Chapter 19 #2
For the next ten minutes I had Ruth all to myself, and she’d listen patiently, seeming interested, often making witty remarks.
When she’d let me out at the end of my driveway, I had to start all over again, hurrying back to my original destination.
I did this at every opportunity, and if she was wise to me, she never said a word.
Her son Ned, my first crush, was a different story.
Sometimes she picked him up after school, parking behind the old brick building.
If I spotted her car, I’d walk past several times as if looking for my bus in the long line of them.
Ruth would see me, offering a ride. It worked every time until one afternoon when Ned rolled down his window.
“You can stop walking past our car because we’re going to Asheville!” he announced.
I was devoted to Ruth from afar after that first visit to her mountaintop when I was nine.
I took it personally when people tried to invade her family’s privacy.
Scarcely a day went by during the summer when strangers didn’t ask where Billy Graham lived.
They’d stop their cars, quizzing the locals, wondering if we knew him, and where they might go to catch a glimpse.
They always wanted directions to his house, and it was an unspoken rule that we never told. Most Montreaters would shrug and say they didn’t know. But not me. I’d send nosy tourists on a wild-goose chase, offering detailed directions, pointing, and elaborating while playing innocent.
I’d instruct them to turn around and go back out the stone gate. Typically, this was followed by the driver looking skeptical.
“Are you sure? Because I thought he lived inside Montreat…”
Well, that’s exactly what people are supposed to think, I’d confide. Only those of us who are his neighbors know the actual location of his house.
“Makes sense.” A knowing nod.
I’d explain that beyond the gate they were to take the first dirt road on the left and follow it to the top of Rainbow Mountain.
Watching them lumber away, I’d hightail it, taking one of my many shortcuts through the woods before the tourists got angry and came back looking for me.
I figured there was always a chance of that.
I knew very well what they were about to confront.
Soon enough those I misdirected on any given day would roll up on log cabins and outhouses.
They’d see dilapidated lean-tos, trash strewn down the hillside, and rusted-out cars.
The mountain folks didn’t take kindly to strangers rubbernecking any more than the Grahams did. But for a very different reason.
Because of the active moonshine stills in that part of the world, there was the threat of the revenuers showing up on a raid. The people of Rainbow Mountain were known to sit on their porches, their shotguns loaded with rock salt to scare off trespassers.
Mom and I loved to cruise the Innsbruck Mall, rarely buying anything unless it was on sale. It was a favorite pastime of ours, and sometimes we’d have lunch at Bavarian Cellar, a huge treat as much as she loved German food.
During one of our visits to the mall when I was eleven or twelve, I had a strange experience that later seemed like a premonition.
As we strolled past a bookstore, I was startled that the showcase window was filled with books by me.
I saw my name on the covers clear as day.
I was baffled and amazed but didn’t take it seriously. I didn’t slow my pace.
In fact, I walked faster, unnerved, never mentioning this vision to Mom or anyone.
It made no sense, and if I talked about it I would have been ridiculed.
At that stage of life, my ambition wasn’t to be a professional writer.
The thought never entered my mind and was of no interest. Creating little illustrated books and poems was a portal out of my unhappy day-to-day existence. Nothing more.
I dreamed of being an archaeologist and had read all three books on the subject in the school library, imagining myself on exotic expeditions, digging up treasure.
I was intrigued by the lost city of Troy, and King Tut’s tomb.
I wondered what it would be like to unwrap a mummy, having no clue that one day I’d witness such a thing in the Andes Mountains.
I envisioned digging up dinosaur bones as my partner, Staci, and I would do many decades later when our good friends actors Dan and Donna Dixon Aykroyd invited us on a dino dig in Grand Prairie, Ontario.
Our camp was in a valley where a herd of Pachyrhinosaurus drowned in a flood some seventy million years earlier.
The hillsides we excavated were littered with chunks of petrified bone, and to the amazement of our paleontologist guides, I discovered a tooth.
Finding dangerous artifacts seemed to be my karma.
In the 1990s when I volunteered at the Jamestown archaeology site near Williamsburg, Virginia, I found arrowheads and a musket ball.
I was always looking for something. While growing up in Montreat I’d pan for gold in the creeks, using tweezers to pick up tiny garnets on the roadsides, hoping I might find a ruby.
When an elderly woman at the other end of town gave me strands of chipped pearls, I didn’t realize they were fake until I presented them to Mom.
I was always scavenging for anything of value that might solve our financial worries.
My most memorable find was on the dirt access road at the Montreat gate.
One day, I noticed something flat and greenish in the rocks, and squatted down to pick it up.
I was perplexed by an Indian Head penny that had a hole through it.
I collected coins like buffalo head nickels, Liberty dimes, and knew the Indian Head penny was worthless because of its poor condition.
I wondered who nailed the hole in it and why.
What did the coin mean and how did it get lost?
More perplexing was why it ended up near the dirt road’s surface and I happened to see it.
I don’t recall the exact date on the penny, but it was the late 1800s, and I imagined all sorts of scenarios.
One of Montreat’s early settlers had worn it as a lucky charm.
Or it was a memento from a lover, and I conjured up a couple dressed in old-fashioned clothing.
They’re on a stroll when he finds the coin, turning it into a necklace that she’ll never take off.
But one day, she loses it and is heartbroken.
It made me sad to think that the lovers probably were dead by now.
It was possible that someone in more recent history had lost the penny, but it appeared to have been out in the elements for a long while.
Why it suddenly appeared when it did is a mystery.
Finding it when not looking somehow seemed a message that has held true throughout my life. If I’m receptive and attentive, treasures find me, including stories. My ideas aren’t premeditated, my best work never forced. I’m constantly surprised by what I consider gifts from the universe.
The only requirement is that I try. Nothing happens if I’m passive. I wouldn’t have found my special penny had I never left the house. Threading cotton string through it, I fashioned a necklace that I wore for a while. I wrote a poem about it.
Jenny’s kisses many
Warmed the copper penny
Wedded to her neck with cotton string…
I gave the necklace to my would-be boyfriend, Ned Graham. After several neighborhood boys had teased me about him “liking” me, I was in love for the first time. I wrote in my diary that I wanted to marry him one day. In fact, almost everything in my diary was about him.
… No words of passion spoken
She loved him with a token
I could tell that my grand gesture meant nothing to him, and the penny would end up lost yet again. Perhaps to be found by another girl-next-door pining away for a prince.