This walking stick is not for sale. Owned by Bo Petersen. Stick modified by Bo with the orange bungee cord to facilitate better grip.
Bo and I have known each other since college in the 1970's. He was the best man at my first wedding in 1984 and we have stated close throughout the years. Recently, he took me to one of his favorite hiking places, the Panthertown Valley in western North Carolina. That is where these photos were taken, specifically at Schoolhouse Falls.
Bo wrote the preface to one of my books, Dementia Blues. Being a now retired newspaperman, he can flat out write with humor, truth and vigor. And he knew my mother Mary as well. Below is the preface to that book.
Truly, Bo, you are my oldest close friend. And I'm grateful for our friendship. Thanks for enjoying (and tolerating) the weird and wonderful world that is me. You are family. Love you, man.
What You Have Is What He Found
Introduction by Bo Petersen.
Well, how it happened was I wanted to go to Florida for the weekend. My brother was in school there, lived out on the Indian River and had a beer ball game planned. (You don’t want to know.) My last class was Thursday morning, and my first class the next week would be Monday at noon. It had taken me until junior year, second semester, to rig this kind of user-friendly class load and I meant to use it.
There were two issues.
This was the 1970’s. Thumbing was a way of life if you were in school and didn’t have a car. But the Indian River was 630 miles down I-95, the bad ass pro road of the East. I didn’t hesitate to stick out my thumb on most North Carolina roads, but I-95 was a different animal. I wanted a second. Only a few people I knew would do it. The all-over-the-place found object artiste of Chapel Hill was the first one. Naturally.
The second issue was a little more ticklish. Getting to I-95 from Chapel Hill meant going through Smithfield, and in those days the road to Smithfield had one of those huge, eyesnatching KKK Wants You billboards. Neither Stu or I was real big on strolling underneath it with our thumbs out.
Mary Jenks took care of that one. Stu’s mom drove us to the interstate ramp.
Mary Jenks always was a handful, not shy about laying into Stu or anybody else over whatever irked her at the moment. But she didn’t lecture us. She pressed enough to realize we had at least a clue what we were doing and that we were going to do it with or without her OK. She took us to the interstate and told us she would come get us when we got back. You had to love the optimism.
We grabbed our backpacks, walked on down through a stand of pines and stuck out our thumbs. Just like that, we got picked up by a trucker on a Quebec to Miami run who was bored enough of the twice-a-week haul to put up with us.
We ended up Sunday on I-95 outside of Melbourne, Fla., trying to thumb home and watching car after car zoom by with drivers and passengers giving us the sort of terrified glance you would give a guy standing there with a chainsaw. We had no idea that a serial killer down in Miami was operating as a hitchhiker and police had just alerted motorists to Be On the Look Out. All we got was sun poisoning and—in one of those double entendres that you could twist into a harbinger of either of our careers—a warning ticket for “walking on the expressway.”
Anyhow, it was Mary Jenks who picked us up Monday morning at the Raleigh airport, drove us back to school and dropped me off outside Greenlaw Hall just in time to stroll into class.
Mary has always been conflicted, so she tends to leave others with conflicted feelings about her. She is much more like Stu than he might be ready to acknowledge, and it’s tormenting in this book to see the glimpses of her coming through the dementia. What it does to him is right there bleeding on the page.
Stu has always been off somewhere. He lit out from school one time to hike the Nolichucky Gorge in the Appalachians in the dead of winter, with no real gear for the weather. He planned to sleep in his beater Karmann Ghia, which by this time had a rust hole under the passenger seat big enough that you could watch the road zing past. He gave me a lift to Hickory, where my family lived, and I sat hunched shivering in the warmest coat I had, with my feet up on the seat to keep them out of the cold blast. That one, I think, ended when he was forced to turn around on an iced-over mountain road. The Ghia wasn’t your ideal all-terrain vehicle.
Stu has made a name as a “mythic” photographer. To my mind his strength is earthier, rooted in landscapes and people who fascinate him.
I like to tell the True Fact that I lived with 11 different people in college after first semester freshman year. Every one of them dropped out of school; every one of them dropped out of school while they were living with me. Hell, one of them did twice. The found object artiste was among them, and maybe was the one you would have picked to go if you knew us back then. And, yeah, go he did, off in a lot of different directions.
What you have is what he found.
Bo Petersen
Reporter, The Post and Courier, Charleston, South Carolina
January, 2011
#bopetersen, #stujenks, #extendedfamilyseries