Miller, Heather Ross
Description
For thirteen years, Heather Ross Miller, her husband Clyde and their children lived in North Carolinas Singletary Park, a remote wilderness fifty mile
...
s from the nearest town. This memoir, written in quiet narrative, explores her life in the park, recounting the hardships and the joys that taught her to respect both nature and the people sharing her hinterland.
From Crusoes Island:
We had grown up close to each other, but, separated by a generation, still didnt know each other. But when I got to the park, I heard rumors about Clyde: hed been in the navy, hed been to Chapel Hill, to Mars Hill, to Bowling Green University, graduating finally from Pfeiffer College, the Methodist school just seventeen miles up the road. If you left your pocketbook in his way, the last summers secretary warned me, Clyde Miller would paint right over it. He didnt care. He thrived on eccentricity. He lived in the kitchen of the ranger barracks, made it his pad, even had a hi-fi system built right into the kitchen cabinets. The other seasonal help, lifeguards and park attendants, boys between college semesters, were awed by the man, thirty years old, who filled the barracks with barbells and other weight-lifting equipment, papered the walls with Playboy centerfolds, and left cold bourbon in the fridge where even his own mother could see it.
They told me Clyde had slept with a hundred women.
And I, at nineteen, was tantalized.
Read more