MAY-B-11
MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND IN THE CAROLINAS
A VISIT TO CRAIG AND CAROL SCHAEFER AND
A RENDEZVOUS WITH “THE BOAR’S HEAD”
MAY 25-29, 2001
I have it on good authority—that of my (now, first of two) GPS’s, the Magellan, now joined by a Garmin GPS III Plus, and programmable from a CD download from my laptop---that it is 388 miles from CRAI (Craig Schaefer’s former house in Salisbury MD at 35*, just a little east of due north from their new house at CJSS 22* 28.57 N and 79* 05.52 W. Further, it is 500 miles and exactly nine hours from the front door at Derwood in a Bronco set on cruise control and let loose, with only one brief pit stop for fueling.
I had made one stop for a startling spectacle on my way down I-95 through Gastonia NC when I saw a billowing pillar of black smoke, which I thought might be coming from one of the old shacks abandoned to the kudzu along the roadside. It turned out to be far more spectacular than that. It was a large Winnebago-type mobile home that had caught fire and was shooting out large flames being totally consumed within the first few minutes of its startup. The traffic was stopped because of the smoke which made it dangerous to drive through, but it was actually very hot even in my southbound side of the divided highway, and there did not seem to be any point in directing any squirt of water at the melted steel ribs of what was left when the fire truck got around the gridlocked traffic on the northbound side, and the slow down from the southbound side since no one wanted to bump into anything in a thick black smoke cover.
I arrived at the Hampton inn turnoff into the Mill Creek at RiceFields Plantation at 9 hours and two minutes from Derwood takeoff—the Memorial Day traffic would be much denser on my return. In one way, there were fewer people around the Myrtle Beach area, since there had been a convention of Harley Davidson owners the week before, which was a boon to the restaurants and motels, since the Harley folk were genteel and well-heeled. But this was the big weekend of the Black Bikers gathering—with large trailerfuls of motorcycles, often looking like Dayglo modern sculptures –gathering for a holiday weekend, when most of the shops and bars closed. The custom was for twenty or more to come in for a meal and then walk, and that had happened often enough, that the owners were reluctant to stay for legitimate business. This alternating business practice could be considered racist, but I cannot imagine why it would not be, sense I do not know who would name an organization the “White Bikers Association.”
But, I arrived in the lull before that lull into a community that looks like it had been antebellum plantations in the unreconstructed old south, that then was peppered with developers who converted them all to carriage trade mansions and golf courses. Craig and Carol Schaefer live in a nice new house on a golf course; Rodger and Peggy Althoff live in a nicer and bigger house and are moving to a still bigger newer house all on golf courses---140 golf courses in this area—and none of them, and certainly not I, do not play this game!
This area behind the Intracoastal waterway, is separated from the barrier islands by a marshy inlet. The island is named Pawley’s Island, and is an older eroding island with some houses on it that look like Ocean City Maryland, and the mainland area is called Pawley’s Island community. Real Estate agents try to sell big new houses always by reference to the adjacent golfers—Schaefers were shown one next to Jack Niklaus.
The house they have is large and spacious with two-story living, dining, and kitchen areas with a loft above for the TV room where the bearskin rug now rests in state. I envy all that abundant cathedral ceilinged wall space for a fine place to hang heads and pictures, but this is not to Carol’s taste, so a pair of heads—the caribou and elk, are still in Maryland with the Bob Davis’s. I will have to figure where those three large heads and horns---the caribou, elk, and greater kudu will be going, since none of them fit in a conventional room, and the giant maral stag is still coming back from taxidermy, not to mention the inevitable later arrival of a large moose. Ah, well, it seems some of these are going to be arriving even before the space they will be filling is ready for them!
This area was the wealthiest of the 13 colonies in pre-industrial America, since the cotton the south was known for was only one of their products. The big one here was the rice plantations, and this “Port of Georgetown (established 1739 as the principle port) was the number one rice exporting port of the world. But the altercation here called “the war of northern aggression” ended all that, so it then rested on paper (the smelly pulp mills of the whole southern coast) and Georgetown steel, processing 800,000 tons of iron ore from Canada and Venezuela into wire. But, the more recent boom has been in real estate of the Sunbelt for winter refugees; most of the people here seem to be northern refugees from Northeast and Midwest.
Craig is not as busy as he would like to be, yet, although there is far more potential than there was in Salisbury. Carol is not working at all, and she feels like she is on vacation too long and ought to get to work soon. Craig has been selling off things like his Harley, and a number of the fine guns he had collected, one of which he had saved for me. He had sold so many that he had an empty gun safe so I bought that too. We looked over the fine Charles Daley over and under double barrel shotgun with the different invector chokes, and a full ammo can of the 20-gauge ammo that would be fed into it. I could carry the shotgun home, and a few of the short handled garden tools he offered, but the gun safe and the long-handled tools will come up next month when they come to visit Derwood when they drive north to settle on the sale of their Salisbury house. These things will fit in the bed of the new GMC Sierra pickup truck that Craig bought to exchange for his big “duelly” Ford which could not easily be parked anywhere here.
We had dinner as steaks on the grille in the backyard and porch, and pondered where the hammock should be hung between trees so Craig could make the full conversion and fix mint juleps to be sipped while looking over the golf course. We drove around the area, getting a feel for the Waccamaw River and the canals that thread around the plantations into it, around one called the Heritage, where Rodger and Peggy live now as they are moving to a new house later. Some of the old plantation houses look like Plum orchard Mansion on Cumberland, or “Tara” with “Gone With the Wind” overtones—large live oaks draped with Spanish Moss all around them. But, they look labor intensive, and the end of slavery made them a rather expensive upkeep. One of the items I noticed here, looking for all the world like a long-tailed meerkat, standing up curiously, is what is called here the Eastern grey-white fox squirrel. It has a black face and is twice the size of our fox squirrel—and they rummage around amid the very large pinecones from the other tree species besides the old live oaks.
The name Huntington that is so familiar to the Southern Californians is also prominent here. It is the same man and family. He was a wealthy steel and business magnate in pre-income tax America, and followed a few VanderBilts down to this area and began buying up property. He married a modest middle class woman named Alice who was a Boston violinist, who contracted Tb, and upon doctors’ advice in an era when people followed such advice, they moved south. They had a mansion in a Moorish style they called Atalaya—the same name as the coastal port town in Turkey that I so much enjoyed with all its Roman ruins around it, --on the beach. That beach is now the Huntington State Park, and as we passed the low architecture of Atalaya, there were caterers setting up a wedding in it. Across Route 17 is the other half. Alice was recovering in a genteel way from her TB, and had taken up sculpture. She liked horses. She preferred working with aluminum. So she cast one of her first sculptures, a fully mounted and well-armored Jean d’Arc, which was the first female equestrienne sculpture cat by a female culture (etc) so it won prizes. She then set about casting other sculptures and horses, such as Don Quixote on his horse Rocinante—she commissioned another artist to do the Sancho Panza counterpoint to her errant knight. This is now in a beautiful spread of an old plantation called Brookgreen Gardens—and if there were a similar theme---I call it Frederik Meijer’s sculpture gardens complete with Leonardo’s horse-type equestrian sculptures and other pieces that look very similar—like the paired flying swans. There were also some nude females in bronze, “Young America” and “The St. James Triad” which were photogenic, but a lot of animal sculptures, some posed along a pond in which the real thing swam by as a good size gator.
The combination of the Huntington State park and The Brookgreen Gardens are in a trust that is perpetual, so it forms a natural barrier to the sprawl of Myrtle Beach high-rise condo-type development. It is a pretty, rather soft and genteel—but still modern, rich and well-kept—along the area south of the Huntington’s largesse where Craig and Carol now live and where the future growth of Rodger’s expanding empire of surgical practice will be. We talked a lot about the business and medical opportunities, which Craig is anticipating, and about which Carol is worrying since it is not up to speed as yet. We met Rodger and Peggy for lunch at Croissants, as they were heading off to a wedding in the All Saints parish, a big Episcopal Church in which they are very active. I went off running along the Olde Canal and the Waccamaw River, and later along the Huntington State Park Beach all the way to Murrell’s inlet and back. Along the way I met a wounded molting immature Loon on the beach, who was still sitting there when I returned on the run. I met a State park Ranger and told him about the loon and he came to check it out. He said, “I have seen the sharks tear them up all along this coast.” For those of you who were just now thinking of getting back into the water, I add that I spotted and photographed six gators, two garter snakes, but also one water moccasin and one cottonmouth along the marshy side of the inlet.
Craig and I had a few Memorial Day activities besides my running as he went off to make rounds. We went to the Coastal shooting range and fired off a few targets worth of .45, .357 and 9 mm pistol rounds. We watched the story of Doolittles’ raiders and the bombing of Tokyo, and what happened to each of them subsequently after they crash-landed their fuel-less B-25’s into China. We listened to veterans who were telling their stories of the war and captivity. Then, we watched “Saving Private Ryan.” We did this rather deliberately to remember the folk of our fathers’ generation and what they had endured, so that we can sit here and sip mint juleps or—for that matter- -race up and down Route 17 with the “Lady Bikers Convention.” It is a sobering thought that there were eighteen million Americans in uniform for the Great War, and that 1,200 of such veterans who had to lose a fair amount of life and youth in the mindless madness of even a “just war” are dying each day today, taking their experiences with them.
Craig and I indulged in a bit of Americana of our own when we went to Hog Heaven—an all you can eat and drink Bar-B-Q, which was superb. I ate a lot and was wearing my Marine Corps marathon shirt as a family of folk was watching as the only other customers. They were talking about running, sine a pretty dark eyed girl was making her plans for her first long run, as I was overhearing them. The mother, whom no one would have assumed was a runner from how she looked now, proved that you could always be wrong on the first impression, by talking about her first Ultra! They finally turned to me and said: “We know you are a runner!”
I asked: “Did you know that from my MCM-25 shirt?”
“No,” said the father. “I figured that out from seeing how much you had on your plate and still you look so fit like you do!”
MEMORAIL DAY TO
FORT BRAGG NORTH CAROLINA
AND RETRIEVING THE NEW RESIDENT OF DERWOOD:
“THE BOAR’S HEAD!”
While I was in Georgetown, SC, I got a phone call from Joe Brewer, just that moment coming out of Benin, Africa, on a special forces training mission for humanitarian relief of violent spots; he had just collected all my calls of the last month about my coming down to the Carolinas. He is the fellow who “in 3 years, 5 months and three days more” will be retiring from the Army and going back home to Montana where he hopes to set up a taxidermy business. Here he has been trapping –beaver, coons, fox—and, incredibly enough, since no on seems to be seeing them---bobcats in North Carolina. He has done about twenty deer a year, and has a lot of sins and skulls around the house filling freezers and manikins awaiting the tanning of some hides still to be done. I had met him on Cumberland and asked if he would be interested in dong a big boar hog. He was interested and there it is! So, I picked up the new resident of Derwood who would be keeping company across from the Ram picked up the week before. I am now going to be hanging these heads, and not relegating them to the basement floor—except for those that require their own room to be built around them since they would otherwise take up too much room on their own!
I compared notes with Joe after looking over his collection and his plans to return to Montana in another three years. This means I would be applying for a Montana pronghorn permit in three years, as I have just purchased an Arizona license in order to re-apply for a desert bighorn permit—if for no other reason that getting refused regularly means I get preference points that might eventually fall my way.
Joe showed me one other item. At the PX the Garmin GPS III Plus is sold at about two thirds of what it might cost elsewhere. Here is the chance for me to upgrade my GPS system with a programmable system. There are CDs for each part of the world with a four disc set costing about a thousand dollars. He can get access to the four-disc set for the price of a bottle of Scotch, and burn copies of the discs. This means that if I buy the new Garmin system with all the computer connections that can allow me to load the hand held, antenna-hooked Garmin GPS, I would have a routing listed on a graphic map with 500 waypoint capacity. I had previously tried to buy one but balked at the cost of the discs. Now, I rolled that into the package for which I sent a single check to Joe Brewer who will burn the discs when they come in from the shipped packages he has returning from his African trip.
So, my Memorial Day was spent in traffic, listening to the story of the four chaplains on the SS Dorchester, sunk by a German submarine torpedo, for which a memorial now exists in the form of a board of men headed by the German submarine commander. I threaded my way through the I-95 traffic and made it right on time at Derwood, in time to fuss along through the night trying to get the heads hung on the small nails I had in plasterboard for the dining room—now filled with a remarkable menagerie.
MORE PLASN FOR A FAR FLUNG FUTURE
I had just returned when I got an email inviting me to North Carolina to talk with George Poehlman about the proposed Malawi/Mindanao mission in early 2002. One of my medical student advisees, John Sutter who had been with me on the last trip to Ladakh, wants to join me on this one also, so we may make a trip to North Carolina again in the first of July to make such plans. I got a cancellation at the last minute of my providence Rhode island speaker’s gig around which I had built my trip to Denver, so I have to rearrange this end of the travel. I heard from Scott miller who had been on the trip to Alaska, and had overnighted with me in the abandoned hangar in the rainstorm. He was very interested in joining in on the trip for Kamchatka Big horn Rams and Brown Bears if it could be arranged, and George Sevich will be happy to hear about this possibility. I should be packing up for the Steamboat marathon, for which I am not at all ready—and then to think about the Bighorn Ultra that follows is another redoubling of that mileage. Ah, well, this is summer, and it is time to be stretching those hours and days of vacation adventures---while we still may!
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