Sometimes Your Writing Comes Back To Haunt You

Before I read Deliverance, before I saw the movie, I heard James Dickey read from his novel one evening at the University of South Carolina’s Longstreet Theater, a fitting place. Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, a Georgia boy like me, gave his name to the theatre. What better place for Dickey, A Georgian, to read his story about Georgians, fictional though they be.

The evening came about as an accident. A friend with a literary bent was giving me a lift to the bus station, later an art deco bank and later, nothing. I was to catch an all-night local to Charleston, West Virginia.

“Dickey’s reading from Deliverance at the Longstreet Theater,” he said. “Want to go?” It was 1974, two years after the movie came out. I had time to kill.

“We went.”

We walked into the dark theater—standing room only—where the north Georgian’s voice floated over the vast hall. Dickey was deep into his story, where the Atlantans discover Drew’s body downstream. Bobby and Ed are about to sink Drew with stones, knowing the rising impoundment will forever cover him and the truth as well.

The audience sat still as stones beneath the Chattooga.

We were moving toward the white, light water and were very close to it when I saw Drew’s body backed up between the rocks and looking straight at us … I looked at Drew’s hand floating palm-up with the guitar calluses puckered white and his college class ring on it, and I wondered if his wife might not like to have the ring. But no; I couldn’t even do that; it would mean having to explain. I touched the callus on the middle finger of his left hand, and my eyes blinded with tears. I lay with him in my arms for a moment weeping river-water, going with him. I could have cried as long as the river ran, but there was no time. ‘You were the best of us, Drew,’ I said loud enough for Bobby to hear; I wanted him to hear. ‘The only decent one; the only sane one.’

Women dabbed tissues to their eyes.

That night, kept awake by a busload of singing Marines, somewhere near Hillsville, Virginia, a river ran through my head and I thought about what I had witnessed. It was an evening I would never forget.

—

In the minds of many, Deliverance cemented Dickey’s reputation as a popular novelist—not the poet he truly was. To me, a naïve twenty-five year old, he was a writer, pure and simple. And that was enough. Being a Georgian like him and harboring writing dreams myself, I knew I had to meet him someday. But would I?

Seeing Dickey at the Longstreet Theater was a turning point in my life, only I didn’t grasp it at the time. (I grasped little back then.) Nor did I know I would abandon a much-desired writer’s position one day, a defiant act that would, in fact, lead me to the poet.

The chain of events began one brilliant October afternoon in 1973 as I approached the end of my master’s studies at the University of Georgia. My department chairman, Dr. Juanita Skelton, a brusque, intimidating woman—professors scattered like quail upon hearing her high heels clop down the hallway—summoned me. “I’m going to give you 10 hours’ credit for teaching six months at a woman’s college in Columbia, South Carolina. You will do this.”

“Yes ma’am.”

I began teaching at Columbia College in January 1974. Not much older than my students, six months turned into four eventful years. Teaching at a woman’s college carries beautiful benefits but a career for me it wasn’t. I had an itch to write.

In 1978, I applied for a position as a scriptwriter for natural history films, a position I wanted in the worst way. To get the job, I had to survive an interview with a tough Georgian. I was nervous, dying inside.

John Culler, bearded, tall, and lanky, with a gunslinger’s bearing, could well have been Josey Wales in a previous life. It would not have surprised me had he turned to me and said, “Dyin ain’t much of a livin’, boy?”

Despite working for bureaucrats with the vision of a mole, he turned a cheap flyer into South Carolina Wildlife, the country’s best conservation magazine of its day. He and Billy DuRant, the man I’d work with, interviewed me over lunch in washed out West Columbia at a diner with a bewitching name—the Sunset Grill.

When you are young, job interviews feel like a walk to the gallows. The food was supposed to be very good—that’s why we went there—but I don’t remember anything about the interview except the very last question, which I thought was a trap, set by my days at the woman’s college, and about to spring.

We were on the way back to the office. Culler driving, he and DuRant ignoring me. Contemplating my fate, I sat in the back of a Plymouth Fury Commando V8, one of the best-loved police cars of all time, one immortalized in “Hill Street Blues” and “T.J. Hooker.” Just as we crossed the Congaree River, Culler turned and shot me a Clint Eastwood-like stare. “I’ve just got one more question. Do you like to drink liquor and chase women?”

Trap or not, the truth burst free. “Yes.”

Culler turned to DuRant and barked, “Hire him.”

During six years in the film production unit, I wrote a few features for the magazine. Then I became the magazine’s managing editor. Here, I wrote my first speech for a governor, Richard W. Riley. Here, I began to make contacts with the community of people needing the services of a writer. Altogether, I worked at South Carolina Wildlife nine years, developing the skills of a freelancer on the sly. I learned a lot about writing and even more about people, and I learned to dislike authority. And when I could learn no more, I left.

One steamy afternoon, thunderclouds gathering in more ways than one, a book contract in hand, I tallied my freelance earnings on a yellow legal pad. August 19, 1987, at 3:30 in the afternoon, I quit my job on the spot. Giving no notice, I walked out to pursue freelance writing, a world of odd assignments, books, and kooks—disappointment and exhilaration—where James Dickey and I would meet two years down the road.

—

Dickey’s shadow loomed over Columbia. Over the years, I saw him from afar in restaurants, on TV, and read about him in Bill Starr’s book section of The State. His life seemed one of readings, signings, and partying. He seemed to be soaking up life, the good life, drinking, reveling in life itself. On a day yet to come, talking to me, he would casually dismiss his drinking escapades, the stuff of legend. “People say that the good feeling that alcohol gives you is false—but all you have to do is live a human life to know that, in many instances, a false good feeling is better than none at all.”

I agreed with him 100 percent.

In 1989, Robert Clark, Steve Bennett, and I co-authored South Carolina, The Natural Heritage, for the University of South Carolina Press. Bennett, from Thunderbolt, Georgia, knew Dickey’s wife, Deborah, who was also from Thunderbolt, and through this connection and $800 of USC Press money, Dickey agreed to write our foreword. And so I met the man at last, some 15 years after he spoke at the Longstreet Theatre. We sat side by side at book signings. We shared the Georgia connection. His mere presence encouraged me to write. He was my muse.

We kept in touch over the phone and from time to time, on some pretense, I’d drive across town to his place. No longer were we strangers. I remember walking the shade-dappled sidewalks of Senate Street in 1990 when a festival, Mayfest, took place there, long before moving it to a public park killed it. Lost in thought, watching the sights, someone called my name. It was Dickey.

Slowly I built up a local writing career. Small steps, but steps forward, and one step involved an ambitious stride toward Mississippi where a short-lived magazine, Reckon, Southern to the core, published features about writers. And so, on a humid Saturday, June 24, 1995, I interviewed a Dickey in decline for Reckon, soon to cease publication.

A question had long burned in me: “How did he get into writing?”

At home, sitting in his wingback, on oxygen, fortified by stacks of books and wearing two watches, he answered me, telling me how language caught his ear. It started with his dad; he worked as an attorney.

“What my father liked most about the law was the courtroom rhetoric,” Dickey told me. “He had a set of books, Classics of the Bar, which gave transcripts of all the important trials from Jesus up to Fatty Arbuckle in 1929.”

Many times, Eugene Dickey read speech transcripts by Clarence Darrow and Robert Ingersoll to his son, and across the decades one speech lived within James Dickey. He recited Ingersoll’s opening statement in defense of some Southerners accused of murder.

“The Southern boys were out on the coast in the gold mining fields, Sutter’s Mill,” said Dickey. “Ingersoll’s opening statement went like this. ‘I’m very happy to talk to the gold miners. I’m very happy, today, to be your guest in this courtroom, guest of you hardy souls who earn your precarious living by wresting the precious metal from the clutches of the miserly rock.’

“My father said, ‘Now Jimmy isn’t it wonderful that a man can express himself that way.’ I replied, ‘It sure is, daddy. That’s great; read it again.’ And that’s how I got into writing, but all ways to get into writing are strange, all ways.”

In 1995, Dickey, thin as a reed, looked nothing like Sheriff Bullard. He had fears. Dickey, who had been exposed to the Nashville Agrarians, the Fugitives, feared the South was in danger of becoming one giant Rexall. Surely its last gasp was coming. The generic culture of superstores, malls, and cable television was eating the South he had known.

“Every time a new factory locates down here, everybody whoops it up—so many more new jobs and this, that, and the other, but look what it’s doing to the culture. The juke box music comes in and the traditional, Southern, Appalachian ballads go out.”

Dickey, of Georgia mountains, grew up hearing the twangs of bluegrass music echo across the valleys and he didn’t like contemporary country music. He was a purist. He never used a word processor, just cheap Japanese typewriters. “I think it’s too much machinery between you and what you’re writing, with those electronic devices.”

I will go to my grave believing one thing about James Dickey. Had he used a computer he would have finished his sequel to Alnilam, Crux, and another novel for sure.

—

I wrote 231 words in Reckon about Dickey’s drinking. I wrote that his drinking “led to overindulgence and damage.” Didn’t think twice about it. It seemed “writerly,” and I was impatient to get my hands on the Winter 2006 issue. Dickey got his first.

My phone range in the quiet moments of dusk. It was Dickey. My heart leaped. He loved the piece. I knew that’s what he was about to say. No. “Why did you have to write about my drinking? It hurt me and it hurt my family.”

His words stung me. The call ended badly. I gave him a wide berth for a while. I wasn’t sure what to say to him. The months rolled by and I struggled: what to do, what to say. A year passed. Somehow I knew I had to make amends.

One Monday morning while shaving, I heard the news report. Dickey had died the night before. I felt a loss. And guilt. From that first reading at Longstreet Theater to the foreword for my book to estrangement, and now this, the end. You can’t break a circle that isn’t complete. I knew one thing. For James Lafayette Dickey, his circle was complete at last. For him, “by and by, by and by
, there’s a better home awaiting, 
in the sky Lord, in the sky.”

In time, I put it all behind me but then Henry Hart came out with his unkind 811-page biography: James Dickey, The World As A Lie. Hart, with hair like Moe of the Three Stooges, had done exhaustive research. There, on page 733, my damning words rose like demons to renew my haunting:

“Dickey acknowledged how destructive alcohol had been to himself, his family, and everyone associated with him. In July, he told a writer for Reckon magazine that, while alcohol had enhanced his confidence for years: ‘I am forever off drinking. God could not get me to drink, Him and Jesus combined. That’s over. Dickey decried his lack of judgment in the past and advised his interviewer: ‘You ought to quit, too. Don’t let it do to you what it did to me.’ ”

I was a hypocrite.

I recall an icy December night in 1989. Robert Clark and I went to Dickey’s home with twenty-seven copies of South Carolina, The Natural Heritage for Dickey to sign, Christmas gifts. Intending to drink with the man, Robert and I brought bourbon as a gift: Jack Daniels Single Barrel Whiskey I believe. I remember the bottle was pretty.

We arrived on time. 7:30 p.m. Dickey met us at the door in his pajamas. He had no need to drink further. He took the bottle and placed it high on a shelf. Then after signing the books with his ornate signature, he asked us to join him in his study. There, to my disappointment, he asked if we were from the South.

“You know I’m from Georgia, like you,” I said, “and Robert is from Charlotte.”

“Good,” he said, grabbing his guitar. “Then you know the old Southern gospels. Let’s sing.”

And with that pronouncement, he launched into “Will The Circle Be Unbroken.”

I was standing by my window, On a cold and cloudy day, When I saw the hearse come rollin’ For to take my mother away.

Robert and I stood there mute. Dickey stopped strumming.

“You boys said you were from the South, c’mon, let’s go,” and with that he took up the song, singing with all his might.

Will the circle be unbroken? By and by Lord, by and by

Robert and I involuntarily took a step backwards and looked at each other for help. Dickey stopped again, stood, and stared with anger.

“I can’t sing a lick,” I said in apology.

“Me neither,” said Robert.

Dickey moved toward the hall. “Boys, I’m a busy man. I’m expecting a call from my agent any minute.” He showed us the door.

In the space of 15 seconds Robert and I were out in the cold, a precarious stack of books in our arms, wondering, exactly, what had hit us. Wondering what happened to our night of drinking with the Deliverance poet. We pretty much knew what happened to the Jack Daniels.

That cold December night was soon forgotten. We stayed in touch, and I proposed the feature to Reckon and Dickey agreed to an interview. Toward the end of our 1995 interview, Dickey discussed his failing health. “I met the Dark Man. I’m very much aware of mortality. I’d like to think I have some more years, maybe 10, 12, or 15 at the most, but that’s in the lap of the Gods.”

The Gods were tightfisted. He had but nineteen months.

Dickey died January 19, 1997. He left a novel unfinished and he left critics aplenty, especially in Columbia, South Carolina. Some colleagues felt he was a horse’s ass. One professor told me he couldn’t stand the man but in the same breath said, “Deliverance was a helluva novel.” I tried to defend the man, but heard instead, “To those who much is given, much is expected.”

Dickey left eloquent defenders behind. Jeffrey Meyers wrote in The New Criterion: “James Dickey, handsome, blond and blue-eyed, formidably energetic, large, and larger than life, scaled the heights. College athlete, air force navigator, advertising executive, guitarist, archer, hunter, teacher, performer and poet laureate, winner of a Guggenheim fellowship and a National Book Award, he covered the Apollo launching for Life and read his poetry at President Carter’s inauguration.”

Dickey was an icon to me. I didn’t care what his critics thought but I sure cared what he thought, and I had hurt the man. He had encouraged me to write, (“You underestimate yourself”) and thanks to my freelancing, I could relate to him. His stand on writing ad copy versus poetry is memorable. “I’d sell my soul to the devil by day and earn it back at night.”

To this day, when asked how the freelancing life goes, I respond, “Every night is a Saturday and every morning is a Monday.” Were he here, Dickey would nod and say “Amen.”

Dickey was laid to rest at All Saints Waccamaw Episcopal Church cemetery on Pawley’s Island, South Carolina, on a chilly sun-paled January day, everything blue, everything dead.

—

One afternoon in 1997, a summer thunderstorm raging, a student and I drove to his home so she could say she had seen Dickey’s house. There was no home. Its location had been sold. Nothing remained but rubble and bulldozer tracks. We trekked through the rain and returned with three bricks. She kept one. The other two sit in my office. Alongside them is a smooth stone I picked up from shallow Chattooga waters, monuments you could say. That was twelve years ago.

A new home sits at 4620 Lelia’s Court today, overlooking Lake Katherine. No marker, nothing, tells the passersby that the poet and author of Deliverance created literature and art here. What a shame.

When it comes to James Dickey, there are regrets aplenty to go around—on all sides. Among them, a share belongs to me. I earned it when I yielded to the temptation to disparage a man just because it seemed stylish. The thing to do, as so many others had.

Across The Savannah

Photo by Tom Poland

I was on my way to buy sunflower seeds for my bird feeders, which the squirrels, especially, appreciate. Along the way, a vagabond perched near the interstate holding a sign, “Will work for food.” I see guys like him a lot. Usually, they come in pairs and work both sides of the intersection. I hear it’s a scam.

I drove on with no guilt about feeding birds, not humans. I suspect the drifters had birds in mind too—Old Crow and maybe dreams of Wild Turkey flitting through their scalawag heads, if they “worked for food” long enough.

At Lowes, I was checking out 20-pound sacks of sunflower seeds when a fellow in a business suit walked up. “We’re spending money on birds and a lot of folks are out of work,” I said. He laughed and said, “Times are tough all right unless you’re a bird”

That’s for sure. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service estimates that 53.4 million Americans drop nearly $5 billion a year to see nature in action. That ain’t chicken feed, folks.

My backyard hosts two birdbaths, three feeders, a hummingbird feeder, and a fountain. Running water sounds like a dinner bell to birds and when the fountain cascades rivulets, a feathery ensemble descends on my yard. Cardinals, finches, orioles, woodpeckers, brown thrashers, and other birds arrive in such plentitude my backyard becomes a wildlife refuge.

I work at home and filling the feeders brings entertainment and now and then a lesson about life. Besides, birds and I are old friends. We share a professional connection of sorts that goes back nearly 30 years. Watching birds provides a break from writing these days, but in the past birds meant work. As a cinematographer in the ’80s, a series of films regularly took me to Cape Romain Wildlife Refuge off the coast near Charleston.

Long days … I’d board a U.S. Department of Interior Boston Whaler at McClellanville well before dawn and spend the morning filming shorebird rookeries on small, low-slung islands. Rookery islands are flat, sandy places. Little vegetation grows there. A mere scrape in the sand suffices for a nest. The speckled eggs look just like sand. I stepped carefully.

Rookery islands are wild and pristine. They hold no trappings from civilization. They truly are for the birds. A beautiful place, sun splashed, wild, and desolate. And desolation is where the business of raising fledglings best takes place. The Department of Interior owns this territory; it’ll never become another Hilton Head. You’ll never see pot-bellied men in golf carts riding along where baby pelicans grew up. It’ll remain barren yet full of life: a ravishing contradiction.

Back in the ’80s, I took that natural splendor for granted. It was a job. Work. Now, reminiscing with the benefit of a bit more maturity, I realize I was in a place magical and majestic—bird land—a bird watcher’s paradise. Islands with names like Cape and Bulls sit off the Lowcountry just beyond where the edge of North America slips beneath the Atlantic. Farther out beyond the islands, the warm Gulf Stream courses through the sea. Life’s basic elements abound here.

The ancients believed the world consisted of air, fire, water, and earth. Perhaps they had their own feathery islands in mind. On islands such as Cape Romain’s, the sun bears down with the fury that melted Icarus’s wings even as it incubates eggs destined to fly in another life of sorts. And there, in those scrapes my feet avoided, the sand was nothing more than the remnants of ancient mountains, long washed into the Atlantic and built up into isles. There I was walking across aged peaks shooting scenes for TV and film.

It seems like only yesterday that I trained my Arriflex on pelicans crashing into the sea in search of menhaden. There in that sun-bleached land, I loaded film magazines and shot footage of baby pelicans, brownish-purple blobs with bobbing heads and oversized beaks. At day’s end, the sun sinking over the continent, the U.S. Department of Interior guide would take me back to the mainland. Hot, hungry, and tired, I made the long drive back to the office and sent film off for processing.

Looking back, avian moments stand out from my bird-filming years. Seeing my first Bald Eagle wheeling overhead, its regal white head flashing in the sun. Spotting the oh-so-rare Swallow-tailed Kite (the Arriflex was cased, useless when I needed it most). Filming baby wood ducks leaping on high from a tree cavity, bouncing off the forest floor like yellow tennis balls, then forming a fluffy, yellow train to follow mom to a beaver pond. Their inaugural swim waited.

That was then. Backyard bird life is tamer by far. One moment, though, stands out. A tender moment. One morning a bird crashed into my sliding glass door with a sickening thud. Opening the door to my deck, I saw a female house finch on her back, feathers ruffled on her right wing. Spasms racked her little finch body. I was sure she was dying.

I reached down to pick her up, and the sight of me was enough to get her to fly. Somehow she flew to a nearby pine, latched onto a small limb, and hung upside down by one foot. Her redheaded mate flew to her side at once, chirping in a way that sounded like pleading. “C’mon, don’t die. You can make it. Please don’t leave me.”

The male kept nudging her with his beak and pacing the limb she clung to. I expected her to drop in a freefall of death. After what seemed an eternity, she struggled and managed to stand upright on the limb, wobbly at best. Her mate nudged her more, chirped louder, and after about 10 minutes, the pair flew away. Later that afternoon I spotted her, wing feathers still askew, at a feeder, with her mate right beside her. All seemed right in her world again. Mine too.

That old expression, “for the birds,” generally carries a touch of sarcasm implying something is no good. “This economy is for the birds.” Well, there’s nothing worthless about feeding and watching birds even in tough times. The best thing about my backyard birds is that it’s not work. I don’t have to cart heavy equipment around, keep batteries charged, avoid camera tilt, or unload film magazines. I don’t make any money doing it; in fact, it’s just the opposite, but it’s fun. And sometimes quite revealing.

Email Tom with feedback and ideas for new columns. tompol@earthlink.net

Across The Savannah

The Giving Tree

Growing up, two sounds greeted me upon awakening each morning. Close by, the snarl of chainsaws being tested at Dad’s shop rose and fell like some prehistoric cicada. More distant was the drone of Mr. Henry Partridge’s sawmill. Neither the saws nor the mill could exist without the other. They had one thing in common: an appetite for trees.

What brings this memory into focus is an innocent remark a friend made the other day. I was talking about my land back home and how it has beautiful oaks and hickories, but few pines. “Why doesn’t it have pines,” she asked, going on to say pines are the South’s dominant tree.

“Not so,” I said, explaining how the faster-growing Southern Yellow pine makes a better cash crop than the dense-grained, slow-growing hardwoods. Left alone, a forest is forever changing, and a cycle of plant succession ultimately results in hardwoods. We just don’t give the hardwoods a chance now. And so, pines rule much of the South in a sort of suspension of the natural cycle, by default you could say.

“Pines, the Green Monoculture,” he said. His words dripped with contempt. Americus native John Culler, founder of South Carolina Wildlife magazine and a sportsman, disliked pine forests because they offer deer and turkeys little nourishment compared to hardwoods’ acorns, nuts, and fruits. Others liken a huge forest of pines to a green desert. And when it comes to fall color, pines are a no show though they shower us with gold dust in the spring. Yeah, what joy pine pollen is.

You see more pines than oaks for sure, except in pockets where hardwoods’ canopies deny pine seedlings the light they need to grow. What, then, helped pines ascend to their faux dominance?

Let’s turn back the clock to 1830 in Germany. An orthopedic surgeon, Bernard Heine, needed a better way to cut bone. He developed a guide around which a chain could move, cranked by hand. Just like that, bone cutting became far easier. Time moved along and a German mechanical engineer, Andreas Stihl, patented the first hand-held gas-powered chainsaw in 1929. Just like that, cutting trees got a whole lot easier. Folks in the know say Stihl is the father of the modern chainsaw.

The chainsaw gave hand-held crosscut saws and the axe the axe, so to speak. Funny thing, too, about the chainsaw and those woodsmen of long ago. It elevated the lumberjack, a disdained laborer at one time, from the bottom of the social ladder to that of respected specialist. Logging is now among our biggest and most important industries.

Are you a tree hugger? Hate to see trees cut? You can divide people over issues involving forestry, wetlands, global warming, and the destruction of habitat, but that aside where would we be without trees? As I write this, I’m sitting at an oak desk in a house sided with cypress. From wooden cabinets and desks to books, magazines, and papers, the remnants of trees surround me. I’m sitting in a glade surrounded by trees that made the ultimate sacrifice. I owe them much. We all do. We can repay our debt, however.

Plant a tree. Even better, help a child plant a tree. Create a legacy, a living lesson that teaches much about nature, the seasons, and man’s relationship with forests, a major chapter in the human saga. Trees and woods have played major roles in literature. Look no further than William Faulkner’s short story, “The Bear” for a classic story. Among its themes, Faulkner’s masterpiece explores the gradual loss of wilderness to frontier settlement—the loss of millions of trees.

There’s a beautiful children’s book, The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein, a short tale with a moral about the loss of one tree. A boy and an apple tree become fast friends. The tree always gives the boy what he wants: a branch to swing from, a shady place to sit, apples to snack on, and branches to build things with.

As the boy grows older, he wants more and more from the tree. The tree loves the boy so it gives him anything he wants. Lying in the tree’s shade with a girl, the boy carves her initials in a heart in its trunk. Then one fateful day, the boy decides he needs a boat. In the ultimate act of self-sacrifice, the tree lets the boy cut it down so he can build his boat. Nothing remains but a stump, and then the years roll by.

One day, the boy, an old man now, returns, and the stump says, “I have nothing left to give you.” The old man says he just needs a quiet place to sit and rest. The stump obliges.

Giving everything and getting nothing in return. That’s the life of a tree.

Many giving trees have sustained us our entire lives in many, many ways and they will continue to do so. Meanwhile, we go about our busy lives giving trees no thought. Gripping the ground with their roots, their crowns swaying with the wind, trees go about their business quietly converting sunlight, minerals, carbon dioxide, and water into new generations of trees destined to give their all in the ongoing cycle of death and renewal, satisfying the appetite of other saws and mills.

Email Tom with feedback and ideas for new columns. tompol@earthlink.net

Across The Savannah

A Blind, Unkind Law

In the summer of 2008, a manuscript crossed my desk. Sylvia, a mother in need of an editor, had written a 200-page memoir about her son’s battle with Bipolar disorder. You may know it as Manic Depression.

Sylvia’s son, Bryan, was 27 when diagnosed with Bipolar disorder. Like an earthquake, Bryan’s illness struck without warning, shattering his and his family’s life. From the start, it was sheer chaos. The first time Bryan was hospitalized, he told his mother, “This place is not really a hospital. It’s a training ground for the CIA. My room is bugged. All my conversations are monitored. These people are not doctors and nurses. They’re actors.”

Today, Bryan’s mother is an advocate for the mentally ill and she champions a burning cause: changing state laws that overprotect mentally ill adults’ rights and force their family to watch helplessly as their love one falls deeper into mental illness. Most states have a law that says, in effect, you can’t hospitalize mentally ill adults without their consent unless they present an imminent danger to themselves or others. The law’s intent is to keep people from being confined just because someone says, “they’re crazy.”

That very thing was common in the Soviet Union. During Stalin’s reign, for instance, a Moscow court found a young woman, a writer prominent in civil rights, to be unstable. Her real crime was protesting illegal trials. Tried in absentia, she was declared mentally ill and placed in an institution.

We’d never tolerate such an abuse in this country, and that’s what this thorny law tries to prevent. In Sylvia’s view, however, laws protecting genuinely mentally ill adults go too far. Suppose you have a child who is bipolar. Put yourself in her situation. Who is a better judge of your child’s behavior? You or some judge with an overloaded docket?

Sylvia raised Bryan. She knew when he was slipping into mental illness. She knew when he was not taking his medications and deceiving the doctors, judges, and others who let him roam the streets manic. Trust me, she knew when he needed to be hospitalized.

A mother’s tears have fallen on every page of Sylvia’s manuscript. The experiences she shares break the heart. Many nights Bryan would call his mother at 3 a.m. to tell her he was the president of the United States. He’d give his credit card to homeless people. He would quit taking his medications. When he did, bizarre things took place: He’d dump several hundred dollars’ worth of coins all over his church parking lot and write a $10,000 check to his minister. He told his mother God had commissioned him to write another book for the Bible.

He’d disappear for days and his family would fear the worst. Then he’d resurface in a full-blown manic state and accuse his psychiatrist of trying to poison him with prescriptions and fire him. He threw away his cell phones because he believed the Secret Service had bugged them. He grew more and more delusional, would take off on long drives across several states asking state troopers to escort him because he was the president of the United States avoiding Russian agents who wanted to kill him. He told people he was in the witness protection program. He sent a woman 48 dozen red roses—a dozen an hour—for 48 hours to the tune of $2,300.

The really bad episodes enabled his family to get him before a judge, but the judges released him, fooled by his ability to act normal. In fact, he became an expert at fooling doctors and judges, but he couldn’t fool his mother and family. Blindly enforced laws left Bryan and his family headed for catastrophe, but he’s not alone.

Perhaps you saw A Beautiful Mind, a movie based on the true story of John Nash, a Noel Laureate in Economics who had schizophrenia. The film takes up the story in Nash’s early years at Princeton as he develops an extraordinary idea that will revolutionize mathematics. The storyline deals with mental illness. Nash developed paranoid schizophrenia. He believed he possessed top-secret Soviet codes and feared Soviet agents were trying to kidnap him. This illness and its grandiose imaginings that struck Nash and Bryan is more common that you think.

I had a neighbor who was Bipolar. When he got off his medications, he’d grow delusional and paranoid. He stuck the barrel of a loaded handgun to my chest one day and other neighbors and I had him committed for observation and treatment. He had become the law’s “imminent danger to others.” I moved eventually, in part to get away from this man, who himself moved to Georgia up near Atlanta.

And Bryan? What became of him?

Early one cold February day, Bryan got in his car in his garage and started it up. He never bothered to open the garage door. His destination was far beyond anything on the other side of that door. At the age of 40, after 13 years of Hell, he slipped the surly bonds of earth, free of his terrible illness at last and was no more. Tears continue to fall on every page of Sylvia’s manuscript to this day.

Friends, you never know what’s down the road. Sylvia and Bryan’s sad story could be yours someday. For many, it will. Something like 15 to 18 percent of Americans possess a diagnosable mental disorder. No socioeconomic group is free from the sting of mental illness. Mental illness affects one in four individuals. There but for the grace of God go you and I …

When passing laws to make it illegal to force mentally ill people into treatment, lawmakers failed to make provisions for people like Bryan. He didn’t think he was sick, but he was. Very sick. If you don’t realize you’re sick, how can you make rational decisions regarding your treatment? The answer is you can’t. It’s the families of mentally ill people who are the first to recognize their loved ones are ill, but the law renders them helpless.

It makes sense to amend such laws. A judge sees you for 30 minutes but your family has known every fiber of your being for as long as you’ve lived. If you or someone you love spirals down into the deep, dark abyss of mental illness, wouldn’t you want your family to be able to intervene on your behalf? I sure would.

Email Tom with feedback and ideas for new columns. tompol@earthlink.net

Across The Savannah

Don’t Kill The Messenger

Stirring the pot. Not my thing. When it comes to writing these columns, I have one rule: nothing too controversial. You won’t see me writing much, if anything, about religion, gun control, race, very little on politics, nothing on abortion or any topic sure to fire people up. Today, though, I am writing about a topic that divides people as surely as the Berlin Wall once separated Germany, and I’m writing it because of the fierce backlash I got from doing my job: covering an assignment. I feel the need to make a point.

It started innocently enough. Back in the spring, a magazine editor asked me if I would write a feature about the Marsh Tacky: a stout but small horse “14 hands high at the withers” as horsemen describe it. Spanish conquistadors brought them here in the 1600s, and today, only 250 live in South Carolina. As horses go, they are endangered.

The horses have long lived along the islands and swamps of the Lowcountry and are sure footed in wooded and swampy lands. They calmly and effectively get out of boggy areas safely and quickly, traits that would lead me into hot water.

I agreed to do the story. A few months later, the editor contacted me saying I ought to go see the Marsh Tacky in action. And so a few weeks ago, I got up at 4:30 on a Saturday morning and drove far out into the South Carolina backcountry to tag along with some men trying to preserve a way of life: hunting on horseback. The men were using dogs and hunting wild hogs. And the wild hogs’ sanctuary is in swamps and boggy terrain, areas the Marsh Tacky can traverse with ease.

We covered some fiercely wild terrain along the banks of the Great Pee Dee River, the river that just missed being in Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home.” Foster liked the way Suwannee sounded better, though he misspelled it “Swannee” to better fit the melody. My mind kept playing “Way Down Upon the Pee Dee River” as we rode over areas haunted by large rattlers and cottonmouths. I kept my eye to the ground whenever I stepped out of my ride, sure that an arm-thick Diamondback might sink his fangs into me.

No equestrian, I followed the riders in a Polaris Ranger, a golf cart on steroids. Soon the dogs, Pee Dee Curs, struck a trail. It sounded primeval. Baying dogs, pounding hooves, and a trail of dust rising behind riders like some scene from a Western. It’s but one vestige of how man used to live before he learned to capture and fatten animals in a pen.

Was the capture of a wild hog easy to be around? No. Was it a part of Southern lore? Yes. But it was something more than that. The men rode and hunted just as their forefathers had. They are trying to preserve a heritage.

I’ll spare you the details but I told some folks close to me how things went and they flailed me with criticism for being anywhere around this ritual. Taken aback, I explained that I was an observer only, a working journalist.

Other people, normally amicable and good company, pounced on me with vengeance. Over dinner, one friend, amid bites of sirloin tips, flailed me for having anything to do with an animal’s death. In between bites, she let me have it. As she stuck her fork into what once was a living, breathing animal, she dressed me down.

I am not a vegetarian, but I eat less meat than ever, mainly because I believe fish, fruit, and vegetables make for a healthier diet and eating far less meat, I discovered, leads to beneficial weight loss without dieting. I also believe the only people who can criticize the hunting and killing of animals are vegetarians. They live their belief without a trace of hypocrisy.

My position on hunting is simple and based on a founding principle of this country. Freedom. A wild animal may succumb to the bow or gun or knife, but at least it gets to live free. It beats being kept in a pen, stall, or field and fattened for the slaughterhouse. A wild animal lives an unfettered life, born free and free to range as it wishes.

We love our steaks, pork chops, and chicken don’t we. I spent two weeks in Green Bay, Wisconsin, one summer long ago. While there, a fellow said, “You ever seen a packing house?”

“No,” I said when a lie, “yes,” would have served me better. It was something I’ll never forget: superbly efficient, mechanized slaughter. Right before my disbelieving eyes, living creatures were transformed into steaks, ribs, roasts, and burgers. None of those cattle lived a free life. From birth to slaughter, the hand of man had directed their every moment. Wild hogs, squirrels, wild turkeys, whitetail deer, bass, bream, and foxes, however, live free.

I’ve got quite a challenge in the months to come. I’ve got to write about the Marsh Tacky in action without revealing what really happened. I interviewed the men who own the horses and dogs and got some great material. I found the horses and the dogs (equipped with radios for tracking them in swamps) quite friendly, affectionate even.

I did not get the chance to interview a wild hog. They were too busy evading capture, but could they talk, I am sure one of the wiser, older boars would have quoted Patrick Henry: “No pen for me. Give me liberty or give me death.”

Email Tom with feedback and ideas for new columns. tompol@earthlink.net