Mayan numerals are cool. It's a base 20 system. The bars are fives and the dots are ones. Two bars and three dots equals 13. My favorite class in college (not UNC at the time) was Mayan Art and Architecture. Smokeshow professor, small amphitheater dual slide projectors usually with a photo of a monument on one and the corresponding line drawing on the other to make the iconography easier to read. I skipped a lot of classes, never that one.
“Today is a special day in the ancient Maya calendar, the day of "thirteen stones." A stone (tun), symbolized the 360-day period of the Long Count, and 13 was a very sacred number. Today would be fully expressed as 13.0.13.0.0 4 Ahau 18 Yax. This hieroglyph from Palenque reads uxlajuun tuun, "it is 13 stones," marking a similar station in 744 CE. (Photo by Jorge Perez de Lara).”
From friend David Stuart
May dad grew up in Edenton in the house to the right in this picture:
A version of this chronicle was posted earlier.
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Walking through the pastures and woods on my Grandpa’s farm where my Deddy grew up and kept his cows there were always great giant trees uprooted and stretching catywampus horizontal to the ground. They had been felled by a great wind while healthy and the way that their roots were exposed created openings into the dark, damp underworld. Lots of times I’d jump onto them and run up the inclined trunks until I was in what was once the treetops, now only a few feet from the ground. Deddy would just say, “Hazel.”
Hurricanes were the biggest force of nature that visited #DeepChatham. It only snowed occasionally and everything pretty much came to a halt for a couple of days until it melted. The lay of the land was nothing drastic so floods weren’t a threat. We had no mighty rivers to overflow. Forest fires don’t much lend themselves to the landscape as it exists today. Maybe once. There did used to be lots of fire observation towers. I don’t notice them as much anymore. Perhaps a young boy’s dreaming made me fix on them. Maybe satellites took them out of the equation. An ice storm could wreak some havoc with electricity and already foolish fairly reckless driving habits - that’s for sure. Heat wave? Pretty normal. Cold snap? The word ‘snap’ says it all. Hurricanes were IT.
The word Hurricane comes to English from the Maya people of Yucatán, southern Mexico, and Central America. Huracán is a creator god and associated with the elements of nature, especially wind. The word and the deity, which can also be spelled Hurakán, appears to come first to language among the K’iché Maya of the highlands of Guatemala. I suspect that supernatural spirit has inhabited the hearts and minds of the people of the Caribbean, Central America, the Gulf Coast — and our own Hurricane Alley home for millennia.
If you know me very well you know that Guatemala is a very beloved place to me. I have spent months and years living there and have dedicated my life’s work to researching and bringing to students in North Carolina the history of that region and the people whose roots run so deeply there. You also know many of those folks have joined us in North Carolina in the years since Hazel. Touchstones.
Hurricanes are embedded in my life and the very essence of things in this part of the world writ large. My parents lost an #OakIsland #LongBeach house when Hazel hit in ‘54. That humdinger of a storm made landfall on October 15 (and 16)which is, coincidentally, mine and Leah’s wedding day. When my Deddy was walking down the aisle with me as my Best Man, he looked over at me and simply said, “Anniversary of the day Hazel hit.” Some things stick with a person forever.
Chathamites I was raised up around all had Hazel Stories. In those days science was less advanced, predictive powers minimal, and school children were caught, buffeted about in buses as the late call to head home meant busted emergency protocols all around. Workers had to make their way over dangerously flooded roads when the word went out down at the mill to go home. My parents told of hunkering down in our Hardware Store, a sturdy brick building, but most importantly one mainly isolated from trees. There were survivor stories - those who don’t tell no tales - that modern research and technology spare us from experiencing today. These are new-fangled things for which we should be thankful. Times to recollect but not to revisit.
#OnThisDay (October 15 and 16) we remember Hurakán Hazel even if we weren’t around in 1954.
Absolutely Special days There was also a bakery near the Red and White and Daddy found out the Baker had trained at a Bakery in Jacksonville Florida which Dad frequented as a child in the 30s. Oatmeal Raisin cookies were his soft spot.......
I too was born in 1954 about a month or so before Hazel hit. Allegedly, it still had hurricane force winds when the eye passed over our little town in Eastern NC. Supposedly, when the eye of Hazel passed over our home, my Dad just had to walk around outside while my mother stood in the doorway screaming for him to come back inside. While lots of damage to our home was done by Hazel, among the damage was that chimney in our house was cracked. This meant from this point on, it was purely an ornamental chimney, never to be used again. And another oft-told Hazel tale was that my mother heated up the milk she fed me over a fire in the fireplace that was to be never used again.
And 435 days later, Roberto Clemente died in a plane crash attempting to deliver relief supplies to the victims of an earthquake in Nicaragua.
And on September 30, 1972, he doubled in what would turn out to be his final at bat for his 3000th and final hit.
I have a great aunt who lived to be 101 and who attended UNC at the same time Thomas Wolfe was there. Apparently she danced with him at some school dance. There were not many women at UNC during those times.
As a homegrown Tar Heel I’ve always harkened to the trumpeting of the prose styling of Thomas Wolfe. I admit that I’ve not read every word of ‘Look Homeward Angel.’ THERE - I said it. I have, however, read a good deal of the book - most recently, the account of the death of Ben Gant, the older brother of Eugene, the main character and narrator, of the ‘Spanish Flu.’ Years ago I also mined the book for mentions of UNC and Chapel Hill. I have some plans to do both again soon. We’ve all got plans to read - and sometimes to write.
Wolfe was six-foot-seven. There was a basketball team when he was at Carolina - the year that Wolfe graduated - 1920 - UNC beat Trinity College 36-25. Trinity, having moved from Asheboro to Durham in 1892, would soon (1924) be renamed for its new owners, the Duke family. They would dream up the Faux Gothic design as well.
That 1920 contest was the one of the first Carolina/Duke basketball games even though the private school - the. Trinity College - was still thrashing about for funds and identity and yet to be bequeathed its present four-letter name. Billy Carmichael scored 14 points in the Carolina victory while guard Douglass and center Lipfert were cited for their solid play as well.
They eventually named the Auditorium on the campus where Dean Smith won so many games after that same Billy Carmichael - his brother Cartwright was Carolina’s first hoops All-American - that honor did not exist during Billy’s playing years. Billy returned to Carolina after a brief career in investment and left a great legacy in administration. UNC was actually only 7-9 for the 1920 season but improved to 12-8 the next year followed by 16 more years in a row of winning seasons. Carolina also went 14-2 versus Duke during that time.
Wolfe, despite his towering height did not play basketball but he was the editor of ‘The Tar Heel’ campus newspaper (just like Eugene Gant in ‘Look Homeward Angel’) which published an account of the win on page 5 of its January 30, 1920 edition. So Wolfe knew of that result — I like to think of him savoring that senior year victory. Wolfe surely also knew Carmichael as well. Enrollment in those days were small and Billy also served as Business Manager of ‘The Tar Heel’ so they crossed paths over campus scoops and news.
On This Day, October 18, 1929, Thomas Wolfe’s #LookHomewardAngel was published. #Altamont (actual #Asheville) and Dixieland, (actual name of The Old Kentucky Home, the boarding house operated by the mother of the protagonist-Eugene Gant-were the setting and an angelic gravestone and the real town’s characters inspired the plot and prose. Thomas Wolfe and “The Old Kentucky Home”
A monument at Wolfe’s stonecutter father’s Pack Square tombstone shop gave the tome its unique title. Wolfe left Asheville and only visited again just before his too young death in 1938. He is buried @RiversideCemNC in Asheville and the boardinghouse is now a State Historic Site. Thomas Wolfe Memorial – Historic Victorian Home in Downtown Asheville, NC
Poignantly, on October 19 (tomorrow) in 1918, the real Ben Gant — Ben Wolfe — the author’s older brother actually did die in an upstairs room in their mother’s Asheville boarding house — a victim to the global pandemic then sweeping the globe.