the editor talks with you

We live on Lake Murray’s south shore. It is still semi-wild, the land the developers have not yet discovered or the families who own them have not yet been willing to sell. It is still clean and fresh – unspoiled as yet by the rest of us.

Living here is an adventure.

The lake is one of the reasons we came home to South Carolina. Our dream was to live on its 45-mile long shoreline, publish the local newspaper and live the good life.

We had by then had enough of large cities. Their exhilirating but often unnerving experiences take a lot out of you.

Some friends who live elsewhere want to know what it’s like living here. They may have been to Charleston or Myrtle Beach or Hilton Head. But they have never been here unless they were on one of our interstates headed somewhere farther south and west.

Telling them what it is like is akin to trying to describe the universe. There aren’t enough words to do it justice and they don’t have time to listen anyway.

This reminded me of a fellow journalist who lived on a houseboat in a river separating two vast nations, the US and Canada.

It was his dream to come home from New York to northern Minnesota, live on a houseboat on Rainy Lake, publish the Rainy Lake Chronicle and enjoy all that nature and a small town can offer to a sharp-eyed observer of mankind and the world.

His name was Ted Hall. We visited him in his remote corner of the planet several times, a 22-hour drive from Lake Murray.

We would do it straight through, spelling each other every two hours at the wheel, stopping for gas or nature calls when needed and trying to sleep in the front seat while our companion was driving.

I dug out a piece he wrote in what he called his “nubby little newspaper” about questions from such visitors as us about what it is like to live in such a place – and does it change your perspective.

“We tried to explain what it’s like to stand in the silent winter night looking up at this planet’s fellow performers in the universal balancing act,” Ted wrote. ”The universe stays in business by maintianing perfect balance– hotting up a new star over here as an old one cools over there.

“Does living in a place like this change your perpective? Of course it does.

“It invites some suspicion that maybe the human race takes itself more seriously than its place in the universe warrants. You cannot live in a place like this without taking such measurements once in a while.”

Before we moved home to South Carolina, Ted discussed with us the life we might expect in a small town where everybody knows – or think they know – everybody else’s business, They read the local newspaper to find out what they might have missed and if we had managed to straighten out the latest rumors they had heard.”

Ted was a poet at heart but with the fine-tuned ear and eyes of an engineer.

Like us he measured the beat of life in his corner of the planet and shared his observations with his readers, many of them like us who live 1,442 miles away in the south.

When the dogs take my wife and me for a walk at sunset, we can look up and see the same sky Ted saw on the Canadian border.

That’s the change in perspective that you can gain from living here.

Need a speaker?

Editor Jerry Bellune will share insights and inspiration from his book, “Your Life’;s Great Puirpose,” with your group. You can email him at JerryBellune@yahoo.com