Cover

Title Page

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Dedication

For Norma
and all my friends,
then and now

Prologue

Prologue

In the middle of North Carolina, there is a beach that has no ocean. Eons ago, the land faced the sea and the actions of surf and wind built up huge dunes. Then the waves withdrew, foot by foot, behind silt the rivers laid down. Today a coastal plain over a hundred miles wide separates the sand hills from the ocean that made them.

Now the soft rolling land is overlaid with golf courses and planned communities. Before the real estate boom, it was thought best suited to timber. Camp Courage was built on a forty-five-acre tract that had been planted in pine forty years before. Once planted, the trees were left alone by absentee owners.

With active management, the trees would have been thinned at regular intervals. The weaker ones would have been taken. The others, judged more likely to thrive, would have been nourished. The result would have been a regiment of uniform, straight trunks, ideally suited for the market, with just enough space between them to bring in machines when it came time to turn them into logs.

With neglect, however, the pines grew dense. Roots plunged deep to find the water that filtered through the sand. Trunks twisted toward the sun; limbs became so entangled that it would be hard to say where one tree ended and another began. Low to the ground grew a struggling crowd of seedlings, waiting for their chance to take over when wind or disease took down the big trees. Some made it. Young pines shot up amid the old growth.

In the deep shade below the lowest branches grew a hardy crop of weeds: nameless grasses, leaves, and vines not planted by design but accidentally sown by wind and animals. The weeds could do without sun. Their short roots found nourishment enough in the musty layer of decaying plant matter. They got their living from their own remains.

Most of the tract was covered with those woods. A single dirt road cut through the trees and brush and wound up and down and around the dunes. Not counting the lake, Camp Courage occupied about three acres. There the underbrush had been cleared away and the pines thinned. The remaining trees had room to thrive. Periodically, they were inspected, trimmed, fertilized, and protected from parasites. However, at this stage no amount of management could change their basic nature. Thin and thick, twisted and shapely, bent and straight, they remained. Unrehabilitated.