The Pivotal Bitterroot Event That Still Shapes America

Today I’m headed up to Appalachian State University (ASU) nestled near North Carolina’s border with Virginia on the western slopes of its namesake range.

Durham, where I live, lies in the foothills of the Appalachians which gives way to the Eastern Coastal Plain just east of Raleigh.  Whoever wrote on Wikipedia that Durham is flat doesn’t walk much.

In just a quarter of our two and a half mile walks each morning, we climb up and down the equivalent of nearly a 15 story building.  I kid my friends down in Raleigh that based on what the legislature is doing there, Durham will be beachfront in a couple of hundred years (smile.)

Invariably, I gravitate to Southern Rock during this twice yearly three hour drive (with stops) up and over the Eastern Continental Divide to ASU where rivers run west toward the Mississippi.

It is a fusion of rock, country and blues, with gospel and jazz that falls under the genre of Americana or “roots” music. East of Blue Ridge, think Marshall Tucker Band and Allman Brothers.

Knowing I am the only son of an only son descending from generations of Idaho ranchers with roots back to before it became a territory may hint at the country music in my genes.

But the truly common thread through my seemingly eclectic taste in music is “roots” music.

On arrival, I’ll be speaking for two hours about strategic thinking and insight to seniors completing a “capstone” course in the ASU business school, with majors evenly divided into accounting, management, marketing and hospitality.

Road construction will prevent a jog in my route along a portion of the Pisgah National Forest set aside in 1912 three years before it was given that name and just two years after a horrible calamity ignited public opinion.

When I arrived here in 1989, less than 30% of its trees dated to that time because industrialists had logged it so heavily before the 1891 act creating forest preserves was finally adjusted to allow set asides in the east.

By then they were forests in name only on lands nobody wanted.  In photographs taken two decades later to document construction of the Blue Ridge Parkway, the devastation is still apparent.

Forestry education first took root further south along these ranges in North Carolina, but conservation didn’t.

President Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, who got his start working on the Biltmore Estate near Asheville, made Conservation a national overarching strategy.

But strategic preservation of forests is an idea that took shape in 1876, a year before the dawn of the “Gilded Age” and four years after Yellowstone was created as the first national park during a fifty year period dating from the Civil War when Republicans were in control.

Things weren’t gilded for 9-in-10 Americans getting by on less than $1,200 a year and most had a sense that deforestation beyond clearings required to make a home didn’t make sense.

John Muir echoed this sentiment that year with one of his first op-ed newspaper essays entitled “God’s First Temples: How Shall We Preserve Our Forests” but scientists were also worried and sounded alarms to Congress based on a paper by Dr. Franklin Hough.

“On the Duty of Governments in the Preservation of Forests,” outlined a case for government action based on a study of the fate of countries that ignored the overuse of forests.

Three years later, a month after dispatch riders reached my ancestor’s Idaho settlement and telegraphed word of Custer’s Last Stand, Congress finally responded.

Hough was embedded as a government researcher where he would conduct five more years of forest and timbering analysis.  It would take another another ten years before the forest preserve act would be enacted.

President Benjamin Harrison, the great-grandson of one of the signers to the Declaration of Independence, showed his independence from powerful special interests in his party by setting aside the first 12 million acres of national forest, including a portion of Yellowstone Park.

The same year, John Muir and some friends formed the Sierra Club, modeled after the Appalachian Mountain Club which in 1876 had been formed in the northern reaches of the range I will cross today by vacationers seeking to preserve forests.

The time of Harrison’s bold move was also when Gifford Pinchot went to work for a branch of the Vanderbilt's at their vacation estate in the North Carolina mountains tasked with rehabilitating deforested land following earlier advice from Fredrick Law Olmstead.

Teddy Roosevelt was serving as Governor but a naturalist by inclination he had already cut his teeth on conservation as a New York State Assembly member during the mid-1880s debating the Adirondacks as a forest preserve.

Today’s trip across the Blue Ridge is a warm-up for a cross-country trip I will soon take with Mugs, my English Bulldog.  The route each year is different, with one segment always in common.

After collecting my grandsons and daughter we all head up into the Bitterroot Mountains, an iconic northern Idaho range that suddenly cuts east behind our ancestral ranchland to touch the Tetons.

Regardless of where we cut through these forests, I can’t help but think about the fact that 104 years ago next month, it would have been a scene similar to the aftermath of an Atomic bomb blast.

In 1910, 3,000 fires combined into one and burned 3 million acres, an area the size of Connecticut including a fifth of the entire forest area of northern Idaho.

In the aftermath, the image shown in this essay was taken along Idaho’s St. Joe River, depicting the devastation across the state’s panhandle leading to the destruction of several towns and killing nearly 90 people.

Led by a Republican Idaho senator, Congress had been trying to decapitate the fledgling National Forest Service by starving it of funding.

This forced Rangers to pay for their own supplies including firefighters out of their own paychecks.  Adding insult, special interests and their Republican allies blamed these public servants for the devastation, a tactic often deployed today when funding cuts results in dysfunction.

As a final insult they even stiffed those who were grievously injured but not killed their medical costs and then denied a proper burial for the nearly 90 who died.

A recent book about the event is The Big Burn, written by journalist Timothy Egan, but it’s more than a riveting account of the massive fire. (For any non-readers who made it this far or those who want to see images click here for a documentary.)

Egan’s book weaves accounts of the event with its impact on the American public and a turning point in public policy. As he documents, “conservation was no longer an abstract debate.”

Outraged, Americans turned against the Republican Party and its special interest wing, many leaving for the Democratic Party which found its voice for social justice.

The forest I see carpeting the Bitterroots today began to come back three decades later later after persistent nurturing and experimentation by the Forest Service.

But the impact was still clearly visible in my early years.

Forest products today are turning more and more to commercially grown forests, leaving National Forests for recreation and tourism.

But urban and roadside forests which are even more crucial to tourism, especially in states such as North Carolina, are now under threat of desecration from a different set of special interests

These include insatiable clear-cutting-enabled Billboard companies and developers who are too lazy too lazy to get off their mechanized assets to bother with sustainability.

It isn’t clear when enough will be enough and the American public will rise up again.

A Lifetime Lesson - Sense of Place is Either/Or

I can’t remember why, when in my thirties I suddenly stopped fly- or even spin-fishing, but it probably had to do with worsening of a condition that first manifested itself in grade school called “essential tremor.”

It was the end of a long line of rivers I frequented wherever I lived with names such as Provo, Spokane and Ship Creek but it all began on the Henry’s Fork.

Well into retirement now, following a four-decade career in community marketing, I sometimes wonder about the origins of my sense-of-place sensibilities in that career and the realization reached late in my career that “you can’t have it both ways” when it comes to that attribute.

I suspect my sensibilities trace to when I first began to fly-fish the Henry’s Fork of the Snake River (aka North Fork or Upper Snake) as a young boy.  It ran less than a mile from our ancestral horse and cattle ranch.

The prized trout species on the Henry’s Fork, acclaimed as one of the best in the world for fly-fishing, is not the invasive Rainbow but the native Yellowstone Cutthroat.

It is one of at least fourteen subspecies of cutthroat, each native to a separate geographic area of the Rocky Mountain West.  While it was the first type of trout encountered by Spanish explorers in 1541 near Santa Fe, New Mexico, cutthroats evolved millions of years ago in the Snake River basins such as the iconic Henry’s Fork.

They had become rare in their native Henry’s Fork by the time I caught my first Yellowstone Cutthroat in 1954 or so.  They had fallen victim to commercial fisheries about the time my great-grandparents homesteaded in that nook of Idaho.

That’s also about the same time invasive, non-native species of trout such as the Rainbow were introduced and began to overrun the native Yellowstone Cutthroat.

It wasn’t until 1958 that efforts began in earnest to protect and foster Yellowstone Cutthroats as well as repair their native ecosystem.  By the time I was heading to Alaska in 1978 for the decade prior to coming to Durham, North Carolina, Idaho Fish & Wildlife forsook non-native trout planting.

After nearly seventy years of stocking lakes and rivers with the use of fish trains, fish trucks, fish helicopters etc., Idaho adopted a wild or native trout management policy eventually including a plan now for Yellowstone Cutthroat.

Still, until recently, the state tried to have it both ways, stocking 100,000 Yellow Cutthroat annually in the 1980s and 1990s while also flooding its population over that period with 44 million rainbows, polluting not only the gene pool but the ecosystem.

Yellowstone Cutthroat is the only native species on the Henry’s Fork, but reestablishing this incredible trout has also relied on organizations such as the Henry’s Fork Foundation, founded in 1984 and the forging of partnerships with ranchers, farmers, towns and hydroelectric projects along the river.

Much of the credit for the realization of the importance of geographically-specific native trout species is due to the work of Dr. Robert Behnke, who in his 80s, passed away a few months ago a few years after authoring the spectacularly illustrated and encyclopedic, Trout And Salmon of North America.

In tribute, this winter’s issue of Trout Magazine, a publication for members of the conservation group Trout Unlimited, features mini-essays by scientists Behnke influenced entitled Why Natives?

While learning about the corrosive influence of non-native or invasive species of trout may have planted a seed in me as a six year old, during the first three decades of my career in community marketing for visitor-centric economic and cultural development I labored under the hubristic fallacy that somehow a community can juggle both.

Only in the fourth and final decade of my career did I come to grips with the truth that no matter how hard a destination marketer tries to balance the real and fake attributes of place while guiding venturers who seek the former, in the end the two cannot coexist.

Just as with trout, the invasive, non-native or fake attributes are corrosive and by their nature, even as hybrids, erode sense of place.  This epiphany is also at the root of my strong belief now that no amount of accommodation for sign blight such as roadside billboards can be tolerated when it comes to preserving sense of place.

While this epiphany came to me in the year 2000, I heard it prophesized so eloquently a few years later by Dr. Scott Russell Sanders at a groundbreaking conference held in the Southern Rockies but attended by only a handful of professionals responsible for preserving, promoting and protecting sense of place.

For some communities, it is too late.  But they can become reservations for that shrinking layer of tourism that is more like shopping, where people seek out the familiar in settings that are either simulations or the backdrop for zip lining.

In time, as the 1973 movie Westworld foretold, maybe one day there will be regions of what some call fake places.  Ironically, it was the last release by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios (MGM) before transforming as a centerpiece in simulated places such as Las Vegas where the “real” no longer exists except in film.

Others such as Durham, where I have now lived nearly forty percent of my life, are still riding the fence.

Belying well deserved credit for preserving sense of place, such as that published last week by the uber-hip Virgin Atlantic airline from Jason Frye on its Our Places blog post, is that Durham does not have a comprehensive over-arching strategy when it comes to preserving and fostering sense of place.

Just because unique sense of place is in Durham’s DNA, something fully embraced by the community marketing organization responsible for leveraging visitor-centric economic and cultural development, doesn’t mean corrosive influences aren’t at work.

Often these influences are enabled by those who think they can ride the fence by also fostering things that make the community the same as hundreds and thousands of other places.

It took me an entire career to realize it can’t be done.

Just as Idaho came to value its wild and native trout as unique to specific geographic locations such as my native Henry’s Fork, Durham is in a struggle for its soul, drawn as often to the “new and shiny” as it is to sense of place, often planting one next to the other as if to tempt fate.

Instructors such as Dr. Dana Clark at Appalachian State University in the northwestern mountains of my state, are valiantly attempting to embed respect for sense of place in a new generation of community marketing executives, often using Durham’s as a role model.

But judging by how long it took me to come to the realizations expressed in this essay, it may not be possible.

This may be why we experience the awe of a genuine and authentic place in our youth but come to appreciate what it means and what it  takes to sustain only with age.

I so hope I am wrong.

Noodling “Strategic Thinking” Through North Carolina

As I turned off I-40 W last month and headed northwest up U.S. Hwy 421 into the North Carolina mountains, the coincidence of the terrain to my mission that day wasn’t lost, nor its connection to my heritage, although I am a native of Idaho.

The class is a “capstone” class on “strategic planning” at the Walker College of Business at Appalachian State University.  It is required of students across many majors including economics, finance, marketing and management.  My topic was “strategic thinking.”

I wondered if a part of the class shouldn’t be taught the first year as a foundation; a lens through which to better understand these subjects, as well as a cap prior to graduation.  As I drove that day, the Jeep was crossing and running parallel to the paths taken in 1865 by Stoneman’s Raiders.

Nineteen years before the raid, fresh out of West Point as a second lieutenant in the Dragoons, (cavalry) George Stoneman was the quartermaster with the Mormon Battalion during the war with Mexico. My great-great grandfather Sebert C. Shelton was the quartermaster sergeant for Company D.

I suspect there was talk of California as they stewarded the 25 supply wagons during the march southeast from Fort Leavenworth.  At Santa Fe, Sergeant Shelton was assigned to take a detachment of very sick soldiers north to winter at Pueblo and then to ultimately reconnect with a vanguard wagon train of Mormons and three of my other ancestors.

Stoneman continued on with the battalion to San Diego. After a few months near Ogden, north of Salt Lake City, Shelton also headed to California, ranching for the remainder of his life near Petaluma.  But their paths would cross as least two more times.

A native of the tip of southwestern New York, Stoneman fled Texas with his unit as the Civil War broke out.  A “strategic thinker,” he laid the groundwork that would revolutionize the way cavalry was used by the Union.  He also fought with Sherman in Tennessee and down to Atlanta.

In North Carolina, we often view the Civil War here through the lens of Sherman’s March which culminated with the effective end of the Civil War in Durham, where I live.  But Lee’s earlier surrender of just his Virginia army at Appomattox and the culminating surrender later that month in Durham may not have happened without by-then General Stoneman.

For 61-days in the spring of 1865, Stoneman led between 6,000 and 7,000 cavalry troopers on a series of raids through six different states.  They traveled without supplies and with only a general sense of direction drawing desperately needed resources and troops away from Lee and Johnston as well as cutting off any hope of their retreat or reunion.

Stoneman’s Raiders entered North Carolina through Boone—where I lectured last month—on March 29, 1865.  He was led by North Carolina scouts and followed by units of Union troops from this state.  They headed east along the Yadkin River paralleling my drive up Route 421.

Stoneman wasn’t seeking engagements (though he encountered dozens) but rather to destroy what would eventually be 115 miles of track on four different railroads, numerous depots and locomotive engines and up to 40 railroad bridges along with countless supply and ammunition depots and related manufacturing facilities.

Regularly dividing his cavalry units, Stoneman made it impossible for Confederate intelligence to anticipate his objective, until the very end of his 1,000-mile raid as he headed back through the mountains at Asheville.  He was returning to base in Knoxville while sending one unit after Confederate secessionist leaders as they fled by carriage south from Charlotte into Georgia when they were chased into capture by another Union army.

Feinting at first toward Salisbury from along my route late month, he headed instead up through Dobson and Mt. Airy and into Virginia. His units reached within miles of Lynchburg and Lee’s lines before heading south through Henry County where my great-great-great grandfather Shelton had been born and came of age before returning as a Mormon missionary in the years before he met Stoneman.

The raiders found dozens of small to medium-sized engagements including one at Henry County Courthouse, capturing overall more than 10,000 Confederate soldiers and 17 battle flags.

Fanning out as they came back down into North Carolina, Stoneman’s units narrowly missed capturing CSA President Jefferson Davis as he fled first from Richmond to Danville and then to Greensboro by train.

My first awareness of Stoneman was in 1969 when The Band released their own version of their composition The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.  Some who subsequently covered the song such as Joan Baez had substituted the words “so much” for “Stoneman’s” in the memorable refrain:

“Virgin Cain is the name and I worked the Danville train –‘Til Stoneman’s Cavalry came and tore up the tracks again.”

As Stoneman’s raiders threatened Greensboro, it was filled not only with paroled Virginia troops riding home after Lee’s surrender but tens of thousands of Johnston’s troops as they reeled there west from Raleigh through Durham and along my route to Boone after engagements with Sherman.

Other units had briefly occupied the Salem part of Winston-Salem and raided Jamestown and High Point while others raiders swung in an arc down to Salisbury in an attempt to free Union prisoners there only to learn they had been dispersed or sent home.

During the raids, Stoneman’s troops were joined by more than 1,000 freed slaves, many of whom joined the Union Army after being escorted back to Tennessee.

Confederate government leaders including Jefferson Davis stopped briefly—but unwelcome—in the Greensboro chaos during Stoneman’s raids in the surrounding country.

On the rainy night of April 15th, Sherman’s cavalry fought his last engagement in southwest Durham before a truce and surrender negotiations began with Johnston.  Meanwhile, Confederate leaders passed near Salisbury as Stoneman’s Raiders completed their destruction there, on their way to Charlotte and then south to Georgia.

The day after Stoneman’s Raiders left Salisbury (feinting toward Charlotte) for home base in Tennessee, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.  The only person in North Carolina who was aware at the time was General Sherman.

He hurriedly worked out surrender terms with a visibly shaken Johnston, similar to Grant’s for Lee at Appomattox, based on directives for leniency from Lincoln.

Those terms were rejected by Union officials and Sherman was ordered to open negotiations with Johnston under harsher terms.  By then Stoneman had finished with Asheville but his troopers returned under the same stipulations brought about by Lincolns death to lay waste to the town.

Stoneman epitomized the strategic thinking that ended the war.  His were not the only raiders.  General Sheridan did the same down the Shenandoah, while other units did the same through Mississippi and Alabama.  The brilliance of this strategy was studied by General George Patton as his tank battalions, including the 35th in which my father served, fought the Germans across Italy and France in World War II.

These harsh policies of Reconstruction Republicans led Stoneman to become a Democrat after the war.  As much as he is often demonized by Southerners who have reconstructed the meaning of that war, Stoneman sacrificed his military career in protest.

After leading cavalry in battles with Indians in the southwest, he retired from the Army in 1871.  Along with his wife, he moved to California and established a vineyard in a valley below along the San Gabriel mountains near where I would live in the late 1960s.

My great-great-great grandfather Shelton had passed away in 1857 so even if they had not been located several hundred miles apart, there would be no reunion with Stoneman.

However, vineyards didn’t mean the end of Stoneman’s public service.  He served as Railroad Commissioner from 1876 to 1878 and then was elected Governor of California in 1882.  His administration saw the emergence of Progressive Era reforms.

In 1885 though, a fire destroyed his papers and Civil War mementos.  Ruined financially, he returned to New York where he died in 1894.

Even though as a cavalry officer for whom resulting hemorrhoids were especially debilitating, his former commander, U.S. Grant had demoted him to colonel when he retired.  He was therefore without disability, possibly because Stoneman had rejected Republicans over the harshness of Reconstruction.

He incurred frequent and painful surgeries throughout his life.  During my lecture last month at ASU, I didn’t mention my remembrance of Stoneman during my trip there but I did vaguely reference the military as the origin of “strategic thinking.”

By the time my career in community-destination marketing began in the 1970s, “strategic thinking” was emerging in social enterprises.  In 1978, I was one of many indebted to the Pulitzer Prize winning book by Dr. James McGregor Burns entitled Leadership.

Burns’ work as a Harvard professor had earlier been part of my studies at Brigham Young University, both in my areas of study in history and political science.

The importance of “strategic thinking” such as Stoneman’s is captured in a quote by Burns:

“It is persons’ intent, along with skill in exploiting power bases, that signalizes the most human factor in all the economic, social, military, and other “deterministic” forces that are said to make history. It is purpose that
puts man into history.”

There are many good resources about General Stoneman and the Mormon Battalion.  In addition to family history, I found the correlation of events in Chris Hartley’s Stoneman’s Raid, 1865 and Jim Wise’s On Sherman’s Trail particularly enlightening.  Both live in North Carolina.

America’s Next “Hero” Generation

A month ago I spoke to Dr. Dana Clark’s large class of potential “community-destination marketers” at Appalachian State University (ASU) perched in the northwest mountains of North Carolina.

Weeks from graduation for most, I told these students that should they land a position with a destination marketing organization (DMO) they would already be among the top 1% in knowledge about the topic.

Two things will be required of them.  One, patience with co-workers and supervisors who will be stuck in out-dated approaches, and two, a realization that within 3 to 5 years what they have learned at ASU will be obsolete.

Using a quote I had read in my local newspaper, I relayed the wisdom of a friend of mine, Dick Brodhead, who is the president of Duke University in Durham, where I live.  In a speech to faculty, he had noted just the day before my trip to ASU that a liberal arts education:

“…aims to engage multiple forms of intelligence to create deep and enduring habits of mind, an active, integrative spirit naturally disposed, when it comes upon a new fact or situation, to go to work trying to understand it, updating preexisting understandings in a new light.

…It is, in the fullest sense, equipment for living.”

These kids to whom I spoke at ASU are bright, energetic and very thoughtful.  They asked great questions, and I could also see it in their eyes as each one filed by to shake my hand later.

Any DMO will be lucky to land one of them but I wish for them that they will find one smart enough to listen to and engage them in contemporary applications of community marketing such as the one in Durham.  Unfortunately, those odds aren’t good even if they limit their availability to just those that are accredited.

I offered to these students that the college courses most beneficial to community marketers today outside of those about destination marketing and development will be historical analysis and statistics just as they were during my now-concluded 40-year career in that field.

Many people misunderstand the value of historical analysis because they think of history as linear.  Actually, it is cyclical.  It doesn’t exactly repeat itself but the cycles are similar.  However rather than predestined, outcomes depend on the reactions of generations to times of crisis (e.g. Civil War, Great Depression/World War II.)

To understand their role in historical cycles, I recommended to these students a book first published when they were preschoolers entitled An American Prophecy, The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny by William Strauss and Neil Howe.

First published in 1997 and now available as an iBook, it accurately forecast what we now know as the financial crisis.  It traces cycles over the past five centuries.  Cycles span a human life or roughly eighty to one hundred years.  Each cycle has turnings that follow seasonal rhythms, e.g. “growth, maturation, entropy and destruction.”

The turning dating from the 1980s until the financial crisis has seen an “unraveling” of society, similar to other cycles in our history.  I told the generation to which I spoke last month at ASU, that if I read the book accurately, their generation is potentially a “hero” generation, much like the G.I. Generation of my father.  They will also face a similar crisis in their lifetime.

Just short of a week after that presentation, the New York Times published two columns.  One, by liberal-turned-conservative David Brooks summarizes a paper by a Yale senior describing the generation to whom I spoke at ASU and the influences that have shaped it.

The author, Victoria Buhler describes how she and her peers in that class grew up in a time of prosperity in the 1990s.  That was shattered first by 9/11 and then by the jadedness and moral ambiguities created by two long wars followed by the financial crisis.

As they enter their adult years, Buhler, according to Brooks, writes that this generation is now more anxious and cynical.  They are less idealistic about America and the world.  In Brooks’ assessment of Buhler’s thesis, this generation emerges empirical.

They “require hypothesis to be tested and substantiated with the results replicated before they commit to a course of action.”

To me, this means they will be far more capable of bringing America back from the unraveling of the last forty years based on a sound, “what works” policy rather than the ideological gridlock of many in high office today.

The same day as Brooks’ column was published, the New York Times published one by liberal economist Dr. Paul Krugman, a Nobel prize-winner who as a young man worked in the Reagan administration just as the unraveling so now apparent was set in motion.

Krugman argues that we’re cheating our children all right, but not from debt.  We’ve been cheating them for decades by neglecting public investment in infrastructure, disabling regulatory oversight of the food and water supplies and undermining upward mobility and the middle class to the advantage of the 1%.

I saw the future in the eyes of those students with whom I spoke at ASU and I have faith they can help us recover from this most recent unraveling and a crises yet to be manifested.

However, it will all come down to whether they are able to turn things around as we did during the American Revolution, the Civil War and the Depression/World War II, each of which could have gone another way.

It isn’t a given but my hopes and prayers are with them.  God bless America!

Mapping a Cross Bones Rediscovery of My Roots

Last week I looked into the eyes of tomorrow’s community-destination marketing (DMO) executives and the future is very promising indeed.

Old enough to be the grandfather of most of these students, I had several reasons for jumping at the invitation to drive up to Appalachian State University (ASU) to share the background that shaped my understanding of community marketing and what I see as the future.

I’ll blog more about my observations from that presentation in the future, but during my drive, it struck me that before I was recruited to jumpstart Durham, North Carolina’s DMO in 1989, I had little awareness of this part of the country nor to my knowledge did I have any roots here.

I was born and spent my early years in the Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho, and by then had lived and worked in five other states.  However, I had never lived east of the Great Divide until I moved to Durham, unless you count a month or so in 1967 along the French Alps, the southwestern tip of Switzerland and Provence.

I had hoped to ride the Cross Bones up to ASU, but that didn’t work out for this trip.  I was invited to come back, so the next time I plan to motorcycle this route:

• Cut north for an hour from Durham, North Carolina where I live via NC 86 to Danville, Virginia (e.g. “Virgil Caine is the name and I drove on the Danville train.”)

 

• I’ll be tempted to shoot across US Route 58 along the Virginia-North Carolina border past Martinsville to the Blue Ridge Parkway.

 

• But I want to see more of Henry County. which I know from family history research that one of my maternal great x 5 grandparents named Shelton had petitioned to create in the fall of 1776. One of our ancestors in that line had paid for the legendary Patrick Henry’s schooling.

 

• To see that part of my heritage I’ll cut up US 220 skirting Martinsville (of NASCAR fame,) then across the Faireystone Park Highway skirting Philpott Lake, then down the Wolverine Highway, turning west again on the J.E.B. Stuart Highway (US Route 58.)

 

• In less than 14 miles, I’ll pick up the Blue Ridge Parkway heading southwest and ride it a little over 100 miles down to Boone, North Carolina, the home of ASU.  On my right as I ride will be valleys I know now were settled by another set of maternal great x 5 grandparents named Messersmith.

Overall the mileage on this route won’t be that much more than driving Interstates.  However, this scenic route with personal connections will take twice as long.  If I leave by 7 a.m. I can still be at ASU by noon with time to stop for breakfast.

On the way home, I  may drop down through Blowing Rock along two national forests to NC Highway 228 where I will take the 29 mile ride crisscrossing the origins of the Yadkin River, the state’s longest and past W. Scott Kerr Reservoir before heading east again.

My route home will continue northeast past Hanging Rock and then dip down to Guilford Courthouse where my paternal great x 4 and 5 grandfathers settled in 1776 after emigrating from Northern Ireland through Baltimore.  They immediately enlisted in North Carolina units to fight in the American Revolutionary War.

Different than when I moved here nearly 25 years ago, I now realize that a significant part of my roots had been here all along.  Maybe that is why this part of the country remains home even in retirement.

The Ironies of Sense-of-Place Desecration

If you were to ride a motorcycle, as I do from time to time, through Burlington, Graham and Mebane, North Carolina, you would know they are cool little towns. Unfortunately that isn’t the first or last impression of visitors or other people who pass through by traveling in well more than 100,000 vehicles on I 85/40 each day, about 1 for every 1.4 residents who live there.

According to a transportation planning survey, residents in that area care about their quality of place with 80% wanting to preserve natural areas, open space or farmland and improve air quality, while 90% support the planting of trees and shrubs along roadways and 100% support the preservation of historic buildings and sites.

Returning home to Durham last week from a presentation on strategic thinking to B-school grads at Appalachian State University, I counted approximately 156 huge roadside billboards (counting those that are two-sided) in just the approximately 13 miles from the western edge of Burlington to the eastern edge of Mebane or 1 every 4 seconds at the 5 miles per hour over the speed limit set on my cruise control.

Since it takes approximately 2.5 seconds at the very least to decipher a message on a billboard at all, the advertising placed on those monstrosities is a waste of money even in an attempt to reach the 1 out of 10 consumers who use them regularly according to surveys while, at the same time, the messages are sure to turn-off the 7 out of 10 who never use them and view them as a desecration.

Not exactly what those advertisers were hoping.  The desecration was just as great as I traveled further west through Greensboro cementing first and last impressions of North Carolina’s third largest city while de-greening the boro.

Making the desecration even more memorable is that there were no or relatively few billboards along the other stretches of my route.

One lonely billboard though drew an ironic smile as I neared Boone, NC where ASU is located.  It proclaimed the spectacular views from Grandfather Mountain, now a state park, while desecrating the view of the forest and mountains behind the billboard.

Unfortunately this irony is too often lost on enablers of these obsolete forms of advertising.  In Durham, where I live and where billboards have been banned since 1984, a local government agency is using one of the few billboards remaining (gratis I’m sure) to advertise the smoking ban here while enabling the desecration of oxygen-generating trees and vegetation.

That may be a double, triple or quadruple irony.

Some one who hasn’t connected the dots hoping hypocritically to connect the dots about one ban while lending credibility to the circumvention of another with a message about freeing our lungs of smoke on a structure enabled during by the last session of the legislature to clear cut huge swaths of oxygen-generating trees and vegetation.

Our Fortunate Mistake

Shortly after I arrived in North Carolina in 1989 for the concluding chapter in what would eventually be a 40-year career in community-destination marketing, Dana Clark’s six years in that field was just ending.

After earning an MBA at the University of Georgia, he had gone to work in group sales for the destination marketing organization in Charlotte, but over that span of six years he came to realize he was a mismatch, classifying himself as an “introverted marketing guy in a position that called for an extroverted politician.”

He was very good at booking business but he was soon to learn that destinations that fail to insulate their community marketing from cutthroat politics, as far too many do, can find their good work trumped by as little as two or three relentless and self-serving “enemies,” usually fronting for special interests.

An excuse came along, thanks in my opinion to a borderline breach of ethics by another DMO, and Dana was fired.

That mistake turned out to be extremely fortunate for tourism in North Carolina including destination marketing!

Clark continued his education at Virginia Tech and, while successfully completing a dissertation for a PhD, he started teaching at Appalachian State University in 1991 where he has remained ever since while consulting and assisting many professionals across the state including me.

With roots going back to the end of the 19th century, Appalachian State with a student enrollment of ore than 17,000 is located in the spectacular nook of northwest North Carolina framed by Tennessee and Virginia and a stones throw from Kentucky and West Virginia.

You can climb to the top of Beech Mountain near the campus and, if the atmosphere permitted, you would be able to see clear to the Rocky Mountains.

Dr. Clark, as Dana became known in 1993, has helped shape and direct what is arguably one of the most dynamic hospitality and tourism programs in the country as part of the Walker College of Business at ASU.

App’s was one of the original three programs of this type in North Carolina but that number has mushroomed to eight, including one in Durham where I live, as tourism has exploded into one of the state’s largest economic sectors over the last 20 plus years, the majority now driven by tourism drawn by communities.

Programs such as Dana’s are rigorous and many students wash out. But key to the incredible popularity of North Carolina and its cities, towns and counties has been the simultaneous evolution of a talented and educated workforce as well as a corps of entrepreneurs.

They thrive not only in destination marketing organizations but in tourism-related industries such as events, attractions, retail, lodging, restaurants and transportation.  I came across or worked with many ASU alumni during my now concluded career.

Dr. Clark could run any DMO in the land, but we’re all much improved and far better off because he found his passion in education.