin up on Wilson’s creek, but I moved them down here when I gave up that place.”

Fly-fishing reels were all over the table, and Jim told me that they were for his trip coming up in a week or so. “Some of my old buddies from out west are going to meet me in Belize and we’re going to do a little bone fishing.”

Jim also has a cabin on the family farm close to Oxford. I read about it in several of his columns in Wildlife in North Carolina.

“Real primitive,” Jim said. “No running water or electricity, for that matter; but there is an old cast-iron wood cook stove that will put these modern inventions to shame. The farm is about 400 acres with a couple of good bass ponds. I used to bird hunt regularly; but like everywhere else, the quail have disappeared.”

Along with his skills as a writer, Jim also is an accomplished painter, using watercolors as his medium. He also carves duck decoys that would rival the early masters.

We walked back into the kitchen and I asked Jim about a photograph that was on the counter. It was of a pretty girl smiling into the camera as if she knew a secret about the photographer.

“That’s my daughter, Susan. Believe it or not, she has two children. She looks like a child herself. Susan lives up in Evington, Virginia. I also have a son, Scott, who lives in Dayton, Ohio. He graduated from North Carolina State and is a meteorologist.” The pride that every father has for his children was evident as Jim talked.

“These kids have meant everything to me. We’re great friends.”

“Tommy, I’ve been real lucky and have had a super life. Good friends, a great family, and the time to do what I love, and that’s to enjoy the great outdoors.”

I packed up my stuff, and we headed out on the back deck overlooking a carport that housed an old Bronco from the ‘70s, a four-wheel drive SUV, and a wrapped-up Harley Davidson motorcycle.

“I love my Harley,” Jim laughed. “I think I surprised everybody when I bought that thing. Call it my late life crisis. I think I’ll take it out for a spin this afternoon.”

As we were saying our good-byes, I asked Jim about his upcoming trip to Belize.

“I’ve never been down there, and I can’t wait to try out the bone fishing. We’re also going after permit. It’s gonna be a great time.”

And in perfect form, he ended our visit in true Jim Dean style.

“I also plan on hanging around in a hammock under those palm trees and drinking something cool and tall with one of those little umbrellas sticking out the top.”  PS

Tom Bryant, a Southern Pines resident, is a lifelong outdoorsman and PineStraw’s Sporting Life columnist.

The Road to Greatness

Along a historic American highway, the heart and soul of a nation is revealed

By Jim Dodson

Over the past few months I’ve been traveling the Great Wagon Road, researching a book about the 18th-century route that brought generations of Scotch-Irish, English and German immigrants to the American South, including both branches of my family.

Roughly following the so-called Great Warrior’s Path that lay along the eastern slopes of the Appalachian mountains from Pennsylvania to Georgia, used for millennia by native American peoples for hunting and warfare, the Great Wagon Road stretched more than 800 miles from Philadelphia to Augusta, Georgia, and was said to be the most traveled road in Colonial America.

Thomas Jefferson’s daddy mapped and named it, and a young George Washington cut his teeth scouting and fighting Indians along it. Dan’l Boone traveled the Road from North Carolina to the unexplored frontiers of Kentucky and Ohio, while three major wars that shaped our national identity were conducted along it: the French and Indian War followed by the American Revolution, and a dozen critical battles of the American Civil War, most notably the bloodbaths at Antietam and Gettysburg.

By my rough count at least three presidents and more than a dozen colleges and universities grew up along the Great Road, as I first heard a Salem College history professor call it 40 years ago, not to mention a dozen of Eastern America’s most important towns and cities, home to social visionaries and inventors who created everything from the Conestoga wagon to Texas Pete hot sauce and Krispy Kreme Doughnuts

Most of the early Quakers who populated Guilford and Alamance counties also made their way to a new life in these parts by traveling the Great Wagon Road, a branch of which was called the Carolina Road that took others (including my English and Scottish forebears) to Hillsborough and the coast.

Though I’m not yet halfway on my travels from Philadelphia to Georgia, thus far it has been a trip full of rewarding surprises, unexpected turns, fresh insights and inspiring encounters. In my quest to know more about where we collectively came from — and how this remarkable road shaped the nation we inhabit today — I’ve already traversed a dozen major battlefields and museums, attended lectures and church services, hung at the elbows of area historians and academic scholars, spent hours in local archives, historical associations and historic sites, investigated iconic forefathers and forgotten heroes, unapologetically played tourist everywhere I could, checked out the hokiest roadside attractions and sampled local cooking every chance I got. 

What a simple pleasure this project has been — not to mention a refresher course on the power of American democracy during one of the most divisive years in memory.   

For perspective, try Googling  “What Americans Know About Their Own History” and you may be deeply alarmed to learn what we collectively don’t know about our past and how our democracy was designed to work. Various polls over the past decade have shown, for example, that 67 percent of Americans have no idea what the purpose of the U.S. Constitution is for — or what exactly an “amendment” means. Another recent poll indicated more than half of high school graduates thought the 4th of July celebrated the end of the Civil War, another that the majority of Americans couldn’t simply name the three main branches of American government. 

The estimated half million frontier settlers who came down America’s first great “highway” beginning in the early 18th century — Ulster Scots, German Lutherans, Moravian bretheren, Amish and Menonite farmers, Presbyterian and Anglican preachers, and Eastern Jews — had no prescient awareness of the diverse nation they were collectively creating. The vast majority were simply ordinary folks who’d crossed oceans to seek a fresh start, religious freedom and a piece of the New World they could claim as home.

In the process, the native peoples of North America were largely marginalized and exterminated, a tale as old as the hills, and an entire race was enslaved — mistakes we are still struggling to come to terms with and compensate for today. 

For this and other reasons, my desire to travel the “Road that made America,” as a prominent Pennsylvania historian called it during a long lunch conversation, has been building in me for at least two decades.

That’s why my travels along the Great Wagon Road have been such a soul-stirring pleasure — a much-needed reminder of why America has always been great and simply needs to get back in touch with the values and principles that drew our forebears to a wilderness in the first place.

In Philadelphia, I dined at the historic City Tavern where the Sons of Liberty plotted the birth of a nation. I sat for a golden hour in a sunlit pew at Christ Church where Washington, Franklin and Betsy Ross worshipped, chatting with a fellow who lives and breathes the values of Benjamin Franklin, American’s first true Renaissance man

At Lancaster, I dove deep into Amish culture and found myself trying to eat my way through the nation’s oldest farmers’ market and discovering the origins of the revolutionary Conestoga wagon that carried pioneer Americans across the continent. Just down the road in York, where in 1778 the Second Continental Congress signed the Articles of Confederation (a prelude to our Constitution), I sat in on a delightful night of local historians spinning tales about a town where the American Industrial Revolution essentially began.

On a cold morning in late November, I attended the 154th reading of Abe Lincoln’s extraordinary Gettysburg Address with a distinguished Lincoln biographer, standing on the very spot in the National Cemetery where Lincoln gave the most inspiring speech in American history. Afterwards, I lunched with the nation’s leading Lincoln impersonator — a biology teacher from Illinois — who told me that “playing Lincoln” had profoundly changed his life in a dozen different ways. The next morning, I walked the famous battlefield at dawn where the course of the Civil War changed over three days in July of 1983. I could swear I heard drums.

Two weekends later, my wife and I joined a slow-moving line of cars inching across five miles of soulful Potomac countryside simply to drive — sans headlights — through the annual illumination of the Antietam National Battlefield, the 29th year that more than 1,500 area Scouts and volunteers have placed 23,000 luminaries on the tranquil killing ground where more Americans died on a single day than in any other battle. The next morning, we attended services at the oldest Episcopal church in West Virginia, just across the river in Shepherdstown, a gorgeous little Potomac town where the wounded of Antietam shared Trinity Church on alternate weeks going forward — the Union wounded one week, the wounded boys in butternut and gray the next. 

In Hagerstown, Maryland, where the German wing of my family got off the GWR to head west to a new life in Cumberland and West Virginia, we attended a wonderful German Christmas market and spent an hour learning about the Colonial origins of Christmas in America during a walking tour of town-founder Jonathan Hager’s original stone house. Our guide was a retired career military man named Max Gross whose love of local history was flat-out contagious. “We are a blend of so many diverse cultures and people in America,” he said, explaining how various aspects of Christmas traditions really came from a dozen different cultures ranging from Poland to Turkey. “We think of these traditions as uniquely ours, but we are the splendid sum of so many cultures and people who came together in a wilderness to form the greatest democracy in history.”

I could go on indefinitely about the diverse and lovely Americans I’ve met on my little odyssey through time and history, the sacred places I’ve walked, the many surprising things I’ve managed to learn, and even the hokey tourist traps I’ve explored with boyish glee.

For this correspondent, the year ahead holds the promise of more spiritually enriching encounters with people from all walks of American life,  a lesson of civic renewal  among people who love their towns and communities with a passion that is palpable, a devotion that is true. Despite our present differences, their Great Road ancestors, I suspect, would be proud of how far they — and we — have come.  PS

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

From Eagle Springs to Antarctica

Todd Pusser’s magical photos are a portrait of our wild and endangered world

By Jim Moriarty • Photographs by Todd Pusser

If you’re going to photograph something as low as a snake’s belly in a wagon rut, you have to get right down there with it so it’s no surprise to find Todd Pusser stretched out on his stomach somewhere in the Sonoran Desert, nose-to-nose with a snake at sun up. That may not be your idea of a good time but, to him, it’s hog — or maybe Gila monster — heaven. At its best, photography isn’t about pushing a button, it’s about pulling on heartstrings, even if the subject is a bit cold-blooded.

One of the 44-year-old Pusser’s exploring buddies is Gary Williamson, a 73-year-old retired Virginia state park ranger. “I love the way he would compose his shots,” says Williamson. “We’d see a snake stretched out and, if it was late in the day and there was a pretty sunset starting to form, he would lay right down with the sunset in the background and the snake in the foreground, whether it was a harmless snake or a venomous snake. Instead of just a close-up, he’ll have the habitat in the background. He has one of a scarlet kingsnake in burned pinewoods in South Carolina. It shows the burned ground and the tall longleaf pines and a beautiful scarlet kingsnake on a charred log. To me, those kind of photographs are far superior to just a close-up of an animal. Todd’s pictures really tell a story.”

That story begins with a paper and pencil and a bucket of glue. With their closest neighbor a mile away, the adopted son of Larry and Dayle Pusser, had a black lab named Midnight and hours to spend in the woods around their Flowers Road home in Eagle Springs. “I was always the kid flipping logs, looking for frogs or snakes. I made notes of everything I saw. I’d see a red-tailed hawk and I’d make a note of what time I saw the hawk. I was taking field notes at eight, nine years old,” he says. “I wanted to document it. I think that’s how I got into photography. I just wanted to be able to remember it.”

The glue was Larry’s Carpets in West End, the family business. “My dad was a carpet man. It was a family-run business. Mom handled the paperwork and dad did all the physical labor. He worked non-stop until he got the job done. It wasn’t 9-to-5. He’d be there at 6 a.m. and it might be midnight before he got finished. Everybody knew my father. Probably 80 percent of the homes in Pinehurst, he’s done. He had the contract for the Pinehurst Hotel, the Country Club. He did all the carpet there in the ’80s.”

And Todd could have qualified for membership in the hod carriers’ union. “Mostly I was the guy who brought the tools in. He didn’t trust me to lay carpet. Occasionally, he’d let me put pad or glue down. Or a patch. I was patching artificial grass and I laid my finger open and dad was, ‘Just stick it in the bucket of glue and keep working. And don’t get blood on the carpet.’” Todd laughs. “I think he wanted me to inherit the business, but the work was just too hard.”

Sharks seemed easier. Go figure.

“The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau is what really got me interested in the world’s oceans,” says Pusser. He went to the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, stuck his nose into pharmacy, got it bloodied by organic chemistry, and decided being a deck hand on the Calypso (or a facsimile thereof) was preferable to filling prescriptions anywhere on dry land. When he wasn’t putting on his great pumpkin display — an Eagle Springs Halloween tradition that attracted thousands and raised money for the Cameron Boys Home — he started taking summer classes in Morehead City, majored in biology, minored in marine science and specialized in pestering whale biologists at the Smithsonian Institution in the Pacific Northwest. “Three days after graduating I was on a research vessel (the Oregon II) in the Gulf of Mexico doing contract work for the government on a marine mammal survey looking for whales and dolphins,” he says. “I started seeing things like sperm whales. I saw killer whales in the Gulf of Mexico. No one really had any idea killer whales were there at the time. All kinds of dolphins. I was a contract worker for a lab in Mississippi and then I was doing contracts for labs in San Diego and Seattle and Miami. I was going all over the place doing these marine mammal surveys. That’s kind of how I got into the field.” All the time he was taking pictures.

“I was getting photos of animals that had never really been photographed in the wild before, a lot of weird dolphin species,” he says. Other groups began hiring him, including the International Whaling Commission out of the United Kingdom. It was doing surveys in the Antarctic. Pusser figured, hey, why not?

“I’ve made eight trips down there now,” he says. On the first trip for the IWC, he was surveying minke whales. That led to a position as a lecturer for a high-end tour company out of Seattle, defunct after the tourism business fell off a cliff post 9/11, called Society Expeditions. “I was lecturing on their ships taking small groups of people to remote areas of the world. We did this in the Arctic and the Antarctic, the Russian Arctic and the Bearing Sea. Obviously the photo opportunities were incredible,” he says, particularly the Antarctic. “There’s 150,000 penguins, King penguins, that stretch as far as the eye can see. Totally unafraid of people. They never had predators. It’s pretty amazing to be next to those birds.”

Pusser honed his photographic skills the hard way, “trial and error, mostly error,” he says. He mastered his craft in the pre-digital, home-run-or-pop-foul days of 35mm slide film. “I never took any kind of photography class,” he says. “I would study photographers I admired. At the time there was a guy who worked for National Geographic named Flip Nicklin. He was their whale photographer and I really liked his work. And there was another guy named Franz Lanting who was doing a lot of work in jungles and using flash with his photography, which was unheard of with nature photography at the time. It almost had kind of a studio feel to his photos. I really tried to emulate that with my work. I come from a biological background where you studied the behavior of animals and I think that helps with your photography because you’re able to anticipate action or know what an animal is going to do to really kind of capture the personality of the animals, not just a quick snapshot.”

Of course the switch from film to digital was inevitable and, in some cases, desirable. “I was not an easy convert,” says Pusser. “The main reason I started switching to digital was for underwater. Let’s say you’re in the Bahamas and you’re interacting with spotted dolphins — I used to do trips down there almost every year — you have 36 images on your roll of film. You’re there and you’re taking pictures and you hear that last frame and the film rewind in your camera. Get back to the boat. Get out of the water. Dry off. Open the back of your housing. Pop the camera. Pop the film canister out. Reload. You have 30 minutes invested in doing that. By then the behavior you’re trying to photograph is over. Now I stick a 64-gigabyte or 128-gig card in a camera and I’m under water all day. You miss fewer shots.”

So, about those sharks. “One of my favorite shark dives is actually off the coast of North Carolina,” says Pusser. “There are a lot of wrecks off the coast and there’s a species of shark that aggregates there called a sand tiger shark. These are big sharks, 8-10 feet long. They have really large teeth that stick out of their mouths. They’re not afraid of divers. If you sit real still they’ll come right up to you. They’re great subjects to photograph.” How close does he get? “As close as I can,” he says. “If they’re bumping my lens, I’m happy.”

The subject doesn’t have to be a shark or a blue whale to pique Pusser’s interest. “I do tend to try to photograph the more obscure animals that get ignored by other wildlife photographers,” he says. In 2006 he was part of an international team doing a survey on China’s Yangtze River trying to locate an endangered dolphin. The species had been in the river for millions of years but its population had been reduced to a handful by the river’s constant cargo ship traffic and a billion people trying to eke out an existence on its banks — often employing fishing methods lethal to the dolphin. “It was a monotypic genus, meaning it was the only member of that genus. There was nothing else like it anywhere on the planet,” he says. “We spent nearly two months going back and forth on the Yangtze River looking for this dolphin. We declared it extinct in 2006. First dolphin to go extinct at human hand.”

Pusser returned last November from a similar five-week trip to Mexico surveying an endangered porpoise, the vaquita, that’s being killed as by-catch in the northern Sea of Cortez where the Colorado River flows into the Gulf of Baja. “It was kind of a Hail Mary effort by a group out of California to bring them into captivity and breed them,” he says. “There’s a fish, totoaba (a type of croaker), that gets to be like 250 pounds. The fishermen there catch this fish using gill nets and take the swim bladder. Then they send this bladder to China for medicinal purposes. The bladder sells for more than cocaine. So the vaquita, they’re mammals. They swim into a net, get tangled up and drown. The government says you can’t set a gill net but they can come out in an evening, set a net and buy a pick-up truck with a fish bladder. I first did a survey there in ’97, again in 2008 and again in 2015. In 2015 there were like 50 left.” Pusser puts the number closer to 30 now.

“The project managed to capture an adult female but unfortunately she died. The stress of captivity was just too much for her,” says Pusser. “This was a huge blow for the conservation community. I fear the vaquita will soon be added to the long and ever-growing list of species humans have wiped off the planet.”

His camera and his curiosity have taken Pusser to over 30 countries and into every one of the world’s oceans. “Initially, I was only photographing aquatic subjects sharks, whales, dolphins,” he says. “I’d come back here (North Carolina) between projects. I never explored the state, outside of the Sandhills, when I was a kid or a teenager. So, I started networking.

One of the people who entered his orbit was Jeff Beane, the collection manager for herpetology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, who became one of Pusser’s closest friends. “He opened my eyes to a lot of things I ignored as a kid. So now I spend a lot of my time documenting biodiversity and conservation issues across the state,” says Pusser who lives in Virginia Beach, Virginia now but remains a regular contributor of both photographs and stories to Wildlife in North Carolina magazine. “We have incredible biodiversity for a temperate region. We have the highest mountains east of the Mississippi; we have a lot of rivers; we have natural lakes; we have the ocean which has the Gulf Stream and the Labrador Current; we’re on a major migration route.”

And, as it turns out, he’s just as enthralled with crawfish, chubs or squirrels as blue whales.

“Fox squirrels are probably Todd’s favorite mammal and for years he had never gotten satisfactory photos of one,” says Beane. It wasn’t for a lack of trying. Anytime Pusser saw a fox squirrel, he chased it. “Once he ran through the woods after one in a suit and tie and another time he ran after one in his underwear,” says Beane.

The latter happened when Pusser, in the field with Beane, was trying to photograph an undescribed salamander endemic to the Sandhills and slipped down a muddy creek embankment, sinking in up to his waist. After removing his wet jeans, he saw the squirrel. “I used to say he was always either too overdressed or too underdressed to get good fox squirrel photos,” Beane says — a condition that has since been remedied.

One of Pusser’s writing and photographic projects is scheduled to run as a three-part series in future issues of Wildlife in North Carolina. “There’s this really interesting fish behavior I found out about a few years go and I’ve been trying to document because it’s spectacular,” says Pusser. “In the spring we have two or three species, what are called chubs, that build these nests. If you’ve ever been fly fishing in the mountains, you walk through any creek or stream, you’ll see these mounds of rocks when the water is low. You’ll think maybe people are doing it but these fish, the males, build these nests. They’ll entice a female. They spawn over the nest. They aerate the eggs. They move the rocks around and they guard the nest. But what’s interesting is you have all these minnows and at the right time of year, they light up. Neon yellows, florescent colors. It’s like a corral reef. People don’t associate tropical reef color with a cold mountain stream.”

Another one of his passions, picked up from Williamson, is champion trees. “Each state has state champions and they might qualify for a national champion,” says Pusser. “The world’s largest longleaf pine, up until this past year, was on Highway 220 between Candor and Asheboro. It was over 12 feet in circumference and 150 feet high. It snapped during a strong thunderstorm. Now the largest longleaf is somewhere I think in Alabama or Mississippi.” The village of Pinehurst has a Darlington Oak that might be a state champion. “Come outside the Drum and Quill, turn left and you go to the next left,” says Pusser. “It was growing there probably before Pinehurst was created.”

Williamson and Pusser track down champion trees together. “One tree I showed him was a hollow yellow poplar and it’s a national champion,” says Williamson. “I got inside it and he handed me a couple of strobe lights to put on either side to give the interior a little bit of light.”

Shining a little bit of light is Pusser’s specialty. “You don’t have to save the world, just try to get people to appreciate what’s in their backyard,” he says.

It’s a message he enjoys spreading. “There’s a lot of joy in seeing something yourself,” says Beane, “but when you can show it to somebody else who appreciates it, that’s really special.”

And there’s photographic evidence, to boot. PS

For more information visit Todd Pusser’s website at: https://toddpusser.photoshelter.com/

Jim Moriarty is senior editor of PineStraw and can be reached at jjmpinestraw@gmail.com.

January Books

FICTION

Direct Fire, by A.J. Tata

A thriller that cuts to the heart of our cyber-security threat. When Jake Mahegan receives a distress call from Gen. Savage in North Carolina, he rushes to the commander’s home — and walks right into an ambush. Joining forces with Savage’s combat JAG officer, Mahegan follows the trail to a killer, a Syrian refugee-turned-terrorist who vows to avenge the bombing of a Syrian wedding by killing as many Americans as possible. Terrorist cells are gathering in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Hackers are emptying the nation’s banks of millions of dollars. And their final act of vengeance will bring the whole world to its knees. 

Munich: A Novel, by Robert Harris

Hugh Legat is a rising star of the British diplomatic service, serving at 10 Downing Street as private secretary to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Rikard von Holz is on the staff of the German Foreign Office — and secretly a member of the anti-Hitler resistance. The two men were friends at Oxford in the 1920s, but have not been in contact since. Now, when Legat flies with Chamberlain from London to Munich, and von Holz travels on Hitler’s train overnight from Berlin, their paths are set on a disastrous collision course. Robert Harris, author of Conspirator: A Novel of Ancient Rome, places characters of historical importance — Hitler, Chamberlain, Mussolini, Daladier — at the heart of an electrifying, novel you can’t put down.

The Woman in the Window, by A.J. Finn 

With captivating prose Finn crafts a novel about a woman who watches her neighbors through the telephoto lens of her camera. After witnessing a brutal attack, her attempts to contact the authorities turn her life into a nightmare. A fantastic thriller where nothing is as it seems.

Need to Know, by Karen Cleveland 

A gripping novel by a CIA insider about an agent tasked with identifying Russian spies living in plain sight. After accessing the computer of a potential Russian operative, Vivian stumbles on a secret dossier of deep-cover agents within America’s borders. A few clicks later, everything that matters to her — her job, her husband, even her four children — is threatened. Vivian becomes torn between loyalty and betrayal, allegiance and treason, love and suspicion. A frightening glimpse into what may be happening today. 

The Chalk Man, by C.J. Tudor

In 1986, Eddie and his friends are just kids on the verge of adolescence in a sleepy little English village. The chalk men are their secret code — little chalk stick figures they leave for one another as messages only they can understand. But then a mysterious chalk man leads them to a dismembered body, and nothing is ever the same. In 2016, Eddie gets a letter in the mail, containing a single chalk stick figure. When it turns out that his childhood friends get the same message, they think it could be a prank . . . until one of them turns up dead. This is a suspense novel of the highest rank where every character is wonderfully compelling, where every mystery has a satisfying payoff, and where the twists will shock even the savviest reader.

The Black Painting, by Neil Olson

There are four cousins in the Morse family, long fractured by the loss of a cursed Goya painting, when their grandfather summons them to his mansion at Owl’s Point. The family finds the old man dead, his horrified gaze pinned on the spot where the painting once hung. As suspects mount in this literary mystery, cousin Teresa hopes to solve the puzzle of the painting and her grandfather’s death, but to do so she must uncover ugly family secrets, and confront those who would keep them hidden.

Green, by Sam Graham-Felsen

Boston, 1992: “House of Pain” is on the radio, Arsenio Hall is on TV, and Bill Clinton is in the White House. The city’s school system is largely segregated and former working-class neighborhoods are in the early stages of gentrification. Dave (or, as he longs to be called, Green) is the white boy at the mostly black Martin Luther King Middle School, where he is lonely, constantly taunted, and desperate to fit in. Dave’s life takes a sudden turn for the better when he befriends Marlon, who lives in the public housing around the corner from Dave’s own gentrified block. Marlon confounds Dave’s assumptions about black culture: He’s nerdy, neurotic and a Celtics fan whose favorite player is the white, skinny Larry Bird. Together, the two boys seem almost able to resist the contradictory personas forced on them by the outside world. But as the school year progresses, challenges arise in the form of girls and bullies, family secrets and national violence, and Marlon and Dave struggle not to betray themselves or each other in this coming-of-age novel.

Fire Sermon, by Jamie Quarto

A daring debut novel of obsession, lust and salvation by the highly lauded author of the story collection I Want To Show You More, Qurto charts with bold intimacy and immersive sensuality the life of a married woman entirely devoted to her husband, Thomas, their two beautiful children, and to God. Devoted, that is, until what begins as a platonic intellectual and spiritual exchange between writer Maggie and poet James transforms into an erotically charged bond that challenges Maggie’s sense of loyalty and morality, drawing her deeper into the darkness of desire.

NONFICTION

Jackie, Janet & Lee: The Secret Lives of Janet Auchincloss and Her Daughters Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Lee Radziwill, by J. Randy Taraborrelli

If the Bouvier women personified beauty, style and fashion, it was their lust for money and status that drove them to seek out powerful men, no matter what the cost to themselves or to those they stepped on in their relentless climb to the top. Based on hundreds of new interviews with friends and family of the Bouviers, among them their own half-brother, as well as letters and journals, Taraborrelli paints an extraordinary psychological portrait of two famous sisters and their ferociously ambitious mother.

The Meaning of Birds, by Simon Barnes

One of our most eloquent nature writers explores how birds achieve the miracle of flight; why birds sing; what they tell us about the seasons of the year; and what their presence tells us about the places they inhabit. The Meaning of Birds muses on the uses of feathers, the drama of raptors, the slaughter of pheasants, the infidelities of geese, and the strangeness of feeling sentimental about blue tits while enjoying a chicken sandwich. Barnes explores both the intrinsic wonder of what it is to be a bird and the myriad ways in which birds can help us understand the meaning of life.

Stirring the Pot with Benjamin Franklin: A Founding Father’s Culinary Adventures, by Rae Katherine Eighmey

In this remarkable work, Eighmey presents Franklin’s delight and experimentation with food throughout his life. At 16, he began dabbling in vegetarianism. In his early 20s, he convinced his printing press colleagues to forgo their breakfast of beer and bread for porridge. He applied his scientific discoveries to the kitchen and ate with curiosity in France and England on his diplomatic missions. Franklin saw food as key to understanding the developing culture of the United States, penning essays presenting maize as the defining grain of America. Stirring the Pot conveys all of this Founding Father’s culinary adventures, demonstrating that his love of food shaped not only his life but also the character of the young nation he helped build.

The Monk of Mokha, by Dave Eggers

From the best-selling author of The Circle and What Is the What, a heart-pounding true story that weaves together the history of coffee, the struggles of everyday Yemenis living through civil war, and the courageous journey of a young man — a Muslim and U.S. citizen — following the most American of dreams.

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

Dear Girl, by Amy Krouse Rosenthal

Sometimes you feel pink and sparkly; sometimes you feel just the opposite.  Sometimes you want to ask: Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?  Sometimes you want to make your room awesome (and sometimes I wish you would just want to make your bed!). Sometimes you are brave and sometimes you are tentative, but whatever you are, you are awesome. From the author of Uni the Unicorn, in this celebration of girl power no obstacle is too high, no dream too big, and no wish too grand for a strong woman. (All ages.) 

I Am Harriet Tubman, by Brad Meltzer, illustrated by Chris Elipoulos

A few years ago, best-selling author and History Channel host Brad Meltzer, motivated by his own experience raising three children, decided to offer them a different kind of hero. He was tired of the princesses and reality stars that people looked up to, and knew from his love of history that there were incredible real world heroes that children would be fascinated by and look up to. The Ordinary People Change the World series was born as a way to give today’s kids the right role models and to encourage them to live heroically. Harriet Tubman, the newest addition to the series, is an American hero who had a pivotal role in the fight against slavery and will become the first African-American woman to have her face appear on American currency when the $20 bill is revamped in 2020. (Available January 16. Ages 6-10.)

Upside-Down Magic: Dragon Overnight, by Sarah Mlynowski, Emily Jenkins and Lauren Myracle

Nory, Elliott, Andres and Bax are classmates in Dunwiddle Magic School’s Upside-Down Magic class. In a classroom in which students all have magical abilities, lessons are unconventional, students are unpredictable, and magic has a tendency to turn wonky at the worst possible moment. Dragon Overnight, will be published Jan. 30 and is the fourth book in the fun Upside-Down Magic series.  Meet the authors Friday, Feb. 2 at 4 p.m. at The Country Bookshop.  This event is free and open to the public. (Ages 7-10.) PS

Compiled by Kimberly Daniels Taws and Angie Tally.

Waterlogged

Look for the charismatic, aquatic Pied-billed Grebe in winter

By Susan Campbell

Here in North Carolina, winter is the season for spotting waterfowl. Inland, in addition to Canada geese, birdwatchers have a shot at seeing more than a dozen species of ducks on local lakes and ponds. If you are looking closely, you may notice a very small swimmer, one that is often solitary in its habits. This would be the charismatic pied-billed grebe. It is the pied-billed that has the largest range of five grebes found across North America.

The pied-billed grebe is a compact waterbird in a family of birds that are expert swimmers and divers. In fact, you will never see a grebe on land. Their legs are placed so far back on their bodies that walking is very difficult. Not surprisingly the word “grebe” means literally “feet at the buttocks.” But these birds can readily dive to great depths to forage for aquatic invertebrates such as crayfish as well as chase down small fish.

However, they are not the strongest fliers, having relatively small, rounded wings. I find it amazing that our wintering individuals come from as far away as the upper Midwest or even central Canada.

The pied-billed grebe is smaller than a football with shades of gray and a white underside.

Pied is defined “as having two or more different colors.” As its name implies, this bird has a silvery gray bill with a black band. It is very stout. The jaws of these birds are also very strong, and more than compensate for what they lack in bill length. Cracking the exoskeletons of insects, shrimps and clams is no problem for this beautiful swimmer, as is hanging onto slippery minnows. Another interesting detail of this bird’s anatomy is that it has an extremely short tail with bright white, undertail coverts that make it possible to identify this bird at a distance.

These little birds have some interesting behavioral adaptations that are well worth watching for. For one, they have the capability to sink below the surface if the situation warrants. Somehow, they are able to control the buoyancy of their plumage and so can readily absorb water to increase their weight and quickly disappear from sight. Likewise they can swim with their heads just below the surface so as to not be seen. And they can even employ a “crash dive” to evade predators, pushing themselves downward with their wings and kicking hard with their feet.

One other well-known trait of pied-billeds is that they eat large quantities of their own feathers. It is thought that they create a large but porous plug in the gut that traps dangerous fragments of certain food items from entering the intestine. They even feed feathers to their young.

You can look for pied-billed grebes on any body of still or slow-moving water. Larger creeks, marshy ponds or even larger lakes in our area may host these little birds from October through March. However, individuals may give themselves away by the long, loud series of variable chatters, bleats or coos that they make in late winter or when advertising their territory to the occasional interloper. Either way, these birds sure deserve a good look any time, even though they are not that large — or very colorful.  PS

Susan would love to receive your wildlife observations and photographs at susan@ncaves.com.

Dark Side of the Moon

As ironic as it is, this month’s total lunar eclipse is a highlight of 2018

By Astrid Stellanova

Oh, my, Star Children! We are in for a treat on January 31st, when there will be a total eclipse of the full moon. If that isn’t a bang-up way to start the New Year, then I don’t know what is.  Take a moon bath under the stars! Hoot and holler and raise your voices up! Star gazers say this cosmic event will bring mothers and working women into the limelight. Watch for this to be a recurring theme all year long. Ad Astra—Astrid

Capricorn (December 22–January 19)

You don’t need to keep looking in the rearview mirror. All good things lie ahead, Sugar. Memory lane is closed. And what you have lying straight before you is worth focusing on. Meanwhile, there is a great opportunity for investing in yourself and a new idea in the new year. Don’t let that escape you — take the off ramp!

Aquarius (January 20–February 18)

Well, look at you social caterpillar! You have broken into a tough circle of friends that only took about a thousand forevers. But you were patient and they finally saw that one of you was worth ten of a lot of people.  You’re well loved, Honey Bun.

Pisces (February 19–March 20)

You sayin’ your Jaguar can’t make it up the driveway at your mountain place? Or you’re allergic to all metals but platinum? Sugar, that is something called a humblebrag. Nobody else has told you, so I have to. It is true you have been prosperous. And that you have especially fine taste. Just say a little bit less about it

Aries (March 21–April 19)

Somebody bamboozled you pretty good. Looked like you couldn’t tell a skunk from a Billy goat. Well, they reckoned wrong. You’ll get your chance to settle the score but don’t let it concern you. The view ain’t worth the climb, Honey Bunny. 

Taurus (April 20–May 20)

There is one somebody who gets under your skin and makes you lose your ever-loving mind. You know who and when. You have got to stop the blame game, hurling insults faster than Kim Jong-un. It might be a game to them but it is bad for your constitution, Sugar. 

Gemini (May 21–June 20)

You’ve been showing too many teeth. Makes people nervous, and that completely undermines you. Stop trying so hard to be liked. You don’t have to work that angle. If you can stand in your truth, they will admire you, anyhow. You are likeable enough, Sally Field.

Cancer (June 21–July 22)

Let’s get some lumbar support for you, since you’re having a lot of trouble with your backbone. The thing is, you let a situation get out of control because you felt a lot of misplaced sympathy. But what they need from you is leadership. That might require you to be a lot firmer than your Beautyrest mattress.

Leo (July 23–August 22)

Yep, your little plan fell into place, which either puts you in the catbird seat or the litter box. You were cunning and scored a win. But is this a game you really want to win? Ask that question. Also, a friend from your past needs a pal. It would be good karma just to let them know you remember them.

Virgo (August 23–September 22)

Can’t never could, Sugar, but don’t kill yourself. It is also true that flop sweat ain’t becoming. During the holidays you may be asked to step up and take on a social role that you have never especially wanted. But it will be growth for you. And a toehold inside a door that has been closed for a very long time.

Libra (September 23–October 22)

You speak Southern? Then you know not to look over yonder for something right under foot. Focus is all you need to find your heart’s desire. And even though you feel like you have given all you have for a mighty big goal, you have something important and don’t even recognize it.

Scorpio (October 23–November 21)

Hunh? Darling, you brought a cup of Ramen noodles to a knife fight? I don’t know what got into you lately, but you have had this idea that life is a spectator sport. Well, what are you planning to do with the rest of this special life? This month is a good time to ask yourself if you are going to keep chasing after unicorns.

Sagittarius (November 22–December 21)

It was not your fault that all the effort you made last month didn’t pan out. So move on, Sunshine and enjoy the show. There’s a whole new opportunity right before you, right this second, to become the person your Mama always knew you could be. Nobody can eclipse your bright lights this month.  PS

For years, Astrid Stellanova owned and operated Curl Up and Dye Beauty Salon in the boondocks of North Carolina until arthritic fingers and her popular astrological readings provoked a new career path.