The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

  High on Beech Mountain, NC sits an unexpected surprise - the land of OZ! This amusement park is an all-but-abandoned place, as inaccessible and remote as the fairy-tale land itself. One weekend every year, though, the magic returns to the mountain! I'm eternally grateful I got to visit this place in the height of my love of all things Oz in the 70s. Rhonda and I went together as part of a Modern Woodman field trip. 

Dorothy led you along the yellow brick road, and you met every familiar character along the way. 

 At the end of the yellow brick road, there was a stage show and balloon rides and everything!

All that's left of the balloons today.

 A very good friend of mine and I returned just a few years ago on the October weekend the park is open, and we had every bit as much fun on our "return to Oz!"

Return to Oz

Entering Dorothy's house.

Through the cyclone!

Is that Dorothy and Glinda I spy through the trees?

Welcome to Munchkinland!

If I only had a heart.

Put 'em up! Put 'em up!

Beware the Winkies!

Waylaid by the witch at her castle in the Haunted Forest!

Poppies will put them to sleep!

The gates of Oz!

 Farewell to Oz...

For those who love L. Frank Baum's timeless story, I discovered this weekend that there were fourteen Oz books written in all, plus one book of Oz fairy-tales. L. Frank Baum even dubbed himself "Royal Historian" of Oz. Books of Wonder has all the books available for the first time in about 90 years - there is even a wonderful recreation of the 1st edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Not surprisingly, they're on back order...and I think it's great.

Cold Mountain - An Interlude

Cold Mountain was the novel I was supposed to write. I have never felt more like some part of me had been taken and transformed into written word than when I grew to know Ada Monroe. Seldom have I been so transfixed through an entire book and devastated at a conclusion. I usually underline moving sentences to return to ~ or to pull for memorable quotes. Nothing is underlined in this book ~ there was no point in beginning because there would've been nowhere to stop. It is raw intensity ~ much like Wolfe's ~ and once again of the mountains of Western North Carolina. And once again, it is based on truth.

I began my search for connection at Petersburg. Petersburg is the site of the opening battle in the film, and I admit the crater scene was amazing. I was so disappointed they didn't film the movie on location, though (they took it to Romania instead). North Carolina has certainly proved to be more than an adequate mecca for movies ~ look at Last of the Mohicans, Nell, and even the train wreck from The Fugitive...but I digress.

My kindred cousin Marie and I toured Petersburg, and we were amazed at the remains of the crater and of the tunnel dug beneath it. The Union army decided that the only way to remove the entrenched Confederates and seize the heights above Petersburg to end the siege was to dig a tunnel under the "fort" and blow it up.

The entrance to the tunnel

While the explosion did, indeed, brutally dislodge the Confederates, the excited Union soldiers ran into the hole left by the blast and became fodder for Confederate bullets. You can still see the remains of the crater today.

The "real" Inman was author Charles Frazier's great-great Uncle. Family tradition holds he was wounded at Petersburg and deserted from the army to return to Tennessee and North Carolina. They say he was killed near "Big Stomp" by a home guard, and his father went to retrieve his body. Lore holds he is buried at the Haywood Cemetery in North Carolina. I hope to go there someday.

Perhaps the greatest discovery I've made, however, was quite by accident. I was traveling the Blue Ridge Parkway with a friend one day when I missed my exit. I was frustrated, because I had to go quite a way to the next overlook to turn around. I whipped my car into the pull-out ~ and then I slammed on the brakes and gasped. My friend had barely enough time to ask what was wrong before I was out on the misty mountain-top to take a picture of what the overlook revealed.

"Mornings on the high bald were crisp, with fog lying in the valleys so that the peaks rose from it disconnected like steep blue islands scattered across a pale sea."  
Cold Mountain

Synchronicity can be a very beautiful thing...

Scott and Zelda: In Search of the Golden Couple

"Every place has its hours...So in Jeffersonville (Montgomery) there existed then, and I suppose now, a time and quality that appertains to nowhere else. It began about half past six on an early summer night, with the flicker and sputter of the corner street lights going on, and it lasted until the great incandescent globes were black inside with moths and beetles and the children were called in to bed from the dusty streets."
                                           From Southern Girl, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, 1929

One of the things that is the most alluring about Southern literature is how it maintains a vast air of unreality while focusing on the most overlooked of realistic things. It can take something as mundane as the summer street lamps and make them beautiful despite the horror of dying moths and beetles. So it is with the South, itself.

As a friend and I were traveling to Mobile, AL one summer to see an exhibit on Nicholas and Alexandra, the last tsar and tsarina of Russia, we took a side trip into Montgomery. Although Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald only lived in this house from 1930-1931, it is the only museum dedicated to the couple. While living here, Scott worked on Tender is the Night, and Zelda began her stunning only novel, Save Me the Waltz.

Our museum hostess was Russian, and we became fast friends when she learned of our love for the golden couple, as well as why we were headed to Mobile.

Holding Scott's original published edition of the Saturday Evening Post.

I was thrilled to be able to have my picture made at the same place as one I love of Zelda sitting atop her trunks with ballet toe-shoes on.

The parlor was cluttered with many examples of memorabilia, and I pored over it all.

The Fitzgeralds moved on to many different locales, and Zelda suffered breakdowns until she found refuge in an asylum in Asheville, NC. It was during that time she visited the Wolfe house, and Scott would stay in the Grove Park Inn when he came to visit her. Zelda became a painter of fantastical pictures, some of which were done in Asheville. She said, "What I want to do is paint the basic, fundamental principle so that everyone will be forced to realize and experience it - I want to paint a ballet step so everyone will know what it is - to get the fundamental essence into the painting."

"Marriage at Cana" by Zelda Fitzgerald - from Zelda: An Illustrated Life

Tragically, Zelda was killed when the asylum caught fire in 1948. Years later, when the city hosted a show of some of her paintings, I was sure to go. It was an extraordinarily moving exhibit. I can sum it up best by the exchange of our Russian guide and myself in Montgomery. When I told her, "I adore Zelda," she replied, "Zelda deserves to be adored."

A scan of my tattered copy of the book.

I highly recommend the Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald, which includes Save Me the Waltz.

"A southern moon is a sodden moon, and sultry. When it swamps the fields and the rustling sandy roads and sticky honeysuckle hedges in its sweet stagnation, your fight to hold on to reality is like a protestation against a first waft of ether..." Save Me the Waltz

Laura Ingalls Wilder: On the Pioneer Trail

 
One of the best parts about becoming an adult is the ability to take yourself to all the places you dreamed of going as a child. The "Little House" books had an enormous impact on my growing up years as well as my playtime...

My cousins and I played Laura, Mary, and Carrie growing up.

It was only natural that I'd want to see these places in person. On the first trip, I took in both the beginning and the end with the "Little House on the Prairie" site in Kansas and Rocky Ridge Farm in Mansfield, MO. The latter was Laura and Almanzo's last home, and where she wrote her endearing family series.

The cabin on the Kansas site is a reproduction, but it was still thrilling to step on the plot of land deeded to Charles Ingalls from 1869-1871. Baby Carrie was born in Kansas, then the family had to leave the site because they'd unwittingly settled in Indian territory.

There was one authentic part of the site left ~ and that was the well that had been hand-dug by Pa.

Rocky Ridge farm was a quaint old white farmhouse in the Ozarks. Almanzo (pronounced al-MAN-zo, the locals who knew him tell you) built the house to scale for Laura, who was only about 4'11" tall! No wonder Pa dubbed her half-pint. They used all local materials so it is full of rich timbers and limestone. Their daughter Rose built them a modern Sears and Roebuck kit stone house, and that's where Laura actually began writing her series. It didn't take the couple long, however, to move back over the hill into their original dream house.

Rocky Ridge farm

The stone house. It is also open for tour, but fewer people go here.

 A few years later, Emily and I set out for Minnesota and South Dakota. While we also took in about ten National Parks, I had to complete my Little House tour. We rented a cute red convertible from the airport and headed straight to Walnut Grove! While Walnut Grove was never named in "On the Banks of Plum Creek," it was the closest town to the Ingalls homestead ~ and it was made famous through the later tv series.

Downtown Walnut Grove today

It was just a short drive on to Plum Creek, where we saw the remnants of Laura's dugout. The farm is now privately owned by a couple, but they let you drive to the creek. The spring, the plum trees, and the "big rock" are all still there.

Enjoying wading in Plum Creek!

In South Dakota, DeSmet is still very much the same as it was when Laura lived there during "By the Shores of Silver Lake," "Little Town on the Prairie," "The Long Winter," "These Happy Golden Years," and "The First Four Years." We stayed in the old bank building ~ now a B&B ~ and I loved waking up to the sound of the train whistle. Pa first went to DeSmet to work for the RR. The family joined him, and they stayed the winter in the RR Surveyor's House.

Laura's powers of recall were fabulous - every detail in the house matched the book.  Later on Pa filed a claim and built a house. The house is gone, but the location is marked and the cottonwood trees planted by the family still surround the site. This is a working recreated homestead for visitors, but we focused mainly on the "actual" location.

The family spent the hard winters in town, in a building Pa had built. It's no longer there, but a plaque marks where it had been. The old Loftus store where Laura and Carrie bought Pa Christmas suspenders is still in operation though!

We went in and bought a few souvenirs, of course.

After Laura and Almanzo married and the girls moved away, Pa and Ma moved to a house in town. This is the last "house that Pa built." After Pa died, Mary and Ma lived in the house together.

The Ingalls family right before Laura and Almanzo left for Missouri.

Ma, Carrie, Laura, Pa, Grace, and Mary

Ingalls family row ~ DeSmet, SD

Laura and Almanzo, Mansfield, MO