Leaving Cooper Ridge

Leigh and I knew we were going to write Finding Strong several years before we actually started it. We didn’t know the title (as a matter of fact, Leigh never knew the title of her book). Holley came up with the idea for the title after Leigh died. As I waited around for Leigh to finally decide to begin the book (she just couldn’t find the time with all her involvements), I was getting itchy to write something, anything. I wrote a couple of not-for-publication essays to scratch that itch. One was entitled My Youth, and writing that one gave me the notion to write more of my life story. Before I knew it, I was writing my own book, a memoir that I called Leavings: Honeycutt to Cooper Ridge. I didn’t come up with that title until I was almost finished with the book. You can learn a lot about yourself writing your life story. We moved a lot. We moved from Fayetteville, NC to Sumter, SC when I was in the 9th grade. While I was at Clemson (my first tour), my parents moved to New Braunfels, Texas, then later to Shreveport, Louisiana, and eventually back to Sumter. And of course with a military career, I moved our family many times after college. As I wrote about my life, I realized how each place I lived had affected me and who I was. There were things about each place that I loved, things I didn’t particularly like, things I wasn’t proud of. But I felt that each place I lived was a part of who I am, and that I left a part of me at each place. My son, Graig, said it best in a description he wrote about the book: “It’s not just the people and places we leave behind as we journey through life, it’s more likely the parts of ourselves we leave behind that truly define who we become.”

Honeycutt was a neighborhood in Fayetteville developed to accommodate the military expansion at Fort Bragg during WWII. It consisted of very low-cost housing for lower ranking enlisted families – poor folks. It is not where I was born, but it’s the first place that I remember having an impact on me as a person. I was about five years old when we moved there and we lived there for two years. My dad was a corporal when the war ended, and he then got a low-paying Civil Service job at Fort Bragg.

Cooper Ridge is the last place Louise and I thought we would live. I retired from the Army in 1993, my last job being Professor of Military Science at Appalachian State University in Boone. When the university then hired me to an administrative position, Louise and I decided that we would make the Boone area our permanent home. We searched and found the perfect spot about ten miles outside of Boone – 23 acres of beautiful mountain countryside. We picked the ideal spot on a ridge with a wonderful view, designed our dream home of over 4,000 square feet, and built it ourselves. There was no doubt in our minds that we would live there until we died. We eventually developed a small subdivision on that property and called it Deer Tracks, put in some new roads, and built houses for daughters, Leigh and Holley and their families. We named our ridge and the road up to it Cooper Ridge. I finished the draft of Leavings: Honeycutt to Cooper Ridge just before Leigh died. She was actually the first person, other than my editor, Louise, to read the book; although I didn’t manage to get it published until after Leigh’s death.

The last 80 pages of Leavings: — is about our time in Boone and Cooper Ridge. Those 80 pages will give a glimpse of the tragic (Leigh’s abduction in 1989) and the joyful times we had there. But they won’t begin to describe the things we left behind at Cooper Ridge. Anyone who’s lost a child knows that a large portion of your heart and soul are buried with her/him. I loved Cooper Ridge. I loved living in a small town where virtually everyone in town, at least those with whom you do business, know you by your first name. I loved our house, our view, our many meals with 12 or 14 family members at the table, the pool tournaments downstairs. I loved looking out on our lawn and seeing the deer and turkeys. I loved the birds on the back deck (though not the squirrels). I didn’t particularly care for the brutal winter mornings when I would spend two hours or more on that damn tractor plowing snow and ice off the roads, although that did give me a sense of being needed in my retirement. But Cooper Ridge was truly our Eden.

A good friend, whose company I enjoy every Thursday morning at breakfast, asked me this week, “Claude, has moving to Clemson been what you thought it would be?” I didn’t really have to think about the answer. I said, “Yes, and more.” I never wanted to leave Cooper Ridge, but I know that coming to Clemson was a life-saver. When Leigh died, things just started falling apart in my life and in the family. Everyone in the family left, each for their own legitimate reasons. It quickly became obvious to me, and I think to Louise as well, that we too had to leave to maintain our sanity and to live our lives. Riding past Leigh’s vacant house two or three times a day was terribly depressing. We had great friends in Watauga County, but none that we saw on a regular basis. We felt isolated on that ridge. We knew that we needed to be around close friends on a more constant basis. With the close ties we already had at Clemson – college classmates with whom we’ve been close for over 50 years, this was the obvious choice. For me personally, and I’m sure Louise feels the same, friendships have not only become stronger, but have expanded. Renewing alliances with the university and with the city have been especially beneficial to me. But, a good portion of my heart is and always will be on Cooper Ridge.

There’s one thing we didn’t leave on Cooper Ridge. The year before Leigh died, two couples – one from California and another from Georgia – Officer Candidate School classmates and their wives, visited us for a weekend. They met Leigh and her family and, like everyone who met Leigh, were very impressed by her. When they learned that Leigh had died, they said they wanted to give us something special in her memory. They gave us a young weeping cherry tree. We initially planted it on Cooper Ridge, but later decided to bring it with us when we moved to Clemson. We felt that we needed to see it every day. As you can see from the photo below, the Leigh Tree is thriving in our back yard at Clemson.