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The Haywood Gap Stream Discovery

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View from Tennent Mountain of Black Balsam, Mount Hardy and Little Sam's Knob (Ross Peters)

In the summer of 2000 I drove into Pisgah National Forest almost everyday. Living in Asheville, NC at the time, I decided I would focus 6-12 mile walks in those parts of Pisgah that I either hadn’t been in a number of years or had never been at all. Having suffered a back injury a couple of years earlier that made it difficult to sleep on the ground or rock climb, I resorted to long walks. I had simple rules, the most central of which was to avoid walking the same route or even more than a half-mile of the same route twice. I carried a map roughly worn at the edges on which I traced my routes with a blue ballpoint pen, and I carried a compass so that I might bushwhack my way in order to avoid retracing previous approaches when necessary. I was always back home by dinner.

I rested in places like Pea, Squirrel, Butter, Bennet, Cat, Club, and Coontree Gaps; struggled up Perry, Pilot, Horse, and Saddle Coves; wandered along creeks such as Slate Rock, Clawhammer, Avery, and Buckeye. I saw a small bear after making a wrong turn, which led me toward Yellow Gap instead of back toward Turkey Pen Gap, and I saw a large rattle snake headed out of Picklesimmer Fields toward Long Branch. For the first time in a long time I spent a great deal of time alone, and I was fully entertained as well as often out of breath and somewhat sore.

View of Pisgah National Forest from Tennent Mountain (Ross Peters)

I initially thought that these hikes would provide me with time to reflect on a school year that challenged me in new ways and offered reward and frustration in remarkably unpredictable rhythms. I even carried along a ratty old composition book just in case I decided to jot something down. Instead of profound revelations about my life in general and specifically my life as a faculty member at Asheville School, however, I found I did stunningly little thinking at all. I stopped thinking and started observing. I watched my step. I made no plans for my classes—I created no agendas for my department meetings. I clearly needed this time—this summertime, and I felt fortunate to have it.

My final walk that summer was near Mount Hardy, one the few peaks over 6000 feet in Pisgah and probably the least visited (the others in the vicinity are are Black Balsam, Sam’s Knob, Tennent Mountain, Black Balsam and Cold Mountain). After hiking about three miles down Buckeye Gap, I came to a perfect campsite next to a beautiful stream. It struck me as a great place to take a group from school someday. The Haywood Gap Stream was replete with outstanding places to soak and wade and explore—enough in fact that it could easily entertain a group for an entire day. As I was thinking about the possibility of returning there with students, I realized that for the first time in many weeks my thoughts were turning back to school, and given that it was already early August, it was time.

After eating lunch I started up Haywood Gap. The walk was rigorous and technical, and at times it was so narrow and overgrown that I could imagine being the first person ever to scramble up those rocks. The spell was broken as I stepped over some of the rusted two-inch cable that is not an uncommon sight in that part of Pisgah. Several steps beyond there was an iron rail wheel in the ferns and between chair-sized rocks ten feet or so above the trail. Both the cable and the wheel are artifacts of the extensive logging that ravaged those mountains a century ago. I clearly was only one of many that had gone up this trail, but this fact does not negate the fact that I was a discoverer that afternoon.

The idea of discovery fascinates me, whether it is the discovery of a beautiful place or it is the discovery that appears wherever vibrant discussions of literature take place. I love the feeling of discovering something, and as an educator and administrator, I wonder more and more how we can best create that powerful feeling of discovery in our students, knowing that some traditional pedagogical approaches are more apt to dull the spirit rather than to enliven it. Perhaps, given the fact that my hikes took place during the first summer of a new century, it is appropriate that the idea of discovery feels so relevant to me in the context of 21st Century learning. It strikes me that there is much work to be done in in schools in order to provide the richness we seek for our students' education. It also strikes me that it will be worth it. Here's hoping the view we find at the turn around in the trail will be good!

View of Mount Hardy and Little Sam's Knob (Ross Peters)

The Role Models We Need For Our Students

I have always looked and continue to look for role models. By the time I reached my senior year in an all-boys school, the teachers that seemed to have found a way to create their own space within and somehow separate from the school itself fascinated me most. Nothing seemed to surprise them; they had seen it all. I was someone who spent much of high school surprised and appalled, so they represented an attractive contrast. By placing themselves apart, they placed themselves above the rest of the school community. My admiration expressed itself every time I parodied the way they talked or the way they rolled their eyes at disappointing behavior of their charges.   

Perceptions are funny things though, and I have come to see this kind of teacher quite differently.  I now believe that their approach to our profession will only leave them tilting at windmills. If this teacher-as-silo approach was ever a good teaching strategy, those days are gone.

            These days I admire a different kind of teacher most. Great teachers have the ability to reveal to students that we all should be in the process of becoming—becoming thinkers, writers, mathematicians, scientists, speakers, listeners, challengers and leaders. The self-isolating teacher is by this definition handicapping him or herself because he or she becomes merely an artifact of learning. Students deserve more than that.  Great teachers must be willing to embrace the process that leads to change; they must ask the hard questions; and they must take the steps necessary to ensure that the change is in fact progress. Our students are fortunate to go to a school where there are many such teachers, and as we take steps toward creating more and more dynamic learning experiences for our students, we are going to need every one of them.

Scholarship as the Antidote to the Addiction of Comfort

(After a brief welcome, I gave these remarks earlier this evening at the National Honor Society and Cum Laude Induction Ceremony at The Westminster Schools.)

If I told you that I could take you to a place right now where every desire you ever have, EVERY DESIRE YOU EVER HAVE, would be immediately satisfied and where you would never be unhappy, would you go?  Would you even bother to ask any questions before signing up for the trip?  What would you be willing to give up in order to gain entry to such a place?  Please keep these questions, particularly the last one, in mind for a couple minutes.

This evening, while we celebrate the individual accomplishments of a number of our students, we also celebrate the role of scholarship in our school.  When I have the opportunity to speak to people about Westminster, I speak of a place where teachers and students get to do the things that teachers and students should get to do—learn, reflect, and contribute.  Though we might take the opportunity to learn, reflect, and contribute for granted at times, our opportunity here at Westminster is actually both rare and important.  We are able to spend time seeking knowledge that stands beyond our plain view.  We have the chance to look for something more.

For a number of years my AP Literature students read a novel by Aldous Huxley entitled Brave New World.  The characters in the novel live in a world where every comfort is provided to them.  Almost every desire is sated instantly for the inhabitants of this futuristic world, and when desires can’t be met, the characters have access to a drug called Soma, which provides them with what Huxley calls a “holiday” from reality.  Denizens of this world awake from their “soma holidays” refreshed, without a care in the world.  They never have homework, tests, or essays; right now I bet many of our honorees this evening are fantasizing about this no tests or essays idea, but before you all get carried away…

Think about our world.  We are often tempted toward the addiction of comfort; however, such a life might not be as wonderful as its seductive siren voices would have us believe.  The messages of our culture, ubiquitously placed before us, teach us to prefer getting a lot rather than giving a lot.  We are told we have a right to expect a life without struggle, search, or turmoil…now...right now.  My advice is…do not buy it, friends, and do not regret that it is not true.  Even brief glances behind the curtain of our protected world here at Westminster point in another direction.  The world needs more than glances…it needs our full attention and it needs our voice.   

As an educator teaching under the large umbrella of the Humanities, I have spent a great deal of time as a teacher addressing “What is Beauty? And what is Truth?”  My students and I bump up against this question often as we have study works such as Brave New World.   Engaged students run face first into the same question whether they are reading the opening of The Iliad or they find themselves momentarily lost within the brushstrokes of a painting by Monet.  The questions to which we seek answers are not limited to Truth and Beauty, however.  We seek to know more in many areas.  As scholars we attempt to see beyond ourselves and beyond our powerful desire for comfort.  The searches that take place in our classrooms at Westminster every day are not always comfortable, and they are certainly not without real demand…hence the celebration of achievement that brings us together today, but these searches that allow us to discover the joy of solving a proof elegantly, or the eloquence of Martin Luther King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” or the graceful form of a brush on canvas, or a striking connection between our language and the language of the Cicero, Ovid, and Virgil, or, finally, the value of acceleration due to gravity, these searches, are far too valuable to give up for comfort and superficial happiness.

All the learning we do here, and certainly that which we recognize today, is important.  It makes us students, searchers, and explorers, and it allows us to be teachers, solvers, and builders.  It allows us to develop our own views and learn to assert them.  In the end it makes us human.   To me, that it makes us human is the most essential point.

The inhabitants of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World compromise their humanity in order to have sedated comfort and numb happiness.   They become, as a result, blank, hormonal facsimiles of human beings.  The inhabitants of Westminster should have none of it, for there is too much work to be done in order to live toward our potential for achievement, in order to project our voices into the conversations that affect our shared life on this planet, and most importantly, in order to live toward the promise for which our maker made us.  This final sentiment is beautifully expressed in the philosophy of Westminster, which seeks to help students become life-long learners and truth seekers who will be good stewards, caring for and serving the world in accordance with Christ's example.

Finally!--A Name for my Blog

From http://www.psdgraphics.com/backgrounds/blank-world-map/

Last week I finally gave blog a name--Ross All Over The Map. Since starting it almost two months ago I have simply called it Ross' Blog in part because giving it a real name might obligate me to keep it up for the long term and in part because I could not think of a title I liked.  To be frank I am uncertain I will stick to this title; however, I picked it because my interests are indeed "all over the map," and my family and I have a desire to continue to travel--quite literally to go "all over the map."

My wife's scholarship, writing, and teaching has taken us on some wonderful adventures "all over the map."  We had a great chance to travel abroad to North Africa for several weeks during the summer of 2010, and it was amazing the extent to which my daughter Eleanor’s experience defined the meaning of the trip for Katie and me.  Eleanor has had some amazing birthday locations—Cambridge, England when she turned two and three, Vogogna, Italy when she turned six, and Tunis, Tunisia when she turned seven.  On the North African trip, her ability to rise to new challenges awed us—in Egypt, she even rode a camel with me around the pyramids!  The way she expressed excitement and joy made the trip extraordinary.  She is so awake and forever ready for what is next before she even has a clue about what exactly is coming next.  Her questions are endless—she goes to sleep asking them and when she wakes up she picks up where she left off.  I want her to be this engaged forever.  I want her to be challenged like this forever.  And I want the same thing for the adults and students at the school where I work.

After years spent wishing I was a prodigy of some sort—a world-class tennis player or perhaps a musician as comfortable with a guitar as most people are with silverware, I have discovered that I am a generalist. To be honest I was quite slow to own this truth, for the evidence was in and was in front of me for a very long time.  When in my mid-twenties I became Director of a boys camp in the mountains of North Carolina, I had already held virtually every job in the camp short of owning the place.  I had been a counselor, Senior Counselor, and Head Counselor, and I had taught tennis, rock climbing, ultimate frisbee, orienteering, riflery, skeet shooting, white water canoeing, and…wait for it…I had even taught a few overly enthusiastic nine year old boys how to tie-dye cheap white t-shirts (it was no small mess!).   I also drove the bus, and I was in charge of the Fourth of July fireworks (amazingly enough, I have all my fingers and no visible burn scars).  Hence, my work was "all over the map." 

My generalist tendencies followed me into my career in education though it is easy to identify common denominators—my love of reading, my devotion to my students, my desire to seek out the best teachers and learn from them, and, most powerfully, my ambition to help the school where I work become better.  From my first year as a teacher, I have enjoyed being the one who said “yes” when the question began with, “Would anybody be willing to…?” or “Does anyone know how to…?” even when, though I might have been “willing,” I may not have known yet exactly “how to.”  

To me, a generalist is "all over the map" but that in no way means he or she is aimless.  Instead "generalist" refers to a person who has interests in many areas and purposefully seeks connections and meaning from the intersection of those interests. For instance, my love for folk pottery grew out a recognition that a great piece of folk pottery is an emblem of timelessness and authenticity--two ideas that have driven my love for great literature.  

So "Ross All Over The Map" it is...until it becomes something else.

Some Thoughts Regarding Seamless Digital Integration

In a conversation by a neighborhood pool on a recent Saturday evening in Atlanta, I found myself trying to put language to something I have been troubled by for some time.  As we find technology integration becoming more and more seamless, and as information becomes increasingly integrated through the funnel of a very few mechanisms, we are pulled powerfully in opposing directions.  In order to preserve our freedom to connect quickly, efficiently, and meaningfully and in order to gather what we need through digital means, we have to surrender much of our ability to operate privately on-line.  I worry about how I will find the right balance between the freedom web-based resources offer and the privacy that is diminished each time I add content to the cloud. 

On one hand the convenience and apparent inevitability of having everything in our lives pass through Google, Facebook, or Twitter, is lovely, and it promises to be convenient, manageable, and understandable; however, on the other hand, I struggle because of our increasing inability to separate business from personal digital footprints.  Having our entire digital lives held in the hand of a few entities that will continually mine whatever of value they can gather is frightening.  Not surprisingly, thinking about this issue can quickly begin to sound dystopic; however, I am not inclined to start borrowing too much vocabulary from 1984 or Brave New World.  Not yet at least. 


My greatest fear is cultural apathy—have we become a society that will thoughtlessly sacrifice independence and privacy bit by bit?  Irony abounds here for educators in particular, for as we strive to be and to create independent learners, we risk creating dependence on the means (i.e., the platform and search engine) that facilitates access to stunningly powerful technological tools.  Every step forward (and there are many that lie ahead for individuals, businesses, and schools) seems to involve a bit of surrender.  Will we be aware enough or reflective enough to make the hard decisions regarding how to move forward without sacrificing too much?  Or will we be like the pony that can be led astray by sugar cubes left one after the other until he has gone over the hill, across the pasture, and finally off the farm?   


Working in a school on the threshold of bold steps forward, I am immersed in different versions of this conversation, and I am aware of the presence of strings of sugar cubes on the hill and across the pasture.  Approached thoughtfully though, the digital tools now available to us are not all sugar cubes, but rather they are something far more substantive...something that has the potential to become an extraordinary set of learning tools.  I believe the role of teachers in this moment is to make sure we are helping students discover and use these tools to make meaning, to communicate articulately to a wide audience, and to learn how to participate in the conversations they will engage as adults.  

A Thought for NAIS: An Emerging Practice Cohort Structure

I have a proposal for a structure that will sustain and support innovation and emerging practice in independent schools.  As conversations are taking place across the country and indeed beyond our national boundaries about what our schools will need to become over the coming years and decades, our institutions and our profession increasingly struggle to form functional and sustainable networks of conversation.  The problem is not that the networks do not exist—rather the problem is that no single conversational network can hold a wide enough breadth of the conversation to catalyze progress in schools toward the brave, comprehensive steps that will be required of our schools.  I believe NAIS is uniquely positioned to ameliorate this challenge.

NAIS has been assertive in pursuing challenging themes at its Annual Conferences; however, to my knowledge, it has not found the means by which to extend the conversations in a successfully systemic way beyond the annual conference.   This is not to say the conference themes disappear after the conference—on the contrary there has been substantial dialogue and focus on topics such as Advancing Our Public Purpose (the theme of the 2011 Conference); however, there is too much risk that the conversation will disintegrate unless there is a structure to support its extension beyond talk and toward meaningful and lasting traction in our schools.  

So this is my thinking…

• First, hire a Coordinator of Emerging Practice at NAIS.  This person, who will serve as an ex officio member of the NAIS Board, will be charged with setting up, recruiting for, and coordinating a network of five cohorts.  Of those five, the lead cohort, called the Emerging Practice Cohort, will serve as a Think Tank for NAIS regarding issues of emerging practice, and it will provide oversight for the work of four other cohorts.  The team leader for each of the four cohorts would serve as part of the membership of the Emerging Practice Cohort.  (As of now there is a Think Tank for the Annual Conference, and it begins its work 18 months before the conference.  It is not set-up though to extend its work based specifically on the theme.  Its membership is largely regional: for a conference in Seattle, the membership of the Think Tank is comprised of seven people from Oregon and Washington, and one member from New York.)
• The four other cohorts, called Theme Cohorts, will focus on the central theme from one of the NAIS conferences.  Each cohort will have a shelf-life of four years.  Each cohort will begin its work at the Annual Conference one year before their theme is the focus of the conference.  The membership of each cohort will not exceed fifteen.  
• Each Theme Cohort will meet annually for each of the four years at the Annual Conference.  They will also meet using digital communication on a monthly or bi-monthly basis.  The scheduling practice for cohorts might well vary as a result of their different themes although I imagine that there will be usefulness to some (50%?) of the online meetings/conversations being open to the larger NAIS community.  I believe each group should also have its own digital presence, administrated by the cohort leader--i.e., a twitter hashtag and a facebook page so that educators not part of the cohort might have access to key aspects of the conversation and might in fact be able to contribute to the dialogue.  The purpose broadly stated for these cohorts will be to: extend the conversation (and its reach) regarding an annual theme for the NAIS Conference, collect examples of best or emerging practice in the context of that theme, help connect schools and individual educators who are doing the most vital work in the arena of the theme, and provide counsel to the Coordinator, to the Emerging Practice Cohort, and to the NAIS Board about the impact of the best work being done in the field.  The final task of the group will be to bring together the artifacts of its work in a white paper, presentation, or book.

This structure will provide a hub for dialogue on some of the most exciting, challenging, and nettled topics of our field, and it will position us to create a more vibrant network of thought leaders than is currently sustainable elsewhere. 

I believe this structure will empower schools who are engaged in the difficult work of cultural and curricular change.  It will provide valuable professional development for the membership of the cohorts, and it will lend a currency and credibility to do the most rigorous and important work in our schools better.  In order to create durable progress-cultures, independent schools need just such a structure to create a more strategic ability to share the weight of these efforts.

As I reflect on what I have just written, I am aware that aspects of it may be more than a bit naive.  NAIS has a substantial structure already, and it has long been a strategic operation.  I am uncertain for instance how this proposal would sit within the structure that already exists within NAIS.  I am also aware that more structure does not necessarily lead to progress.  However, I believe there is a need to re-situate the means by which we attempt to hold our various conversations together.  The conference structure itself faces a risk of becoming incongruous with the fast-paced dialogues occurring in our field.  The Annual Conference and the idea of having a defining theme for that conference has a potential to play a highly relevant role, but without a longer lasting voice, it will become an anachronism.

The Role of Communication in Establishing a Progress-Culture in Schools

School faculties and school leaders need families and students to exert the same attachment to innovation and to progress in their schools that they have demonstrated to technological innovation and progress elsewhere.  Think about how quickly we have moved toward the latest iterations of the digital age—we are forever poised for the next iThing.  Figuratively, we have moved at top speed toward an HD world, but we have pinned our schools to an analogue past.  I am not just speaking of the uneven move toward technology in classroom pedagogy—as a matter of fact, technological change in schools is simply one of many markers that shows us that schools are slowly evolving at a moment when everywhere else is revolution.  Schools need enough space to innovate, and in order to create it, school leadership must learn how to communicate our strategies effectively to those who are vested in schools but unfamiliar with the current educational lexicon.

There is an old metaphor for leading change in schools: "Leading change in a school is like needing to be the best airplane mechanic in the world because you can only fix the plane while it is in the air."  The tentativeness this statement encourages is inappropriate for the pace of progress that will be demanded of schools in the coming years.  Without greater support for innovation, schools are likely to maintain a status quo that provides specialization instruction and teaches to standardized tests at the sacrifice of teaching students the skills requisite to engage complex multi-faceted problems.  In short, we will neglect the very skills that will be most relevant to them out in the world.

In order to get the alignment we need from students and families, however, school leaders must be willing to improve significantly the way they engage students and families in conversation about the purposefulness of our direction.  Often in schools leaders react to constituents based on poorly assembled (and often overly-fearful) assumptions regarding how those constituents will react to change rather than recognizing the potential efficacy of making to those groups the same compelling case that has convinced the leaders themselves that traditional schooling needs dramatic reimagining.  In short, the communications function in schools will need more aggressive and innovative positioning than school leaders may yet have imagined.  School faculty members and leaders need to tell better and better stories about their positive work in innovatively strategic directions.  Schools need to be staffed for this function in ways that allow communications to families to be far more flexible, imaginative, and responsive than they have been to date.  I fear that in the very schools that have developed the most admirable internal progress-cultures, there is a danger of systemic ignorance of the import of creating parallelism between the innovations created and the means used to communicate them to the outside world.

The esoteric vocabulary school teachers and leaders have created to hold internal conversations about 21^st Century learning reveals the best evidence of the risk of communications failure.  At times, it seems that in order to communicate a fascinating curricular direction, the footnotes and glossary would be three times longer than the explanation itself.  At the very moment our communication to external constituents needs to be the most concise, it threatens to become so cumbersome that it is likely to be rejected out of hand with eyebrows raised and heads shaking to and fro.  The work ahead in schools is too important to sacrifice to weak communication.  What great schools will do in the coming years will be extraordinary, and school teachers and leaders must position themselves to tell the stories in understandable and compelling ways.  

Interdisciplinary Work and Real World Learning

We see an increasing need for generalists. What is your vision on schools/education to meet that need?

I got this question from Arnold Beekes of the Society of Creative Generalists after posting something on their webpage (http://creativegeneralist.org/), and interestingly it jives in some ways with a conversation we have been in at my school regarding what kind of education we need to provide our students given what we know about the fluidity of the socio/economic/political/ globally-connected world that awaits them, given the remarkable tools made available to us through technology, and given the myriad demands placed upon us by families, students, and communities.  

We say too often that education is at a crossroads.  I started teaching in the late eighties, and according to the rhetoric of the profession we have been at a crossroads each of the twenty-three years since I first stepped into the classroom.  A constant crossroad isn’t a crossroad—it is a parking lot.  In actuality, the pace of change in schools is staggering though it cannot be fast enough to keep up with cultural and technological change, so as a result we feel that we are persistently at a crossroad when indeed the truth is that we have moved into an age when steep change is the constant.  The goal of great schools, however, should be to make progress, not simply change, the constant. The crossroad metaphor is dead. 

In order to make sustainable and relevant progress, we must see beyond the silos that traditionally separate academic departments and programs, and faculties must model the ability to think beyond the confines of individual academic departments.  That is not to say specialized knowledge and a deep immersion in the esoteric language of our respective academic fields is suddenly irrelevant.  On the contrary, it is the deep learning in specific fields that most often leads us to discover the connections between the staid constructs of academic departments and allows us to bridge the space that has strangely divided them.   In short, we need hearts and minds that are immersed in our fields AND that seek to make connections between that content specific knowledge and other areas of learning. Thus, our alignment needs to tilt toward interdisciplinary work, which strives to knock down departmental walls and hang curtains where they once stood.  In so doing we may indeed go a long way in equipping our students with the wide-ranging skills and flexibility of mind that are requisite for the world they will enter.

Beyond what we can accomplish with an interdisciplinary mindset within the confines of our classrooms, we also need to create opportunities for students to meet real world challenges outside of them.  Such experiences rarely fit neatly within the boundaries of a single academic discipline, and they do not obey the rules and regulations of traditional academic schedules, yet I believe they can be constructed to fit within a school’s offerings if we are willing rethink how we use time in our curricular programming and daily schedules.  In order to stay relevant in a world where our schedules and requirements look more and more anachronistic each year, we cannot make necessary steps forward for our students without looking outside the traditional classroom and into the community.  Our students demand relevance, and they should.  The vessel that our old and rigid scheduling models provides does not set us up for success in providing the most relevant or the most engaging education.  In order to create a progress-culture in our schools, we must find ways to be lighten on our feet in creating curriculum, programs, and schedule, so that we can create the opportunities for wide-ranging, engaged, and deep learning that our students deserve.   

September 11: I could not stop watching because I could not begin to understand

View of Mt. Pisgah from Asheville School (Photo: AdmissionsQuest)

I read the following comments during the September 11^th Commemoration Assembly at The Westminster Schools today.

On September 11, 2001, I was teaching at a boarding school in the mountains of Western North Carolina, and I remember that I had a distinct sense that the events of that day would be etched in the memory of each of my AP Literature students for the rest of their lives. I wanted, more than any other moment in my career, to be a good teacher that day.

During my classes while we listened to the fast moving news on a sorry old portable radio, we wrote and talked about what was most important to us, and we struggled to reconcile the startlingly beautiful and verdant view out of my fourth floor classroom windows with the reality of events in New York, in Pennsylvania, and in Washington DC.  In the days to come I watched the footage of the planes disappearing into the World Trade Center over and over and over again.  I could not stop watching because I could not begin to understand.

Just days earlier in August of 2001, the nation had been focused on a debate about the relative merits of stem-cell research.  It was an intense debate—the president, the Congress and the news media had the topic running on the high rotation of the 24-hour news cycle and the high octane of charged rhetoric.  Many pundits were positing that this debate would in the end define the legacy and the relative success of George W. Bush’s Presidency.  The events of September 11, 2001 suddenly made the Stem Cell Debate seem like ancient history and the effort to define a president’s legacy seem trite.

Nearly 3,000 Americans lost their lives that day—ordinary citizens, firefighters, police, and rescue workers. Those who died were on airplanes, in the World Trade Center, or in the Pentagon, and in a couple of hours the lives of their families and this nation were forever changed.  Since that day close to six thousand U. S. Service men and women have been killed in the conflicts that have grown out from the 9 11 attacks, and many times that number have returned home as casualties.

So today, in anticipation of this sad anniversary, we honor the memory of the victims of that attack, and we honor those that serve the public good and put their lives in harm’s way in response to those in need.  We also honor all the members of the armed services and their families for the unfathomable commitment they have made to our country since that horrible day in 2001.  We cannot understand the extremes of such commitment and should not pretend to unless we have made it ourselves; instead we should simply say thank you and do all we can to support them, while recognizing that the price for preserving our nation rests unequally on the shoulders of our citizens.   

  

(The World Trade Towers and the QEII Photo:Neal Boenzi/The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/09/08/us/sept-11-reckoning/towers.html#17)

From the South Asheville Cemetery to Thurburbo Maius

Vintage Postcard depiction of Asheville, North Carolina from Beaucatcher Ridge 

Just east of downtown Asheville, North Carolina the land rises steeply toward Beaucatcher Ridge and on its other side, as it falls away further east, is the Kenilworth neighborhood where my wife and I lived in the late nineties.  It is a lovely shaded place that, while not run down, had not yet been brought to the high sheen of gentrification, so often a potential in such places.  It was an eclectic mix of houses—as if the neighborhood had grown in fits and starts.  To the right of our ranch house on the uphill side of Kenilworth Road were hints of an old road or wagon path, which coursed back up toward the ridge and about 200 yards further on turned ninety degrees from west to south then continued along the contours of the land, neither gaining or losing altitude.  I walked partway down this route after the turn several times before I realized that if I stayed on it just a bit longer, a small red-brick church, St. John A Baptist Church, would appear through the pines, white oaks and heavy underbrush.

After living in Charlotte, North Carolina for a number of years, the discovery of so much unmanaged wooded land less than ten minutes from the center of town and right next to our house was a dream.  I walked there often, particularly the first fall and winter after we moved.  I wanted to know the area's boundaries and to see if I could find a way to walk all the way up to the top of the ridge and look westward to and beyond downtown Asheville.  I wanted to see what houses might be up there, and I wanted to see if there were any hints as to what may have been there in the past.  So much of what I wanted seems connected in my memory to wanting to find my bearings, literally and figuratively.

By the time the first snow came in the first days of December, a bit early but not rare in that part of North Carolina, I had already walked in those woods a number of times, yet with a few inches of new snow, suddenly I was able to see them as if for the first time.  My initial surprise was an abandoned and dilapidated cedar shingle shack only about fifty yards off the right back corner of our yard.  The angle of the roof, usually obscured by the high green tangle of brush and briar, was now exposed by the snow, making it all at once unavoidable in my sightline.  It was embarrassing to know it had failed to register with me for so long. My narrative-obsessed imagination made it ghostlike, an apparition invisible until it was ready to have me spot it.

Walking uphill on the pine needles, leaves, and snow was manageable, but coming back down required concentration, and so it was that at dusk one evening, I started back down toward the house after searching for whatever else might have eluded my sight.  I was focused on my feet, and I have a vague memory of slipping a couple of times.  I don’t know what made me look to my left…maybe simply the awkwardness of walking downhill on the slick ground made me look in a new direction, but suddenly I saw something that didn’t compute at first—a straight line of regularly undulating ground going back and back until it disappeared in the ivy and bramble probably thirty yards back.  Each dip was around five feet by two feet.  With both the shack and this new mystery, it was the straightness of a line that made me notice, such things rarely occur in nature without human help.

I had quite truthfully “slipped up on” one of the boundaries of the South Asheville Cemetery, an African-American burial site active from around 1840 to 1943.  The undulating ground was the result of so many people, unable to afford coffins, buried in wicker baskets, which later collapsed under the weight of the soil.  On subsequent trips I found the row I initially noticed was actually part of a far larger, crowded and loosely organized, grid.  It does not take long for such places to show signs of neglect, and this place on the hillside had been suffering from neglect over the course of several decades. Even ten paces outside its borders, one would be hard-pressed to recognize it for what is was.  Clearly the natural world was busy taking it all back.   After that first recognition made while clumsily stumbling back to my house, the discoveries kept coming: tin nameplates, faded plastic pink and yellow flower pedals, and sections of one foot high iron fences formally marking family plots now pulled up and tangled in the slow tide of ivy and periwinkle.  I trod as lightly as I could, touching as little as possible, noticing as much as I could.

South Asheville Cemetery in 2009 (Photo: Jim Archer).  Note: when I first saw this particular section of the cemetery it under at least four feet of poison ivy ridden growth, and there were significantly more trees, some of which were removed during the time we lived nearby. 

While there were some impressive gravestones, many more were marked only with rocks or bricks—more still seemed to have no marker at all.  The taller the stone, the more likely it had been knocked over or broken.  The scene somehow brought to mind Ecclesiasticus, Chapter 44, which you might know as the “Let us Now Praise Famous Men” meditation:

                       "And some there be which have no memorial; who perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born…"

Because record-keeping was poor and the boundaries of the cemetery hard to identify, estimates vary regarding exactly how many people are buried there--I have heard numbers as high at 1500.   My wife and I worked over the next couple of years with a group called the South Asheville Cemetery Association to help clean it up.  Both of us took groups of students on many occasions to remove brush and pull weeds.  Without an endowment to provide for its perpetual care, however, I feared for the legacy of our work, as well as the work of the many others who put in time there.  Part of me was proud of our contribution, while another part wondered if the place would be better preserved by leaving it alone and hidden.  I found myself worrying about the safety and integrity of the place now that people knew it was there, for stripped of its verdant cover, it looked vulnerable and exposed.

I had not thought much about the cemetery in a couple of years until we travelled to Tunisia in the summer of 2010.  My wife was there as part of a seven-week NEH Institute studying St. Augustine and St. Perpetua in situ, and my daughter Eleanor and I had the good fortune of joining her for about half of that time.  Eleanor and I were able to go to several of the archeological sites the NEH group visited, and I found myself reflecting once again on my experience with the South Asheville Cemetery Association.  

Detail from Roman mosaic from The Bardo Museum, Tunis, Tunisia (Photo: Ross Peters)

Many of the finest examples of Roman mosaics existent were discovered in Tunisia, and they are truly amazing things.  They made me hyper aware of the stunning level of artistry and craftsmanship present in that area of the Roman Empire.  Nejib Ben Lazreg (Chargé derecherche Institute National du Patriminie, a title sort of like Chief Archeologist for Tunisia) joined the group on field trips, and he told us that many more sites were known and remained buried because there was not funding to dig or provide security for the preservation of the finds.  There are clearly myriad sites that will have to wait for future generations to find and properly preserve.  The idea that the uneasy world of current events should temper our desire to discover what we might learn of the past was placed in high relief for me six months later when Tunisia strode first toward the "Jasmine Spring."  I worried about how The Bardo Museum would fare if the events should take a darker turn. 

My daughter at The Bardo Museum Summer 2010 (Photo: Ross Peters)

My anxiety found additional traction as Egypt pulled itself apart early this year because we had also traveled for a week to Egypt on our way to Tunisia--"if we have the chance to travel to North Africa," Katie had argued to me while we stared out at snow drifts outside our window in Cleveland, "we should go to Egypt...you never know when you will have another chance!"  Those words have come back to me time and again since the events of January and February of 2011, never more poignantly than when my daughter became infuriated that vandals had torn the heads off several of the mummies in the Cairo Museum during the height of the revolution there.  Only seven months earlier we had paid the extra fee to walk down the stairs and see those very mummies together.

Thurburbo Maius, Tunisia (Photos: Ross Peters)

At both the cemetery and at archeological sites, such as Thurburbo Maius pictured above, we had a desire to see and to understand (in the case of the cemetery we also had a desire to serve and to contribute), but I think it is important to recognize the precarious situation we create when we uncover such places.  In our effort to discover and to learn from to the past in order to locate ourselves in our own complex world, we also accept a sacred responsibility to take care of the sites going forward.  We do not often put the same effort into preserving as we do in the uncovering, and we should.


I find myself thinking today about the shack so close to our house in Kenilworth--"an apparition invisible until it was ready to have me spot it."  Part of me likes thinking of it this way because it taps into a sense of magic and mystery regarding discovery.  However, I don't really believe that shacks, or cemeteries, or archeological sites are like ghosts making decisions about when to be found.   We are responsible for what we find.   

A couple resources for the South Asheville Cemetery:

• http://toto.lib.unca.edu/findingaids/oralhistory/SACC/default_colored_cemetery.html
• http://www.mountainx.com/news/1998/0923cemetery.php#.Tl2XjHOEbJQ
• http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=pis&PIcrid=2177808&PIpi=21812151&PIMode=cemetery

added Sunday, September 4, 2011: The following link is to "Libya's Other Wealth: Archaeological Treasures," which was posted on CNN on September 3rd. http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/09/03/libya.archaeological.sites/index.html