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For Lisa and Jim van Camp, life at Silver Spur ranch balances nature’s raw majesty and a daily challenge

Story and Photographs By Maureen Clark

The first time Lisa Van Camp turned down the road of her Montana ranch, two bald eagles flew from the aspen trees along the creek and crossed her path. “It was a sign,” she remembers. “And I believe in signs. I had been looking (for land) for a couple of years. I called Jim right there and told him I had found the right place. I knew this was it.” Six years later, cows and calves graze on the hillside, horses nose around the paddocks out- side the barn, new fencing stretches down the drive, a noisy collection of dogs welcomes visitors, and a handsome lodge commands the acreage.

Van Camp, East Coast horsewoman turned Montana rancher, is married to Jim Van Camp, a well- known Moore County attorney. Since the sale of their horse farm here on Furr Road, she has man- aged the couple’s Montana adventure home, while he continues to practice law in North Carolina. Undaunted by the work involved in both building and running a 750-acre spread with 80 head of cattle and more than a dozen horses, the petite “cowgirl” is thriving in Red Lodge, Montana. The sign marking the entrance is still in the works, but it will read Silver Spur Ranch, giving the name of their old farm a new translation.

Red Lodge, located southwest of Billings at the foot of the Beartooth Mountain range, serves as a gateway from Montana into Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. The winding, connecting road, known as the Beartooth All American Road Scenic Byway, is one the late Charles Kuralt considered the “most beautiful roadway in America.” It climbs to an altitude of over 10,947 feet, passing snow-capped peaks and clear, alpine lakes. The town at the base is known for one legendary bank robbery.

The Pollard Hotel, built in 1893, a hangout in the early years for Calamity Jane and Buffalo Bill Cody, also attracted the notorious Sundance Kid, Henry Longabaugh. He robbed the bank across the street while hotel guests watched. Today, The Pollard has been renovated and serves the best $3 dollar martinis around. The Van Camps bought their ranch land from the owner of the historic hotel.

Jim and Lisa Van Camp didn’t exactly leave North Carolina behind. They sort of brought it with them. A stunning stone-walled hallway in the master wing of their home has niches for bronzes of an Indian on horseback balanced by a mounted cowboy on the other side. The two bracket a large oil painting by Beth Turner of the family foxhunting in Ireland. On the breakfast table, longleaf pine cones are mixed with elk horns in a copper bowl. And even in the tack room, the sturdy Western saddles are perched next to the lighter English ver- sions for the two jumpers Lisa brought West. The corral is full of quarter horses that handle the elements, grazing on alfalfa more handily than the Danish warmbloods, but she is committed to embracing both.

The view from the living room of the lodge through two-story paneled glass windows frames the Beartooth Mountain range in the distance. Watching the sky and landscape in Montana is like watching the sea in North Carolina. The clouds move and change. The colors soften and darken and the hillside grasses move through shades of gold like the ocean on the Atlantic seaboard switches from gray to blue. No two days are the same. No two hours are either. The clouds, the surface, the color, the wind, the light are all mesmerizing moving variables. Dotted across the landscape are black silhouettes of the cattle, always moving, alone, in pairs, in single file, then fanned out, then gone. One look and the far pasture is bare. The next look they are plodding in single file across the hill.

A glassed, two-story projection from the living room, positioned in front of the mesmerizing view, holds Jim Van Camp’s large bronze sculpture of a cowboy on a bucking horse done by T. D. Kelsey. The piece is particularly appropriate for Red Lodge, known as home to the most legendary rodeo cowboys in the West. Watching the bronc like a wise, woolly old man is the massive buffalo head hanging above the fireplace.

Lisa had a hand in every aspect of building the lodge, from location to finishings. In a manner reminiscent of the Montana women who homesteaded here, she lived in a motor home, throughout a winter, at the building site. She shrugs off hardiness with a customary, hearty laugh that projects, surprisingly, much larger that her tiny frame. If the bucking bronc and buffalo head are husband WJim’s contribution, the kitchen is hers. Although beautiful, it is not for show.

When grandson Campbell and daughter Ashley came for a visit, Lisa served her homemade lasagna and lemon meringue pie. The next evening she followed an equally stunning meal of steak, sautéed asparagus and blue cheese macaroni with another homemade dessert. Her blueberry pie could have made the cover of a gourmet cooking magazine and won a state fair cook-off at the same time. Ranch hand Joey Madrid, who also hails from Moore County, and his friend, Sarah Ross, are treated to dinner on a regular basis.

The kitchen, with a breakfast area that overlooks the creek side and bank of Aspen trees, also opens to the great room, the stone fireplace and dramatic view west. Warmed by wood tones and braced by the views, paintings and sculpture with an equestrian theme, from either the east or the west, are in harmony here.

On an early morning trip by Kawasaki Mule to the highest elevation of the ranch, Lisa points out the landmarks. The Beartooth Mountains loom in the distance, claiming rain and moisture from the clouds that pass it heights. The

hills across the range are separated by coulee, dry gulches that were cut by water flow. The group of ranches in the Van Camps’ community are lined up single file along the flowing creek basins. The drive into the ranch weaves in and out through a grouping of homes and livestock reliant on the water source. The ranches each have carefully regarded water rights and are organized to protect them.

One look at the crusty, seemingly barren surface of the highland begs the question: How does this rocky pasture produce the robust cows grazing in the distance? Lisa smiles. “It’s the buffalo grass,” she explains. “See that thin, light grass on the ground? It’s highly nutritious.” The threadlike tendrils look more dead than alive.

On the way back to the barn, Lisa explains cow termi- nology. She does not have bulls on her ranch, but raises cows (the older females) with calves, either bull calves or heifers. Steers, older neutered males, are rare on ranches. They are nonproductive in a herd and sold at market early. Lisa’s beloved Tuffy is the exception. She singles out a large Hereford/Charolais cross standing near a group of black Angus cows and calves.

“Tuffy was a bum calf,” she explains. “He had lost his mother. Sometimes on a drive the calves get separated or the mother may have died. Back in 1992, LP and Diane Tate were at TX Ranch and we were moving about 700 head fifty miles from Lone Wolf down to Lay Out Creek. The older cows lead a herd. There was one lone calf that I saw was behind the whole way. He never looked right or left. He just kept marching on. He had a mousy gray tip on his tail and a white tuft of hair sticking up on his back. I named him Tuffy.” Lisa admired his moxie. Often the stranded or orphaned calves fail to thrive.

After the drive, she bought Tuffy, and for twenty years he has been a ranching anomaly. “No one in this business has a pet steer,” Lisa points out. Tuffy was left on the TX range. Every year Lisa would locate him in the roundups. “Two winters ago, we couldn’t find him. There was a lot of snow early and I thought we had lost him. Then he showed up on Thanksgiving Day at TX Ranch. He had made it through three cattle guards.”

After the scare, she brought the old fellow to Silver Spur. According to the rancher, he is earning his keep. “Last spring we had a set of twin calves. One got separated and I heard it bawling. Tuffy went over the hill, touched noses with the calf and brought him back.”

The ranch, spread along the creek basin, consists of a ranch hand’s house, a bunkhouse for overflow guests, equipment sheds, cattle pens, hayfields, the lodge and last in line, a six-stall center aisle barn with paddocks. On the property, wildlife abounds. A female pheasant leading a dozen chicks paraded across the lawn headed for the fields. Mule deer are so abundant Lisa has rigged her irrigation to trigger when they attempt to eat the flowers and shrubs landscaping the lodge. More than once she has had to clean the strong, oily scent of skunk off her dogs. (A grease cutting liquid like Dawn works.) Grandson Campbell caught a rainbow trout from the creek out back within minutes of his first cast.

Flocks of sheep who graze close to home on nearby ranches are protected from predators by the odd, sentinel llama. Every grouping is guarded by one large, scraggly llama, reputed to be aggressive in fending off coyotes and eagles. Wolves, black bears and mountain lions round out the threats to newborn cattle and sheep.

Another curious feature of the ranching landscape is the proliferation of white bee boxes sprinkled throughout the communities. The state of Montana Department of Agriculture is working with ranchers, in three-mile radiuses, to promote beekeeping, in an effort to increase alfalfa pollination. “I tried to get bees,” Lisa said. “But there was already a project within three miles of our ranch.”

Nearby, about two miles by dusty road, and shorter by horseback, is the Van Camps’ neighborhood church, St. Olaf’s Lutheran. Built in 1921, the white clapboard structure is a reminder of the strong Scandinavian immigration during the homesteading years at the turn of the last century. Looking like a study for a Georgia O’Keeffe painting, the church faces the Beartooth Mountains with a graveyard to the side and a two-door outhouse in back. “We meet on Sundays, once a month,” Lisa explains. “But it closes after Christmas in the hard part of the winter.” She had plans to attend, on horseback, an upcoming bluegrass Mass to be celebrated at the church.

The Beartooth Mountains are close enough to enjoy on outings from Silver Spur Ranch to the Custer, Gallatin and Shoshone National Park in Stillwater. The Stillwater River Trailhead that follows the cascading waters up to an expanse of trout filled lakes is a favorite destination for Lisa. She recently trailered horses to the park and spent an afternoon riding the trails with friends. Ranch hand Madrid heads for the ski slopes whenever he can get away. Lisa laughs at their potential plans to practice for joring competitions this winter. The sport, popular in Scandinavia, is a timed event involving a rider pulling a skier through a slalom course with jumps at breakneck speed.

“We’ll see,” Lisa mused, mentally measuring time for fun against the demands of a drought. She hand-builds the irrigation heads into the hillside. Jim spent his last visit locating hay for the winter. “I found enough hay in Helena,” he said. Ranchers in Montana who can’t feed through the winter will sell off cattle in the October sales. Those who can will wait for, hopefully, stronger markets in the spring. In Montana, the beauty is paired with challenge, the romance with reality. The Van Camps are signed on for both. PS

As friends from back home discover, a real cattle drive is about the wide open spaces and small comforts

By Maureen Clark

The friendship between a Southern lawyer, Jim Van Camp, and a young rancher, Hip Tillett, began with a handshake and a warm Montana welcome to the TX Ranch over thirty-five years ago. “I had seen an ad for the working ranch. It said ‘Don’t just go out West. Live it.’ I decided to give it a try,” Jim Van Camp remembers. He arrived in Montana on his Harley with teenage son Richie in tow. “I was struck immediately with the romance of it,” the attorney admits. Today Van Camp’s V3Bar branded cattle are mixed into the larger Tillett herd on the over 8,000-acre ranch strad- dling the southern Montana border west of the Big Horn River along the Pryor Mountain Range. Over the years, the strong bond that grew between the Tillett and Van Camp families has served as a bridge from Southern Pines to the West.

Rattling off names of friends he has encouraged to sign on for the TX drives, Van Camp got to fifty pretty quickly. Tommy Howe from Pinebluff, June O’Connell, Betsy and Larry Best, George and Mickey Wirtz, Reg Miller are just to name a few. No one, however, took to moving and working cattle with more heart than the beloved Southern Pines horseman LP Tate. “I liked going out for the last drive of the season (taking the herd to a winter range in Wyoming),” Van Camp explains. “Hip would give me a call, then I would talk to LP. He would get on a plane and come every time.” Tate, who died last year, is revered locally as a founding personality of the Moore County equestrian community. Traces of his beautiful Starland Farm mark the golf course at Longleaf on Midland Road, a standing memorial to his part in the resort’s early history.

“That first year, it was just me and Richie, and three more guests,” Van Camp recalls. He was introduced to the TX Ranch from a generation that took Montana from land grants to cattle ranges the hard way. The ranch has been in the Tillet family over a hundred years. Hip’s mother, Abe, was part Lakota Indian and could cook from a campfire like Julia Child in a gourmet kitchen. She was known for her sticky buns and blueberry pies. His grandmother Bessie delivered mail in the territory on a mule and told stories of running from Indians on the Crow reservation. In fact, the Custer battlefield lies

a touch north, then due east with no interruption except the flow of the Big Horn River. The Tilletts were instrumental in donating land and establishing the Pryor Mountain Wild Horse Range described on Montana maps.

Hip Tillett’s father, Lloyd, came up with the idea of guest ranching in the ’70s. Van Camp remembers the early setup. A few guests. No tents. They slept on the ground. No showers. “Once a week we took our horses out into the lake, about chest high, at the Beaver Dam and put our clothes up on the saddle. We bathed in the water. Put our clothes back on and rode out.” The conditions may have changed slightly, but the overall work of the ranch remains the same.

The Tilletts’ home base in Lovell, Wyoming, is near Crooked Creek, the winter range for their 1,000 or so head of predominately Black Angus cattle. (In Montana, creek is pronounced and spelled “crick.” Natives know.) In April, the herd is moved into Montana for the spring and summer ranges. Before the cold sets in hard, October or November, there is a drive back to Lovell. During the intervening months the cattle are worked, section by section, in a series of roundups based from one of two camps, Lone Wolf or Deadman. The daily work involves first finding the cattle, who are happily spread out across the countryside, and then gathering them together for brand- ing, tagging, castrating or inoculations as necessary.

So what is the lure? How do the Tilletts draw “part-time cowboys” to their ranch, many of whom return year after year, for dust, hard work, long hours, a tent and outhouse, then ask them to pay for the privilege? A recent trip to TX with Van Camp’s daughter, Ashley, and his 14-year-old-grandson, Campbell Jourdian, provided insight. Ashley, the owner of the popular Ashten’s Restaurant in downtown Southern Pines, has been to TX more times than she can count. Son Campbell, an accomplished rider who fox hunts, and events, has been angling to go back all summer. “I don’t know how to explain it,” Ashley says. “But you’ll see. That outdoor shower (from the hanging, sun-heated plastic bag) will be the best shower you’ve ever had in your life.”

On day one, Hip and his wife, Loretta, tall, blonde and sparkling with kindness, gathered their recruits from various hotels in down- town Billings. The couple embody a characteristic President Teddy Roosevelt once noted in cowboys: “They treat a stranger with the most wholehearted hospitality, doing all in their power for him.” The group of eighteen that pitched their gear into the waiting vehicles were from Sweden, Britain, Montreal, Oregon, Indiana, Virginia and Brooklyn. Six were returning veterans. While Campbell vied for a seat next to Hip on the way out so he could start negotiating for a spot as wrangler, Ashley commented knowingly, “By the end of the week you are going to love these guys.”

Montana, like most of the western United States, is experiencing a drought. The ride from Billings, southeast to the range at the foot of

the Pryor Mountains, took several hours going from a rustic two-lane highway to miles of dirt roads winding through gates and expanses of barbed wire fencing. Whorls of red dust marked the progress to Lone Wolf.

Camp was a gathering of tents tucked under a spread of squat, box elder trees, a stick-built corral, log cabin with dining tables and kitchen, a deep spring-fed water tank, two outhouses, a campfire and two beach-type outdoor showers. Importantly, a stone-framed root cellar, dug into the side of a hill, provided cool storage for the food supplies, a critical feature of every Montana home- stead or ranch built in the outlands in the last century. The perimeter was fenced in barbed wire to keep horses in and maybe whatever howled or roamed at night out. No electricity. No indoor plumbing. No cell coverage.

The parallels to Billy Crystal and Jack Palance were inescapable, particularly as the group lined up the first morning to be interviewed by Hip and matched to a pair of horses that would be used on alternating days for the week. Campbell won his quest for the head wrangling spot. He slipped out of his tent in the darkness before dawn to bring the horse herd down from the pasture with the help of two outriders. By sunrise and breakfast an hour later, the herd would be thundering across the ridge and down into camp.

Wrangling involves moving horses, not cattle. The Tillets keep about fifty-five horses shod, using about twenty each day. There are over one-hundred additional horses on the ranch in various stages of breeding, training and rest. With the herd stirring up dust in the corral, one by one Hip made his matches. Moving down the line, Hip, a permanent twinkle in his eye, and a curb on his ready wit, focused on pairing riders and horses. The man has what you might call Montana mettle, a steel and grit beneath the polite surface, that has been tempered by years of dealing with the elements. This year it is the drought. Last year it may have been an early winter, flood or injury.

The first difference between Crystal’s film version and TX reality was the high comfort level of the riders with horses, although each came from a different equestrian background. And, secondly, the high quality of the horses in the Tillett herd. Sporting no-nonsense names like Cash, Gus, Biscuit, Chicken, Splat, Moose, Marble and Dirt, the horses did not bolt, kick, bite or display anything less than solid behavior all week. A smattering are named for Southern Pines friends like Russell (Tate) and Tommy (Howe). A number of the horses came from Jim Van Camp, who enjoys going to the horse sales in Billings, the largest in the nation.

Southern Pines native and Wyoming transplant Sam Morton, in writing about the horses of this area in southern Montana and northern Wyoming in his book, Where the Rivers Run North, describes them as “the best horses in the world. The grassland grows strong-boned, hard-footed, and long-winded horses. The horses raised here are tougher; they are fed from the land their ancestors grazed, and watered from the melted snow that flows from the mountains.”

Hip assigned a different section of the range each day for rounding up cattle. Some destinations were a three-hour ride. Campbell, trading his cowboy hat for a baseball hat turned backward, always took the longer rides and generally rode with ranch hand Pancho (Ryan Moody). By early afternoon, one or two o’clock, a large, milling herd was assembled. Lunch arrived by pickup truck. Then the work of branding, ear tagging and inoculating the younger calves began. First, however, the skittish critters had to be spotted, roped and thrown down. Hip’s daughter, Des, tall like her mother, beautiful, and a masterful roper, worked her way through the herd snagging calves by the back leg. Campbell teamed with a teenager from Oxford, England. Together, they would grab the tail, push the calf off balance, then hold down both ends for the work at hand. The task was proportionately difficult according to the size of the calf. The boys were matched in the dirt wrestling matches by the laughter, enthusiasm and pure spunk of two college coeds, Anna Paseka and Grace Littlefield, from Brooklyn, New York, appropriately dubbed the “A Team. “

The heat is dry, and a day on the range feels like slow baking in an oven. Several days the wind blew on the flats where the cattle were herded powdering every surface — faces, hats, horses — with a thick red dust. The functioning reason for every piece of cowboy garb and equipment from hat tospurs became explanatory. There was no shade during the day. A cowboy hat is a mini umbrella throwing down the only shade in a circle as wide as the brim. The bandannas keep sun off your neck, sweat off your brow and dust out of your nose and mouth.

The long, needle-sharp thorns of hawthorne snag and untie a laced boot but not the western version. The thorns also rip shirts, cut hands and pierce blue jeans. Dense copses of hawthorne are the favorite hiding places of sneaky cattle. They stand still and you can ride right by. Flushing them out requires voice intimidation, then stick threatening, and lastly crawling under the thorny branches to chase them out. Unless, of course, the herding dogs are nearby, then life is sweet. The Tillets have three border collies and two Australian shepherds that are absolute wizards.

Spurs, the clanging, boot clinging symbol of a cowboy, are also essential. Once the cow and calf are out of the under- brush, they can turn and sprint right back unless a horse can move quickly to cut them off. A touch of the spur signals the message quickly. Ashley believes that the sound of spurs clanging also serves to scare off bears when a cowboy has to step into the woods.

The younger folks, in the evenings around the campfire, would practice roping. They roped chairs, rocks and each other in preparation for a chance to rope from horseback at week’s end. They all proved capable when the time came. The surprise superstar of calf roping, however, turned out to be a French dressage rider from Montreal, Brigette Charbonneau. Although she looked like a model who had walked right out of a western Ralph Lauren ad, she took instantly to roping. The seemingly impossible of catching the back hoof of a moving calf, hiding behind mom in a milling herd mixed with restless bulls, came easy. Throughout the dusty afternoon, the call of “Got one” consistently came from Brigette. Encouragement for all efforts at roping came from those on the perimeter, often in the form of cowboy trash talk. The laughter, the effort, the fun and pulling for each other bound the group together. Ashley was right.

Like her father she is captured by the romance. Explanations of the magic are frustrating. The terrain is an opportunity to experience a breathtaking vista in every direc- tion. The beauty is overwhelming with the Pryor Mountains on the horizon, hills and plains rolling toward the Big Horn in the other. The panoramic views are beyond the scope of a camera lense and words. The closest comparable in North Carolina would be the vast view of the Atlantic Ocean from the height of Jockey’s Ridge with a 360-degree spin around.

Maybe, in the end, in a place where everything is big and awe inspiring, the sky, the horizon, the hills, the herds, the vistas and the land it is really about the small things after all: a warm shower, a good horse, a cowboy’s hospitality, the glow of a campfire, the time to make a friend, laughter and a steam- ing cup of coffee. “It’s a way of life,” Van Camp reflects. “And it is very real.” The most poignant memory from his years

at TX was the funeral of Hip’s father, Lloyd Tillett. “He was the last of the real cowboys,” he said. “I will never forget that simple pine casket with handles made from turned around horseshoes. The TX brand was burned into the wood and tumbleweed was by his hat. It was so beautiful.” The little things. PS

Maureen Clark is a frequent contributor to PineStraw Magazine.

Nature becomes the text in Southern Pines-born sculptor Patrick Dougherty’s magic doorways to another world.

by Maureen Clark

Internationally renowned sculptor Patrick Dougherty travels the world to create his magi- cal, swirling, stick-work structures. But once a month, he circles back to a house in the woods outside Chapel Hill that is a durable version of his art incorporating the texture, pattern and soul of trees. Tall and boyish with a shock of white hair, Dougherty enjoys the company of his son Sam, the comfort of a home he built at the start of his career, and talking for a while about his work.

The stick work forms created by Dougherty speak to the imagination of childhood in the viewer. Some are swirls of saplings winding up an indoor staircase. Others seem like inhabitable huts gathered under a grove of trees. Another clutch of branches clings to the side of a building. One weaves through a row of classic Doric columns. “There is a certain amount of magic,” the sculptor observes, “that occurs in the process of creating (the works). People make lots of personal associations. They talk about bird’s nests, or when they played in the woods. I heard one woman say to her husband, “‘Honey, we could live there.’” A friend’s reaction to a photograph of Na Hale “Eo Waiawi” created for The Contemporary Museum in Honolulu was an enthusiastic, “I know what that is. That is where the wild things live.”

Dougherty grew up in Southern Pines and credits a childhood spent in the pines as inspiration for his art.

“It is very clear that growing up in Southern Pines made it easier to have vision and be part of a world of ideas. We lived on Grove Road near the Pine Needles golf course. I don’t know if it is still there, but I had a favorite little hollow in the woods. That was when there was a different approach to childhood play. We would go outside and not come back until dinner. We climbed trees and messed with things. Kids see sticks and know how to use them. We built forts on the pine needle carpets of the woods. That was a real baseline for me as I look for a way to express what beauty is in a certain way.”

Dougherty’s sister, Kate Farrell, a writer and poet, also remembers a childhood spent in the woods, in an essay written about her brother published in the British magazine Resurgence:

“Patrick Dougherty often remarks that his trek toward art began in the pine woods around his child- hood home in Southern Pines, North Carolina. I know it’s so because, as his sister, I was there. Patrick, the eldest of five and a born outdoorsman, led the rest of us on countless forest expeditions. Even back then he brought to his wanderings a love of nature and a knack for “‘dwelling in possibility’” – an aptitude that would prove as useful for creating art as for exploring a forest — and his urge to build left a long trail of forts, tree houses, lean-tos, and hideouts. Later on he would build the mystery and freedom of the woods into these outsized, nestlike structures he is now known for.” Farrell calls them dream shelters.

After graduating from East Southern Pines High School in the early sixties, Dougherty went on to Chapel Hill and afterward earned a graduate degree in hospital and health administration from the University of Iowa. During the Vietnam War he worked as a hospital administrator at an Air Force base in Germany. After the war, he returned to Chapel Hill to study sculpture and begin building his house in the woods. Farrell, again, quotes her broth- er’s moment of “stick conversion.”

“I saw waves of saplings along my drive and thought, ‘I could use these.’ Plentiful and renewable, they were just what I needed. But I first had to learn what birds and beavers and other natural shelter builders knew already: sticks have an inherent method of joining. Drag one through the woods to see what I mean; it entangles with everything.”

At the time Dougherty recalls, “I was a no account student. We had a student show and I had to come up with something.” He produced his first piece: “A sort of body wrap made out of maple saplings. It was very lacy, about human sized, like an open-ended mummy.” The entry caught the attention of the show’s juror from Los Angeles. He considered it the “best piece he had seen all year.” A representative of SECCA, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, was also enthusiastic about the work. He offered to give Dougherty a show.

“I told him I didn’t have any other work,” Dougherty remembers. He was informed that he had three months and was pressed to come up with some- thing. “I made some figurative pieces that sat in chairs. But after that, I started going large.” Next, Dougherty was given a stipend by the North Carolina Arts Council to do a show in Salisbury. He has not looked back. Today there are 238 works that Dougherty has created in museums, parks, woodlands and buildings throughout the United States and around the world. Denmark, Italy, Ireland, Austria, Scotland, Mexico and Japan are among the hosts. Dougherty is traveling to Korea and Belgrade, Serbia, this year. He is booked through 2014. “I have been gone three weeks a month for almost 30 years,” the artist explained. He creates eight to ten works a year for which he is paid $20-30,000 apiece depending on the travel and location.

Over the years, Dougherty has developed a process. He learned that it wasn’t necessary to transport materials. He relies on being able to locate saplings in every geographic area. Standing in his studio examining a row of leather work gloves clipped to a line, he explained the participatory process. Each glove is covered with signatures of the workers who helped on a particular piece. He cannot work alone and requires assistants in each location, many of whom volunteer.

A planned preliminary visit to the site for each sculpture allows Dougherty an opportunity to locate the source of saplings for gathering, order scaffolding and begin to envision the work. He makes sketches. A key to the process links to the skills he developed in hospital administration. “I am organized,” Dougherty states emphatically. When he returns to a location, the actual construction phase begins and generally lasts three weeks.

And herein lies the art. Dougherty is not building monuments like heavy stones of Henry Moore or the generals on horseback that have endured a century of winters in Washington and Richmond. The swirling masses of saplings, more reminiscent of the emotional brushwork of a Van Gogh, are temporary structures. “They stay up two years and need to come down while they still look great,” Dougherty says. “The line between trash and treasure is very thin in the sticks.”

Art critic John Perreault understands the medium: “Dougherty’s sculptures are festive. They are events rather than monuments, holding their own by virtue of their manner of construction and inflection of the site, revealing the site through surprise. They are signatory rather than a species of unwarranted, unwanted, incomprehensible oratory. They are about what they are. And just as important, they are about where they are. They do not preach. Through them, the artist signs the site. Nature is the text. The sculptures are about what one artist can do. They are as much performance art as they are sculptural forms.”

Dougherty counts on making connections to people throughout the process. The traditional separation between art and observer is removed. He relates to every person who has signed the work gloves and those who have watched him create. They are a part of the process. He wants to talk with bystanders about what he is doing, answer questions, hear reactions and even accept invitations to dinner. The work is open and participatory from the beginning through the two- year life of the sculpture.

Each one is what Dougherty calls “a doorway into another world.” In those worlds, the artist has learned how to problem-solve. Among the more challenging locations was a Shinto shrine in Japan. The priest told Dougherty that there were snakes where he would be living and working. After requesting that his wife, Linda, be given a call if he was bitten, Dougherty stayed awake for three nights in a bed that was much too short for his lanky frame. Finally, he was too tired to care and became resigned to the conditions. “I figured they could go ahead and bite me.” They didn’t.

In Austria, France and Germany there were language barriers, but the works still evolved. Problem-solving is inherent in each venture. “I work with stick,” Dougherty explains. “That is the only constant. Nothing else is.”

The artist was home recently, leaving a work under way in New England, to spend time with Sam and his wife, Linda, a chief Curator at the North Carolina Museum of Art. An older son, Arthur, is in Asheville and daughter Eilene lives in Charleston with her husband, Dan. The grounds surrounding his home outside Chapel Hill are a testament to the sticks. A number of sheds hold carefully sorted and divided stacks of wood. The doors to his studio are an enchanting design of twigs, as is son Sam’s playhouse, the garden gates and fence around the vigorous vegetable garden. Dougherty’s world is a celebration of saplings, their potential to have curve and what the interac- tion will produce. For all of this, he credits a child- hood well spent in the woods near Pine Needles.

His words in an excerpt from sister Kate’s essay: “Sometimes,” he says, “when I’m working on a sapling sculpture, repeating the same motion over and over, I’m overtaken by a feeling of serenity and freedom. In those times, I have the longest view.

I feel not only the pleasure of my childhood and its building phase, but I sense the presence of the forests of long ago and feel myself to be part of the largest conversation.”

Dougherty currently has a sculpture titled “Outside the Box,” on display at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. Interested readers can visit the artist’s website: www.stick- work.net and enjoy the many fascinating photo- graphs of the Patrick Dougherty’s works. PS

Maureen Clark is a frequent contributor to PineStraw Magazine.

Dani Devins, known locally as an equestrian artist, sculptor and art teacher, is a woman with a story that she has carried in her heart and in her art for a lifetime. Her childhood involved the glamour, romance and danger that vintage Hollywood movies were drawn from, films that might have starred Greta Garbo and Laurence Olivier. Ocean voyages, an Italian villa in the Tuscan hills, and the Nazi Army of World War II all played parts in the young life of Danila Frassineti Devins. But for Dani, the characters and settings are real. They are her family, her history, and the tale is her true story.

In 1925, a beautiful young Philadelphian stood on the deck of an ocean liner pulling away from the mooring in New York Harbor. Helen Gill was embarking on a trans-Atlantic voyage and tour of Europe in the fashion of young women from wealthy families in her day. She waved good-bye to her fiancé standing below on the crowded dock. Standing nearby was a handsome young man, Guido Frassineti, an officer in the Italian Navy, on board for the crossing. He introduced himself. By the time the ship docked in Venice, 30 days later, the Italian and American were engaged to Tbe married.

The years before World War II were happy ones for the Frassineti family. Danila was born two years after her brother, Giordano. They lived in Villa le Querci in the hills outside of Florence overlooking the city. “We were south of the Arno (River) up in the hills,” Dani recalls. A sepia-tinted photograph shows her parents, her father in white tie, dining formally with Ubaldino Peruzzi and his wife. “He was the architect who designed our home,” Dani explains. “His an- cestors designed for the Medici family in Florence.” Another photo shows Dani as a toddler looking up at her mother in front of a massive fireplace.

The early years, she said, “were very nice. My parents were gorgeous and popular. They had lots of friends. We had servants. And we traveled a lot. I remember the Lido.” She also remembers an early trip to Southern Pines as a big disappointment. She was about 5 years old. “My brother and I were looking for Indians,” she explained. “Buffalo Bill and the Wild West Show had been touring Europe with cowboys and Indians. We could not find a single Indian in the United States.”

The memories most treasured by Dani involved a love of horses she shared with her father. “I remember the horses the best. My father was in the Navy but he was into horses. He bred an old mare to a famous racehorse in Florence. The foal was meant for me.” Again, the old family pictures depict the passion, with Dani and her family posing in a variety of carts and carriages pulled by ponies, a burro and horses. One shows the four on the back of a cart wearing knee boots. “Old Ferragamo, the father of Salvatore Ferragamo, used to come to the house like Sam Bozick to measure and make boots for us,” Dani said. “He also made shoes for my mother.”

Her father’s early death from an aneurysm ushered in the war years and a change in Dani’s idyllic life. Her mother married a British citizen born in Italy, Edward Gordon-Mann. There were two more children in the family in the early years of the war. “The worst day of my life was when the Facists came and took all the horses,” Dani reflected. “No one had a lot to eat then. I thought they were probably going to be slaughtered.” The colt bred for Dani by her father was also confiscated.

Later, in 1942, her mother, stepfather and baby sisters were declared “foreign enemies” and taken to a concentration camp. They were released in Switzerland as part of a prisoner exchange for cap- tured German soldiers and relocated to the United States. Dani and Giordano, natural born Italians, remained in Florence. “We lived in the bottom of the villa,” she explained. “Upstairs was empty because of the bombing.” The teenage siblings were looked after by family friends and servants.

The chaos of war, however, did not diminish Dani’s early development as an artist. “I attended the Royal Institute of Art and would have gone on to the Royal Academy had I stayed. I started in the sixth grade. It was very tough. We did academic work in the mornings and art in the afternoon. It was a full day’s work. I won my first award for art there.” Shellings and shrapnel were also a part of life. “You got used to it,” Dani said. “You just hoped you didn’t get hit.”

In August of 1944, there was a siege of Florence and the Germans retreated from the city. “We were right in the middle of the siege,” Dani remembers. “When the Germans pulled out they blew up all the bridges on the Arno except the Ponte Vecchio. But you couldn’t cross it because they blew up so much rubble around it.” One particularly chilling experience stays with Dani. “It was dusk and I was sitting outside at the place where we ate with the family.

A retreating German soldier took one last shot through our garden gate. I felt the bullet go by my face. I was just lucky.” Dani’s mother, working through the U.S. Consul in Florence, helped arrange for the American Field Service volunteers to stay at Villa le Querci for a year. Dani remembers one particular mem- ber of the AFS. “Gordon Buchan Forbes, the son of the founder of Forbes magazine, was very kind and helped us communicate with our family, saw that the drivers were respectful and took care of the surroundings.”
A year after the end of World War II, Dani and her brother boarded the S.S. Gripsholm, the same Swedish ship that brought her mother to the United States during the prisoner exchange.

“I will never forget that moment in Naples,” Dani reminisced. “There was a candy machine and Cokes. We had never tasted Coke. Mainly, I remember the British song ‘As Time Goes By’ playing. It was my happiest time.”

Helen Gordon-Mann never returned to Italy. The wartime memories were too painful. She sold Villa le Querci and the fam- ily farms. It was twenty-five years before Dani returned, posted to Italy with her husband, Capt. Herb Devins, a West Point gradu- ate. They met at a dance at Fort Bragg arranged by the command- ing general for cadets involved in summer training at the base. Back in Tuscany, Dani learned the fate of the family horses confiscated during the war.

“My father had farms in the wine country,” she explained. “One of the managers told me what happened. He heard about the horses being taken. He found a military uniform and came to Florence dressed as a soldier. He showed them a paper and took all the horses back to a farm. I found out that my foal and all the horses lived out a good life.”

Today, Dani, the Grand Dame of Sandhills art, lives on a horse farm, teaches watercolor and continues to paint, having woven the strands of her childhood in Florence into a life-long engagement with horses and art. She taught at Sandhills Community College for almost 30 years. Her daughter, Dorian Devins, is a lyricist and lives in New York. Her brother, Giordano, is a lawyer, is married and has two children. He also lives in the Northeast. Over the years, Dani has amassed an impressive list of awards for art with over twenty first-place des- ignations. Her work has been on the cover of magazines, bought for permanent collections and featured in numerous prestigious exhibitions.

“I know it is not professional to keep your work, but there is one piece I can’t let go of,” Dani admitted. She pointed to a large equestrian painting hanging in her studio. “It’s the Carabinieri. They are the Italian elite mounted police drum and bugle corps. They open big horse shows in Rome.” The piece, done in gouache, a watercolor without transparency, earned a first place award from the Accademia Italiana.

Article from this month’s issue in PineStraw Magazine

The Boyd family began foxhunting in the Sandhills nearly a century ago. Luckily, the tradition endures

This is a lovely house we sold to Tom and Sally Wood in Old Town Pinehurst. With the help of Michael Lamb the house has new life a world of charm.  To read the article in full published in PineStraw Magazine please click on this link:

Taste Times Two – Story of a House

Please find photographs of the house and from the article below. Enjoy!

Fall Time &  Colors on a goregeous Cattle Ranch….

Please enjoy these photographs and the changing colors of the trees as the cattle graze the farm…..

Maybe it’s the glorious October weather that has blessed us lately. But it feels like time for another “things I love about Southern Pines” column.

So here goes. Things I love about Southern Pines:

The presence everywhere on town streets of quaint, one-of-a-kind, sometimes eccentric old homes, some of which started out a century or more ago as boarding houses or winter homes, but which now offer the exact opposite of a cookie-cutter subdivision look.

The ubiquitous sight of layers of russet pine straw, which softens the landscape — and, at certain times of year when the wind is blowing just so, sometimes bundles itself into weird, moving shapes that make you think there’s a dog in the road ahead.

Speaking of dogs: Taking our aged but still spry Kelci for a nice, long, bracing walk around the perimeter of the lake in Reservoir Park on a picture-perfect Sunday afternoon — and, as usual, stopping to chat with fellow strollers or runners or bicyclists we happen to know.

Venturing into the underbrush along the Reservoir trail to check out the subtle color changes now transforming all those sassafras saplings — which, uniquely among tree species, always display three distinct leaf shapes: one-, two- and three-lobed varieties, all on the same tree.

Dropping by for lunch at the Ice Cream Parlor and, here again, almost always running into someone you know — in addition to amiable young proprietor Anthony Parks.

Taking in a cool, can’t-see-it-anywhere-else movie at the Sunrise Theater downtown — and maybe enjoying a glass of white wine and a candy bar (yes, they go great together) while doing it. For those of us who banded together to rescue the theater all those years ago, just driving by at night and seeing the lights on and realizing that some kind of entertainment is being offered inside is enough to bring a lump to the throat.

Feeling a sweet-scented breeze in my face as I coast my bicycle down the Connecticut Avenue hill, wearing a silly helmet while on the way to work on a Saturday morning.

Being able to leave my office for a head-clearing stroll up to and along Broad Street — perhaps pausing on a bench, as I’m now doing, to whip out a piece of schmaltzy writing on the notes app of my iPhone.

Running into our outgoing (in more ways than one) mayor, Mike Haney — who never, it seems, met a person he didn’t find a way to like. He’ll be a hard man indeed to replace in that position.

Strolling through the Farmers Market in Downtown Park, checking out the peaches and tomatoes and okra and comparing notes with other patrons there while a live and local bluegrass band or solo guitarist plays in the background.

Talking with the wonderfully helpful ladies at the Southern Pines Public Library — who, if they don’t have the bit of information you’re looking for at their fingertips, know where to get their hands on it quick.

Savoring a plate of spicy lasagna at Vito’s, a pancake special at Mac’s, or a Bell Tree Burger with blue cheese sprinkles and a side of whole fried okra pods. (I know I’m leaving out some other cool dining establishments. Forgive me. Maybe next time.)

Hearing (and feeling) the distant, rhythmically throbbing thump-thump-thump of a rock band playing at a wedding party under a tent on the grounds of the Weymouth Center, or at a First Friday evening in the downtown.

Walking along the street near our home and encountering a heartbreakingly graceful and delicate mama white-tailed deer with two half-grown fawns, who curiously regard us with bright eyes and cocked ears for a few seconds before turning and effortlessly vaulting a fence and vanishing on their way to who-knows-what destiny.

Awakening to hear the lonesome, somehow comforting horn blare of a freight train rumbling through town in the middle of the night — or of a passenger train making its 7 a.m. stop at the beautifully restored downtown depot.

Yep, there’s a lot to love about Southern Pines.

Wonderful article on Southern Pines in this month’s issue of Our State! Please click on the link below to read the article.

Southern Pines | Our State Magazine.