North Carolina

There was something about traveling westbound across North Carolina that tickled boyhood memories. If you find this blog filled with boyhood memories, please understand that they seem to be flooding me lately. One thing has led to another and the fact that I am writing a serial set in Northern Indiana where I grew up has increased the number of memories.

This particular memory was of Indian Guides, a program of the YMCA in Mishawaka. We had a tribe. It was a good program in which fathers and sons met together to do crafts, tell stories, go camping, build crystal radios, and even sometimes watch TV. That’s what we were doing in October of 1959 when I was ten years old. We gathered at Craig’s house. Brian, Dennis, Mark, Mike, and me. Maybe Monte was there as well. The occasion on that Sunday night was the airing of Disney’s Wonderful World of Color premier, The Swamp Fox. It starred Leslie Nielsen in the days before “Airplane” made him a white haired comedy star. We met at Craig’s house because he had a color TV. The series was intermittent with two shows that October, four in January of 1960 and two more in January of 1961. I think we only met together to watch the first episode. By the end of that school year when we were entering sixth and seventh grades, the Indian Guides kind of fell apart. We each had our own thing to do.

So why would I think of this admittedly random memory? I was traveling westbound on Swamp Fox Highway through Francis Marion National Forest.

I ended up at a little campsite somewhere near Fort Bragg for Mothers’ Day weekend.

I have to say that I loved traveling across North Carolina. It seemed like every house, no matter how small, had a neatly manicured lawn, sometimes an acre or more. There were a lot of white fences and horses running around the gentle hills as I moved inland.

I moved on Monday, as I often do, to a site about fifty miles south of Asheville. Everyone had told me that I had to visit Asheville, so I did. What a beautiful little town filled—in my experience—with friendly people, including the two soldiers who were walking my direction and said they were stationed there. I said I didn’t know there was a base at Asheville. One soldier said they were on special assignment. The other said, “We’re everywhere. Just lift up any manhole cover. You’ll find the United States Army.”

The Grove Arcade Public Market (above), I discovered, had been commandeered by the U.S. Government back before World War II and was walled off and closed for a headquarters building. It remained in the possession of the Federal Government until it was sold back to the City of Asheville in 1997 and has been undergoing a revitalization ever since. Very impressive architecture.

I’d been reading some stories over the past several years that were set in the mountains of North Carolina and other venues, but all the locations were cleverly renamed with things like “County Seat” and “The Swamp.” It hadn’t been difficult to figure out that the swamp referred to was the Great Dismal. It took me a long time, though, working through vague phrases like, “the Interstate on the north” and “the park” to the west and “forty minutes up to the college” to decide that the pattern for the places was based loosely on Hendersonville, about twenty-five miles south of Asheville. So, like I often do, I decided to check out the county seat of Henderson County. Nice little town with some of the best coffee shops I found in North Carolina.

Apparently, the town has as big a thing for bears as Seattle has for pigs.

I decided to take U.S. Highway 176 south out of Hendersonville—a route which took me back into South Carolina in order to get to my campsite. It was narrow and twisting and I decided not to take with the trailer when I headed out on Wednesday for Tennessee.

But the route and North Carolina in general were beautiful and relaxing.