Simple Life

The Garden of America

It may not be Eden, but it comes mighty close if we tend it

By Jim Dodson

The last time I went to church was back in middle March.

Seems like half a lifetime ago.

On Sunday mornings these days — most days, actually — I’m out well before sunrise watering my gardens and watching birds.

The garden has become my church, the place where I work up a holy sweat and find — no small feat in these days of safe distancing and social turmoil — deeper connection to a loving universe. The arching oaks of our urban forest rival any medieval cathedral, and the birdsong of dawn is finer than any chapel choir. It’s the one time of the day when I feel, with the faith of a mustard seed, to quote the mystic Dame Julian of Norwich, that all will be well.

A rusted iron plaque that stood for decades in my late mom’s peony border reminded:

The kiss of the sun for pardon

The song of the birds for mirth,

One is nearer God’s Heart in a garden 

Than anywhere else on Earth.

This well-loved verse is from a poem by Dorothy Frances Gurney, daughter and wife of an Anglican priest who reportedly was inspired to jot this particular stanza in Lord Ronald Gower’s visitor’s book after spending time in his garden at Hammerfield Penshurst, England. The poem later appeared in an issue of Country Life magazine in 1913, gaining Dorothy Gurney a slice of botanical immortality.

Though I descend from a line of rural Carolina farmers and preachers, it wasn’t until I began roaming Great Britain as a golf and outdoors editor for a leading travel magazine in the late 1980s that the verdure in my blood asserted itself and my own passion for landscape gardening took root and began to grow like a Gertrude Jekyll vine.

In those days, it was my good fortune to write about classic golf courses and fly-fishing streams that happened to be near some of Britain’s greatest sporting estates and historic houses.

One of the first I visited in West Sussex was Gravetye Manor, the former home of William Robinson, the revolutionary plantsman who, despite being Irish, has been called the “Father of the English Flower Garden.” Robinson’s pioneering ideas about creating natural landscapes with hardy native perennials, expressed in his famous book The Wild Garden, became the bible of English gardeners and led to a gardening style now admired and copied all over the world.

I showed up there to stay one hot mid-summer afternoon when the 100 acres or so of woodlands and gardens were already past their peak. But like Dorothy Gurney, I was so taken with the sweeping natural landscape that I spent an entire day just walking the grounds looking at plants and chatting with the gardening staff. Among other things, I encountered my first Gertrude Jekyll vine, planted by Robinson’s protégé who went on to partner with Surrey architect Edwin Lutyens to create some of England’s most acclaimed private gardens.

After this, every time I traveled to England, Scotland or Wales with golf clubs and fly rod in tow, I made time to seek out some of the most historic houses and private gardens in the Blessed Isles. During bluebell season, I wandered through the breathtaking New Forest National Park to Chewton Glen — where farm animals by law walk free — and moseyed over to Kent to play a British Open course I’d always dreamed of playing. I also spent a blissful summer afternoon checking out the structural plantings of diplomat Harold Nicolson and the sumptuous gardens of his wife, author Vita Sackville-West at Sissinghurst, an ancient Anglo-Saxon word that means “clearing in the woods.”

I spent a day with Shropshire rose guru David Austin, toured the amazing terraced gardens of Wales’ Powis Castle, checked out the stunning gardens of Stourhead, Hidcote and Kew — even eventually found my way to Hammerfield Penshurst where Madam Gurney was moved to poetry. There I was so impressed by the riotous blue-and-pink peony border — my late mother’s favorite garden flower — I vowed to someday make my own peony border.

Back home in Maine, in the meantime, I cleared a 2-acre plot of land on top of our forested hill, rebuilt an ancient stone wall and began making my own mini-Robinsonian gardening sanctuary. My witty Scottish mother-in-law suggested I give my woodland retreat a proper British name, suggesting “Slightly Off in the Woods.” The name was apt. The garden became my passion.

In 2004, I set off to spend a year exploring two dozen private and public gardens and arboretums all over Britain and eastern America, learning that gardeners are among the most generous and life-loving people of the Earth. Among other things, I went behind the scenes at the famous Philadelphia Flower Show and England’s venerable Chelsea Flower Show, got to pick the brains of America’s most acclaimed gardeners at places like Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Jefferson’s Monticello, Pennsylvania’s Chanticleer and Longwood Gardens, and finished the year by spending six weeks with plant guru Tony Avent and three fellow plant nerds in the wilds of South Africa hunting rare species of plants. During this time I even helped design my first golf course and shape its landscaping, at times wondering if I’d perhaps missed my calling, though what is a golf course but a great big parkland in the tradition of Capability Brown?

One of the most surprising moments came when I called on John Bartram’s historic garden across the Schuylkill River from downtown Philly. I spent an enriching afternoon in the garden of America’s first botanist, learning that Thomas Jefferson frequently turned up in the garden during the long hot tumultuous summer he spent in Philadelphia composing the Declaration of Independence. According to Bartram garden lore, Jefferson jotted notes for his hymn of American democracy while reposing in the shade of a sprawling ginkgo tree on the grounds. The last time I checked, the ancient ginkgo was still standing.

For the Founding Fathers, gardening, agriculture and botany were elemental passions of life. As Andrea Wulf writes in her wonderful and prodigiously researched bestseller Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature and the Shaping of the American Nation, a tour of English landscape gardens — like the extended one I took — helped restore Thomas Jefferson’s and John Adams’ faith in their fledgling nation during some of its darkest hours. Gardening also helped make James Madison America’s first true environmentalist.

“The Founding Fathers’ passion for nature, plants, gardens and agriculture is deeply woven into the fabric of America,” she writes, “and aligned with their political thought, both reflecting and influencing it. In fact, I believe it’s impossible to understand the making of America without looking at the founding fathers as farmers and gardeners.”

My book on America’s dirtiest passion, Beautiful Madness: One Man’s Journey Through Other People’s Gardens — was my most fun book to research and write. Since its publication in 2006, I’ve heard from gardeners all over the planet and have made plans for a follow-up book on the diverse gardening passions of America and the adventures of an early 20th-century plant hunter and Asian explorer named Ernest Henry “Chinese” Wilson, whose discovered lilies are probably growing in your garden today.

As any devoted gardener knows, the beautiful thing about a garden is that it is forever changing and never completed. Revision and evolution go hand in hand with making a garden flourish and bloom.

As another July dawns in the midst of a worldwide pandemic and sweeping protests in quest of long overdue social justice and an end to racism, it strikes me that American democracy is really no different from the botanical wonders of the world.

A true gardener’s work is never complete, likewise for a true patriot of the diverse and ever-changing garden that is America. The garden must be tended regularly, weeded and watered, nurtured and fed, pruned and tended with a loving eye.

The good news is, gardens are remarkably resilient. They can take a beating, endure violent storms and punishing drought, yet come back even stronger than ever as a new day dawns. As Jefferson, Adams and that Revolutionary bunch knew, the one thing a healthy garden or democracy can’t abide for long is neglect and indifference.

And so, as mid-summer and our nation’s 244th birthday arrive, I plan to spend even more holy time in my garden — church until further notice — planning a new blue-and-pink peony border in memory of my late mama and thinking about what it means to be a good gardener and a true citizen of this ever-evolving garden we call America.  PS

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

Simple Life

The Stolen Flower Child

Love, loss and living things

By Jim Dodson

On the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, a clear spring morning in my tiny corner of the planet, I was out early planting a fig tree in the side garden — my primary hideout even before a killer virus came to town — when I witnessed an enchanting scene of discovery.

An elegant gray-haired woman and a toddler on wobbly legs came slowly down the street hand in hand. The woman was about my age. I guessed the little dude might be her grandson. 

They paused at the edge of my garden. The woman pointed to a birdbath and a pair of busy bird feeders hanging over flowering shrub roses. Several finches were at the feeder and two cardinals were taking morning dips in the birdbath. Bees were circulating through blooming sage. Spring was alive and buzzing.

The little dude dropped the woman’s hand and wobbled straight into the garden for a closer look at the action.

The woman followed close behind, keeping a maternal hand ready to catch him if he fell. The birds didn’t appear the slightest bit perturbed by the pair’s intrusion, and neither was the gardener — for what good is a garden if living creatures don’t pay a visit, be it birds, bees or boys?

Indeed, at one point, the little guy tripped and tumbled over. He didn’t cry, however. He pushed himself back to his feet and giggled, holding out a fistful of my good garden dirt to share with his companion.

She made a delighted show of accepting his special Earth Day gift. Together they examined something in the palm of her hand, perhaps a big wiggly earthworm. My garden is full of them.

How wise she was to encourage this new citizen of the Earth to get dirty in a garden. Once upon a time, when people lived much closer to the soil, Nature was regarded as an essential teacher of the young, a maternal presence used in the service of myths, legends and fairy tales to convey important lessons about survival in a wild and unforgiving world. Perhaps the handsome older woman knew this. Perhaps, given the enchantment of the moment, she actually was Little Dude’s fairy grandmother.

In any case, as I watched this tender scene unfold, leaning on a shovel in my side yard, two thoughts came to mind.

One was a line from a poem that I had commited to memory decades ago, “The Stolen Child” by Irish poet William Butler Yeats

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

The other was a powerful flashback to the enchanted young woman who introduced me to this poem and changed my life, 50 years ago to the day.

*   *   *

Her name was Kristin.

We grew up attending the same church and sang together in the youth choir, but she never really looked my way because she was a year older and several lifetimes wiser, a beautiful cheerleader who became a wise and spirited flower child.

During the autumn of my junior year in high school, however, she turned to me after choir practice and wondered if I might give her a ride home. On the way home, she informed me that she’d ditched her college boyfriend and wondered, with a teasing laugh, if we should begin dating. I had a new Chevy Camaro from money I saved up from mowing lawns and teaching guitar. I thought she just liked my car.

What she saw in me at that moment is still hard to say. I was such a straight arrow kid, an Eagle Scout who grew up camping and fishing and was more at home in the woods than the city. Once upon a time, I’d even briefly been a member of the local chapter of Young Republicans and shaken Richard Nixon’s hand, though I didn’t dare let this out until our second or third date.

“That’s OK,” she said with a laugh, “I think the universe sent me to wake you up and save you from the Republicans.” 

Perhaps it was our shared passion for the outdoors that created such a powerful bond. She loved to hunt for wildflowers and visit public gardens where she could sit and read poetry or study her lines for a play. She even walked golf courses with me doing the same. Yeats and Walt Whitman were her favorite poets. Because of her, I fancied Yeats and Whitman too.

I was 17 on the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, though I cannot tell you much about the rally we attended in a public park after school that Wednesday. There was a good crowd, lots of posters and energy, a bevy of passionate speakers warning about the dangers of air and water pollution to future generations. Someone had hauled a rusted heap to the rally site, as I recall, and protesters took turns gleefully bashing the gas-guzzler with a sledgehammer — or maybe this was a subsequent protest we attended together. In any case, I was grateful we’d parked my almost-new Camaro well away from the scene.

I recently learned from the earthday.org website that the first Earth Day protest “inspired 20 million Americans” — at the time, 10 percent of the total population of the United States — to take to the streets, parks and auditoriums “to demonstrate against the impacts of 150 years of industrial development that had left a growing legacy of serious human health impacts.”

The site goes on to note that the first Earth Day led to some significant steps by year’s end: the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of other environmental firsts including the National Environmental Education Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and the Clean Air Act. Ironically, Richard Nixon signed these pieces of legislation into law. He deserved a handshake for this.

“Two years later,” the website adds, “Congress passed the Clean Water Act, followed by the Endangered Species Act — laws that protected millions of men, women and children from disease and death as well as hundreds of species from extinction.”

In 1990, 200 million people in 141 countries mobilized to make recycling and alternative energy sources primary objectives of Earth Day activism. “Today,” the site concludes, “Earth Day is widely recognized as the largest secular observance in the world, marked by more than a billion people every year as a day of action to change human behavior.” And create a sustainable planet. For me, the best part of that first local rally was when Kristin read Yeats’ “The Stolen Child,” a poem that appeared in his first poetry collection in 1889. The theme plays off loss of childlike innocence against the unmentioned backdrop of a world being turned upside down by the social upheavals of Britain’s Industrial Revolution. Yeats grew up in beautiful County Sligo where folklore and legends of fairies stealing children were commonplace, a subject that deeply interested the poet for much of his career.

In the end, the innocent child is lured away from the familiar comforts of home to a world far removed from the one he knows and loves — stolen away, in the end, to a place that is both wild but also faintly sinister.

On some level, the message is an allegorical plea not to abandon the beauty and challenges of real world, seduced by an illusionary longing to leave troubles behind. Over the year and a half we were together, Kristin opened my eyes about so many things in this world — poetry, art, music, the power of an open mind and the spiritual connectedness of every living creature.

Whenever we debated politics — I was still something of a half-hearted Republican — she joked that she might end up becoming my Maud Gonne, the  23-year-old English heiress and ardent Irish Nationalist Yeats met in 1889 and proposed to — without success — at least three times. She became the poet’s unrequited love and lifelong haunting. In a way, Kristin became mine — or at least my Stolen Flower Child.

We agreed to part when she went off to college in the mountains. The separation was my suggestion. I had a cool Camaro and a silly notion that I needed “space” to date around “before I settled down.” The decision was one I soon came to regret.

Two years later, we got back together. For three October weekends in a row, I drove six hours across the state to reconnect with my first love. She was soon to graduate with degrees in social work and drama, and was being considered for an understudy role in London. I was trying to decide between becoming an English teacher or a journalist. She helped convince me that writing was my proper path.

On Sunday night, October 25, 1973, we parted having made a plan to go to England together someday soon and see what life would yield. Kristin went to the steak house where she worked as weekend hostess and I drove six hours back to school. Later that evening, three young teenagers entered the restaurant to rob patrons, held a gun to the head of the hostess and pulled the trigger.

*   *   *

As I watched the wise fairy grandmother and Little Dude resume their walk down the block, hand in dirty hand, I went back to planting my young fig tree, marveling how quickly half a century had passed. I also wondered, on this important day in the life of the planet, what sort of world Little Dude would soon inherit.

Ironically, just days before, a gutted Environmental Protection Agency removed the last regulations on air and water pollution in America, part of a systematic dismantling of the sweeping gains in environmental protection that had taken place over half a century, at a time when the vast majority of scientists warn the Earth is facing perilous consequences due to climate inaction. Among other things, the coronavirus pandemic has been traced to human encroachment into formerly wild places where Ebola, SARS and other killer viruses were born. Experts also warn that the world’s population of insects — the basis of our own food chain — is nearly half what it was the year of the first Earth Day.

As for me, it took almost two decades to speak of my own personal tragedy. A final golf trip with my father to England and Scotland when he was dying allowed me to finally open up about that dark October. It proved to be my second great awakening.

Today, I understand that the world is indeed full of sorrows, but thanks to the gifts my stolen flower child gave me, I understand that the power of love is the real magic of life on this planet, not to mention the importance of keeping an open mind while celebrating the spiritual connectedness of every living creature.

I sometimes feel her presence — keeping an eye on my progress, I suspect — especially when I’m in the garden.  PS

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

Simple Life

Simple Small Places

And how they produce some of life’s greatest moments

By Jim Dodson

Marcus Tullius Cicero, the famous Roman philosopher and statesman, once observed that all he needed to live was a good library and his garden. I’m beginning to know what he was talking about.

In a world where life as we knew it outside home has largely come to a standstill, familiar people and places that provide a measure of comfort and sense of normality are more important than ever. 

In my own narrowed sphere, I am fortunate to have a home library and garden where I can find useful diversion, fresh perspective and life more or less unchanged. As any reader knows, a good library can transport you anywhere in the world you’d care to go without leaving your comfortable armchair. And a garden keeps on growing regardless of the day’s news. 

Before it became a library, the small room that leads to the large screened porch out back was where our house’s previous owner, Mama Meryl Corry, spent most of her days during the final years of her life. Her late husband, Al, was a larger-than-life character and a gifted contractor who built a number of the first houses in our postwar neighborhood, including, in 1951, his own dream house for Meryl and their four children. It’s a cozy brick-and-wood bungalow that looks more like the private retreat of a Hollywood starlet than a Carolina housewife and mother.

In fact, Mama Meryl was both — at least in the opinion of a kid who grew up two doors from the Corrys but was always in and out of their house with their two youngest sons, Craig and Britt.  At a time when preteen boys begin to notice such things, Craig Corry and I maintained that we had the best-looking moms in the neighborhood. Meryl was a statuesque beauty with flowing auburn hair who looked a lot like filmdom’s leading lady Maureen O’Hara. My mom was diminutive and blond, a former beauty queen from Maryland who could have been Doris Day’s kid sister. Not surprisingly they were best friends, their alliance forged by the noisy abundance of boys underfoot.

Several years ago, as if by the sweet hand of Providence, Mama Meryl passed on and the Corrys reluctantly placed their family home on the market, just as my wife Wendy and I happened along in search of our own perfect house in which to grow old. We purchased the place within a week. The Corrys were delighted. To this day, you could never convince me that Mama Meryl and Big Al, wherever they relocated, didn’t have some say in the matter.

During the first two years we were updating and renovating rooms, the one space that proved to be a puzzlement was the small room with a fireplace that connected the dining room to the large screened porch in back — the same room where Mama Meryl spent most of her time after Al was gone. From oldest son, Chris, I learned that the space was originally an outdoor patio with a fireplace — another California touch. Al enclosed it for a cozy reading room featuring an entry door at the rear of the carport, allowing easier access and a good view of the arriving postman. 

Sometime during our second spring in the house, as I turned my attention to tearing apart and rebuilding Mama Meryl’s overgrown gardens, it suddenly hit me that the room was ideal for a home library like the one I had for two decades in Maine.

Earlier this year, we completed work on the library, providing space for 500 or so books in custom-built maple bookcases, with new gallery lighting, original artwork, vintage rugs, a handsome antique walnut writing table and five comfortable chairs suitable for any and all sort of visitors, including spirits.

In ancient times and in every culture, libraries and gardens were considered sacred places that nurtured the human spirit. The Great Library of Alexandria in Egypt was considered the spiritual wonder of the world, housing the writings of Aristotle, Plato and Socrates, and many others — until, after years of decay, Julius Caesar was blamed for burning it down. Jesus spent his last night on Earth praying in a garden and, of course, Adam and Eve were reportedly invited to leave one dressed in fig leaves for violating property rules. 

I’m pretty sure Mama Meryl approves of how I’ve updated her garden and reading room, evidenced by the fact that I can almost feel her presence in both places.

With nobody but the dogs and me likely to occupy my library’s armchairs for the foreseeable future, I’ve lately taken to inviting the spirits of well-loved authors who anchor my bookshelves to come sit for a spell in a chair of their choosing. 

As Mama Meryl hovers approvingly, methinks Walker Percy prefers the houndstooth club chair while — naturally — Joseph Campbell fancies the mythic oak chair with Egyptian carved heads. Mary Oliver lounges in the elegant red Deacons chair where Annie Dillard often sits, and the big comfy wicker number is rightly claimed by my friend Elwyn Brooks White, whose iconic children’s books (Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web) and collections of essays shaped my views on life and writing from age 6 onward. They inspired me to chase a career in which I’ve wound up eating my own words — or at least living off them.

At times like these, E.B. White’s Pulitzer Prize-winning essays, letters and other works have traveled with me since the year I graduated college, and are a tonic for the captive soul.

Particularly endearing is his essay, “Death of a Pig,” which details the author’s struggles to save an ailing pig and make peace with his own grief.  After burying his pig beneath a wild apple tree with his rambunctious dog Fred in attendance, White confides: “I have written this account in penitence and grief, as a man who failed to raise his pig . . . The grave in the woods is unmarked, but Fred can direct the mourner to it unerringly and with immense good will, and I know he and I shall often revisit it, singly and together, in seasons of reflection and despair, on flagless memorial days of our own choosing.”

White and his wife, Katherine, lived on a saltwater farm in North Brooklin, Maine, an hour or so up the road from where my first wife and I lived after we married in 1985 — four days after my favorite author passed away.

I never got to meet him, though an unlikely connection unexpectedly came my way through the garden.

Upon learning that Wendy and I planned to move home to North Carolina in the winter of 2007, an elderly friend who claimed to be friendly with Katherine White gave me a remarkable going away gift — a clump of white Italian coneflowers she claimed originated in the garden of Katherine White.

Remarkably, the flowers made it through a succession of long-distance moves and careful transplantings, faithfully returning spring after spring for more than a decade.

Ironically, our last move home to the Corry house proved to be the undoing of my well-traveled coneflowers. Perhaps their uprooting in late summer and the idea of making it to another spring was simply too much for them to contemplate.

In any case, I think about those coneflowers from time to time, usually when I’m resting with a cool beverage in an old wooden chair after a day of work in the garden, my other sacred sanctuary in the time of coronavirus.

From the depths of that old chair, I find it reassuring to study the stars before dawn and while the birds of late afternoon are dive-bombing the feeders as the last light falls like a benediction over the yard.

Certain questions, for the moment at least, remain unanswered. For example, I shall probably never know if those handsome white coneflowers really came from Katherine White’s garden, though I like to think that they did. Their message is clear. 

“To live in this world,” advises my friend the poet Mary Oliver from her grand red chair in the library, “you must be able to do three things. To love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends upon it; and when it comes time to let it go, to let it go.”

Mama Meryl knew this. I suppose I’m finally learning it, too.

Someday this house will pass into other hands and the books of my fine home library will be boxed up and donated to the annual church auction or carted off to the community book sale.

Likewise, without me around to keep it trimmed and tidy, my garden will likely overrun its borders and spread into places it was never meant to go, a disordered Eden that may prompt the new homeowner to hack it down without a trace.

But for now, like long-gone Cicero before me, these are the simple small places where I seek and find whatever there is for present comfort during these flagless memorial days — from books that still let me roam the world to a garden where, I noticed just yesterday, the bluebirds have returned for the third year in a row to start a new family — a sign that life always begins again  PS

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

Simple Life

Life in the Slow Lanes

In praise of the snail’s pace

By Jim Dodson

The TED Radio Hour recently hosted a fascinating program devoted to the art of slowing down.

The program began with a public TV producer from Norway describing how a historic passenger train rigged with multiple wide-angle cameras documented the passing landscape during its daily run between Bergen and Oslo for seven hours and 14 minutes.

There was no voiceover or narrative explanation of the journey — merely the peaceful countryside passing in real time.

The train documentary became a runaway sensation.   

What might sound like an elaborate April Fool’s joke turned out to be a ratings bonanza when an estimated 1.2 million Norwegians — roughly one-fifth of the country’s population — tuned in to watch Bergensbanen (The Bergen Line), giving birth to a new concept called “Slow TV.”

Since that time, similar programs have devoted eight straight hours to Norway’s “National Firewood Night,” 18 straight hours to salmon fishing, more than eight hours to people knitting and chatting, 60 hours to Norwegian hymn-singing and five-and-a-half days to passengers on a cruise ship.

The producers discovered, in essence, that viewers are longing for something authentic, something that minute-by-minute matches the pace of actual living, not manufactured “reality” shows that simulate or distort events in real time. In a world forever speeding up, Norwegians seemed eager to slow down and smell the roses — or at least watch them grow.

Another TED stage segment featured an efficiency-driven professor from The Wharton School of Economics who learned a valuable lesson in the art of procrastination — how “slowing down” can be a boon to personal creativity — from a pair of his business school students who took six months just to come up with a name for their proposed business idea, right up to the project’s deadline.

The company name the students finally came up with was Warby Parker, which evolved into a billion-dollar eyewear firm that was recently named the world’s “Most Innovative Company,” proving the timeless maxim that all good things come in time — and often require lots of it.

Among other insights professor Adam Grant gleaned from the experience — including his own subsequent efforts to teach himself to procrastinate — is that putting something aside often aids in refining the outcome; that human beings possess a better memory for incomplete tasks that stay active in the mind than hastily produced results; and that, in the end, our biggest regrets are not what we failed to accomplish — but what we never took the necessary time to try to do well.

“What some people call procrastination,” professor Grant says, quoting screenwriter Adam Sorkin, “I call thinking.”

In a world where feedback is as instantaneous as a nasty tweet, the faster we move through our days, the professor concluded, the less inclined we are to pause and reflect on methods that might produce a better outcome.

As one who has consciously been “slowing down” for years, it was reassuring to discover there are others in the world who believe there is great value — not to mention improved perspective and sanity — in taking the time to do the job right, to slow down and think it through, to measure twice and cut once or simply stop and buy some of those proverbial roses, whatever cliché works for you.

Pausing to think about this, I do believe it was the house and garden I built on a forested hill in Maine two decades ago that brought this important lesson home to bear.

The year it took to clear the land and rebuild the ancient stone walls that once defined an 18th-century farmstead gave me time to conceive and refine the plans for the house, which took an additional nine months to actually construct with the help of a pair of skilled post-and-beam housewrights. Creating the interior of the house (which I largely did on my own — building walls and floors, custom designing and making bookshelves and the kitchen cabinetry) also underwent several revisions and took at least three more months to complete than planned. In the end, just about everything about that house pleased me and suited my young family perfectly.

In a sense, the forest around us and the ambitious landscape garden I subsequently set out to create conveyed an even more enlightening lesson about the value of taking one’s own sweet time.

Nature keeps her own clock, and a northern woodland can’t be rushed into leafing out in spring or fading away in autumn. Summer’s lease in Maine may seem all too brief while winter can feel maddeningly endless. And yet, as I learned, watching the seasons come and go at their own pace was like attending a seminar in the art of Slow TV, a chance to absorb the beauty and spiritual messages of a living world that follows an ancient dance as old as the stars.

Any gardener worth his composted cow manure understands that the life of a garden is a slow-moving and somewhat mysterious affair, relying on faith, patience and years, if not decades, of learning about plants and their needs from others who are wiser than you about the art of coaxing living things from the soil.

Even my work as a journalist and author — always facing one kind of deadline or another — reminds me of the importance to take my time and get the story right.

At the end of summer in 2017, I set out to travel along the Great Wagon Road from Philadelphia to Augusta, Georgia. I calculated that a three-week jaunt investigating the historic towns and people who reside along arguably America’s most historic Colonial-era road would give me a wealth of material for a book on the very road that brought my European forebears — and possibly yours — to the Southern frontier.

As of last week, I’ve officially clocked more than 2,500 miles traveling the 780-mile road and am now starting into my third year of researching the astonishing life of this ancient American pathway, constantly learning new things and unearthing stories that demand time to pause and take a deeper look, to linger and reflect, to pursue new leads and find the facts.

It’s been an unexpected and bewitching journey, to say the least, something akin to a personal Chautauqua that has immeasurably enriched my life and understanding of America. I shall almost hate to see it reach its conclusion, probably sometime in early summer when I finally cross the Savannah River at Augusta.

For the record, I’ve rewritten the book’s prologue and first five chapters at least half a dozen times already, discovering as I do how the work comes a little more alive and compelling each time out, proving strength resides in careful (and sometimes slow) revision. Hopefully, my brilliant young editor at Simon & Schuster will agree, whenever he finally gets the book.

Not for the first time, traveling the Wagon Road has also reinforced my self-awareness that I am a natural slow-lanes traveler who will always choose the winding two-lane roads if at all possible.

If past truly is prelude to the future — or at least the present — this instinctual habit was likely encouraged by my first job as a cub reporter at the Greensboro News and Record in the late 1970s. Placed in command of a DayGlo orange AMC Pacer staff car, my task was to find colorful characters and interesting feature stories for the Sunday paper in a 50-mile circumference of quiet countryside around the Gate City, a job that took me along winding back roads from Seagrove to the Blue Ridge.

Looking back, I realize those slow road adventures were an education unto themselves, a great way to begin my writing career. It was maybe the most fun job I’ve ever had.

All of which may explain why, as the world seems to speed up with each passing day, I remain a committed slow-lanes traveler who is in no particular rush to get where he’s going. What I supposedly lose in time by avoiding interstates and super highways, I gain back double in terms of perspective and peace of mind by passing through beautiful countryside and small towns where time moves at a slower pace. Come spring, roadside produce stands seem to whisper my name.

Recently I flew a long way on an airplane, about a dozen hours in the air each way.

I took the slow way there and back.

In normal times airports are noisy places with folks rushing frantically about. But once I’m in the air, locked in a silver bird soaring as high as 40,000 feet above the Earth, it’s such a pleasure to read an entire book or simply sit and think about life as I gaze out at continents of clouds.

On this trip, I discovered that one of the video channels featured its own version of Slow TV — 45-minute film loops showing either a serene rainforest or the restless ocean on the craggy Northwest Coast.

I watched both films — twice.

Someday I may graduate to “National Firewood Night” or 60 hours of Norwegians singing hymns, but for now that rainforest and restless sea worked their magic on my high-flying soul.

“Does anything actually happen in that movie,” my curious seatmate was compelled to ask at one point, unplugging from his action thriller.

“Not much,” I admitted. “Isn’t it great?” PS

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

Simple Life

The Stuffed Potatoes

Sustaining power of wise friends — and a good lunch

By Jim Dodson

Two or three times a month, we meet for lunch at a quiet bar of a local restaurant.

We catch up on news and work, talk about books we are reading and swap tales about the adventurous lives of our wives, grown children and grandbabies. Sometimes it’s history and politics that dominate the conversation. More often than not we share thoughts on life, love and matters philosophical. In a nutshell, we attempt to solve most of the world’s problems in the span of time it approximately takes to consume a couple of stuffed baked potatoes.

That seems about right since the three of us always order the same items off the bar menu. Joe and I routinely order fully loaded stuffed baked potatoes while our worldly friend Pat — who prefers to be called Patrick — gets a fancy club sandwich. There’s always one in every crowd.

Some time ago, I began calling our gathering The Stuffed Potatoes Lunch and Philosophy Club.

Spud Buds for short.

You see, we’ve known each other for more than half a century. Pat (as I call him) is my oldest pal; we grew up a block from each other and have spent years chasing golf balls and trout in each other’s company. Pat and Joe grew up attending the same Catholic church. But I got to know and like Joe in high school.

To look at us, you might think we’re just three old geezers telling war stories in a booth.

Technically speaking, I suppose we are “old” guys, though none of us thinks of ourselves that way in the slightest.

We were born weeks apart in 1953 — Joe in January, me in February, Pat in March.

What a banner year it was: Dwight Eisenhower became president and the Korean War ended. Hillary — the mountaineer — reached the summit of Everest. Elizabeth II was crowned Queen of England. Gas cost 20 cents per gallon. The first Corvette went on sale. Albert Schweitzer won the Nobel Prize. From Here to Eternity was the top Hollywood movie. Ian Fleming published his first James Bond novel, Casino Royale. Mickey Spillane was the king of crime fiction.

Our mothers, bless their hearts — suburban housewives of the 1950s — knew what they were doing giving us simple 1950s names like Joe, Pat and Jimmy, names that fit us like a pair of Buster Brown shoes, names from a Mickey Spillane novel or a Burt Lancaster movie.

I’m guessing nobody these days names their kid Joe, Pat or Jimmy. Not when you’ve got so many exotic choices like Brendan, Rupert or Hamish floating around in the Millennial baby pool. Just to be sure what I’m talking about, I looked up the most popular male names for millennial babies in 2020.

Michael, Christopher, Matthew and Joshua are actually the top Millennial male names for 2020. Daniel comes in fifth.

That’s four Biblical names shy of a Christian baseball team. With a starting lineup like that, you could almost write your own New Testament — if Millennials bothered to go to church anymore.

Joe’s the only one of us who has achieved exalted granddad stature. He and wife Liz have two, in fact. One’s in Durham, the other, Asheville. They go see them all the time and who can blame them for that? If I had grandbabies somewhere within shouting distance I’d burn up the highway just to make a proud and happy fool of myself every dang weekend.

As of this month, we’ve all turned 67 years old. No applause necessary.

Truthfully, it’s rather amazing how quickly this happened. Once upon a time, 67 sounded positively ancient to our youthful ears — one bus stop shy of the boneyard, as Mickey Spillane might say.

The funny thing is, none of us feels at all ancient or even looks terribly old, according to our thoughtful wives and daughters. Then again, they might need new glasses.

With age, however, comes a number of often unadvertised benefits.

We’ve each buried family and friends, suffered setbacks and experienced comebacks, seen enough of life and sudden death — not to mention the drama of our own aging bodies — to know that bittersweet impermanence is what makes living fully so important and precious. To laugh is to gain a taste of immortality.

Failed projects and busted business deals have taught us that there’s really no failure in this life — only reasons to get up, dust off our britches and try a different path. A new summit always awaits.

Our faith has been tested and found to be alive and kicking, after all these years.

We’ve learned that joy and optimism are spiritual rocket fuel, that divine mystery is real and the unseen world holds much more intriguing possibilities than anything we read about in the news, or watch on Netflix, Hulu or Amazon.

Ditto the natural world of woods and fields and streams.

It’s no coincidence that we share a profound love of nature, drawing comfort and wisdom from its many lessons.

Joe, a forester by training, spends his days helping clients find and set aside wild lands for future generations to enjoy. He and Liz are dedicated wilderness hikers, walking encyclopedias of botany and flora, forever in search of new trails and unspoiled vistas when they’re not slipping off to see those beautiful grandbabies of theirs.

Pat is a top businessman whose real love is the spiritual solitude of remote trout streams and the joy of chasing a golf ball around the highlands of Scotland with his oldest pal. He’s also a skilled bird-hunter but these days shoots only clays with Joe some Wednesday afternoons.

Several years ago, Pat and Joe built a cabin on Pat’s land up in Meadows of Dan, Virginia. They set up cameras just to film any wildlife that happened by, cleared roads and got to know the locals. Since both are still working and have no plans to retire, that cabin became a way, as Joe puts it, “to reset our clocks — inside and out.” We take from nature, said Theodore Roethke, what we cannot see.

As for me — a veteran journalist and writer who is busier than ever and shares their view of the dreaded R-word — I’m an “old” Eagle Scout, fly-fishing nut, bird-watcher and gardener who once spent six glorious weeks in the remote bush of South Africa with a trio of crazed plant hunters dodging black mambas and spitting cobras just to see the world’s smallest hyacinth and other exotic plants in the ancestral birthplace of the world’s flowers. The baboons, birds, springboks and elephants weren’t bad, either. I felt like a kid in a Rudyard Kipling tale.

At that time, I also lived in a house I built with my own hands, on a forested hill near the coast of Maine. I also rebuilt the stone walls of a long abandoned 18th-century farmstead and created a vast English garden in the woods that nobody but family, friends, the FedEx guy and local wildlife ever saw. My late Scots mother-in-law, cheeky women, suggested I name my woodland retreat “Slightly Off in the Woods.”

I called it my Holy Hill, my little piece of Heaven.

My two children grew up there watching the seasons come and go, learning to look and listen to the quiet voices of nature. Today, one is a documentary journalist living and working in the Middle East, the other a top copywriter and screenwriter in New York City. Both claim they carry the peace of that Holy Hill with them in their hearts, and I believe them. I do, too.

Maybe that’s what I love most about lunches with the Stuffed Potatoes.

At a time of life when a lot of men our age lose their curiosity and zest for living, spending their days grumbling about sports, politics or the weather, we take genuine pleasure in each other’s company, swapping tales of life’s natural ups and downs while sharing wisdom for the road ahead.

Joe has stories galore and the most infectious laugh you’ve ever heard. He was the fifth of nine kids, has 53 cousins and an uncle who became the voice of the American environmental movement. He’s always coming out with pearls of wisdom that I promptly write down. We call them “Joeisms.”

Everybody has to be somewhere, he once observed about an a certain disagreeable fellow. I just don’t have to be there with him.

Patrick is gifted with what the Irish call the craic — an ancient Irish word that means he can talk to anyone and entertain them royally while he’s doing it. He’s a master at solving complex problems and has quietly done more things that help teenagers and homeless folks than anyone I know. He’s also the only guy I know who’s probably read more books than me, which is really saying something. At least he hasn’t started writing them — yet.

So we are three for lunch — the forester, the fisherman and the gardener.

A fictional Forrest Gump got famous for saying that his mother once said that life is like a box of chocolates because you never know what you’ll get. I beg to disagree, believing a happy life is actually more like a gloriously stuffed baked potato because, the more you put in, the better it tastes.

My Spud Buds, I suspect, would agree — even if one of them prefers the club sandwich.

There’s always one in every crowd.  PS

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

Simple Life

The Winter Gardener

There’s plenty of life stirring beneath the season’s snows

By Jim Dodson

As you read this, the first winter of the new decade is drawing to a close.

Like a certain fabled snowman who danced with the village children until he began to melt away, I rather hate to see it go.

Winter, you see, is my favorite gardening season.

Perhaps this is because I am a son of winter, reportedly born during the height of a February snowstorm on Groundhog Day way back in 1953.

Or maybe my wintry affection stems from two decades of living on a forested hill in Maine, where the snow piled up before Christmas and I learned most of what I know about resourceful living and “making do” — as they say in the North Country — including the art of keeping the home fires burning and loved ones warm.

The light of winter is another of the season’s charms. Clear winter stars over our hilltop provided a dazzling show of celestial beauty, and the feel of the winter sun on your face on a cold, clear afternoon is like a benediction in Nature’s chapel.

Whenever I’m having difficulty falling asleep, I remember cold clear nights when I donned my red wool Elmer Fudd coat and toted a 50-pound bag of sorghum pellets to the spot at the forest’s edge. There, a family of whitetail deer waited patiently for their supper in the arctic moonlight during the hardest nights of year — a memory of fellowship with mythic creatures that never fails to ease me into sleep on my own winter nights.   

It’s possible that my fondness for what poet Christina Rossetti called the “bleak midwinter”  is simply written in the stars. Both my parents were Aquarians with midwinter birthdays just days before my own in early February. Ditto my firstborn child, a beautiful baby girl who appeared during a January blizzard that left the world quilted in white as the golden morning sun spread over Casco Bay, moments after young Maggie’s debut.

When we carried her home to Bailey Island, our unplowed lane lay so deep in snow we were forced to park at the village post office and slide down a steep hill to our back door just steps from the cobalt blue sea. The memory of my newly arrived Southern mother giddily whooping as she tobogganed down the hill on her bottom still makes me smile. Maggie made the trip all bundled into my arms — and claims to remember the journey to this day.

Winter’s other gifts included our annual winter solstice party where friends and neighbors came out of the frigid night to sing and dance for their supper and — because I married into a clan of real Glaswegian Scots — a Hogmanay celebration on New Year’s Eve that included dancing to fiddle reels and toasting with good Islay-made Scotch with Big Ben dialed up on the shortwave radio at 7 p.m. — and sing in bed by nine. The drunks in Times Square could never compete with that.

To some extent or another, of course, every one of these seasonable pleasures can be found in North Carolina winter as well, including cold nights, clear stars, holiday lights, good Scotch and fiddle reels and — despite global warming — the occasional surprise snowfall that stops a madding world in its tracks.

But winter here has one significant advantage over life on a snowy hilltop in Maine.

In the North Country, once the deep cold and snows arrived, I could only tend the fire, browse seed catalogs and picture the ambitious things I planned to do in my garden once the frozen ground thawed and was fully in view again — generally around Easter time, if we were lucky.

Thanks to kinder and gentler Southern winters, however, I am able to get to work planning and digging even before Hogmanay arrives. With Nature at parade rest and stripped to bare essentials, I not only can see the architecture of my garden, but also take stock of last summer’s botanical successes and bonehead miscues.

This year, for example, with the new decade just hours away, I spent five blessedly solitary hours getting gloriously dirty in my winter garden on New Year’s Eve. To briefly review my loves’ labors, I dug up and transplanted seven rose bushes and nine ornamental grasses; moved a mophead hydrangea to a shadier spot and six Russian sages to a sunnier one. I also planted a splendid Leland cypress, raked up the last of the autumn leaves and spread a dozen wheelbarrows worth of new hardwood mulch.

By the time I was finished — and the work finished me — the mistress of the estate required me to strip bare at the side door before entering her gleaming New Year’s kitchen, though she’ll flatly tell you that she never sees me happier than after a few well-spent hours digging in my winter garden, headed for a good soak in the tub or a hot shower.

Dig in the soil, goes the old gardener’s ditty — delve in the soul.

Even William Shakespeare seemed to find this time of year irresistible for contemplation of life’s passing seasons.

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

His theme, of course, is the brevity of life.

As February dawns, such wintry thoughts come naturally to my mind as well, for I reach my mid-60s this year and am both amused and astonished how quickly the notion of “old age” has arrived.

Save for a pair of dodgy knees that make gardening’s up and down a bit more challenging, I honestly don’t feel a day over 40 — yet I know I’m in the midwinter of my allotted visitation time, with scarce time to waste for being present in my own days, whatever the season.

“Tho’ I am an old man,” as Founding Father Thomas Jefferson wrote to his friend Thomas Willson Peale in August of 1811, “I am but a young gardener.”

Two and one-half decades ago, when I really was in my 40s, I spent the entire month of February by my own founding father’s bedside, serving as his caretaker as he slipped the bonds of Earth.

What a fine and joyful life he’d led — my nickname for him was “Opti the Mystic” — and what a privilege it was to simply sit by his bed talking about this and that, weather and wives, golf and grandchildren, nothing left unsaid, saying thank-you as his life gently ebbed away.

The end came a few days into March, after a night of sleet gave way to a stunning spring morning full of sunshine and birdsong.

My oldest friend Patrick turned up, seemingly unbidden, suggesting we go play the old goat farm golf course where we learned to play as kids.

I have no memory of how we scored or even what we talked about, though it was the perfect thing to do. Opti would surely have approved.

That afternoon, I dug up some of my mom’s peonies to take home to my snowbound perennial beds in Maine.

I planted them as the spring thaw finally arrived — sometime around Easter.  PS

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

Simple Life

For the Time Being

To count the hours . . . or make them count

By Jim Dodson

My office over the garage, which I fondly call the “Tree House,” is a place where time stands still, in a manner of speaking, something of a museum for dusty artifacts and funky souvenirs that followed me home from six decades of traveling journalism. Among them is a collection of wristwatches that accompanied me most of the way.  They’re part of what I call Uncle Jimmy Bob’s Museum of Genuine & Truly Unremarkable Stuff.

Most unremarkably (if you know me), many of the watches are broken or simply worn out from the misfortune of being attached to my person. Suffice it to say, I have a history of being tough on timepieces, having cracked more watch crystals than I can count, and either lost or damaged half a dozen of these loyal beauties by various means.

I suspect that a good shrink could have a field day with the fact that all these defunct watches are the same model and brand — the famous Timex Expedition models, an outdoors icon known for its durability and rustic beauty.

You can blame black-and-white television for this unholy devotion.

See, when I was a little kid and the TV world was not yet in living color — I was a highly impressionable son of a successful advertising executive, it should be noted — my favorite commercial was a spot for Timex watches in which suave company pitchman John Cameron Swayze subjected Timex watches to a series of live  “torture tests” in order to prove that the durable timepiece could “take a licking and keep on ticking.”

To this day I remember watching slugger Mickey Mantle wearing his Timex during batting practice. Other favorites included watches freed from solid blocks of ice by a wielded hammer, also dropped to the bottom of fish tanks for hours or put through the washing machine cycle, even attached to the bow of a roaring speedboat!

In fifth grade, I actually wrote a research paper on Timex watches, learning that the company started in 1854 in Waterbury, Connecticut, producing an affordable six-dollar clock using an assembly line process that may have inspired Henry Ford to do the same with cars half a century later. The company made its name by selling durable pocket watches for one dollar. Even Mark Twain carried one. During the Great Depression, they also introduced the first Mickey Mouse watch.

I received my first Timex watch for Christmas in 1966 and wore it faithfully everywhere — to bed, to baseball practice, even to Scout Camp where I took it off to do the mile swim and never saw it again, the start of a tradition. 

The next one I owned was an Expedition model purchased for about 25 bucks with lawn-mowing money. I wore that sucker all the way through high school, occasionally losing and finding it in unexpected places while putting it through the kind of personal abuse that would have made me a natural for Timex TV spots.

For high school graduation, my folks gave me an elegant Seiko watch, a sleek Japanese quartz model that never needed winding and kept perfect time but never felt right on my wrist. 

I have no idea what happened to that lovely timepiece. Or at least I ain’t telling.

By the end of college, I was safely back to Timex Expeditions, the cheap and durable watch that would accompany me  — one lost or broken model at a time — across the next four decades.

I mention this because a month or so ago, during a particularly busy stretch, I misplaced my longest-running Expedition and, feeling it might be the end of time or at least civilization as we know it, impetuously ordered a replacement model from the internet with guaranteed 24-hour delivery  . . . only to discover, the very day the new watch arrived, that the missing watch was under my car seat all along, keeping perfect time.

God only knows how it got there.

But the message wasn’t lost on me.

Why do I need anything delivered within 24 hours?  Instead, perhaps it’s time to slow down and pay attention to what is already happening here and now, to pause and take notice of the simple things that give my life its greatest purpose and meaning. 

The start of a new year is a time when many of us pause to take stock of how far we’ve come this year and may be headed in the year to come.  After a certain age, the question of how to make use of whatever time we have left to do the things we still hope — or need — to do is also on our minds.

Yet in modern America, “where time is money,” most of us live by the silent tyranny of the ticking clock, obsessed with achieving deadlines and keeping schedules. With no time to waste, we put everything on the clock or at least mark it down in the Day-Timer, making helpful “To-Do” lists and dinner reservations, planning holidays a year in advance, booking flights to warmer seas, appointments with the decorator or therapist, paying the mortgage on time, picking up the kids at 3 —all of it shaped by, and subject to, the hopeless idea of saving time.

Someone, my late Grandmother Taylor liked to say, is always waiting beneath the clock for a child to be born, a life to pass on, a decision to be made or a verdict to be rendered. A proper Southern Baptist lady who knew the Scriptures cold but enjoyed her evening toddy, she often told me, “Child, for the time being, you’re on God’s time. This is heaven.”

A nice thought, but just to complicate matters on the planetary scale, there’s the shadow of the infamous Doomsday Clock to contend with, the symbolic timepiece created by the world’s concerned scientists that chillingly charts the steady devolvement of the planet’s environmental and nuclear climates. In 2019, the minute hand was moved forward to two minutes to midnight.

So what happens next?

Presumably, God only knows that, too.

When it comes to contemplating the passing of time, I often think about the month “out of time” my wife and young son and I spent following our noses through rural Italy and the Greek Islands with no firm travel agenda or even hotel reservations. We met an extraordinary range of unforgettable characters and ate like gypsy kings. We swam in ancient seas, probed temple ruins and disappeared into another time, discovering a race of people who happily ignore the clock if it involves the chance for an interesting conversation about life, food or family. For the time being, it really was heaven. Somewhere along the way, I managed to lose yet another Expedition watch — but failed to notice for several days.

To us, a siesta between noon and 3 p.m. would be unthinkable in the heart of an ordinary work day, generally viewed as either a costly indulgence or colossal waste of time. Yet in Italy, Spain and many Arab cultures, the idea of pausing to take rest and recharge batteries in the midst of a busy day is viewed as a sensible restorative act, a way to slow down and keep perspective in a world forever speeding up.   

From the mystical East, my Buddhist friends perceive time as an endless cycle of beginning and ending, life and death and rebirth, time that is fluid and forever moving toward some greater articulation of what it means to be human. Native American spirituality embraces a similar idea of the sacred hoop of life, a cycle of rebirth that prompted Chief Seattle to remark that we humans struggle with life not because we’re human beings trying to be spiritual, but the other way around. A version of this quote is also attributed to French Jesuit priest and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, proving great souls think alike, even in different languages.

How ironic, in any case, that a booming West Coast city that is home to time-saving megaliths of commerce like Amazon, Starbucks, Costco and Microsoft is named for a man who lovingly presaged, decades ahead of his time, that we humans essentially belong to the Earth and not the other way around, and that, in time, when the last tree falls and final river is poisoned, we will finally learn that we cannot eat money or replace whatever is forever lost in time.

Fearing his own time brief on this planet, Transcendentalist Henry Thoreau went to live by Walden Pond “because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

I hold a similar desire close to my own aging heart, though in the short-term I sure would like to finish a trio of half-written novels I’ve been cobbling on for years, write a few more books about subjects that greatly interest me, and maybe — if there’s any time leftover — build a cabin in the Blue Ridge like the one my late papa and I always talked about “someday” building together.

For the record, just for fun, I’d also like to learn to speak Italian, play the piano and spend a full summer exploring the fjords and forests of Scandinavia with my wife. 

So much to do. So little time to do it.

That seems to be our fate. At least mine.

On golden autumn afternoons and quiet winter days, however, I swear I can almost hear Chief Seattle, Father De Chardin and Grandma Taylor whispering to me that we are all living on God’s Time, wise to wake up and slow down and live fully in the now as we journey into a brave new decade, hopefully appreciating the many gifts of time and its precious brevity. 

For the time being, I now have two fine Expedition watches that can take a licking and keep on ticking.

Though how long I can do the same, goodness me, only time will tell.  PS

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

Simple Life

A Walk in the Dark

The nocturnal world reveals its secrets — and the beauty of an Elephant Angel

By Jim Dodson

Every morning for the past few years, a couple of hours before sunrise, while much of the world has yet to stir, regardless of weather or season, my wife and I walk a mile with our dogs through the darkness. Sometimes a little farther than that.

Neither wind nor rain, neither sleet nor snow — and certainly not dark of night — can keep us from our appointed rounds.

What began as a simple way for two humans and three canines to get their feet and bloodstreams moving has become a daily ritual that seems almost second nature now, the one time during a busy week when we — the humans — have time to talk and walk or simply be together. We talk of many things or nothing at all, frequently walking in a mindful silence worthy of Benedictine monks.

We carry a flashlight to shine if necessary but prefer to travel by the light of the stars and an ever-changing moon, plus whatever illumination hails from the odd lighted porch or lamppost.

Fortunately our neighborhood has only a few street lights, which make night skies more vibrant and provide deep stretches of darkness where we rely on faith and trust that one of us won’t step headfirst into an open manhole or fall over someone’s curbed bag of leaves.

That’s a risk I’m happy to take. We live in a world too full of clamor and noise, and save for those wee hours when maintenance crews at the nearby shopping center operate industrial-sized leaf blowers that can be heard for country miles (against city noise codes, by the way, and something that has many in the neighborhood up in arms). The predawn silence and stillness may be the best thing about a walk in the dark, a healing glimpse of a world that was. “Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom,” said Francis Bacon.

Our two older dogs — Mulligan the aging mixed breed foundling (Queen bee, deaf in one ear) and Ajax the golden retriever dandy (pedigreed goofball) — know nothing of Bacon, except the kind they beg to eat, but do know the way by heart though the darkness, chugging bravely ahead. Gracie, the sweet young Staffordshire terrier we rescued from life on the streets, likes to pause and sniff the earth where others have passed, keeping a sharp eye out for breakfasting rabbits, still learning her way through a civilized world. 

Darkness, it seems to me, gets a pretty bum rap.

As kids, we are programmed against the night by popular culture and to fear the darkness and everything that potentially lurks therein — the monster in the closet, the bogeyman beneath the bed, witches who consort with the moon, robbers waiting in the bushes, black cats and burglars on the prowl.

Later in life, of course, it’s the metaphorical darkness that drives the daylight narrative with news of yet another incomprehensible mass murder of innocents in broad daylight by some despondent loner enveloped by his own inner darkness.

Friends — and everyone has them — who’ve made the journey through the Stygian darkness of depression live in a state of perpetual twilight, unable to sleep, untethered from a world that seems to hold scant promise of joy or hope. Their journey back to the light is one of the bravest things you can witness.

Meanwhile, the Web’s dark side is reportedly shadowing all of our lives, spinning fantastic conspiracies while stealing our identities and credit card numbers. Is it a coincidence that the television ads that run in the predawn hours aggressively peddle home security systems, identity protection and male impotence cures? Probably not. These are what we fear most in our darkest hours of the night. 

And yet, it is that very darkness where we take refuge and rest and recharge batteries, snuggle down beneath the duvet, temporarily abandon all cares and set loose on travels through our dreams. For all its magnificent abilities to reveal the workings of living creatures, modern science still cannot fully explain why all living things — even honeybees — need sleep. But thankfully we do. And the best benefits of sleep occur, sleep experts agree, in a dark and silent place.     

A campfire in the daytime seems, well, rather pale and pointless. But on a dark night in the wild, surrounded by the watchful eyes of living creatures great and small, what is more comforting than a crackling fire that sends up sparks to heaven when you toss on another log?

In her marvelous book Learning to Walk in the Dark, spiritual writer Barbara Brown Taylor points out that the human body requires equal amounts of darkness and light to function properly, an ancient circadian rhythm of sleeping and waking that matches the cycle of day and night, allowing natural healing properties in both man and nature to do their thing.

“I have learned things in the dark that I would never have learned in the light,” Brown writes, “things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness.”

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness,” concurs the poet Mary Oliver. “It took me years to understand that this, too was a gift.”

Madeleine L’Engle sagely chimes in from a wrinkle somewhere in time, “Maybe you have to know the darkness before you can appreciate the light.”

Which brings us happily back to lights on our daily walk made mythical by the winter darkness.

Beginning in October (seemingly earlier every year), it’s fun to see the year’s latest crop of illuminated creatures of the night that appear on lawns weeks before Halloween  — gigantic black cats, towering ghouls, giant spiders, fake graveyards, skeletal hands reaching up from the azaleas. It’s all in good fun, meant to mock the very thing we are meant to fear: the mysterious darkness.

Our favorite by a wide margin is the Great Lighted Pumpkin that appears every year at the start of October, floating high in the limbs of an ancient white oak near the corner where we turn for home. He smiles benevolently upon us as if he gets the joke — a beacon of cheerfulness in a season of manufactured fright.

Come December — the hemisphere’s darkest month —  it’s the deep winter darkness that makes the lights of our daily trek through the neighborhood such a visual feast, a kinetic pleasure. As the curtain comes down on another year in the life of this struggling old planet, we hopeful types dutifully light candles and build bonfires to politely rage against the notion of going gently into that good night.

As if to indicate our unwavering commitment to optimism in the face of present concerns, we string lights on trees and lampposts, erect illuminated reindeer and waving Santas, blinking constellations of shrubs meant to light the darkened way. Clearly, there is a message in this.

During the years we resided on a coastal hill in Maine, surrounded by several hundred acres of a deep beech and hemlock forest, our little ones lived for the annual lighting of trees around the property, particularly an elderly American beech that stood in the side yard off the eastern porch.

In order to get up into the limbs of the old tree, I needed a large step ladder and a healthy snort of good Kentucky bourbon for courage in order to finagle the tiny lights into the highest branches. Our resident squirts maintained that the creatures who resided in the surrounding forest — a peaceable kingdom that included a family of white tail deer, a lovesick moose who occasionally wandered over the lawn, a fat lady porcupine who waddled past and a flock of wild turkey, not to mention a couple mischievous made-up story time bears named Pete and Charley — needed our lit-up beech to brighten their cold winter nights.

Not everyone grasped this. The UPS guy, for example, wondered why we bothered to put up holiday lights on a forested hilltop where nobody but us could see them.

Before I could reply, my wee son Jack spoke up.

“The birds can see them,” he calmly explained. “And so can angels.”

One year, in any case, I forgot to check whether the current bulbs were still operational and carefully put up several strings only to discover they were dead as Jacob Marley’s doorknocker.

In frustration, I went out and purchased several new strings of holiday lights and tested them before haphazardly flinging them into the limbs as darkness fell and an intense downpour of sleet began.

Upon flipping the switch, something remarkable happened, proof that children see things that grown-ups lose the ability to see without help.

The old beech bloomed to life with glittering lights in the icy darkness and I breathed a sigh of relief.

“Look, Daddy,” Jack said matter-of-factly. “An elephant angel.”

By golly he was right. I can only describe what he saw — the outline of an elephant with wings, soaring heavenward — as exactly that.

A few days later, even the UPS guy, delivering Christmas presents from faraway Carolina, was deeply impressed.  PS

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com. 

Simple Life

Above It All

The rewards of life’s upward climb

By Jim Dodson

Never lose the opportunity to see anything beautiful, British clergyman Charles Kingsley once advised, for beauty is God’s handwriting, a wayside sacrament.

Because I rise well before dawn wherever I happen to be, I stepped outside to see what I could see from 4,000 feet.

A fog bank was rolling silently down the side of the mountain like a curtain opening on the sleepy world, revealing 50 miles of forested hills in the light of a chilly quarter moon.

The only other lights I saw were a few remaining stars flung somewhere over East Tennessee. The only sound I heard was the wind sighing over the western flank of Beech Mountain.

An owl hooted on a distant ridge, saying goodbye to summer.

In a world where it is almost impossible to get lost or find genuine silence and solitude, this moment was a rare thing of beauty.

I stood there for probably half an hour, savoring the chill, an over-scheduled man of Earth watching the moon vanish and a pleated sky grow lighter by degrees, drinking in the mountain air like a tonic from the gods, savoring a silence that yielded only to the awakening of nature and first stirrings of birdsong.

After an endless summer that wilted both garden and spirit down in the flatlands, a golf trip with three buddies to the highest mountain town in the eastern United States was exactly what I needed.

A door opened behind me on the deck.

My oldest friend, Patrick, stepped out, a cup of tea in hand, giving a faint shiver.

“Beautiful, isn’t it? “ he said. “Hard to believe we’re not the only ones up here.”

Such is the power of a mountain. The lovely house belonged to our friends Robert and Melanie, and though there were hundreds of houses tucked into the mountain slopes all around us, from this particular vantage point none was visible or even apparent, providing the illusion of intimacy— a world unmarked by man.

“So what does this make you think about?” My perceptive friend asked after we both stood for several silent minutes taking in the splendor of a chilly mountain dawn.

I admitted that, for a few precious moments, I felt as if I were standing on the deck of the post-and-beam house I built for my family on a hilltop of beech and birch and hemlock near the coast of Maine, our family home for two decades, surrounded by miles of protected forest. The skies, the views, even the smell of the forest were nearly identical. Sometimes I missed that place more than I cared to admit.

“I remember,” said Patrick with a smile. “It was quite on a hill.”

“The highest in our town. It felt like the top of the world. My sacred retreat for a transcendental Buddho-Episcopalian who has a keen fondness for good Methodist covered dish suppers.”

Patrick laughed.

He knew exactly what I meant. Old friends do. We’ve talked philosophy and gods and everything else sacred and profane for more than half a century.

In every spiritual tradition, mountains are places where Heaven and Earth meet, symbolic of transcendence and a human need to elevate mind, body and spirit. As long as our types have walked the Earth, hilltops and mountains have provided a powerful means of escape and spiritual retreat, a way to literally rise above the demands and hustle of everyday life.

Moses received the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, which translates to mean “The Mount of God.” In Greek lore, it was believed that to spend a night on Mount Olympus would result in either madness or direct communication with the gods. Japan’s Mount Fuji is one of that nation’s three sacred mountains and a World Heritage site that has inspired artists and pilgrimages for centuries.

“Being up here,” I added, “reminds me of an experience Jack had that I would like to have.”

Jack is my only son, a documentary filmmaker and journalist living and working in the Middle East. He and his sister, Maggie, grew up with Patrick’s daughter, Emily. The three of them are all adults now, birds that have successfully flown the nest. We are proud papas.

In January of 2011, though, as part of Elon University’s outstanding Periclean  Scholars program, Jack and a few of his chums joined thousands of spiritual pilgrims for the five-hour night climb up Sri Pada — also known as Adam’s Peak —  to see the sunrise from an ancient temple on Sri Lanka’s most holy mountain, a pilgrimage of 5,000 steps traveled annually by thousands of Hindus, Buddhists, Christians and Muslims for some 1,700 years.

Jack had been asked by his advisor to go to Sri Lanka and make a film about the service work of the Periclean class ahead of his own class’ project with a rural health organization in India. The resulting 45-minute film, The Elephant in the Room, examined the environmental issues of Sri Lanka using the fate of the nation’s endangered elephants to tell a broader story about how the world’s natural system are under severe stress. Jack wrote, filmed, edited and narrated most of the film in partnership with two of his Periclean colleagues.

As he reminded me the other day during one of our weekly phone conversations from Israel, his unexpected pilgrimage to the mountaintop came at a critical moment of his junior year when he had burned out from too much work and not enough rest. In addition to his studies, he was burning the candle at both ends, teaching himself to make films and working as an editor on the school newspaper.

“When I look back, I realize I was getting pretty discouraged about both school and journalism at that moment,” he explained. “But the trip to Sri Lanka came at a good moment because it was the first time I got to make a film my own way about the things that struck me as important, just using my instincts about things we were seeing in our travels. It was a moment of real clarity and freedom.”

The climb up Sri Pada in the pre-dawn winter darkness was one of the highlights of his Sri Lankan film odyssey, a surprisingly challenging climb even for a fit outdoor-loving kid from Maine who grew up climbing mighty Mount Katahdin with his mates. Jack and his fellow Pericleans paused on the ancient steps several times to catch their breath before pushing on to the summit. On the way up, they passed — or were passed by — the young and old, the healthy and feeble, men and women of all ages, shapes and sizes, rich and poor, trudging ever upward. He told me he saw young men carrying their grandmothers on their backs, others carrying torches, bundles and food — couples, families, pilgrims from the Earth’s four major faiths all seeking a common holy mountain top.

“We arrived about 10 minutes after the sunrise,” he remembers. “But the whole mountaintop was bathed in this beautiful golden light. We stood in the courtyard of that temple sweaty and tired but also incredibly happy and at peace. It was very moving. I caught some of it on film. The view was incredible,” he recalled. “We were so glad we made the climb. It was just what I needed.”

Though he’s gone on to make more than a dozen timely films about everything from debtor’s prison in Mississippi to the opioid crisis across America, my son’s earnest and charming little film about the fate of elephants in Sri Lanka — his first full-length effort — is probably his old man’s favorite to date, full of simple images that reveal his budding talents. It is filled with poignant fleeting encounters with ordinary people and moments that have become familiar hallmarks of Jack’s homegrown filmmaking style.

A year after he made Elephants in the Room, his more ambitious and technically refined film about a pioneering rural health care organization in India got shown at a World Health Organization gathering in Paris. His sophomore achievement ultimately landed him a job at one of the top documentary houses before he went on to graduate school at Columbia, met his wife and began a promising career as an independent filmmaker.

I saw a nice change in my son after he came down from that sacred mountain: a fresh resolve, a clearer mind. During our recent phone chat from Israel, I asked if he ever thinks about his climb to the mountaintop on that winter morning in Sri Lanka.

“I do,” he replied. “When I got back to Elon, I started to learn about meditation and developed a different attitude about what I was doing. I still think about that climb from time to time. It was an experience that stays with you.”

We also talked about the last really challenging hike we took together, a grueling hike up Mount Katahdin with his Scout troop. I was 50 at the time. Jack was 13.

Truthfully, I’d convinced myself that I was in excellent shape for a 50-year-old Eagle Scout. But I never made it to the top. My dodgy knees gave out a thousand feet below the summit, prompting me to rest my weary legs at the ranger station beside Chimney Pond while Jack and his teenage buddies scampered up Cathedral Trail to the summit. 

As I contentedly waited, a passage from James Salter’s beautiful novel Light Years came to mind.

“Children are our crop, our fields, our earth. They are birds let loose into darkness. They are errors renewed. Still, they are the only source from which may be drawn a life more successful, more knowing than our own. Somehow they
will do one thing, take one step further, they
will see the summit. We believe in it, the radiance that streams from the future, from days we will not see.”

Above it all, as we watched the chilly sunrise from the top of Beech Mountain, my old friend Patrick simply smiled and nodded when I mentioned this. PS

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

You can see Jack’s work at www.JackDodson.net  and The Elephant in the Room at: https://vimeo.com/30460629

Simple Life

Smoke and Memory

Both are easily gone in a puff

By Jim Dodson

On a cool and misty autumn afternoon not long ago, I found myself taking up a secret pleasure I’d abandoned years ago.

While doing book research for the day in Staunton, Virginia, the lovely Shenandoah Valley town just off the Great Wagon Road that brought thousands of Scots-Irish to the American South, I turned up my coat’s collar and took a stroll though downtown in search of a cup of tea and a bookshop before hitting the road for home.

On the corner, I spotted an old-fashioned tobacco shop.

Its window display featured a selection of gorgeous, hand-carved pipes with names such as Mastro Geppetto and Savinelli Estate.

Beyond them, two gents sat in comfortable wing chairs, smoking pipes and having a quiet rainy day conversation.

On a lark, I stepped inside.

If Marcel Proust’s main character in Swann’s Way associated the taste of a simple madeleine with childhood, my version might well be a whiff of pipe smoke.

The scent of aromatic pipe smoke, you see, has a similar effect on me, conjuring up nice family memories and not a little amusement at my own youthful vanity.

Walter Dodson, my paternal grandfather, a cabinetmaker whose name I bear, smoked a Dr. Grabow pipe, the inexpensive brand once manufactured in the pretty Carolina mountain town of Sparta. Walter was a man of few words but a rural polymath who could make anything with his hands. He taught me to fish and how to cut a straight line with a handsaw.

Some of my fondest memories of him are of fishing together in a Florida bayou or watching my grandfather work in his carpenter’s shop, his Grabow pipe clenched in his teeth, fragrant smoke drifting all around us. Walter was the age I am today — mid 60s — but looked positively ancient to me, and a bit like an old Indian chief. In fact, family lore holds that his mother was a woman of Native American heritage.

I was 10 or 12 years old at the time of these encounters, a bookish kid under the influence of adventure tales in which wise forest wizards and noble Indian chiefs smoked pipes. So it all seemed perfectly natural and wildly romantic to me.

I never worked up the courage to ask my grandfather if I could try a puff of his Grabow pipe, and he never offered.

Ironically, about this same time, heeding the new surgeon general’s warnings about the health hazards of smoking, both my parents ditched their cigarettes, hoping my older brother and I wouldn’t take up the habit.

They needn’t have worried.

Following the prescribed formula for pulling an “all-nighter” for a geology exam my freshman year at college, like an idiot I drank an entire pot of black coffee and smoked half a pack of Camels, my first cigarettes ever. Somewhere around midnight, after throwing up and peeing myself silly, I fell asleep and managed to miss my 8 a.m. exam.

I’ve never touched another cigarette.

That same autumn, however, I drove home on a beautiful October afternoon to surprise my father at his office, hoping we might slip out for nine holes of golf before dark.

I found him sitting in his office reading Markings, a spiritual classic by Dag Hammarskjöld, the Scandinavian diplomat who’d served as the secretary-general of the United Nations.

He was also smoking a handsome wooden pipe.

“Oh no! You’ve discovered my secret pleasure,” he said with a sheepish grin.

Given my recent unhappy run-in with cigarettes, not to mention his own abandoned habit, I was surprised to see him smoking anything.

He explained that pipes were different from cigarettes. For one thing, you didn’t inhale pipe smoke into your lungs but allowed it to circulate in the air around you, “pleasing both the nose and the soul” — one reason, he reckoned, so many writers, poets and philosophers chose to smoke a pipe.

“It was either Charles Darwin or James Barrie who said a pipe stimulates noble thoughts” he said.

“Maybe it was either Santa Claus or Hugh Hefner,” I suggested. “They smoke pipes, too.”

I learned that he’d bought his first pipe in London during the Blitz and brought the habit home with him. “I thought it made me look like an intellectual,” he added with a chuckle. “Truth is, it reminded me of home. Your granddad smoked a pipe. It was pure comfort, a pacifier with smoke and memory.”

I wondered how frequently he smoked his pipes. There were three on his desk. Two looked new, one looked very old.

“Not very often.  A dozen times a year, tops. It’s not a habit — more a simple pleasure.”

He laughed, handing me his oldest-looking pipe. It had a cracked stem.

“This one belonged to your grandfather. You can have it, if you wish.”

“Can I smoke it?”

“Better try this one instead. Fits the hand nicely. Not much bite.”

It was a handsome thing, burled briarwood, a simple Italian affair with an elegant long stem. He showed me how to pack and light it and watched me puff away, reminding me not to inhale.

“So what do you think, college boy?” He asked.

I liked it.

He smiled. “We won’t tell your mother.”

That Christmas, though, he gave me a copy of Markings and a gorgeous handmade-Italian pipe that looked like it had been carved from a knot of mahogany.

I loved my new pipe even if my new college girlfriend didn’t.

She was a fellow English lit major, a self-described Marxist who had expensive tastes in footwear. She laughed out loud when she saw me pull out my fancy new Italian pipe and fire it up at a party where the guests were smoking a different kind of pipe and something that smelled like burning shag carpet.

“My God,” she hooted. “You look like an idiot! Next thing you’ll be wearing a corduroy jacket with elbow patches and calling yourself a Republican.” Had I been quicker on my feet, I might have told her that Che Guevara and her personal hero Virginia Woolf both smoked pipes, and that William Wordsworth carried his favorite pipe with him during his famous Lake District rambles. I could just picture the bard sitting on the crumbling wall at Tintern Abbey, dreaming of his lost Lucy as he sent perfect smoke rings into the still summer air.

We broke up a short time later — irreconcilable differences over politics and pipes — at which point I went straight out and bought a second-hand corduroy jacket with elbow patches, hoping I might look like John le Carré on the back cover of his latest espionage thriller.

By the time I was a married father living in a forest of birch and beech trees near the coast of Maine, I owned several handmade pipes, which I typically only smoked when summer vanished and the weather turned.

Our kids, however, always loved watching me smoke my pipe, probably because I could blow smoke rings prettier than either Bilbo Baggins or Gandalf the wizard.

Which may explain why, on that recent misty afternoon in western Virginia, realizing it had been many years since I even held a pipe in my hand, I impulsively bought a cheap Missouri Meerschaum pipe and an ounce of mild tobacco and had a fine time making smoke rings as I hoofed around town.

Back home, I went searching for a box in the basement that contained items from my office desk in Maine and found a few of my favorite pipes from those days, but not my grandfather’s Grabow or even the handsome Italian number my father gave me once upon a time.

They may be waiting somewhere in an unopened box, like artifacts from a carpenter’s workshop or a spy novelist’s corduroy jacket.

Or maybe they simply vanished, like smoke and memory.  PS

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.