The Pride of the Nez Perse and A Drive You Will Never Forget

This is the Beartooth Plateau which you access along the Beartooth Highway that exits the northeastern exit of Yellowstone Park, passes through the mining town of Cooke City and then dips south into Wyoming before heading back north towards Red Lodge Montana. This drive is often ranked as the second most scenic drive in the lower 48 and passes through the plateau that constitutes the biggest contiguous land mass above 10,000 feet in the lower 48. This tundra landscape with its deep valleys with verticle cliffs, its lakes and wild flowers interspersed with patches of snow all summer long, and its views of distant mountains is an adventure that has to be seen to be believed. I warn you that the drive is not for the faint hearted.

You might also access the Beartooth by heading north out of Cody, Wyoming to the Chief Joseph Scenic Byway which is also a great experience. It was named in honor of the leader of the Nez Perse who escaped through Idaho, through Yellowstone, and along the path over the Beartooth Pass into northeastern Montana where they were finally captured and where Chief Joseph said those famous words, "From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever."

If you can get immersed in the experiences of the Beartooth area without feeling the pride in the human spirit that these pround people exhibited, then you are a more callous soul that am I. I have driven the highways several times and never without both that pride and the shame of what my people did to those people.

There Should Be A Law Against Pink Dragon Outfits

Growing up in the country, Halloween just was not that big of a thing. In fact, I am not sure that it ever went beyond the fall festival stage at our elementary school. Sarah, however, dressed our sons up as all sorts of scary creatures and paraded them through the neighborhoods.
But, my daughter-in-law, Amy, simply has too much imagination, and my grandson was dressed up in this pink dragon outfit and taken to a party on base in Lawton, Ok. and then paraded around the streets later by Amy and Sarah. They thought, to use Amy's words, that he was "so cute."
I doubt that my grandson was permanently harmed by this experience, but I think that the jury is still out on that. Certainly PTSD can wait years to reveal its destructive ways.
If you have a young boy, please do not dress him up in a pink dragon outfit for Halloween, speaking for all the one and two year olds out there. If pictures of that surfaced about the time that the fellow is expressing his first rumblings of manhood, it could set the guy back for decades.

The Thread #8, My Religious Training

I do not know how much influence the world outside a person's brain can have on the religious beliefs of the person. I do know how people learn to incorporate religion into their lives in ways that seem very non-religious. I have spent a lot of my life wondering how people could turn words and ideas to fit their purposes with no problem with the seemingly intrinsic contradictions that they were ignoring.

My father was a pragmatist first. His religion was mostly for show and blending into the larger family and community. He always attended church and he taught Sunday School now and then, but he never let religion inhibit his natural tendencies to get the job done, whatever that job was. My first paragraph about ignoring the contradictions can be first applied to my father. He seemed to have no problem with them.

My mother lived her religion, very much never allowing statements of religiosity to enter her vocabulary of useful phrases. Unlike my father, she made few statements of belief and absolutely no show of her beliefs that could be construed as phony or contradictory of her statements on life. You might never know that my mother had a religious side, except that she was there in her pew on Sunday morning.

So, while we children were ushered off to church with our parents every Sunday, growing up, we were not bombarded with religion during the week. The large Bible was there on the coffee table, and we all looked at it often and read from it, but there were no family devotion or prayer times, except the blessing before a meal.

I listened to all that they had to say. I learned the bible verses and participated in the discussions. But, a child does not really know his or her own mind. To immerse the child in any philosophical belief and reinforce that with all the symbolism, even to integrate it into the totality of the learning process, is no guarantee that it will stick.

Religious belief is an adult thing because only adults really understand the concept of faith. I was a literal child and I think that all the other children were as literal as I was. Literally, church, for all its teaching and preaching, was about getting together with other children and having a good time. It seems to me that if man wants anything to endure that is so encompassing as religious belief, then we best be content with the children looking forward to it as a good time set of events.

I make very little connection between the choices that I have made as an adult relative to church and religion and what I experienced as a child, save this one. I knew that I wanted my children to have the same opportunities that I had, growing up inside a nurturing church community, and so we provided that to them.

But, my religious choices as an adult have to do with what I have learned, and continue to learn as an adult. I really did adhere to the Paul's advise, when I became an adult, I "put away childish things." I quit thinking and speaking as a child on religious matters. The results have been what the results have been.

I never had someone to "push religion down my throat." It is probably a good thing that I did not, for I would have rebelled completely against any such effort. I never really had people warn me that if I did not do this or that, then I would burn in the fires of Hell. Again, had they done so, I would have rebelled completely. I got to be an adult without a strong sense of needing to be "saved" or "born again."

Religion was not presented to me in a way that it gave me reason not to learn all that I could learn. I felt no need to reconcile knowledge that I was learning about the age of Earth or the concept of man being here on Earth for tens of millions of years. I was free to approach science as the great tool of man that it is, and to feel pretty good about the conclusions of science that passed muster.

I really can not speak for all children, maybe not any except myself as a child, but I know that the lack of pressure on me as a child to accept religious beliefs and to change my world view based on those beliefs was a great asset to me later in life. It allowed me to reconcile that wide gulf between the tenets of religion and the practice of religion. I really did not grow up with any great expectations of religious people being any better people than non-religious people. My wonderful and honorable Grandfather Anderson Howington probably had a lot to do with that for he did not join a church until near his death.

Today, I write and speak without the language of church and religiosity. I can quote the Bible very well and use its lessons often. But, I refuse to either blame religion for my shortcomings or give it too much credit for my good moments. This probably can all be attributed to the qualities of my mom and my dad and the freedom that they gave me to be the person that I would become.

Weddington Needs A.....Money Palace?

If you drive across North Dakota and South Dakota, you start to understand, they raise a lot of corn there, a whole lot of corn! So it is not surprising that someone came up with the idea of the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota. But, pulling it off is another thing. You see, all the outside of the building except the lower walls is decorated yearly with corn and grain. The great thing is that they actually grow the many colors of corn in the area only to decorate this building. The many inside and outside murals are done by local families, groups, and organizations. There is big competition for these mural decorating rights.
The building is nothing but a town recreation center. It has basketball courts and can seat a few thousand, I suppose. But, it draws tourists from across the land. It is a great symbol of the crops that are grown locally, but also the great spirit of the people.
Visiting Mitchell, South Dakota, and standing in front of this magnificent structure, it hit me that my home had so changed that if we were to set out to copy Mitchell in some fashion, our palace would have to be covered with money, I suppose. That seems to be what everybody around here is so proud about. A past mayor of Weddington made no qualms about wanting to close the town to only "the right kind of people", and he meant those who had wealth. Even the local church that was once the proud center of a community of small farms gave its thumbs up to a minister who openly recruited "moneyed people" into his fold.
There is no substitute for the wonderful experience of growing up in a town where there is purpose that goes beyond personal financial success. I stood looking at the building and was jealous in a way that I had not been jealous in a long time. I wanted what they had, but I wanted it where I live.

I Love Small Towns

Here is what I love about small towns. This is the gymnasium of the old Dallas High School where I taught. Today, it is a community gym and it carries the name of the biggest little man I ever knew. His name is Dennis Franklin, and he is still alive, though he has liver cancer that will probably take his life in the not too distant future. I would not bet on it though, he is the toughest guy that I may have ever known.

Dennis came to Dallas in 1947. He was from Franklin, NC where his family owned a farm and a general store. He came to teach, coach, and play semi-pro baseball as a shortstop. He was about 5' tall and had more spunk than a mountain lion. For many years he coached both the baseball team and the basketball team at the high school.

Dennis quit coaching the baseball team about 1965. During the 18 years that he did coach it, in the toughest county in the state, he never came worse than second in his conference, which his teams won most of his years.

In basketball, he matched that record for 28 years. His teams never came in worse than second place until his last year of coaching, and won the conference consistently. In order to build his teams, he ran a Optimist Club program for town youth in the gym during summers most of the years that he coached.

The Gaston County Sports Hall of Fame inducted Dennis into its ranks about 7 years ago. This is no small time thing. It includes several major league baseball players and pro basketball players, plus other coaching legends of the storied history of Gaston County sports.

Dennis is my buddy and I will see him this coming Saturday at a reunion of us old teachers at Dallas High School and North Gaston High School. He was a great typing and bookkeeping teacher for forty years just as he was a great coach. We called him "Stumpy" as a term of love and respect, but we never doubted for a minute what he brought to the table in all his capacities.

Small towns have these kinds of characters and that is the reason that excellence and even exceptionalism are so often found in the people that they in turn produce. It is the reason that however much we keep spreading out in suburbs, our soul will always be in those small towns that dot our landscape.

Take Your Grubby Little Hands Off Our Hospital

Many of you will recognize these two buildings. The small one is Weddington Methodist Church as it exists today. The large one is the old church, now used for different things but still a part of Weddington Methodist Church holdings.

Many years ago, when all that existed on the hill where the new church sits was what was left of the old Weddington School, many in the church wanted to sell the property for about $900,000. It was the seven acres that was the most desirable potentially commercial property in Weddington. The majority of the members of the church wanted to sell the property so they could expand the facilities that we had.

Some of us said a very loud, NO WAY! Though we were small in number we put up a good fight, and just when crunch time came, the actual owner of the property, Western North Carolina United Methodist Conference, came to our rescue and helped us save the property. Land that had been out of private hands for a hundred years or more, and served the community as a school, would stay institutional and non-commercial.

Now, some people want to sell the hosptial in Monroe. The dollar signs are doing to some the same that the dollar signs did to members of Weddington United Methodist Church many years ago. It is a time to again to say, NO WAY!

The Thread #7, Developing A Love For Nature

Moving to the seclusion of the small farm that my dad had purchased and built a house on for his family, at the age of eight, was the beginning of a whole new world of learning, but nothing so important as developing an understanding of nature and my place in that world that suddenly was very big for such a young boy. While our farm was just under 50 acres, when you added the land of my aunts, uncles, and grandparents, it was about 200 acres. But, that was just the beginning. The range of our exploration and play was more like about a thousand acres, and 70% or more of it was wooded.

On that thousand or so acres was the west fork of Twelve Mile Creek, about two miles of it in total, plus several feeder streams. The dropoff to the creek was rather pronounced with twenty to fifty feet of steep inclines. The bottom land bordering the creek was flat and rather wide in places for such a small creek. On the hillsides were old gold mines filled in with rock. The quartz rock that I have always heard signaled the likely presence of gold was plentiful.

Nature provided many edible fruits and plants, including creasy greens, wild strawberries, wild plums, blackberries, huckleberries, black walnuts, muscadines, and of course the honey of bees that was often found in a rotten out tree. For young boys, the water of the creek was fit to drink, so, we learned to live off the land, in a manner of speaking. We certainly collected and ate most of the foods that I listed above.

In addition to the fruits, barries, nuts, plants, and honey, there were also animals that were very edible. Fish were the principle ones. Twelve Mile Creek had planty of catfish in that day, and a couple of local pounds had brim, bass, and couters. On the land, there were lots of rabbits. We learned to catch the fish with hook and bait, and also by seining with a large net that we had. The rabbits we caught in rabbit boxes that we learned early-on how to build.

My dad owned one shotgun that almost never came out of the closet. Hunting was not a part of our life, a condition that probably led to none of use owning guns today. It is interesting that the only brother that I have who does own a gun came along much later and grew up mostly in the town of Matthews after we had left home.

Of all the foods available to us from the wild, only blackberries and catfish were what you would call staples in our diet. We picked enough blackberries every summer to put up a couple of hundred pints of jam and jelly, and during the summer, catching fish to eat was a regular part of our routine. I tell people that I am not a fisherman today because when we fished, it was catch the fish or not have any fish for Friday night supper. Thus we often employed the seine or the old crank telephone. But, mostly we dug up worms and set several lines along the bank that we kept a close watch on. Fishing for me was for sustenance , not fun, and as an adult I simply do not need the sustenance.

I watch children growing up today with their hand held games, their planned lives, their programmed activities, and I want to cry for them. God gave us the most magnificent world and yet people grow to adulthood never realizing the width, breath, and depth of that world nor what it can mean to them. I heard some man on the radio last week talk about what he called "nature deficit syndrome." That is one way of saying it. I am not sure what species we become when we move ourselves from the world of nature into being casual observers of it. When you see the damage many are willing to do to nature for their own profit, it is obvious that we have lost respect for that which first gave us life.

There are so many small and insignificant things that we learned in those days on that land that add together to an education in the ways of nature. How does the doodlebug dig those little conical shaped holes that they hide in, waiting on an ant to enter to be quickly gobbled up? Can you really charm them out of those holes with little couplets like we sang to them? "Doodlebug, Doodlebug, where have have you been? Doodlebug, Doodlebug come back again?"

Where do you find running cedar that can be used around Christmas to decorate a mantle or from which you can build a wreath? Why is almost always near ferns in totally shaded areas during the summer? Can you really smell a snake before you encounter them? If you are cutting firewood with a crosscut saw and splitting it with an ax, what type of tree do you try to find to make the job as easy as possible but still have wood that will burn long and hot? Where do you go to find the ideal trees?

When you are playing in a stream, how long can you let the leech stay on your skin before it is too late to just pull him off? How do you find the most illusive of creek creatures, the crayfish? Can snakes bite you underwater and where around creeks do they like to hang out? When the creek dries up, where do you look to find water and all the creatures that live in it except the fish?

These questions and a million other tidbits of knowledge about the crops and gardens that we raised, the animals that we kept, and often ate, the fruit trees and grape arbors that we benefited so much from having, and how to schedule time to take care of it all, constituted a great part of my education. But, the farming aside, it was just getting to know mother nature so up close and personal without parents always there to direct our explorations that I now realize was so absolutely wonderful.

I have spent a lot of time in churches over the years, listening to preachers and others tell me about God and his ways, his love, his will, his gifts, and his demands on us. But, to this day, I have not heard a single preacher say anything that would compare to the silence of the forest as a teaching tool. I do not need a moralizer to tell me what a great gift life is and how much someone must have loved me to make me a part of all of this wonderful world.

There is no aspect of my education that means as much to me as what I learned playing and exploring with my two older brothers on that land that was available to me as a child and teenager. It set me on a trek that has taken me across this land to places like Glacier National Park, Mount St. Helens, the high desert of southern Wyoming, Yellowstone Park, The Great Smokies National Park, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia and New Burnswick, the Wichata Mountains of Oklahoma, up and down the wonderful sea coast of Maine, the redwood forests of northern California, the swamps of southern Georgia, the beauty of the Great Plains, and I am not finished yet.

I thank God every day that my children are as smitten with the nature bug as I have been. They all prefer a walk through a deep forest more than they enjoy the sandy beaches when the crowds are there. Hardly a month goes by that one of them is not exploring some new discovery. Already, my oldest grandchild, who was named for a pass in Glacier National Park, shows a real interest in the great outdoors and its endless ability to amaze and inspire.

On acreage here in Union County, I found my love for the great outdoors and the learning experiences that are offered by nature if I would but ask the questions. There is no end to what can be learned there, and I have more wonders to discover than my brief lifespan could possibly absorb.