A gentleman and a Dean

 I was out of the country when the news broke that Dean Smith, longtime coach of the University of North Carolin Tar Heels, had died last weekend. The tributes that rolled in for Coach Smith were moving especially to those of us who had watch this Kansan revolutionize the game of college basketball while at the same time serving as the conscience of the larger community for so many things.  And it reminded me of the basic, fundamental humility of this giant among the coaching profession.  I never knew him well, but on one magic evening a little more than a decade ago, I sat at his side at dinner and listened to him talk about important things -- winning, for sure, but more importantly, about life.  He was fascinating, informative, inquisitive and gracious as he quietly answered questions from a group of North Carolina's editorial writers and columnists. 

 In 2010, after it became widely known that he was struggling with memory loss and other adverse effects of dementia, the following column appeared in The Charlotte Observer, where I was an associate editor, and The News and Observer.

A gentleman and a Dean

By JACK BETTS

July 27, 2010 

Watching Dean Smith walk onto the playing floor of the basketball palace named for him in February was a thrill for many who didn't know they'd ever see the famed coach on the hardwood again. Adoring fans and players cheered for the innovator from Kansas, sending up thanks for hundreds of memories of the way he coached his teams to success and the way he treated his players - stars, role players and bench warmers alike.

There had been rumors for a while about Smith's condition. Only recently has the news become widespread that his memory is failing him. The man who revolutionized college basketball and set a standard for conduct could no longer always remember those who had been close to him throughout his life.

Smith's family acknowledged these signs of aging in a graceful statement about his progressive neurocognitive disorder. It deprives him of his ability to remember every name, every game, every signal event in a long and productive career.

I've had a few interactions with him over a long period - a handshake and a chat a time or two back in college days when I was a cheerleader. In those days the packed crowd in Carmichael made the place thunder when Bobby Lewis or Larry Miller finished a full-bore fast break with an unbelievable twisting reverse layup followed by Lou Bello's whistle signaling a foul in the act of shooting.

Those were dizzying days. Smith's teams did amazing things - including turning my mother, a conservative, prim grammar teacher who brooked no nonsense from anyone on the globe, into a rabid basketball fanatic. At a game in the 1970s I saw this tiny survivor of the Great Depression and lifelong health challenges practically knock down grown men to plant herself in Phil Ford's path and ask for his autograph on a program.

Maybe it was all those games Smith's teams won that made her such a fan. But I suspect it was more the way he treated those who played for the blue and white - and the discipline and determination he instilled in his players.

Years later I came to find other reasons to admire Dean Smith. In 2004, a group of editorial writers and columnists from the state's newspapers were planning their annual get-together in Chapel Hill, a weekend heavy on discussions of public policy, research findings and brainstorming about upcoming issues. We talked about a dinner speaker, and someone suggested Dean Smith.

I thought it was unlikely we could get him to join us. He was probably getting hundreds of such invitations, and it was well-known that he declined most of them. And since basketball season was still on, he'd be tuned to the TV, not to the questions of opinion writers.

A couple of days after I wrote inviting him to join us, his office called back. Coach Smith loved to read the editorial and op-ed pages of the newspapers and, as long as the Tar Heels weren't playing that Friday night, he'd be delighted to join us.

That was the prelude to the most enjoyable evening with a public figure that I can recall. Smith didn't want to give a speech, but he was happy to have a long conversation about any topic we wanted to pursue. So as we tore into platters of food at a room over Spanky's on Franklin Street, we talked about players, NCAA rules, recruiting, politics, the upcoming presidential election, the U.S. Senate race (and how he had resisted entreaties to run for office) and how college life had changed so dramatically over his career.

I reminded him of some unforgettable moments from the late 1960s when his teams were beginning to win consistently - and mentioned a player who had recovered the ball in a scramble and found himself sitting in the lane, back to the basket and no one to pass to. He flipped the ball back over his head - and might have been the only one in Carmichael not to have seen it drop through the bucket for two.

Smith smiled, reminded me of a few other details about that play and recalled the recruiting of a key player. He was from a family so poor that he had never been to a restaurant and didn't know how to use a menu. When he got to Carolina, the blue blazer the team issued him in the years when the practice was common was the first such jacket he had ever worn. Smith thought NCAA rules governing such things, well-intentioned as they were, sometimes go too far.

In time the conversation turned to opposing coaches. My longtime friend Rosemary Roberts, a columnist for the Greensboro News & Record, wanted to know what Smith thought about Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski's habit of using strong language that appeared on TV to include barnyard expletives.

"Mike's a friend of mine," Smith said, "and I'm not going to say anything bad about him."

Then he smiled and added, "But in the home where I grew up, 'gosh' and 'darn it' were considered pretty strong stuff."

I'm pretty sure I saw Dean Smith express himself in plain terms to the refs a time or two. But I appreciated his gentle answer about a rival coach many thought surely was his mortal enemy.

Reflecting on it later, I remembered that before Dean Smith became famous many folks wondered what it was he was dean of.

It was dean of a lot more than just basketball. It was also how to live and how to conduct oneself.

Thanks, Coach.

"I wish I'd gone in," he said with a sigh

On a raw and misty day in Roanoke I was headed back to the car with a bag of hardware when a shiny red SUV rolled up beside me and a loud voice blared, "I always heard that stood for 'Ain't Ready for the Marines Yet."

I turned, puzzled, and saw a fellow about my age behind the wheel, grinning and pointing to my ball cap. I had forgotten I had an old cap with ARMY emblazoned on the front. It's a cap I wear from time to time to remind me about my days in the Army in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and to reflect on how lucky we are in an uncertain world to have folks willing to put on the uniform and go where they're sent and do what they're trained to do.

The other fellow was smiling and I thought he was having too good a time at my expense, so I asked, "When were you in the Marines?"  He replied, "I wasn't.  I was in the hospital with bleeding ulcers about the time they had the draft lottery, and my number was never called."

We chatted for a while about the military and friends we had known who went in, most of whom came back, and a few who never got back home.  I told him I recalled reading somewhere that in the Vietnam era, most of those in the American military services didn't go off to war, but served stateside like me, or in other relatively peaceful billets around the world.  Now in the post-draft volunteer Army, so many soldiers go off to fight on multiple tours of duty.  My niece's husband has been deployed five or six times, I think -- a huge difference in the way things used to be.

My new acquaintance was staring off into the distance by then, thinking, I suppose, about the changes he'd seen, the opportunities he had, the roads taken and not taken, and he was quiet for a few moments. Then he looked at me and said, "I wish I'd gone in.  I was always sorry I didn't."  We shook hands, and he rolled away into the mist.

Winter? What winter?

It may have been the Knob Creek with honey and lemon that got me through one of the worst winter colds I've had in years.  Or maybe it was the prospect of a family wedding on the island of Maui in Hawaii -- and the wintertime weather there.  I've not spent any time there previously and likely won't be going back anytime soon, but I can tell you it was every bit the paradise written about in the travel guides.  Back home in the Blue Ridge, it was minus 2 degrees F one night, and a heavy ice visitation came at least once.  On the island of Maui, it was in the high 70s and low 80s and we were wearing shorts, T shirts and flip-flops and enjoying warm breezes, cool drinks and sunny beaches.  I know, it isn't fair.

We were in Hawaii to celebrate the wedding of our grandfriend Riley Hart and Koniela Lurie.  Riley has been a part of our lives for most of her life.  When she was little she sometimes stayed with us in Raleigh, went sailing with us on our old cutter a few times and found her way into our hearts. Some years she comes on the family beach trip to Figure Eight, and visits us in the mountains. We're not kin in the traditional way, but she is family to us, as is her mom Joy and an extended circle of sisters, brothers, cousins, nephews and friends of each of them.

Our son John spent a lot of time with Riley as she was growing up and they are as tight as any father and daughter I know. John and our daughter Mary joined us for the wedding and for travel around the rest of the island. We also saw our nephew, Ian Strickland, who lives on Maui and who has known Riley for years as well. And John's friend Jana joined us a few days later.

Riley and Koniela were were married on a lovely Saturday evening, on a bluff high above the beach, on a community farm near Hana, in an unusual ceremony that included chimes, a flute, two friendly dogs, a gathering of family and close friends from as near as the next bungalow and as far away as Winston-Salem and Australia, and a good bit of quiet reflection.  It was followed by hours of feasting in the community cafe with roasted wild beef and roasted pig, and guitar, banjo and other string music well into the night.

The day before the wedding we had found out how gorgeous those islands can be. We flew into Kahului, rented a car, stocked up at the Costco and the Whole Foods (where we ran into Joy, her husband Carl and Joy's sister Sterling, and set out on one of the most gorgeous rides we've ever seen.  Listen, we live near the 469-mile Blue Ridge Parkway.  We've driven the magnificent roads of Western North Carolina, through Arches National Park out West, and on the backroads above Bryce Canyon. But never have we seen anything remotely like The Road to Hana.

If you haven't experienced it, imagine a 50-mile road with 617 curves, 56 mostly one-lane bridges, dozens of waterfalls and places you simply have to stop and gape at the scenery around every curve.  The rich, heady sight of tropical flowers, the vistas of the ocean and the black-sand beaches and the red-sand beaches, and the impossibly narrow curves where car drivers must slow nearly to a stop and inhale while they squeeze by the vehicle coming the other way make it an unforgettable trip.  Just 50 miles to Hana, but it can take you all dadgum day to get there if you spend any time atall stopping to investigate the Rainbow Trees or the stunning falls of water, the dramatic and sometimes scary roadway built in the 1930s, or the remnants of the old sugar cane rail lines.  It reminded me of those lines from Freeborn Man:

"I know every inch of highway, every foot of backroad, every mile of railroad track."

Well, I never exactly saw evidence of the old sugar cane train tracks, except in my mind, but plenty of the backroad parts.  Fortunately, John was driving us, so for me it was rubbernecker's delight. All Martha and I had to do was hold on for 617 curves. It took more energy than you'd think, even with an expert driver.

I thought it would be hard to return to the mountains after those warm days on Maui and a few more on Oahu, but when we got home it was pushing 55 degrees in the mountains -- and the sun shone through Thursday. Caught up on the last of the Fall chores -- guttering the shop porch roof, putting up snow guard bars, taking down a couple of elderly locusts near the patio, reopening the trail down to the pond dam, mowing the dam top and starting the tricky task of pruning the blueberries on a west-facing slope.  These chores never end on an old farm, but I was halfway through the week's work before I even remembered that hacking and wheezing of just a few weeks back.  Remarkable how much good a warm sunny place can do you when a winter cold arrives.  Today, the cold weather moves back in with a forecast of snow, freezing rain and sleet.  I'll put away the aloha shirts and put a coda on a fine trip with a word Hawaiians use: Mahalo. Or as we say, Thank you.

Wheeze, honk and hack

The lump in the back of my throat Sunday night wasn't for my inept Tar Heels, who had gotten blown away by Rutgers a couple days earlier, or the Washington Redskins, which had gotten blown away by Dallas in a forgettable end to a forgettable season that represented an absolutely miserable experience for fans of these old teams this fall.  Well, OK, beating Duke was nice, but East Carolina and N.C. State plumb wore us out and dumped us in the waste bin. Oh, me.

Nope, it was not a lump of sorrow. It was a lump of aggravated, annoyed, irritated, raw as hot gravelly gullet, and I knew what it meant. It was time for my biennial bout with the evils of the season -- what few medical specialists call the coldus hideosis horribilis, Latin for "You ain't gonna be fit to live with for some time, Bubba."  That's a very rough translation, but it is what it is fixing to be: just godawful.

Back in my smoking days I used to get head colds with hacking coughs, explosive sneezes and an ample flow of nasty nasal emissions a couple times a year.  When I finally quit after a couple of decades of abusing cigarettes, pipe tobacco, starlight mints and chewing gum, the rate of what we called Chapel Hill Chest Rattlers diminished considerably.  Sometimes I'd go three years without one, but more usually every other year.

This one is a beast. Probably qualifies as a Belcher Mountain Wheezer.  I'm surrounded by patent medicines, boxes of Kleenex (expect the stock to shoot up rapidly next week; I'm buying it by the freight car load), packs of exotic teas, vials of supplements in caplets and capsules and a little blue bottle with an eyedropper for dispensing some sort of potion said to ease pain, restore health and make childbirth a pleasure, a pitcher of Patrick County well water and, somewhere around here, a dwindling bottle of Knob Creek. It rained yesterday, then froze, then snowed and the thermometer is hanging around 29 while the wedge fog has us boxed in.  Like the Bob Dylan song, You ain't goin' nowhere.

I have a stack of books -- a Bernard Cornwell, a Pat Conroy, a Michael Connely and a Burke Davis  -- to keep me company, a stack of split oak on the deck that feeds the old wood stove and keeps it ticking, and a stack of blues CDs that I haven't listened to in years. They ought to be good for the soul in this winter of physical misery.

Don't think for a moment this is all bad.  I've cleaned out five years of deleted e-mails, restored a Christmas card list lost in in a 2011 retirement move and decluttered a hard drive that had way too many widgets and tuits and thingamajigs that have been slowing the contraption down for a couple years.  Found a couple of short story starts that still might lead somewhere, an outline for a book about growing up in the South and a first-whack at a song about the Blue Ridge.  There's work to do here, son, and the sooner you get better, the sooner you can get going again!  Now where's that Knob Creek....

Chestnuts on a Virginia hillside

The Dan River starts as a seep near the edge of a cornfield just up the road and over the ridge from us. It makes its way a few thousand feet west before it becomes a pond or two, then a rushing creek, then a river that winds its way over to the Blue Ridge Escarpment and plunges down into the Kibler Valley near the Virginia-North Carolina state line.  It meanders for a good many miles, hooking up with the Mayo River near Mayodan and then in Eden with the Smith River, which has its headwaters in a lovely fold of the earth a few hundred feet from the rockers on our front porch.

Watching over this noble set of waters, well before it joins the powerful Roanoke River and eventually waters the Atlantic Ocean, is a group of dedicated folks who do the Lord's work in picking up trash and taking care of the aquatic life and helping folks understand how to do a better job of keeping the countryside healthy.  It's the Dan River Basin Association, and its members and small staff do a great many more things than keeping up with the needs of one lovely river.

So it was that the DRBA put out a call the other week for volunteers to work with the American Chestnut Foundation and with naturalists and other outdoors-minded people to help replant chestnut seedlings on a hillside in one of Southwest Virginia's lovely woods.  As a matter of policy, they don't bandy about where these fields are, in hope of avoiding a lot of pedestrian traffic from the curious about what the chestnut plants look like. A dozen or so of us answered the call one bright day not long ago and went about putting in year-old seedlings to replace an earlier planting that was not successful. Here's a photo of the volunteers after setting out about a hundred seedlings in a field that had been cut over in the past few years.

The first planting may have failed because the seedlings were not protected well enough from animals looking for a quick snack. So the job here was to dig new holes of sufficient depth to spread and plant the seedlings, then place a plastic tube around the stalk of the seedling and support it with a short post, and then to surround the seedling with a five-food high cage staked firmly to the ground.  

 After a slow start as volunteers learned how to put these things securely in the ground, the pace picked up. It wasn't a race, exactly, but crews of two and three volunteers worked together to break ground, chop up the clay soil, spread the roots and firmly place the soil around the roots, pack it just a bit, guide in the tube, pound in the stake and then figure out how to secure the cages to posts, either with zip strips or, as several of us learned, how to weave the flexible pipe posts through the cage wire before hammering them into the ground.

If all goes as hoped, these plants will get enough rain and sun to take root and grow into candidates for the return of the once-mighty chestnut forests that covered many parts of Virginia and other states before the blight  devastated the chestnut. It was  a huge blow to the Appalachian economy, because chestnuts provided mast for animals, good material for fences, better lumber for furniture and stout cabins, and cash income for farmers who shipped chestnuts to large cities in the northeast.

Just last summer I pulled a few boards off a crumbling farm shed down the hill a ways, planed the slabs, glued up a coffee-table top that would look good on our side porch, and thought once again about how the chestnut blight had robbed generations of the chance to work with a lovely and sturdy wood that almost seems to like to be shaped into something useful.  Maybe one day some of these seedlings we planted will somehow help instill that sense of delight in others who live in these old hills.

Nocturnal visitors in the yard

Took the last of the apples and threw 'em out in the little patch of woods on the east side of the house, and tied the game camera to a maple.  Here's what we caught:

Ode to some old boots

These old boots have a lot of miles on 'em.  Bought 'em years ago in Asheville, when our daughter, now 36, was in her first or second year in college up yonder.  Best boots I've ever had.  Comfortable, lightweight, mostly waterproof, and I could walk in 'em all day without getting the wobblies or the barking dogs. 

Hiked in Idaho and Maine in 'em, built an outhouse, a workshop and a garage in them, plowed the gardens, tramped through the ashes of our burnt-down log home in them, hauled timberframe parts for the replacement house, picked  asparagus and the blueberries, mowed the dam and the hayfields, hauled cars stuck in the snow and put nearly 200,000 miles on my pickup truck with 'em on. Great boots.

Trouble is, I've worn them out two or three times. Soles are all but slick. Went through  innumerable sets of laces and at least two tubes of Shoo Goo, but now they come apart in a matter of weeks, the sole flapping like some talk radio host that loves to hear his own voice rattle on, the damps seeping in along the stitches and the toeboxes rising up like elf shoes.

They're going into retirement, because earlier this fall I finally found some replacements -- reasonably lightweight clodhoppers with good ankle support and soft grippers that let me climb on the metal roof without slipping. Liked 'em so well I thought about buying an extra pair, and using the old Army boot trick to tell 'em apart.

I don't expect anyone does this anymore, but when I went off to Ft. Bragg for basic combat training in April of '69, the quartermaster issued us two pairs of black boots -- the old black shoe Army gear.  And the drill sergeants of Company B, 10th Battalion, 2nd Basic Combat Training Brigade ("Bravo, Bravo, B-10-2, First you see Rest, Now you see the Best!", we used to chant whenever drill sergeants ordered it up)  required us to wear one set of boots on odd-numbered days and the second set of boots on even-number days.  They could tell which pair of boots we were wearing by the white dot of paint we had to put on the back of one pair of the boots. You'd wear a white-dot pair one day, the no-dot pair the next. That way, the boots would get broken in equally.

Well, the recruits of Company B didn't want the toes of both sets of boots to get torn up by the constant scraping and grinding and hopeless struggle of being made to low-crawl the machine gun course, the company street, the parade ground and anywhere else those soul-less drill sergeants could think of to make us miserable.  If you've never been made to low crawl, it's exhausting and filthy and hateful. You can't rise up even an inch. You're suppose to drag yourself over whatever terrain is in front of you the same way a snake would -- stretching and reaching and pushing forward but staying in full contact with the ground. There was a point to all this -- not just breaking down the troops in order to rebuild them, but also teaching soldiers how to crawl as flat as possible in order to avoid being shot by an enemy looking for anything moving that they could shoot.

So to avoid ruining both sets of boots, we'd rise in the night during lights out and change the white dots from one set of boots to the other.  This allowed us to continue wearing one set of boots while keeping the other set in perfect unworn condition. 

We thought we were so clever.  And it wasn't until a few days before graduation after eight weeks in basic hell, when you could actually have a human conversation with the drill sergeant, that we learned the truth. It might have been Drill Sergeant Glenn Warner, a tough little bantam of a soldier, who clued us in with something like: "Y'all probably think you invented the white dot trick and were fooling your sergeants. You didn't. We knew what you were doing and we allowed it because you all were starting to work together.  That's what basic training is all about. And now you got a decent pair of boots for your graduation parade.  Outstanding. Now drop and give me 50 pushups."

So I thought about Drill Sergeant Warner and his colleagues back at Ft. Bragg a lifetime ago, and I bought that second pair of new boots. About to put 'em on for the first time.  And I won't have to resort to the white dot gimmick to tell 'em apart, either.  They now come in both brown and black, and today is going to be black boot day. Outstanding!