Cullowhee has seen strong personalities
By definition, though, a university town is different; it’s waters are roiled all the time, and the folks who bounce through are worthy of a fat book full of tales.
Cullowhee has seen its share, and three of them came to mind recently, each one as different from the others as he could be.
Abbey
Controversial and celebrated environmental activist Edward Abbey, author of The Monkey Wrench Gang and Desert Solitaire — and whom Larry McMurtry referred to as “the Thoreau of the American West” — taught at Western in the late sixties. He didn’t put down roots–mainly because he hated every minute of it– and moved on to write Desert Solitaire in Utah in 1968.
He came back through for a visit in 1969, though, and some of his thoughts were recorded in his memoirs. Blogger Gulahiyi posted at length on Abbey’s stay in Cullowhee recently, and you can read that post here.
Here’s what Abbey thought of Sylva:
Sylva must have once been a lovely town. Small, with a population of perhaps five thousand, nestled in the green hills below the Great Smokies, full of beautiful old houses, laved as they say by the sparkling waters of the Tuckasegee River, with the life of a market center and the dignity of a county seat, Sylva must have been beautiful. Now it is something else, for the streets are grimy and noisy, jammed always with motor traffic, the river is a sewer, and the sky a pall of poisonous filth. The obvious villain in the picture is the local Mead’s Paper Mill, busily pumping its garbage into the air and the into the river, but general traffic and growth must bear the rest of the blame.
Sedaris
Author and National Public Radio favorite David Sedaris attended Western in the seventies, the first in a string of a few schools he went to before winding up at and graduating from The Art Institute of Chicago.
Cullowhee, of course, was a much different place then than it is now, and it’s hard to picture Sedaris hanging out in Cullowhee now. Since some of his most hilarious work — The Santaland Diaries and Six to Eight Black Men have to do with Christmas, he often comes to mind this time of year.
The other day, a news report of the commencement address he gave at SUNY-Binghamton, in which he touched on his early intention — pursued at Western — to study art. He did the world a great favor by abandoning that aspiration, he pointed out.
“I went to school for art, but actually have no aptitude for it,” Sedaris told more than 400 Binghamton University graduates and their families. “By not painting, I have made the world a better place.”
Johnson
Paul Johnson, an Avery County, NC, native, graduated from WCU in 1979, and is the likely the only one of these three that’ll ever show up in the school’s marketing materials.
Johnson didn’t play football at Western, but he was sports-minded, and he hoped eventually to coach the Avery High Viking football team — his high school alma mater. Instead, Johnson has gone on to become a rising star on the national coaching scene. He did assistant coaching stints at Lees-McRae, Georgia Southern, Navy and Hawaii before becoming head coach at Georgia Southern, where he put together a gaudy 65-10 record.
He went on to re-float a foundering Navy program, and last year took the head coaching job at Georgia Tech, where he aspires to a national championship.
Read a feature about Johnson at the ACC Sports Journal.
Tags: Cullowhee, david sedaris, desert solitaire, edward abbey, monkey wrench gang, national public radio, Paul Johnson, Sylva, Western Carolina University
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