Raccoons Take a Grand Tour of Grundy County, Tennessee

When I was in elementary school in Escalante in the 1950s, one of our assignments was to find a pen pal.  It may have been in third grade, when Iona Alvey (wife of Dad's Barney relative, Edson) was my teacher, or in fourth or fifth when Roland Porter (Dad's Uncle Rol, his mother's brother) was my teacher.  Or maybe in sixth grade, when Lorenzo Griffin (son of Charles "Pappy" Griffin, Dad's great-grandfather, by his second wife) was my teacher.  We looked at the map, and chose a town in another part of the country.  We wrote to the elementary school in the town, told about ourselves, and asked to be matched up with another student for a continuing correspondence.

 Dad, whose job in the Post Office kept him at the hub of Escalante's communication with the outside world, was interested in this assignment.  He and I together looked at a map of the United States and some reference books,  and we zeroed in on the little town of Palmer, Tennessee, on the Cumberland Plateau, in a green part of the country.  

"Palmer has a third-class post office like Escalante," Dad said.  I wrote to the teacher of the appropriate grade at the elementary school in Palmer, and it wasn't long before I heard back from a student my age.  Her name was Sandra Meeks.  Her handwriting was very neat, and she was obviously a good student.  We were well-suited as pen pals.  Our letter exchange lasted for several years, into high school.  

With Dad's encouragement and interest, I sent petrified wood and other souvenirs from Escalante.  Sandy sent souvenirs of Grundy County, photos of her in her basketball uniform, and something surprising--a photo of the Mormon church in Altamont.   Sandy attended Grundy County High School in Tracy City.  I thought Grundy was a strange name, but it was just not a Utah name.  Felix Grundy (1777-1840), I learned, was a well-known name in Tennessee.  The original Felix Grundy had  been a state legislator, a U.S. Senator, and a U.S. Attorney General.  The major industry in Grundy County was once coal mining, but that is no more, and today Grundy County boasts some of the most beautiful recreation areas in Tennessee.

In 1992, when we moved to Sewanee, in Franklin County, Tennessee, I realized we were not far from Palmer.  I wondered what had happened to Sandy.  I called the high school, and a relative of Sandy's answered the telephone (it was much the same as Escalante in that way, too).  She told me that Sandy's married name was Willis, and that Sandy was a history teacher in Knoxville.  I called her, and we had a long telephone conversation.  Her father had died, and her mother had remarried.  Sandy said her two children were basketball players, too.  We have not met in person, but the telephone conversation was a nice epilogue to our years as pen pals.

In 2004, Mary Priestley, who is curator of the Herbarium at the University of the South, was working on an environmental outreach project for area elementary schools.  She created nature trails for some schools, including Sewanee Elementary School.  In Grundy County, Coalmont Elementary School's location did not lend itself to an adjacent nature trail, so Mary conceived another nature-related project.  Coalmont students took field trips to various sites in Grundy County and drew pictures and wrote about what they saw.  Mary brought the student papers to me in a big paper bag, and I distilled them into a children's book story.  When the idea for the story was fixed--raccoons taking a grand tour of the sights of Grundy County--the students drew additional pictures, all of them delightful, for possible use in the book.  

I wrote about a country raccoon named Felix Grundy, who is told by his mother to entertain his city cousin, Taylor.  Taylor is skeptical of seeing anything of much interest in rural Grundy County, but on the grand tour is persuaded otherwise.  Latham Davis designed the book and created the map of the raccoons' travels.  He used student drawings on every page of the story.  I added two pages of facts about raccoons.

I was invited to the book's coming-out party at Coalmont School.  They had an assembly in the gym, in which they danced and sang.  I read a few paragraphs of the book to the assembly.  Every student received a copy of the book.  I  visited the classrooms afterward and signed some books.  It was a happy day and a great celebration.  

I was emotional that day, and kept shedding tears, much to my embarrassment.  I was thinking about Sandy, and about myself long ago, about how I miss my Dad, who was kind to children and amused by their capacity for originality, and who would have loved the raccoon drawings.  I was thinking about my friend, Chris Kohler Smith, an artist who would have loved the raccoons, too, but who had just died in Marshall, North Carolina, having also made the trek in recent years from the American West to the East.  

I was thinking about how the young find everything is new, but life feels like it will stay the same forever, and yet it passes so quickly.  I was thinking about Escalante, about Palmer, about Felix Grundy, and the pen pal assignment, the specific teacher who cooked it up lost to me no matter how hard I think on it, about how the ribbon of life curls and folds back on itself, and about friendships and family, and how different people get to know each other, and how we find similarities and ways to laugh and to be of use no matter where we are.

One of the Coalmont teachers said she was so proud of such a positive project about Grundy County.  I am proud to have had a small part in it.