THE BACKSIDE OF WATERFALL ROAD

trees beside waterfall road

Drove to town today to pay a few bills due tomorrow. I set out on a leisurely drive. Didn't need anything from any store, my coffee shop friends don't go there anymore, no reason to stop there. I told self to spend no money in town. Don't need gas. Drive up to each of three drive-thrus, envelope in drawer, "Thank you, have a good day," never turn off the engine, drive on through town and make a circuit. Drove into town by way of Pine Swamp Road and returned by highway 18. Felt relaxed the whole time. No radio in the car, no problem. I'd actually rather listen to the tires sing on the pavement. New tires on the road have their own sound. I listen to the motor. It is a near perfect engine, the 93 Buick Century 3300 v-6, a classic motor like the Chevy Nova slant-6 that is used all over the Third World running pumps long after the bodies have rusted away. My motor is such a fine motor, doesn't burn but half a quart of oil per 3,000 miles. A healthy motor. All problems with the car are external to the engine. I love the engine as much as I love the car. It starts right now, in zero degree air as in seventy degree air. The car runs so reliably, just driving it makes me happy. I went on the one-gallon of gas round-trip to Sparta, out seeing the landscape, the slant of the light, the shadows on the ground, the trees, the houses, the sky, the mountains. Out for a drive on a sunny day. Took camera along, saw one scene of an old-time loading pen, a dozen black cows grazing nearby and a tree, stark winter shadows. I'd already passed the only place I could pull off the road and park. I'd need to turn around, go back, etc. Too much. 

 chance installation

Drove through Sparta feeling good, brief verbal exchange at each drive-thru window, pull up to the red-light in the middle of town on hwy 18, turns green and I'm on the way home. At Whitehead, I decided to drive up the back road, the beautiful road that goes through the woods and hasn't been messed with ever, but to throw gravel on it from time to time and let it wash down the roadbed in the side ditches every big rain. Big rocks beside the road that takes a ridge up the mountain, a more direct shot than taking Air Bellows Gap Road up the mountain, though rough, so rough I go slow and straddle ruts the best I can. It's an easy road to drive, just have to drive it like walking. It's a hurry slowly road. I passed some icicles hanging from a rock formation. Pulled up a ways to a place I could get off the road. Nobody uses the road, but sure as I park in it, somebody will come along. It's a natural law. I walked back to the icicles, got some pics of it, some rock and some trees the other side of the road. The road goes up the spine of the mountain. It is the old wagon road to Air Bellows. At the top of the mountain, the sides of the road are like any other. The pavement ends at the top and the further down the road you go, the sides of the road rise gradually as walls. By the bottom, the walls are as high as the car. A few centuries of erosion down wagon tracks in mud, the roadbed becomes a river during a torrential rain washing the mud away. Such a rain happens at least once a year. 

merlin the shop cat

In Whitehead, before driving up the mountain, I stopped at Maxwell Equipment to see whoever was there. Ross was on the phone. It was cold. The building is made of wood framing and tin-roofing walls and roof. It's merely a windbreak. The temperature outside and inside are the same. Ross had the stove going. It made a pleasant zone in a radius of about five feet. Chairs around the stove. Merlin the shop cat was in there staying inside the stove's aura. He sleeps in a stack of insulation in a high corner of the building. Merlin is a good old neutered Tom cat with a white hairs sprinkled randomly through his black pelt. He likes the shop for the mice. Must have left wherever he lived before. Ross and I sat by the stove talking and somebody came in for some minor work, and the three of us talked awhile. Harry came in and the four of us stayed near the fire and talked. Harry lives up the hill behind the shop. Merlin took up with him a few years ago. Harry and Ross needed to drive to Wilkesboro for some steel or a part. I came on home, driving slowly along Air Bellows Gap Road looking at landscape in afternoon winter light. This is where I decided to go up the mountain on the back part of Waterfall Road. The part of the road houses can be built on are at the upper end of Waterfall Road. From the point where the pavement ends, on down to the bottom, the banks are almost straight up on both sides of it. There are so many trees, it's not a concern leaving the road. I have walked the road with dog and photographed it many times. It was one of my favorite walks. In late winter when the two roads coming up the mountain are so rutted that getting stuck is an in-yer-face issue, I take this back road. People with new cars don't know they really can drive over it easily, so none of the new people ever use it. 

icicle and rock

In winter with snow and ice, when the other two roads are nearly impassable, I use the old wagon road. It's like a bobsled run going down it on ice, a slow, very slow bobsled. I drove Ted Stern, whose farm I once caretook, down the the wagon road in his new Cadillac. He was mortified, but I never scraped bottom one time. I'd walked the road so many times, I knew it intimately. One winter, I drove preacher Millard Pruitt down the bobsled run in good packed snow in my 78 Toyota pickup, blue with the driver's side door red. He grew up on the mountain and this was the road he grew up on. I wanted to show him the old road of his childhood. I knew I could easily make it. It was just snow and ice. His eyes were bugged out all the way to the bottom. Never lost traction one time. It was the smoothest the road ever is. A few people like to four-wheel on it in winter. They pack the snow down good to make an easy road to drive. One of my favorite memories happened one day in winter, several inches of snow, walking along the road with my dog Sadie. A crow flew up over the ridge from one side to the other, passing just a couple feet above my head. I heard the wings, thought of the hymn, Come Angel Band, "I hear the sound of wings." In a world of white, one crow, appeared, flew over my head and disappeared down the other side. I felt like that was one of the most blessed moments of my life. The waterfalls are down the very steep bank beside the road. I decided to go to the waterfalls by that way one day years ago. Took a fifty foot rope to tie on a tree at the top. The first thirty or so feet was sheer rock covered with leaves, slicker than ice to try to walk on. It was a fun journey. At the bottom, close to the waterfall I came upon a huge area of jack in the pulpits. Big ones, maybe two feet tall, covered the bank above the water. It's an ideal a Japanese garden designer reaches toward, natural, the way God flung it.  

rock and growth

*

LEGACY

marcel duchamp

Paying attention to the news in this time is too ominously boring. I believe I see where it is headed, at least the direction. I don't want it to go there, but it will, already has in spirit. It's looking like the push is to go all the way now. It looks like one thing, while actually it's quite another. The ignorance level of the people in our government making laws we have to go by has become so obvious in this time. Equally horrid is that the most ignorant ones are the most popular. Ignorance of the law is no excuse. The ignorance behind the law is excused. The strategists use ignorance to disarm us, keeping us in the realm of the irrational where surprise attack is the game. It is very well paid master propagandists having a ball. We stay preoccupied with smokescreen, corporate news. I've been questioning my own intelligence paying attention to the likes of these people, attention given to ignorance. What do I want to do that for? That's not what's going on. I tell myself to let go of interest in stupid. It is not amusing. They're corny cartoons. I pay attention out of curiosity concerning the strategy behind their ignorance front and center. Every time we call Sarah Palin Caribou Barbie, she rises another notch in name recognition. Composer, Jean-Carlo Menotti told college president Ted Stern, "I don't care what they think of me as long as they remember my name." I see video clips of interviews with celebrities of a wide variety. The ones that pretend they're not playing the celebrity ego game, Bob Dylan, took the step beyond of playing the role by not playing, one-upping the other players.

 

marcel duchamp

 

Ted Stern told me what Menotti had said without passing any judgment on it even in tone of voice, though I knew  it struck him extraordinary or he wouldn't have said anything. Stern, himself, was a celebrity in his world, felt at home with other celebrities, and my feeling was he took what Menotti said to heart, something like, Confucius say. The celebrity's creed. When Stern told me, I was new in years on my spiritual path, aware of ego as ultimately self-defeating. In the world of people I live among in this time, I can't think of anyone who would say that of themselves. Surely somebody in the county is thinking it, I don't know who it would be, but maybe a teenage girl dancing with a Christina Aguilera video when mom and dad are not at home, longing to be on American Idol. To my ear, Menotti's proclamation of indifference to what others thought of him went radically against my school system education where popularity was number one. Unpopular, you were nowhere. In the Fifties you were square. Even if you couldn't be popular, being liked a little bit was at least something. Even though I don't have that motivation now, it remains underground within. Initially, his saying shocked my sensibility as a reckless thing to say, or as an Old Baptist might call it, a bold thing to say. Simultaneous with the minor shock wave that ran through my mind, I got it. He's an artist, he's busy. Like it or don't, he composes his music and lives his life. It's what he is about. Somebody doesn't like something he said at a cocktail party, oh well.  

 

marcel duchamp

 

The part of me that got it was interested to note Ted Stern tucking it into one of his memory drawers like where a cow keeps its cud to bring up for a good chew when he has the time. One of his maxims he lived by, by his telling, "Hesitate and you're lost." He lived it for so many years it was automatic. He never lost time to hesitation. He would take time to think something through, and when he saw it, he saw it. Jean-Carlo Menotti was an internationally known composer in his later years with legacy on his mind. Remember the artist's name, carry it into the next generation, remember his name five hundred years from now, the maestro Menotti of Italia. He wanted his name remembered, meaning his music, not his reputation. He knew reputation faded quickly with time and he was thinking of his music's place in the canon down through time. It told me Ted Stern was in the time of his life when awareness of his legacy comes into play. He lived long enough to see his influence fade, called himself a once-was. By his hundredth birthday, he saw his legacy and found it to his satisfaction, publicly affirmed. He would be remembered. He could not be flippant as an artist with his reputation. Ted Stern wanted everybody to like him, everybody. He could turn his bitterest enemies to devoted friends and keep them there. It was a talent. The good man part of Ted Stern was not fake. Often his heart influenced his mind and vice versa. He had a good connection between heart and mind. Like Menotti, he wanted his legacy to be the continuation of his name down through time, in Stern's case the man who walked Charleston through the transition from Old South to New South. His role in the history of Charleston is substantial, as well as in the state history. His legacy, like Menotti's, sez: this man's lifetime contributed in a beneficial way.

 

marcel duchamp

 

I like living in the rural working class where a legacy amounts to a tombstone. It could be called "rural romantic" living outside of society, though from the inside I don't see it like that. Underachiever I can identify with. I've worked hard and know the hopelessness of day after day labor all one's working life toward making ends meet. The romantic part would apply better to an empathy for more than half the people on earth, way more than half, living very sparingly, who don't have the irony or the luxury to imagine what it would be like to think about a legacy. This is where I chose to live out my days, where self-important behavior is frowned upon. I don't want to need to worry over a legacy other than he didn't hurt little kids. I don't like it when somebody hurts little kids in any kind of way. But who needs to be remembered for longer than the lifetime of the last person to remember you? What does it matter how long a man's obituary is? Same as what does it matter how long his wiener is? But it matters a great deal. According to Freud, the biggest deal. OK. It matters. I'm glad every day of my life, am satisfied and grateful not to be a star. Oh yeah, I remember him from when I was little. I think I heard somebody say they cremated him. Aint no grave that nobody knows nothin about. You ever heared about him havin a grave, Honey? No, I aint heared nothin about him in no ground. They said the thought of his body layin in the cold grave for thousands and thousands of years give him the shivers somethin terrible. He said he'd rather go up in a puff of smoke. That's what I heard he said. There won't be no grave for nothing to raise out of when the trumpet sounds. What's the poor soul gonna do? Reckon he'll be left behind? Far as I know. Wonder if he was saved? How would I know? I heard he was weird. Yeah, I heard that too.

marcel duchamp

 

 

*

 

 

MEMORIES OF TED STERN

 jim dine, gate

I'm flooded with memories of Ted Stern over the last few days. Today I was remembering his first year at the college, my last year, when the sound throughout the campus every day in class was the pounding of telephone pole sized steel tubes driven into the ground in a grid where the new library was being built, and another place nearby where a new classroom building was being built. BAM - BAM - BAM all day long, the pile-drivers beating those huge things into the ground. This was every day. It was not objectionable. It was the new college. It was evidence that the college was going to survive the financial crisis it was going through. In a way, it was hope. Charleston the city was wasting away after business went to North Charleston and the suburban malls. Charleston then was in a place similar to what Sparta is in now, businesses barely making it and shutting down. Four movie theaters closed. Only one restaurant and two greasy spoon diners. Even the sailor bars and strip joints moved to North Charleston. For students, faculty and staff at the college, a new university was being built around us. Big change. Some liked it. Some didn't. I didn't like it at first, but when I saw what was happening, I liked it.

Progress was Ted Stern's guiding light. At that time in my life I took progress for a dirty word. It was progress that was messing everything up. I recall a time after I had been in the mountains some years, Ted Stern retired and needing to go back to Charleston for some meetings, I drove his new Cadillac, a really nice ride on the highway, going with him to visit some of my friends there. Charlotte was putting up a beltway all the way around the city during that time. Going out of Charlotte on the southern end of I-77 we saw what to my eyes was uttermost devastation. Not anything growing as far as could be seen, a red clay desert. Big cement structures were up and a highway being built between them for an up in the air experience cloverleaf sort of configuration. Big earth-moving equipment, the kind with tires ten feet high, real American he-man Heavy Equipment. Giant Tonka toys. Ted remarked about how beautiful this was, progress, people at work, new highway being built to accommodate more cars coming into the world every year. It lit him up like it would light me up to see that much acreage in virgin forest. Knowing him taught me to appreciate progress. Years later, I passed over that same stretch of highway, even drove around on it, feeling eerie that high up in the air. It's a beautiful area, really beautiful to my eye.

I'm remembering the time he told me of how his father, Hugo, died. The telephone rang, somebody told him the stock market crashed, the phone hit the floor, he hit the floor and that was it. Ted said the people that came in to clean the body stole his gold cufflinks, his money clip and the money in it. He said he was not going to die over money. He never let money be that important to him. Money was important in that he kept track of it and did his own taxes every year, kept up with the new loopholes. Every time he bought something he'd ask what kind of deal could be worked for him, and he'd get a good deal. In his later years he leased a new gray or silver Cadillac every other year. It was a better deal than buying them. I came out of the College of Charleston thinking I was educated. Over the years post-college knowing Ted Stern as the caretaker of his farm and one he could talk to about decisions he's involved in with the college, Spoleto, whatever it was, aware that I would not be telling any of his business around, I learned that compared to Ted Stern I was a dumb shit every way I can be looked at. I was his ear in that way to the point I taught myself to forget Charleston business he told me, because I was serious about not letting any of  it slip. I did one time, but by chance it did not go any further than the moment. It taught me. Never again will that happen. It was good training for other aspects of my life too. Several old mountain people have told me the stories of their lives with the confidence I would not blabber any of it around. I've told them that if-when I write about them it will never embarrass them.

Ted and I have had some differences too. That I look up to him, respect him highly, it doesn't mean I haven't seen his human side too, which is more on display at home than at work. A year or two after I came to the mountains to work the farm, Ted Stern was having a cocktail party event for the business leaders in Sparta. He said I would wear a white shirt with a bow tie and serve drinks. I told him I would not. He told me I would. I could not convince him I would not, and he could not convince me I would. His final word down at the wire was that I would do it. Mine was you'll see. I told him I have to live here. I was not Ted Stern's step-n-fetch-it, and the gossip around Sparta would never be that I was. I did not know those people then, but knew I would eventually. It might have been a pride thing. I don't care. There wasn't any way in this world I was going to do such a thing. Not that I have a problem with pouring a drink for somebody. I worked among people in bib overalls, bluejeans, workboots and ballcaps. This was my new world I was having to learn in a hurry working the farm. Nobody was ever going to see me in a bow tie, anyway. Especially in my new life among hillbillies that I was quickly coming to appreciate. Ted Stern did the drink pouring at the party or made it a communal pour-your-own. I don't know. I wasn't there. I had to problem with it. I never once told him I would. I only told him I would not. He never let on later like he had a problem with it. I know I paid for it in some way, but don't know how and don't care to know how. If he'd told me to get my ass off the farm, I'd have said ok.

As for somebody to work for, I've only worked for one employer his equal when it comes to being consceintious toward employees. Attorney Donna Shumate. Tom Pruitt, the old farmer who lived nearby and helped me with the farm had a great deal of respect for Ted Stern because all his financial dealings were straight up, on time. He never had the first money issue with the man. That impressed Tom mightily. After living in a culture of poverty awhile I learned why. In a life of poverty people need money all the time, really need it. A dollar or two you're entrusted with won't last long. It's a culture where you have to know somebody very well before you can trust them. Trust doesn't extend beyond family very often in the mountains. By now I've come to understand and feel the same way. I don't ever trust somebody I've just recently come to know, from here or from Away. It now takes me years to know somebody before trust becomes an option. I was told by a smart-ass one day at lunch when we were talking about trust and I mentioned my hesitation. "I'm sorry for you," he said in his superior tone of voice that says: how stupid you are compared to me. I didn't pay him any mind. I knew him for a long time, would never think of trusting him. He taught me not to several times. Ted Stern never talked down to anybody about anything. He regarded everyone with respect and was someone who could be trusted absolutely.


*  

TED STERN AN HONORABLE MAN

     cleve gray, red thrust on gray

This is the day Ted Stern had his memorial service at the cistern, by his request weather permitting. I found a short video Channel 5 put online of the flag-wrapped bier with a friend of more than half my life inside it dead. First time I went to google to look for info on his passing, I saw "Ted Stern dead at 100." It knocked me for a wobble on my track. Dead. It was a little bit hard to take. Dead  is such a dead word. It's inert like a cinder block. A name and memories. The first time I saw him, he was walking across the cistern on his way into the main building. We at the college knew we had a new president, though I hadn't seen him. One day I was walking into the quadrangle through the gate between the library and the main building (1968) and saw Ted Stern walking over the cistern. At a distance and at a glance, he looked somewhat formidable. He walked with a self-confident air. I'd heard he was retired Navy, which turned me against him automatically. I'd been in the Navy too, though he and I had very different experiences there. The Navy was good to him. He gave it his all. The Navy was not good to me, because I gave it my time that it had usurped in the period of the draft, and nothing else. The ultimate authority. I resented having two years of my life taken because I was born a boy in USA. In retrospect, I have an entirely different version of the time in the Navy. Yes, it took me out of my life, but I needed it at the time. The time in the Navy was my transition from rule from outside myself to making my own decisions for myself, which theretofore I'd failed at repeatedly. I needed to get outside my life at exactly that time to assess the pit I'd fallen into of my own ignorance.

I'd come out of a family situation where I had been taught to reject authority. In photographs I've seen of self in childhood, I see that rejection of authority started about the age one and a half. That's when the deep furrows between my eyes started their very early development. Resentment. Hating being hit. Hating the ongoing berating. By the time I left parents, I was dead set against authority and dead to parents. Him for the hitting and berating. Her for never protecting the boy child from his insanity. Hitting the kid sublimated hitting her. Resentment of male authority runs deep in me. Like I say, all the way back to age one. The child within hated being hit daily without recourse. Didn't just dislike it. Hated it. Hated. Going to a Kansas fundamentalist church five times a week, it was hate that was developing in me, not love. Love was nasty. It was a four-letter word. Bad. There wasn't any of it going around in our house, anyway. Certainly not in the church. Church was duty. Or else. In my time in the Navy and the College of Charleston, love was a word I scorned. Had no idea about it. Experienced some heat, but it wasn't anywhere near love. It was a peep hole, nonetheless. A beginning.

I tell this for the origin of my rejection of authority. The authority I grew up under was wildly irrational. There was no reasoning behind it, no guidance, no correction. The only thing I was required to understand was No, Don't and You Better Not. I was promised a better life if I could start everything I do with no-dont-you-better-not. A kid has to move. A kid has to talk. I refused the straight-jacket, so I was in trouble every day. Existence was the cause of my trouble. It doesn't sound good to resent parents openly, but when your mother tells a neighbor woman, "He's my kid, I'll kill him if I want to," and then tells the kid about it, proud of herself, it causes a child to question the advisability of living with these people. But there was no place to go to. It was a matter of seeing I was born in prison with a sentence at least through high school. Free from parents and church, then I had the prison sentence of the military to go through for being born in Amerika. Then there is the prison sentence of you-better, you-oughta, you're-supposed-to, you should, the rules unspoken, but you're expected to know them and go by them. When-ya-gonna-get-married-when-ya-gonna-get-married-when-ya-gonna.... I got married, because of supposed-to.  I'm an Hephaestus personality drawn to an Aphrodite personality. He failed to see the humor in his wife's infidelity.

All this to say that in the first view of Ted Stern at about fifty feet and maybe ten seconds, I saw Authority. He was big with a big Jewish nose, which I respected. I'd known a few people of the Charleston Jewish community, liked them all and respected their intelligence. Upon seeing him with his Hebraic schnoz, I was entirely disposed to rejection, though with curiosity. The Jewish part told me this is not the average white man. It indicated that the board hired him for reasons that cancelled any prejudices among the Southern white men of the Old South way of thinking. Still, it didn't matter to me, one way or the other. Navy. Authority. Why did this have to happen at my school? Within, I was braced against him. There came a time I did something arrogant, disrespecting his authority. He handled it like King Solomon. I was so impressed by his way of "taking me to prayer meeting," rationally, intelligently, as well as firmly, I came away from it respecting his authority. He did it in front of about thirty people, never letting on who he was talking about, never making eye contact with me to say, I'm talking about you. I sat in my metal folding chair red faced in awe. I had never experienced such intelligent authority. My respect for Ted Stern started that day. It didn't change anything between him and me, because I didn't know him to avoid him or cultivate him. I just stopped talking down about him among my friends.

It was not cool to admit I admired him suddenly. His pattern all the way along in his time in Charleston was to turn the people most dead set against him into his most ardent supporters. I saw it even in cases I never believed would be sympathetic with him, like my own. He had a great deal of opposition in his first few years with the college, and he played through it. I'm recalling a Miles Davis concert in England, Isle of Wight Festival, in a documentary about his music. It was a big outdoor show of what is now called classic rock, the Who, Hendrix, Janis, the Doors. Miles was playing his electric music. Audience was throwing every kind of trash at the band, booing them. At a certain point in the music, the bass player told Miles he couldn't take dodging flying bottles and being booed any more. He wanted to quit and leave the stage. Miles said, "Play through it." By the time they finished the set, the booing and bottle throwing had ended and the audience went nuts in ovation wanting more. This sentence, play through it, has been with me since Ted Stern's passing. He played through it when metaphorical bottles were thrown at him and he came out of it beloved by the people of a great Southern city, his funeral a major moment in the history of the city of Charleston. For the College of Charleston, corny as it sounds to say it, Ted Stern was indeed its founding father. His obituary could be reduced to three words, an honorable man.


*

TED STERN FLIES AWAY

     hallelujah bye and bye

Three hours ago the news came to me by email that my friend of 40+ years, Ted Stern, left the body this morning. The email came from Robert Macdonald who is writing his biography. He was hoping Ted would live long enough to see it. He's projecting to be finished with the writing around April. This morning I found an email from Macdonald telling me Ted was not feeling well. I responded by email and then his return email was to tell me Ted had gone on. All morning I'd been thinking about calling Ted. I thought I'd wait until 11:30, before lunch and plenty of time to be alert after getting up. Macdonald's email came through at a quarter to eleven. I set out to send Stern's grandson Eric an email. I'd started to put down his address, had written "eric" and the phone rang. It was Eric to tell me he'd had a call from Uncle Sandy. I sit here looking out the windows at the birds picking up sunflower seeds on the surface of the snow. When I gaze back at the monitor it turns pink and aqua from snow blindness, followed by a moment unable to see at all, then I can see ok. Caterpillar is on her window seat watching the slate-gray snowbirds hopping about and flying against the white background. From time to time she'll squeak and her whiskers will twitch in the Maine Coon way. It excites her so much to watch the birds that it triggers this involuntary twitch of the upper lip.

I find myself reminding self from time to time that this is the day Ted Stern left the body. I've only seen him a few times in the last years. I knew he was in comfortable circumstances at the very expensive assisted-living facility nursing home where they're paid to pay attention to you, not just to clean up after you. He had his own apartment with his own decorations on the walls, furniture from home, and people of his society for neighbors. His peers. He had his books he read during the daytime and football, basketball and baseball to watch in the evenings after the news and a drink. He was a master of self-discipline. It gave the appearance of a neurosis, but I felt like I knew him well enough to see that it was learned. He didn't operate by reaction. Unless somebody really pist him off. It wasn't then that the other would suffer the consequences, but later when it counted. Hitting was not a solution for him. He learned a very great deal of his public service acumen from his cousin in New York, where Ted is from, Robert Moses, the man who could be said to have designed modern Manhattan. I'd met him a few times in his 90s and found most notable Ted's visible respect for him. Ted regarded everyone with respect, so it appeared no more than with anyone else, but his respect for Moses had a golden glow about it. Reverence for the Master. Robert Moses was his teacher, sensei, his spiritual master, guru, cousin and close friend, confident. Moses was the only of Ted's relatives who went to Ted's wedding when he married outside the family religion.

My respect for Ted Stern is that kind of high. He has been my teacher in many ways since we first became acquainted. He was hired to be president at the College of Charleston when I was in my last year. Straight out of the Navy, which I'd been in too and had no love for. I had a hard time respecting a lifer from the military. It was the time of campus activism, not that anything political was going on at College of Charleston. Charleston is not a place for a demonstration. It's like, suppose you gave a demonstration and nobody came. There were half dozen of us that played the anti-war role in our minds. I went to DC in 68 for the march on Washington concerning Vietnam. I'm glad I went, only because it killed my interest in politics except to look at from afar and never commit to. I was a bit insolent after that time. A week or more later my thinking from what I'd seen educated me with new data I needed to know. Stay out of all of it. I hold Johnson down there with Reagan as the very lowest. My regard for Johnson took a nose dive and crashed. Not from what happened at the rally, but from learning afterward the lie he told the press to report in a press conference before the event. The press reported as told, like the good soldiers they're paid well to be, all of them knowing that if they reported what actually happened they'd be shut out of journalism as a career, or any other corporate job. I saw it first reported by Nat Hentoff in the Village Voice, the only journalist brave enough to tell it. Then it turned up in Norman Mailer's book Armies Of The Night. He was at the press conference too.

I pained under the disillusionment that was also a dissolution, beliefs falling away. I didn't know it then, but learned later that disillusionment equals enlightenment. So enlightenment must be the result of being disillusioned. I can't say that Ted Stern saw through the illusion, because I don't know, but he saw through an awful lot of illusion. He spoke in favor of government decisions at the time, respected Westmoreland, and I took it he bought the package. Did I ever find out different. Some years later I saw him in the hospital after an operation; I don't remember what was removed. He was sailing on some pain medication. He spoke freely and conversationally like he was largely unable to do otherwise. He wasn't much for talking unless it had to do with some sort of action, like relating to a mind full of decisions to make every day. He told me his vision of what he sees civilization coming to in the near future. It was darker than my own. Mine has a light at the end of the tunnel, albeit down to like f22. His tunnel was a long cave. I never heard any of that kind of talk again. In his fully conscious mind he saw the illusion of taking care of business, but also saw we need something to keep us going or we revert to shoot-outs, no law enforcement, heavily armed bandits plundering until the ammunition runs out. His desire to make the world a better place as a result of him having been in it transformed the College of Charleston, a little Southern college going under the third time like somebody drowning, into a nationally respected South Carolina state university inside ten years.

He was instrumental in getting the Spoleto Festival to happen in Charleston. He became a friend and confident to Jean Carlo Menotti, the self-centered composer nearly no one could get along with for any period of time. Arbitration was Stern's talent, his learned talent from Robert Moses and possibly an admiral or two along the way. Menotti needed an arbitrator at his side like he would need a translator if he didn't know English. For Menotti, Ted Stern was his harbor pilot who guided Menotti through the minefield of troubles he created for himself. I think Ted took Menotti for somebody who needed help, the kind of help Ted had to give. The way a big kid will sometimes take care of a little kid. He respected Menotti and liked him. He gave him the Ted Stern treatment that he does for everyone close to him, if they'll allow it. Respect is what the Ted Stern treatment amounts to, an encouraging pat-on-the-back respect. The middle class has lost respect for just about all but money and things associated with money. The Ted Stern kind of respect, respect for your humanity first, stands out. In the mountains he was respected by the people that knew him because he respected them first. Respect is very important in the mountains. He was respected here for his respect.

He has told me his life over the years I've known him. I've also learned in conversations with Robert Macdonald writing the biography that I know very little of his early life. I knew upper West Side New York, Jewish, somewhat privileged, the very definition of Capricorn, Johns Hopkins, Navy 27 years, Charleston. At the same time he transformed the College, he did the same with Charleston, transforming it into the ultimate tourist town that is gracious and beautiful, rewarding to visitors. It's odd how a New York Jew's parachute landed him in the quadrangle of a Southern college going under, a truly Southern place in the latter days of the Old South, and it wasn't very long before he was received like the latest thing from Goodwill Planet. The spirit of friendliness that runs through Charleston now is a part of Ted Stern's making, too. His is the optimistic can-do spirit that supports and encourages. The new Charleston was built in that spirit. There was a time in the early 1970s he told me he was president of 35 civic organizations besides the College. The business community paid close attention to him. He became a friend to the black community because he didn't bullshit them. I suppose he would best be called a visionary in that he visioned the new College of Charleston and the new Charleston into existence, step by step. He has been a loyal and true friend to me all the time I've known him. He was instrumental in getting me to the mountains, my home sweet home, before I knew Air Bellows Mountain was the home of my soul. I know he is being received happily today on the other side of the veil.

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TED STERN INTERVIEW IN CofC MAGAZINE

ted stern by jack alterman

charleston magazine

The present edition of the College of Charleston magazine appeared in the mailbox a week or so ago. I flipped through it back to front briefly and put it down. On the cover is a blonde in pink boxing gloves, an '00 graduate. Inside, a picture of a sniper caught my eye, thinking, What? Of course. Snipers go to school someplace. It brought mental images from Tom Berringer's movies, Sniper one and two, and the third one literally son-of Sniper, though not cliched. I enjoyed every one of those movies. I like Tom Berringer as an actor, and saw the films as fictional documentaries giving an unrealistic movie version of an experience that I'm sure is not exactly the same, but enough to give a movie watcher a sense of that world, living in dense jungle with the grace of a wild animal. Having these three views of what it's like in the forest hunting and being hunted at the same time, I felt a profound respect for him. Though my initial response to the picture in the magazine was, What's a Guns N Ammo article doing in there? But a second or two of images from the films running through a slideshow in my head punched my awe button. I saw him for a moment reading the wind, figuring the distance in yards, the pull of gravity and force of the wind in relation to the particular gun he's using. It's impressive. It's impressive like driving in a nascar race at 200mph bumper to bumper, side to side in the pack.

I put the magazine down and left it, thinking about picking it up later to read the sniper article. A few hours ago I went into the kitchen to pour a cup of coffee. Returning to the chair I saw the babe in pink boxing gloves and picked up the magazine, thinking I'd read about her too. It's a cold, windy, overcast day, a good day for reading. I'd been in the first pages of a 1987 Chinese novel by Jia Pingwa, TURBULENCE. Howard Goldblatt translated it. It's so beautifully written that I foresee 500 pages of all-out good reading. He doesn't write like James Joyce, but has a quality that brings Joyce to mind. I can read a page from Turbulence and see it visually, feel like I understood an insight into a character, easy flow in the reading. I go back and read the page again; it's the same information, but it's so much more clear it's like I completely missed it the first reading, even when I got it, almost like I had never read it. I love that quality. I may reread frequently through it. Though it's translated into English, the writing is some of the very finest that characterizes contemporary Chinese writing in attention to detail, appreciation for subtleties, so visually written it's like watching a film.

I'd applied two colors to the new canvas earlier and was feeling good about getting a few things done and slowing down enough to read for awhile. Opened the magazine and there was Ted Stern's almost full-sized face looking exactly like he looks in this time of his life, which is not a great deal different from before. Under the picture it said, Wisdom Of The Century. I thought: somebody has been paying attention. I used to wonder if I'm the only one to see it. I only know a few people in his world, so I really have  nothing to go by, having no idea how other people see him, except that each one is uniquely itself. I looked at the next couple pages and saw him doing pushups on the wall, as he would do, the photo of the dedication of the Stern Center piece of what struck me very respectable architecture in a very functional occupation of its given space. I thought it a beautiful building. It carries the integrity of the campus's older architecture translated into the latter 20th Century. Inside, it feels spacious everywhere, plenty of room for a lot of people to flow in opposite directions at the same time. I was there for the christening and felt good for him; it was a major big day in his life, a monument to his devotion and his ability to get things done.

I'm remembering the day on his farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Air Bellows in Whitehead Township, where I worked as caretaker for seven years, '76-'83. He said, "I don't understand my successes and the money that has come to me. I don't know how to do anything." He was watching me sharpen the chainsaw during a break cutting firewood toward a long winter. I understood his meaning, because operating a riding lawn mower and a weed-eater were the apex of his mechanical abilities. I said to him something on the order of, Your work is of the mind. It pays better than making a chainsaw buzz. On the page opposite the dedication photo, a b&w of the Captain of the Ocean Sea, four gold bands on his sleeve, a studio portrait. Turn the page and there is the Ted Stern I know, sitting back holding a vodka and tonic with a quarter of a lime, the welcoming smile, the paper on the SPORTS section. I started reading a few sentences in the list of questions followed by an answer. Straight-ahead questions and straight-ahead answers. I read the columns of questions and answers backwards, not by intent, but the one at the top of the third column caught my eye and attention, then the one under it, then the one under it. It became amazing right away. I was hearing the Ted Stern I know answering these questions that by the end, in my case the beginning, gave a broad range of insight into the man most people know of making speeches, fund raising, talking on tv, in an office. This interview brought forward who the man is behind his decision-making that transformed the college and the city together.

Soon into it I couldn't stop reading. I was seeing the Ted Stern I've known over 40 years as I know the man. Question: Most critical item in a man's wardrobe. Answer: "I'm not a materialist. I don't think a man of honor or integrity, or a man of force needs physical attributes. He needs moral, social attributes to be successful." That is the Ted Stern I know. Another Question: Best lesson from the playground. Answer: "Be fair. Don't cheat." Reading over his answers on the pages, it sounds like him talking, like him thinking. I liked this form of interview better than the talkative kind. This interview covered a great deal of who Ted Stern is, better than an article about him. I felt like the content from this interview made a good preview to the biography Robert Macdonald is working on with what I believe is an integrity equal to Ted Stern's integrity. It tells me the biography will be the true story of a man whose ethics and attitude toward life have been good examples for me through the greater part of my adult life. The interview is online, can be found at: http://magazine.cofc.edu/2012/10/25/ted-stern-2/


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RETURN TO WATERFALL ROAD

         giacometti

I woke this morning with the same thinking I went to sleep with. I've come up against two stone walls and don't know how to get past them. One of them was that I can't write on this site for it cutting off after every phrase. Now it's working. What's up? I went over to wordpress and it was worse. I wrote a complete page, clicked on publish and it all went away. Wrote another and clicked on publish; only two paragraphs appeared. I can't do that anymore. Now that this site, blogger, is working, I suppose I can trust it to work from here on. My head is in a spin after deciding to stop writing because this site doesn't work, and now it works. Just now sent a thanks feedback to whoever is working the site.

I went to Charleston on a 4-day trip, one day going, one day coming home and 2 days there. Quite a beautiful city now. It's always been beautiful, but in its present incarnation the city is as beautiful as it has ever been, and then quite some more. I thought of Vada, a year old, everything new to baby. I went back to where I'd lived 35 years ago and it felt good. I was like a baby in that I'd lived long enough to see the city change radically to the point it was as new for me as seeing it the first time. Much was familiar, of course, and the familiar was new too.

After 35+ years living in the country, I can't go back to urban thinking. One problem is everyone there is middle class to upper middle class. I am so at home in the working class that the people of the middle class are of another culture, another world, a totally different way of thinking from living in the mountains. It was an enjoyable couple days visiting friends and eating at restaurants with middle class food was interesting. One major difference is that in the middle class having a drink of liquor is not only acceptable, but pretty much required. In the working class you're a drunk if you touch a drop of liquor. When my mother found me with a smile on my face after three beers, she had to wipe it away with an hour long lecture telling me I'm an alcoholic, beating it into my head with intent that I never forget I'm an alcoholic. I sat there bored out of my mind telling myself I am not an alcoholic, because I know. Three beers do not make an alcoholic. They don't even make a drunk.

My friend Eric, who lives in Portland, grandson of Ted Stern in Charleston, flew East and rented a car. Stern is 99 years of age, in good health and clear mind. At 99, he's kind of on the diving board to the spirit world and he's comfortable. No fear of death. Ready to take the deep plunge when it's time. Eric I've known since he was a child. On this trip, 4 days with Eric after not seeing him for several years, I was happy to see that by age 50 he has become a complete human being. He attributes finding his true self to me, the one who pointed the way for him, but he's the one that did it. The child Eric was bouncing off the walls constantly and watching tv at the same time. He lived in the television throughout his childhood. I liked him as a kid, but couldn't get him away from the television long enough to get to know him. I saw a real person in there and set out over the years to draw it out into the open.

I've been hard on him like a parent sometimes, hard on him like a friend. He was a difficult teenager. Through his twenties he was a wreck. Started self-examination in his thirties and came through fascinated by what he was discovering in New Age wisdom passing through, took up with Laura and is now getting on with his life in Portlandia. I'm happy to see him living a good life by his own terms now. Eric is good people. I'm happy he's my friend. It is interesting to me to watch somebody grow up, then when he's grown up, to hear him tell his life that I didn't see at all. It was the difference between objective and subjective. I was looking at his life from outside himself, and he was telling me the story of his life from inside himself. It was like reading William Faulkner.

So I'm back in cyberworld after some time away. I didn't take the laptop to continue while away from home, but it was in the time blogger wasn't working and there was nothing I could do but question whether I'm ready to let this everyday writing go. I didn't feel like I was, but after the wordpress experience, came to the conclusion that I have no choice but to let it go. I get up this morning and like a miracle it's working. I find after deciding to let it go, which I did not feel good about, having it back is a good, happy feeling. That tells me that I do, indeed, intend to carry on.


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TED STERN AND THE NEW SOUTH

        american zeus by tj worthington, 1991, 30"x30"

A week ago today I had an appointment to meet with the biographer of Ted Stern, owner of the farm I once worked, the farmwork that brought me to the mountains. He had come into the College of Charleston as the new President in my last year there. The president before him who served one year was more of a problem than the solution he was hired to be. The board of directors hired Ted Stern, recently retired Navy Captain for damage control. Every semester it was a question of it being the last one. A lot of people transferred anticipating the end of the College. When the board hired Ted Stern, they were looking for action after a year of less than inaction in a time of crisis. They found action in abundance. Nobody saw coming what started on the day they hired Ted Stern, sailor of the dense marine. That was the day they cranked the smaller engine on a bulldozer that cranks the big engine. They didn't have a clue what they'd started. Even their hopes didn't go as far as what took place over the next ten years.



In short, he transformed a small municipal college about to go under into a state university with a population that was approx 450 when he arrived and 5,000 when he retired after ten years. He transformed the main building, which was the building where all the classrooms and offices were when I was there, into offices eventually when the classroom buildings and the new library were built. They went up in a hurry, too. With the contractor's bid he also was given a date it would be finished. Each day after that would have a fine of some sort. He was strict with it, too. It was enough to make them finish on time. He didn't fool with any dilly-dallying. He kept his finger on every construction activity, individually, as well as the faculty, student body and administration. He knew everything that was going on, and he, personally, was in charge of every aspect of making the college into a state university physically after getting it on paper. He was the captain of the ship.



Parallel his work with the College of Charleston, he quickly became at one time president of 35 different business organizations in the city. Charleston was still in the Old South in that time. The New South was starting up in Atlanta, but hadn't yet reached Charleston. Ted Stern worked with the businessmen of the city inspiring them to get going, teaching them how to maintain what he helped them set in motion, then he stepped out and went on to assist another. Individually, he went around Charleston teaching conscientious altruism. He taught that it works out better for self to work toward the good of the whole; then self gets his own reward and everyone around self benefits too, making self's world all the better to live in. I saw the change in Charleston, gradual in the beginnings as nobody wanted change, and once it started rolling it was overnight a new city, self-sustaining, flourishing new businesses, law offices, brokerages, etc.  Restoration of the whole city from its low place after a century long Depression following the Civil War, until it has become certainly the most beautiful and perhaps most prosperous the city has ever been.



I believe the rule is that to put in one thing, another thing has to go. It was the city's diversity of population that had to go. Every income level lived on the Charleston peninsula, and every educational level. The well off and the poor often lived next door to each other. Corner grocery stores here and there. By now, the poor and the black have been squeezed out to North Charleston, the middle class and upper middle class have taken over, run real estate prices so high no one else can live there. The city, like the college, was going under. Shopping centers out in the suburbs across the rivers, a short drive, kept business out of the old part of the city. As real estate went up and Spoleto Festival put Charleston on the international map, upper middle class moved in, a white tsunami, as happened in the mountains with the white middle class moving in. Joe Riley, Jr, the mayor from then to now, orchestrated the changes with conscience, in the same manner as Ted Stern orchestrated the changes at the College. Both the College and the City of Charleston were transformed into their new styles with integrity. Anyway, that's been my observation, the integrity. The integrity is what I've learned to respect in Ted Stern.



The biographer, Robert Macdonald, looks as Irish as his name. Black haired Irish. Before our appointment, I googled his name to see what he'd been up to. Retired curator of the Museum of the City of New York. Evidently, he raised it from a minor museum to a museum of note. Ted Stern is from New York. It tells me Macdonald knows New York, which I'd think would be essential for Stern's biographer. Stern grew up there. WW2 put him in the Navy and 27 years later he retired from the Navy and went straight into the College. I thought it funny how close to my case it was. I was out of the Navy on a Friday and started at the College on Monday. Both of us came to the College from the sea. While Macdonald was here, I found he knew all the fact information about his life. He has a good bead on what Ted Stern is. He was looking for who Ted Stern is, talking with people in Sparta who knew him in the part of his life here. I was struck by the blank I drew when it came to looking for some experiences that would have bearing on defining his character. Though I could think of hundreds hypnotized, but with my atrophied left brain, I have to seek, and when I seek, it all goes away. I have to not think about it and let it come in on its own. I call it the white hair disease.



All week I've looked for samples of who Ted Stern is, the man himself. That is, the Ted Stern I've known for the last 40 years, and I have a hard time finding samples of who he is. That's because I'm thinking about it. I'll close my eyes and wait. One thing came up. He was a bit awkward at social behavior, always, though he handled it. He handled it going way overboard, so much so it reeked of bogus, "HI, I'm SO GLAD TO MEET YOU!!! so loud and so over zealous it's like you're inside the house next door and the windows are closed. It's kind of overwhelming and drips of the appearance of phony, but it's real. It's who he is. He is glad. And next time he sees you he'll remember. On the telephone it's like phone service in some place like Albania, talking loud like it's a bad connection and he can barely hear. He sounds distant and far away, yelling to span the distance. But he's not. He was a man with a mission, no time or room for the extraneous. In one of our conversations on the highway, we were talking about our individual approaches to living on earth. I said I'm like in a canoe, I let things happen. He said he's like in a bulldozer, he makes things happen. That's why he'll have an obituary in the NYTimes and I won't.



Kindness is a word that comes to mind. I believe his kindness was so innate as to be in the nature of his soul. It's automatic and there's never a lapse because it's not directed by mental command. It may have been early in his life, but by late in the life kindness was the same as breathing. His years as an officer in the Navy gave him the charisma of someone to salute. He walks into a room and the people in the room feel in the presence of a leader. A leader he indeed was. I don't mean past tense like he's not living now, but his time of active involvement in the big decisions in Charleston are in the past. He has told me several times he has outlived himself and become a has-been, a once-was. He accepted it, but I can't say he has ever been comfortable with once-was for his self-identity. He's noted for his past achievements, not what he's involved in now. It's difficult for him not to be involved. I remember in the years of working Stern's mountain farm, old man Tom Pruitt in his 80s, when I'd be splitting wood, he couldn't watch me work without helping. He wasn't able to help, so he couldn't watch, had to go to the house where he stared at the wall and thought about whatever crossed the screen of his mind. Ted Stern, now 97, watches tv sports and thinks about whatever is crossing the screen of his mind.



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