Southwords

Buried Treasure

Discovering the Rockefeller “nest egg”

By Pamela Phillips

“Sold for $7 to the young lady in the back.”

There was one other bidder. Maybe two. But less than a minute after hitting the auction block the box was mine. That’s how the eggs came into my possession all those years ago.

Tucked away down a narrow dirt road north of Fort Bragg sit the remnants of an estate that once hosted some of America’s most powerful and wealthy families. Stately cottages, an opulent clubhouse and a Donald Ross-designed golf course welcomed guests who arrived in private railcars. Quiet and secluded, it was a paradise that many locals didn’t know existed.

Set among longleaf pine forests and winding streams, the idyllic tract known as Overhills was acquired by Percy A. Rockefeller, a nephew of Standard Oil founder John D., in the 1920s and remained in the family for nearly 80 years — first as an exclusive hunt club and later as a working farm and family retreat.

Percy’s great-grandchildren later decided to part with the beloved property, and it was sold to the U.S. Army. The sprawling acreage would provide additional training areas for Fort Bragg, but not before the barns and cottages were properly cleaned out. Which brings me to that sunny March morning in 1997.

Scores of vehicles lined the road a quarter of a mile into the grounds. Overhills was an enigma, and people were curious. I parked and headed toward the sale. Walking amid shadows of the once grand estate, I felt as if I were in another time.

Under rusting canopies, I joined the crowd inspecting odd farm implements, worn furniture and bags of golf clubs. Boxes overflowed with chipped pottery, dented pots and faded tablecloths. Not exactly priceless antiques.

A yellow and orange plaid pillow caught my eye. Beneath it was a box containing an Easter basket, several bags of plastic grass and, at the bottom, a cardboard egg carton. I pulled out the carton expecting to find mismatched halves of plastic eggs. Instead, I discovered beautifully painted eggs with intricate flowers, birds and geometric patterns detailed in rich, vibrant colors. A box of masterpieces!

I quickly closed the carton and put it back underneath the Easter grass and ugly pillow. I looked around. Does anyone else know what’s in the box? When I emerged as the winning bidder, I collected the box and made a beeline to my car.

At home I inspected my find. These were real, hollowed-out chicken eggs, certainly not Fabergé-class, but unique, and no two were alike. It wasn’t until years later that I researched and found that my “Rockefeller” eggs might very well be Pysanky.

Pysanky are hand-decorated eggs traditionally made during the Easter season throughout Eastern Europe, most notably in Poland and the Ukraine. Symbolic of the rebirth of nature after winter, they are believed to bring good luck or have special powers, such as protection from evil spirits. The eggs are not painted but inscribed with wax using a special stylus known as a kistka and dyed using natural colorants.

In the years since that day at Overhills, I often wondered about the eggs. Were they commissioned as gifts for the Rockefeller children? Picked up on a trip abroad? Created by a talented employee? I guess I’ll never know. 

Recently I came across Pysanky “eggspert” Joan Brander, a Canadian artist who learned the art form from her Ukrainian grandmother and teaches it to others. She graciously interpreted some of the motifs and techniques used in their creation, pointing out the degrees of difficulty. She even included a recorded snippet of the correct pronunciation of Pysanky. It’s PEH-sen-keh. Of course, I’d been pronouncing it wrong.

Today Overhills lies hidden behind chain-link fencing, part of Fort Bragg’s Northern Training Area, the once-manicured golf course buried in overgrowth and the remaining structures crumbling from neglect. But one small piece of that fabled Overhills world lives on. Every spring, as Easter approaches, I pull out the cardboard carton and arrange the delicate treasures on a fancy platter. For a few weeks, as they have for the last quarter-century in my home, the Rockefeller eggs take center stage.  PS

A native of Ohio, Pamela Phillips has called the Sandhills home since 1987. She is working on her first novel. 

Crossroads

Planet Sandhills

North Carolina’s center of biodiversity

By Bruce A. Sorrie

In simplest terms, biodiversity is the total number of animals and plants that occur in a certain area, say, a country or state. When asked, most North Carolinians would say that here in the Tar Heel State, biodiversity is highest in the mountains, with the extreme range of elevation and rugged topography, including the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. A second area of biodiversity might be the outer Coastal Plain and barrier islands (including the Outer Banks), with its species-rich pine savannas, maritime-influenced plant communities, and huge numbers of nesting birds in summer and birds that winter there in the cold weather. 

Yet, when the numbers are tallied, it is the lesser known and often overlooked Sandhills region that comes out on top. And not just in one category — plants, for example — but in several others as well. This seven-county region (Cumberland, Harnett, Hoke, Lee, Moore, Richmond and Scotland), while not very large — 3,384 square miles — encompasses a wealth of natural habitat types, which in turn support high overall biodiversity.

The Sandhills region overlaps three of the four major regions of the state, encompassing parts of the Piedmont and Coastal Plain as well as the entirety of the Sandhills. Each of those regions has different geology, soil types and topography, and the natural habitats reflect that.

In the Piedmont we see rocks when we walk through the woods, and rock ledges often front rivers such as the Deep and the Cape Fear. The Raven Rock State Park in Harnett County boasts one of the biggest ledges in the state. The brownwater (nutrient-rich) rivers of the Piedmont support wonderfully tall and shady forests on floodplains.

In the Coastal Plain we have Carolina bays, some forested with pond cypress, some open ponds, which support unique plants and animals that have adapted to fluctuating water levels. We also see xeric “bay rims” (dune-like sand ridges) bordering the bays, and dry-to-xeric flatwoods elsewhere.

In the Sandhills, we encounter myriad streamheads where rainwater collects to form acidic and nutrient-poor blackwater creeks and swamps. The margins of these streamheads provide habitat for many species typical of outer Coastal Plain savannas plus endemics found nowhere else. These streamheads are embedded within some of the highest quality longleaf pine communities in the entire Southeast: Fort Bragg, Camp Mackall, Sandhills Game Land, Weymouth Woods – Sandhills Nature Preserve, Carvers Creek State Park, Walthour-Moss Foundation, Calloway Forest Preserve, Eastwood Preserve and others.

Each section of the Sandhills has its own long and complex history, and each brings many products to the biodiversity table.

Now, for the numbers. These have been generated by the ongoing North Carolina Biodiversity Project (nc-biodiversity.com), an online resource where anyone can read species accounts, see images, and view maps of the flora and fauna of North Carolina.

Vascular plants (mosses, liverworts, lichens not included): Moore County is No. 1 in N.C. with 1625 species (including non-natives that have become established); Wake is a close second with 1622; and Orange a distant third with 1548. Notably, Richmond (1475), Harnett (1450), and Cumberland (1436) counties all rank in the top 10 for plant diversity.

Butterflies: Moore tops the list with 120 documented species; Richmond (115) and Cumberland (114) are in the top five.

Dragonflies and damselflies: Richmond is king of N.C. with 119; Moore is a close second with 117; Cumberland (115) is tied for third; and Harnett (110) is seventh.

Grasshoppers and crickets: Wake is far ahead with 110 species; Moore (84) is second; and Scotland (70) is fifth. 

Freshwater fishes: Richmond and Brunswick counties are tied with 91; Moore (81), Harnett (76), and Cumberland (68) make the top 10.

Moths: Madison County in the mountains is No. 1 with a whopping 1352; Moore is 12th with 860. 

Birds: Inland counties cannot hold a candle to coastal ones when it comes to numbers of species of breeding and migrant birds. Dare County boasts 434 species; Wake a very impressive 343 is fifth; but, at 253, Moore is only 23. 

Mammals: The Sandhills region’s best is 38 species in Moore, far down the list, which is topped by Buncombe County with 66.

Of course, these lists are not static and will change over time as biologists and naturalists document new additions. However, the fact that several Sandhills counties rank in the top 10 statewide in multiple species groups will likely not change very much. It is remarkable that the seven-county Sandhills region, which represents only 6.3 percent of the area of North Carolina, supports half of the state’s vascular plants: 2,100 out of 4,200 species.

We who live here are lucky indeed to have such diversity at our doorstep. PS 

Bruce A. Sorrie is a graduate of Cornell University and the author of dozens of scientific papers, including descriptions of 13 new species. He lives in Whispering Pines.

The Creators of N.C.

The Burden and Beauty of Home

Carrying the weight of
William Paul Thomas’ art

By Wiley Cash

Photographs by Mallory Cash

I’ve met William Paul Thomas twice, both times inside an art gallery. He wasn’t present for our first meeting, but his work was. In October last year, I encountered his portrait of Alexander Manly, editor of The Daily Record, which was North Carolina’s only daily Black newspaper, as part of the Initiative 1897 exhibit at a gallery show in downtown Wilmington. The exhibit featured prominent Black civic leaders in the years preceding the 1898 race massacre, a violent coup d’état that saw Wilmington go from being one of America’s most successful Black cities to a place where racial terror and murder were used to take over Black-owned businesses and homes.

The second time I met William was in late February inside the Nasher Gallery on the campus of Duke University, where his portrait series Cyanosis was part of an exhibit titled “Reckoning and Resilience: North Carolina Art Now.” The subjects in the nine paintings in the Cyanosis exhibit are not as historically prominent as Alexander Manly, but they’re nonetheless important to William’s life. Each person is either someone he knows or someone he’s met during the course of a day, perhaps someone with whom he shared a passing conversation or a quiet moment that changed the trajectory of an afternoon.

Top row: Regine’s Brother, 2021, Lindsay’s Friend, 2018, Donna’s Son From Chicago, 2017. Second row: Le frère de Nathaly, 2019, Leticia’s Dear Friend, 2021, Kenna’s Dad, 2019. Third row: Tamara’s Father, 2019, Lydia’s Only Caregiver, 2017, Stephanie Woods’ Fiance As An Icon of Piety, 2017.

The name of the series is taken from the medical term that refers to the blue pallor skin takes on when it is not sufficiently oxygenated. The idea first took root in a portrait William painted of his young nephew Michael. He painted half of Michael’s face blue to emphasize the color of his skin. Soon, the use of blue grew to represent the presence of deep emotions — perhaps trauma, fear or uncertainty — that lie beneath the surface of people’s lives while they present a calm face to the world. In an online interview with Artsuite, William shared the unifying theme of the series: “My question through those paintings is: What would it look like if that trauma or adversity was shown on the skin? Would it invite people to be kinder to each other?”

On the day I finally met William in person inside the Nasher Gallery, Mallory, our daughters and I arrived half an hour early. While Mallory unpacked her camera gear and set off to scout the museum for places to set up, our daughters and I wandered through the exhibits with scores of other masked patrons. When we found the exhibit featuring William’s paintings, we paused and stood in front of them. The nine paintings are all closely cropped portraits of Black men in rows of three with a self-portrait of William sitting at the center. Each of the men is looking in a different direction, some of them seeming to stare right into the viewer’s eyes. Strips of blue color their faces in various places: across the eyes like a blindfold, over the nose like a mask, or covering the mouth like a gag.

William arrived, and we all introduced ourselves to one another. I’d been following his Instagram for several months — which I will later describe to him as being “delightfully weird” — and I didn’t know what to expect from an artist who is wildly experimental and playful while still remaining earnest and sincere. The dichotomy a viewer might find in William’s work also seems present in his personality; he is formal but warm, thoughtful but quick to smile. He told us he had just returned home on a flight from Chicago after spending the weekend at a family wedding with his fiancée and their newborn daughter. We joked that he looked rested and photogenic for a man who’d spent the morning lugging bags, baby and a car seat through airport terminals. His face softened for a moment at the mention of his being a new father, and then he and Mallory got to work.

Meanwhile, our 7- and 5-year-old daughters were feeling inspired after seeing the art in the museum. I tore pages loose from my notebook and fished pencils from my bag, and we found seats in the café and ordered snacks. I must have been feeling inspired myself because, like them, I began doodling on a blank page. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the faces of the men I’d just seen in William’s paintings, that strip of blue still hovering on the edges of my vision. When I thought of deoxygenated skin I thought of the videos I’d seen of Eric Garner and George Floyd, recalled their panicked voices saying, “I can’t breathe.” I looked down at my hands, one holding a pencil and the other resting on the table, the blue veins rolling atop the backs of my palms, not because my skin was deoxygenated or because I was experiencing latent trauma, but because my skin is pale and the blue veins were visible because the blood inside them was moving freely.

After we left the museum, we followed William across the Duke campus to the studio where he teaches a painting class to undergraduates, which is just one of the courses he teaches at several nearby universities. Inside the classroom, one of his students was behind an easel, working on a project from his class. He greeted her warmly by name, and then I watched him return to his work on a portrait of a man named Larry Reni Thomas, a Wilmington native known as Dr. Jazz because of his extensive knowledge of the music’s history. The two men met when William was working on Initiative 1897.

I asked William what interests him about painting people he meets. He lifted his brush from the canvas and considered my question, his eyes settling just above the top of his easel.

“For a long time, my art had been contained within an academic context,” he said, a reference to his Master of Fine Arts degree from UNC-Chapel Hill and his teaching in the undergraduate classroom. “In the portrait work, it’s important that the people that I invite (to be painted) don’t always belong to that same environment, so I’m having conversations with people who don’t necessarily have the same ties to UNC or Duke. I meet someone at the bus station and we strike up a conversation, and that’s a person I’m making a painting of. I feel like I start learning more about this area, or where I’m at, via those conversations. That’s how I’ve chosen to break away from a strictly academic environment.”

I ask him if he specifically looks for subjects outside of academic settings, and he admitted that he does, but that he’s also interested in introducing people to art who do not always think of themselves as being individuals who appreciate it.

“Sometimes I make visits to places with people because of the location. The Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill is right on Columbia and Franklin, and buses run all around that area. So if I was talking to somebody and having a conversation about art, there have been times — if they have the time — I’ll say, ‘Let’s take this conversation to the museum.’ Since I’ve identified museums and galleries as places I love to be as an artist and as a consumer of art, a lover of art, I don’t necessarily expect people to share that same interest, but if you tell me that you are not interested in art but you have not been inside a gallery, I question that and I challenge it and say, ‘Then let’s go check it out.’

“I have relatives, friends, people I’ve met who feel like they don’t have a direct connection to art, and I disagree right away because I’m thinking, if you dress yourself in the morning or if you like a certain model of car or if you like a certain movie, these are visual experiences where you are making choices about the visual world that suggests that you have some interest in aesthetics even if you don’t identify as an artist or a person who likes art. You can treat the museum that way, where you intuitively defer to your own tastes and go in there and judge whether or not you like whatever you see or are disinterested or feel moved by it based on your own experiences and not whatever education you have.”

When William considers how hesitant many people are to engage with art, he views his casual discussions with strangers as an opportunity that might lead them to a museum visit or to their portrait being painted: “It’s really of interest to me to engage in conversations where I try to demystify or deconstruct wherever that idea comes from.”

William is also interested in deconstructing the role art played in his own life, especially during his childhood. There could be no better representation of this than the bright pink concrete block that rested on the floor nearby. I’d already seen the block on his website, and I knew it had been painted to match a wall William’s mother had painted in the apartment where he’d grown up with his sisters in the Altgeld Garden housing project on Chicago’s South Side. He bent down and picked up the block at his feet.

“I extracted a single cinderblock as a way to represent that memory,” he said. “It became a way to carry that experience forward as a part of my narrative. How much of her decision to paint that wall influenced my decision to become an artist? This domestic alteration, how did it have an impact on the way I see the world?”

I asked him about the differences between being affected by the burden of memory and affected by the physical burden of lugging around a 40-pound block of cement.

“I did that unconsciously,” he says, referring to the burden of memory, “and now I’m doing it consciously. I’m choosing to carry this weight with me.” He smiles. “There’s never any good reason to carry a cinderblock around with you, but there might also not be a very good reason to take any traumatic or negative moments that I experienced as a child to have that affect me in the present, but nevertheless, for better or worse, the things we experience through our lives are carried with us. I’m definitely carrying home with me.”

I thought of his newborn daughter, a baby born in the Triangle, far from William’s Midwestern roots. What role would her father’s art play in her own conception of art’s role in her life? How would she carry her childhood with her?

He smiled at the questions, and then he rested the block in his lap as if it were a newborn.

“I hope she recognizes art as a normal, central fixture of her life, whether she is personally creating things or paying attention to the world around her. I hope she recognizes that it’s something valuable and precious.

“I hope she has an interest in exploring and discovery. I hope she gets to know Durham and North Carolina in a way that’s really intimate. I want her to carry with her how rich the world can be wherever she is as long as she’s paying attention.”

If William’s daughter follows the example of her father — an artist who is constantly paying attention to his surroundings with an idea toward capturing the richness of a place and the people who inhabit it — I’ll bet she’ll learn to do just that.  PS

Wiley Cash is the Alumni Author-in-Residence at the University of North Carolina Asheville. His new novel, When Ghosts Come Home, is available wherever books are sold. 

Out of the Blue

Simply Surviving

Two years of getting by

By Deborah Salomon

March marks two years we have battled the pandemic, in several iterations. It has consumed news broadcasts and changed our lives, from how we purchase toilet paper (in laughable quantities) to how we celebrate holidays (in small groups, if at all) to how we recreate (forget movies, concerts, plays . . . hello, Scrabble and Hulu). Politicians are rated on COVID policies rather than stabilizing the economy. The absence of classroom learning may leave an indelible effect on children.

Hopefully, I’m not the only survivor whose weathered eye longs for better days and simpler things.

This began a few months ago, when I started watching season two of PBS Masterpiece Theater’s All Creatures Great and Small. I rejected the first season as borderline corny, certainly not therapeutic. The (true) story begins when a newly minted vet from Glasgow arrives in the beautiful and serene Yorkshire dales, just before World War II unleashes hell on Europe. He’s a plain lad with sincere blue eyes and a sweet smile. The haircut alone — short at the nape, Brylcreemed on top — establishes chronology. A romance ensues with a farming lass with a thick wavy mane, just enough meat on her bones, a forthright manner and the smile of an orthodontist’s daughter. Simple. Relatable. Refreshing.

Now, into season two, I watch each episode at least three times — a balm on eyes hardened by the blood and gore streaming, literally, from ambulatory corpses interspersed by real-life starving children, wildfires, floods, tornadoes, insurrections, shootings.

Simple thrives in the kitchen. Working from home, I crave homemade soup, mainly veggie beef made with chuck and a rainbow of vegetables. I call it sustenance soup, just as good for breakfast as lunch. Then, yellow split peas with grated carrot, potato and onion simmered with a smoked turkey leg. Dunk a hunk of stale artisan bread. Ahhh . . .

Thick. Flavorful. Simple. 

Take-out sushi, pizza, tacos, egg rolls, nuggets, burgers get old fast. Soup is forever.

Simplify communication? Ma Bell must be tossing in her tomb. Cellphones are a miracle rivaling the light bulb. People live or die by their cells, which started out simple flips, progressed to “smart,” lately mini-computers. I learned from priests of the faith that texting has overtaken email, voice mail and direct conversation. Which means people text recipients reachable otherwise, eliminating the human voice by choice.

Makes sense when the caller is a robot, because only a robot would not worry about 5G technology interfering, perhaps even endangering, commercial aircraft. God forbid a crash blamed on improved texting.

The same applies to the automobile — another landmark invention providing a comfortable, safe, relatively simple means of getting from Point A to Point B. Now, urban apartment-dwellers not involved with sports or transporting loads are driven to drive SUVs instead of simple sedans, hatchbacks or stations wagons because . . . ?

You tell me.

Some accoutrements, like cameras watching the dog sleep in the back seat, seem dangerously distracting. Figuring out which button to push for the ice dispenser (just kidding) is problematic, not to mention the button that turns on the oven (not kidding) when you’re 10 miles from home.

The battle to simplify can be exhausting for ordinary folk who don’t live from iPhone to iPhone. I’m happy with a car that simply delivers and an oven that bakes. Flip phones did the job. I will never be convinced that air-fried chicken threatens Colonel Sanders. Even if I won the lottery I would not buy a Whiskers Litter Robot WiFi Enabled Automatic Self-Cleaning Cat Litter Box, its official name, for $549. Because cats are smarter than humans; if my two boycotted an unfamiliar litter brand heaven knows how they would react to a box that talks back.

I am not a crotchety old lady resisting progress while glamorizing the good old days before residential air conditioning and no-iron sheets. I’m all for vaccinations, organ transplants, solar power, even SUVs for large soccer-playing families with Great Danes. But I’m not about to fry an egg on my cellphone or let a self-propelled whirling dervish vacuum my floors.

You couldn’t buy me a ticket on Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic.

Because in times of trouble, simple conveys stable, at least until the crisis passes.

So go ahead . . . scoop your hummus, goat cheese, root beer and bubble gum flavored ice cream. I’ve rediscovered vanilla.

And ain’t it ever good.  PS

Deborah Salomon is a writer for PineStraw and The Pilot. She may be reached at debsalomon@nc.rr.com.

Golftown Journal

Off for Pinehurst

Our embarrassment of riches

By Lee Pace

This email landed in my inbox toward the end
of 2021:

“I’ve been following you via social media the past several months and wanted to seek your advice. I’m planning a golf trip to the Pinehurst area for the fall of 2022. What would you consider ‘must/essentials’ for this trip? I am thinking we will go to the Pinehurst Resort but also wanted your opinion and experience about other courses that might not be as popular but would provide an authentic golfing experience.”

It occurred to me in responding to this golfer from Knoxville that those of us who are local or frequent visitors take the Pinehurst experience for granted when so many have never actually ventured into Moore County. And those of us who are familiar with the wonders of the Sandhills travel scene have to stay on our toes with the constant evolution of the golf, amenity and accommodations market. As Pinehurst Resort President Tom Pashley says, “Someone who hasn’t been here in 10 years would be amazed at what they find.”

A favorite framing in my office is the quintessential drawing of the Pinehurst Golf Lad in New York’s Grand Central Station, circa the Roaring ’20s, his golf bag schlepped over this shoulder amid the nicely dressed swells with the words “Off for Pinehurst.”

Herewith, then, a nickel tour for anyone on their way to Pinehurst:

The Core (the heartbeat of Pinehurst and the Pinehurst Resort and Country Club, where courses No. 1-5 emanate) . . . soak in the history along Heritage Hall and revel in the photos and plaques of golf’s luminaries who have won here . . . pose for a photo beside the statue of Payne Stewart, captured in his exhilaration when his putt dropped to win the 1999 U.S. Open . . . walk the 6-odd miles of the premium courses, No. 2 and No. 4, feeling the taut, sandy loam beneath your feet, absorbing the cacophony of colors and edges of the holes, learning to play the bounce of the ball to an array of green complexes . . . stroll The Cradle short course with a couple of wedges and a putter, bobbing to the strains of Red Hot Chili Peppers popping through a discretely placed speaker in a tree . . . ply your putting skills on the Thistle Dhu putting course, which winds its way a hundred yards out and back over an array of humps and hollows . . . all the while slaking your thirst with a Transfusion from the Cradle Crossing beverage center.

The Village (laid out in 1895 by the landscape architecture firm of Frederick Law Olmsted to resemble a New England village; it’s void of 90-degree road intersections and dominated by white and forest green accouterments) . . . enjoy a hefty deli sandwich on the veranda at the Villager Deli in the heart of Old Town . . . pound a beverage with the locals from a rocking chair on the porch at the venerable Pine Crest Inn, once owned by golf architect Donald Ross . . . sip one of 70 brands of bourbon, rye and Scotch in the hippest bar in town, the North and South in the newly renovated Manor Inn . . . douse some smoked pork shoulder in blackberry habanero sauce at the Pinehurst Brewing Company . . . buy a cashmere sweater at The Gentlemen’s Corner or a rare painting of a Scottish golf scene at Old Sport and Gallery . . . sift through the memorabilia and display cases at the Tufts Archives in the Given Memorial Library and marvel at James Tufts’ original marble soda fountain machine, the source of the fortune from which all these golf riches flowed.

And don’t forget Broad Street, the Southern Pines version of Main Street U.S.A. . . .  there’s nothing quite like a well-run, independent bookstore, and The Country Bookshop is exhibit A . . . for a great burger and pro golf on the big TV, there’s the Bell Tree Tavern, and for dessert there’s The Ice Cream Parlor and its primo location at the corner of Broad and New Hampshire . . . the Sandhills area is chock-full of interesting craft brewing venues, one of the most popular in the Broad Street neighborhood is Southern Pines Brewing Company with its corner location on Pennsylvania and Bennett, spacious outdoor seating and over 30 draft selections.

The Ross Triumvirate (a collection of three pristine Donald Ross courses under the same ownership umbrella — Mid Pines from 1921, Southern Pines Golf Club from 1923 and Pine Needles from 1928) . . . all three have come under the painstaking attention to detail of architect Kyle Franz in the last decade and the essential challenge of each burnished, from the stark crossing features at Southern Pines to the up-and-over fairways at Pine Needles to the exquisite green settings at Mid Pines and its spot nestled in a bowl of surrounding hills . . . play the Pine Needles course, where later this year it will host its fourth U.S. Women’s Open (a fresh-faced Annika Sorenstam won in 1996), dodge the ponds at Mid Pines, where Julius Boros loved to fish during pro tour stops in Greensboro, and play the out-and-back routing at Southern Pines, where Ross made the best use of the land by not shoehorning a ninth-hole return to the clubhouse.

The Outskirts (with three dozen courses within a 30-mile radius of Pinehurst) . . . Three of my favorite courses in the Sandhills are private (Forest Creek North, Country Club of North Carolina Dogwood and Dormie), so if you know someone, beg, borrow and steal for an invitation. There are no such restrictions at Tobacco Road in Sanford, a half hour north of Pinehurst, just a dearth of tee times as the popularity of this eccentric and visually stimulating course has skyrocketed during the COVID-inspired golf boom. Architect Mike Strantz cobbled it from an abandoned sand pit and farmland, and the mammoth mounds, mottled grasses, railroad ties and fescue rough accent the routing.

It’s all quite the experience. I hope our man from Knoxville has fun.

“What a place, what a cluster of golf, what a home for golf,” marvels Mike Keiser, the developer of the noted golf destination Bandon Dunes and a fan of Pinehurst. “Most of these clusters are up north, and you can’t play in the winter. Pinehurst and Pebble Beach are places you can play year around.”

What do you know? It’s the Roaring ’20s again. PS

Lee Pace has written about golf in Pinehurst and the Sandhills for more than three decades. Write him at leepace7@gmail.com and follow him @LeePaceTweet.

The Omnivorous Reader

Balancing the Scales

Justice among disparate peoples in Colonial America

By Stephen E. Smith

Humorist Edgar Wilson “Bill” Nye is credited with saying: “Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.” Readers of popular history who tough their way through 464 pages of Nicole Eustace’s Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America will likely be left with the notion that what they’ve read is more profound than entertaining.

“Covered with Night” is an Iroquois expression describing the state of grief or mourning inspired, in this instance, by the 1722 murder of a Native American man who lived near Conestoga, Pennsylvania, a small community north of the Maryland-Pennsylvania border. Details of the fatal encounter are straightforward and commonplace: English merchants John and Edmund Cartlidge were bargaining with Sawantaeny, a Seneca hunter and fur trader, when an overindulgence in alcohol, probably by all parties concerned, led to a disagreement. Sawantaeny went for his rifle, but John Cartlidge disarmed him and bashed in the Seneca’s skull.

“My friends have killed me,” were Sawantaeny’s last words.

Such incidents, terrible though they may be, are not an uncommon aspect of human interaction, but in the early 1700s, a period in America’s past that is strangely deficient from the history we’ve been taught (we learn about the Lost Colony, Jamestown, Plymouth and mysteriously we jump to the Boston Harbor Tea Party), such a death had far-reaching ramifications for the Native American and Colonial communities. Covered with Night explores the causes and consequences of the Cartlidges’ ill-advised assault on Sawantaeny, while illuminating the fundamental flaws in the relationships that existed between the Native American and Colonial cultures.

Eustace’s complex treatise was made possible by the meticulously documented speeches of a Native man called “Captain Civility,” who reacted to the death of Sawantaeny by attempting to strengthen the tenuous bonds that existed between the competing cultures, and Eustace was able to draw on earlier studies by 20th century ethnographers and on postmodern analyses on social and criminal justice. If all of this sounds complicated, it is.

Investigations of Sawantaeny’s murder by Native American leaders and Colonial officials initiated a debate about the very nature of justice and its cultural context. Colonial authorities were fearful that the murder might bring on a full-scale war, endangering the white population and disrupting trade. The crisis was serious enough that news of it reached the British Board of Trade in England, resulting in a region-wide treaty conference that produced an obscure document signed at Albany in 1722 between members of the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee and representatives from the colonies of New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. It remains the oldest recognized treaty in the history of the United States. Much more than a simple diplomatic instrument, the treaty records a foundational American debate over the nature of justice.

Avoiding conflict with their Indigenous neighbors was the foremost concern of the Colonial authorities, and they held the Cartlidge brothers in irons pending their execution — which is exactly what the Native Americans hoped to avoid. Pennsylvania Gov. William Keith was dismayed to learn that sending the Cartlidges to the gallows was counter to the Native American notion of justice. Native diplomats Satcheechoe and Taquatarensaly asked that the Cartlidges be released from prison and from the threat of execution. They preferred that Keith journey to meet with the leaders of the Five Nations to “cover the dead” by offering reparations and performing mourning rituals that addressed their grief — all of which ran counter to Colonial assumptions about what constitutes civilized retribution.

The Iroquois weren’t “savages,” as characterized by the Colonial authorities. They were possessed of a humanity that tied them to the land and their communities, and they saw the murder as an opportunity to establish stronger and more lasting bonds with their Colonial neighbors. They wanted their collective grief assuaged emotionally and accounted for economically.

“Colonists were so unprepared for Native offers of clemency, a total inversion of their expectations, that they made little deliberate note of the philosophy that informed Native policy,” Eustace writes. “Indigenous ideals entered the record made at Albany almost inadvertently, the by-product of colonial desires to document the land and trade agreements that would further Pennsylvania’s prosperity and security. Still, colonists dutifully wrote down the speeches that Captain Civility and other Native speakers made to them. And in the process, they preserved Indigenous ideas on crime and punishment, violation and reconciliation.” Negotiations were complicated by barriers of language and dialect. Various Native American tongues had to be translated from one Indigenous speaker to another until the words evolved into a concept that could be realized in standard English.

If Eustace’s explication of events is occasionally academic, it’s also thought-provoking, requiring patience and commitment on the part of the reader. Attempts to energize the narrative by using present tense, and a somewhat awkward fictional attribution of motivations to characters whose true emotions are unknowable, only serve to lengthen and diminish the story: “Seated at his table, William Keith warms the bottom of a stick of vermilion sealing wax,” she writes. “He feels the heat but will take care not to burn his fingers. In a quiet room, a dollop of wax makes a soft splotch as it hits paper, round and red as a drop of blood. Keith lets the wax cool a moment from liquid to paste, then presses smartly with his seal to emboss the wax with an intricate pattern of scrolls.”

Eustace also includes detailed descriptions — furniture, dwellings, the travails of daily living, concepts surrounding indentured servitude and slavery — that enhance the reader’s knowledge of an otherwise obscure period in our history. But her primary contribution is the reclamation of alternative concepts of crime, punishment and the mitigation of grief that are no longer components of contemporary life.  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.

Tea Leaf Astrologer

Pisces
(February 19 – March 20)

The only difference between a mythical creature and a Pisces is that a mythical creature believes in itself. Pisceans are magical by nature and naturally psychic. That’s because those born under this mutable water sign are masters of subtle emotion. This month, the cosmos is dealing you a planetary royal flush. In other words, you don’t have to keep swimming upstream. But will you?

Tea leaf “fortunes” for the rest of you:

Aries (March 21 – April 19)

Don’t forget to stretch.

Taurus (April 20 – May 20)

There’s a whole world outside of the box. Think about it.

Gemini (May 21 – June 20)

Less talking. More dancing.

Cancer (June 21 – July 22)

Slow down. Proceed with caution. Be prepared to pivot.

Leo (July 23 – August 22)

You’re back in the spotlight. Breathe easy.

Virgo (August 23 – September 22)

A little salt goes a long way.

Libra (September 23 – October 22)

Someone’s got color in their cheeks again.

Scorpio (October 23 – November 21)

Try zooming out.

Sagittarius (November 22 – December 21)

When one door closes, best not to set up camp on the front porch.

Capricorn (December 22 – January 19)

Three words: Don’t look back.

Aquarius (January 20 – February 18)

Timing is everything. Read that again.  PS

Zora Stellanova has been divining with tea leaves since Game of Thrones’ Starbucks cup mishap of 2019. While she’s not exactly a medium, she’s far from average. She lives in the N.C. foothills with her Sphynx cat, Lyla.

Simple Life

The Baker’s Assistant

How sweet it is

By Jim Dodson

Not long ago, my wife, Wendy, joined 47 million foot soldiers of the Great Resignation by retiring early from her job as the longtime director of human resources for Sandhills Community College.

She loved her job at the college. It was fun and fulfilling in almost every way.

But something more was missing — and revealed — when COVID invaded all our lives.

Simply put, it was time to follow her heart and do something she’d envisioned doing even before I met her 25 years ago: to start her own gourmet, custom-baking company called Dessert du Jour.

News late last year that an innovative shared community kitchen for food entrepreneurs (called The City Kitch, based in Charlotte) was opening branches in Greensboro and Raleigh propelled her into action. She signed up for the first private kitchen studio and got to work preparing for her debut at a popular outdoor weekend market just before Christmas, selling out everything she baked in a couple hours. It was a promising start.

I should pause here and explain that Wendy is no novice or newcomer to the luxury baking world. Even while masterfully holding down a demanding career over the past two decades, she made stunning custom wedding cakes, luscious pies, artistic cookies and other baked delicacies for friends and neighbors.

As I say, she was already wowing customers in Syracuse, New York, when we met during one of my book tours in 1998, and she agreed to go on a formal first date that turned out to be, as I fondly think of it, baptism by baby wedding cakes.

To briefly review, on a brisk autumn evening after a seven-hour drive between my house in Maine and her home in Syracuse, I arrived just in time to find Wendy cheerfully boxing up 75 miniature, exquisitely decorated wedding cakes for some demented daughter of a Syracuse corporate raider.

“Oh, good,” she beamed, flushing adorably with a dollop of icing on her button nose, as I appeared. “Want to help me box these up and take them around the neighborhood for me?”

How could I refuse? Her neighbors, it seemed, had offered space in their refrigerators and freezers until the cakes could be delivered to the wedding hall in the morning.

Truthfully, I don’t recall much about being pressed into service as an impromptu delivery man. I just have this vague memory of carefully boxing up dozens of the beautiful little cakes and bearing them all gussied up with elegant ribbons and bows to her lady pals around the cul-du-sac. “Oh,” one actually cooed as she looked me over. “You must be the new boyfriend from Maine. Careful you don’t put on 50 pounds. Wendy’s cakes are awesome.”

I gave her my best Joe Friday impersonation. “Never tasted ’em, ma’am. Just here to help out the baker lady.”

Happy to report, the baby wedding cakes made it safely to the wedding hall the next day without incident. The grateful baker lady even thoughtfully saved one of the gorgeous little cakes for the trip home to Maine.

I’m embarrassed to say I never sampled it. Cake wasn’t my thing, probably because I grew up with a mama who annually made me a birthday cake from a Betty Crocker box mix and store-bought frosting that tasted like chocolate-flavored sawdust with icing. I gave Wendy’s baby wedding cake to my children, who absolutely loved it.

Another issue emerged on my next visit to Syracuse, our critical second date. When I breezed into her kitchen with a bottle of her favorite wine before we went out to dinner, I found her putting the finishing touches on another masterpiece of the baker’s art.

Sitting nearby on her kitchen counter, however, was a beautiful wicker basket full of popcorn, my all-time favorite snack food. As she opened the wine, I grabbed a big handful of what I thought was popcorn.

Her lovely face fell. It turned out to be a groom’s cake that only looked like a wicker basket full of popcorn.

Profusely apologizing, as I licked the evidence of the crime off my greedy fingers, figuring this might be our last date, I had something of a dessert awakening.

“Hey, this is really good. I don’t even like cake. What’s in this?”

To my relief, she laughed. “Only the finest Swiss white-chocolate, sour-cream cake with salted buttercream. But no worries. I can make another one pretty quickly. Let’s just get Chinese takeout for dinner while I work.”

I’d never seen such composure under fire. Right then and there I decided to propose to this remarkable woman and even confessed my sad history with Betty Crocker, wondering if she would do the honor of becoming my wife and someday making me a birthday cake.

“Sure,” she said. “I’ll even make you a Betty Crocker box cake if you want it.”

Talk about a selfless act of love! This was like inviting a Wine Spectator judge to enjoy a lovely bottle of Boone’s Farm’s Strawberry Hill or LeRoy Neiman to do a doodle of a racehorse! She actually made me a box-mix cake, which I took one taste of and dumped in the garbage.

Fortunately, by the time our wedding rolled around two years later, Dame Wendy had schooled me up like a pastry chef’s apprentice, a culinary awakening sealed by my first taste of her incredible old-fashioned caramel cake — which she now makes me every year for my birthday (along with a sour cherry pie). 

Not surprisingly, the spectacular cake she made for our outdoor wedding beneath a gilded September moon disappeared without a trace before I could even get a taste. Our greedy guests left nary a morsel and even took home extra pieces stuffed in their pockets. 

Since that time, a long and steady stream of fabulous specialty cakes, cookies, pies, scones, muffins and the best cinnamon rolls ever made have flowed from her ovens to the tables of friends, family and customers from Maine to Carolina.

Which is why the creation of Dessert du Jour is such a milestone for the love of my life. She’s never been happier, launching her little dream company at a time we’d all like to see in the rearview mirror as soon as possible. In the meantime, she shares her happiness with others, one gorgeous theme cookie or slice of roasted pecan-studded carrot cake at a time.

And for the moment at least, I have the honor and pleasure of still being her sole employee, the one who puts up the tent and tables at the street market and delivers the goods wherever I’m sent around town, a baker’s assistant happily paid in cake tops and leftover cinnamon rolls.

I ask you, does life get any sweeter than that?  PS

For more information, visit thecitykitch.com and dessertdujour.net.

Jim Dodson can be reached at jwdauthor@gmail.com.

Sporting Life

Lure of the Wilderness

Return to the Okefenokee

By Tom Bryant

I’ve been fortunate in my canoeing life on the water to travel to some fascinating places. At the top of the list is the Okefenokee Swamp, which borders the state lines of Georgia and Florida.

For the last several years, since retiring from my day job, Linda, my bride, and I have camped in Florida during the worst of the winter months. We like the western part of the state, mainly because it’s not quite as busy with tourists. But nothing stays the same. It seems the snowbirds from up north, escaping frosty winter weather, have found our last fishing location; and on this trip we decided to try another spot, Cedar Key, just a little north of Tampa. Folks I have talked with, and fellow campers, told me that that area has remained mostly unchanged in the past several years.

Also on this trip I determined to reacquaint myself with the wilderness stretch along the border of Georgia known as the Okefenokee. In the early ’80s, I made several excursions to the swamp, the longest being a seven-day circuitous paddle from the north landing down to the south and back again to where we started.

There are three put-in locations in the Okefenokee with the eastern entrance at Folkston being the most popular. I’ve put in at all three and like the southern entrance best, although it makes little difference. Once you’re in the swamp, everything begins to look the same.

Linda and I don’t plan to paddle the swamp on this trip. I just want to get the lay of the land for a winter adventure next year. Okefenokee, named by the Seminoles, means in their native language, “Land of Trembling Earth.” The swamp covers approximately 700 square miles. So, if you should decide to explore the area in a canoe or kayak, be prepared to live in the boat. There are 120 miles of canoe trails and very little dry land, so you’re confined to the canoe all day.

Overnight stops are placed at intervals to accommodate an easy day’s paddle — that is, if you don’t get lost. And that’s one thing you don’t want to do. The trails are marked and easy to follow as long as you stay on them. Venture off the trails and there could be trouble. The swamp looks mostly the same in every direction.

Officials at the put-ins require a party to sign in at every overnight stop; and with a controlled number of overnight wilderness permits issued, they can keep up with paddlers as they travel the trails.

The area has been protected since 1937 by the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, and in 1974, a portion was designated a National Wilderness Area.

The headwaters of two rivers, the Suwannee and the St. Mary’s, flow out of the swamp. The Suwannee slowly drifts south through Florida, and the St. Mary’s flows east, delineating the border of Georgia and Florida. I’ve always wanted to paddle the crystal clear waters of the Suwannee, as it is supposedly the natural habitat of manatees. I’ll put it on the list, and maybe next year we can give it a go.

Fall and early spring are the busiest times to visit the swamp, with winter and summer being the slowest. To me, winter is the best time to take the trip. Migratory birds have arrived, and all species of waterfowl can be observed.

Remember, even though Okefenokee is considered semi-tropical, it does get cold in winter. On one trip I made in February, the low temperature set records, getting down to 18 degrees one night.

Any adventure to the swamp might put you in harm’s way as far as bugs, flying and biting, are concerned, so be prepared. Deer flies down there have been known to bite through clothing. Also, it helps to be in shape to live in the boat.

Water depth in the swamp is usually shallow, running from 2 feet to perhaps 9 feet in the canals. Once you’re deep into the watery prairies and away from the put-in areas, you seem to be transported to the days when the Seminoles were the only visitors.

The camping sites are raised platforms built about 2 feet off the water. They’re a welcome sight after a day’s paddle. The platforms have a roof over about three-fourths of the area that helps during the occasional rain shower but doesn’t alleviate the problem of flying, biting insects. I always carry a self-supporting tent with mosquito netting. This not only deters the bugs but keeps the ever present, night prowling raccoons at bay. Another point: Store all food in a cache; hungry animals are about. Oh, and most important, a porta-john is located on a corner of the platform. All the conveniences of home, just about.

Stay on the platforms after dark. Nighttime is not the time to be on the water. That’s when alligators look for food. And there are some big alligators in the swamp. Ten to 12 feet. You can understand the request from the rangers: When the sun goes down, stay in town.

I haven’t been back to the swamp in years, but on this trip south, Linda and I are gonna check out the happenings in that area and put it high on our agenda for next year; that is, if it’s still as I remember it.

If you’re gonna go, I would advise making reservations early. Call the Okefenokee Wildlife Refuge at Folkston, Ga. Good luck, and I hope to see you in the swamp.  PS

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