Heather Ross Miller

CRUSOE'S ISLAND, by Heather Ross Miller, is a poignantly lovely memoir of a particular place that helped form a family, the isolated wilderness area of Singletary Lake Group State Park tucked deep in a corner of the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina. This place, perhaps dark and forbidding-looking to the outsider, was the first home of the newly married Heather Ross and her park ranger husband, Clyde Miller, nearly a generation older than she. That age gap and the isolated wilderness would seem like two strikes against a new marriage. But they managed to thrive during the thirteen years they lived there. Their two children were born there and the author began her writing and teaching career during those years.

The book is a lazily pure delight to read, reminiscent of Thoreau and Aldo Leopold, but with a personal side that makes it much more interesting. Miller has a curious mind and is a keen observer of nature. Add this to her obvious love of family and you have a real keeper of a family memoir. Clyde Miller is as wise and indulgent a father and as loving a husband as Charles Ingalls from those Little House books. And Heather's sharing of her own vivid imagination in this dark swampy forest gives you a close look at how she began to write the stories and books that would establish her reputation as one of North Carolina's premier writers. I very much enjoyed this story of the early years of her marriage. It's a keeper.

P.S. Miller is part of a writing family. Her father, Fred Ross, was a novelist, as was her Uncle James Ross. Her Aunt Jean Ross wrote short fiction, and her Aunt Eleanor Ross Taylor was a poet. Her Uncle Peter Taylor was a fiction writer and her Uncle Donald Justice was a poet. There may be even more connections like this that I'm unaware of, but with family ties like this, how could Heather Ross Miller be anything BUT a writer?… (plus d'informations)

Half way between Wilmington and Fayetteville is the town of Elizabethtown. It sits like a frontier outpost on the border of a vast and wild area known as Singletary Lake State Park. It is on the edge of an eerie landscape- almost like a moonscape in its alien and secretive nature.

The park is only a section of an even larger area known as the Carolina Bays or Lakes- a wide swath of swampy lowland pocketed with scattered depressions that have filled over the years with dark tannic water- seeping in slowly to fill the shallow bowls and turn them into lakes with water so black you can’t see more than a few feet down, even though the water is clear and clean. Bordered on the west by White Lake, and to the South by Lake Waccamaw, it is an area that resists change. Even to this day, much of the Carolina Lakes area remain as wild and untouched as they were when English surveyors first came to grief in their swampy byways.

Into this wilderness one cool December day in 1961 came a woman, her husband, and their small child- not even a year old. The man was Clyde Miller, a park ranger who had been assigned superintendent of Singletary Lake State Park. The baby was Melissa. The woman was Heather Ross Miller. She looked out over the desolate lake and mulled over the question her husband had asked her directly after he asked her to marry him: “Can you stand this? Can you live this?”

Miller spent the next 13 years at Singletary Lake until it was closed by the state for lack of funds in 1974; standing it, living it, loving it and occasionally fearing it. She turned her memories of that extraordinary period into a memoir that has just been published by Coastal Carolina Press: Crusoe’s Island: The Story of a Writer and a Place.

Crusoe’s Island reads like natural history- the natural history of a family surrounded and isolated by miles of swamp and woods. It was a fifty-mile trip into town- a trip Miller made once a week for groceries. Even the landmarks were wild- she marked her trip by the trees since there were no houses, no man-made things at all. In this wilderness Miller raised two children and wrote hundred of stories on an old Royal typewriter- some of which were later published and some of which even tempted photographers from New York City down into the wilderness to take her picture.

The place that is Singletary Lake permeates the pages of Miller’s memoir, just as the rusty but clean water got into her clothes, her hair, and her cooking. Readers will be reminded of the pensive essays of Bland Simpson as he discovered the Great Dismal Swamp, or Jan DeBlieu as she listened to the wind howling around her beach cottage on Hattaras Island. Heather Ross Miller recognizes early in her life on Singletary that the breathtaking expanse of wilderness around her was neither friend nor foe- but something utterly unconcerned with her small life (or the lives of her children and husband). Her memoir acknowledges both the beauty of the place, and the many fears it generated in her- a young mother with a runaway imagination. Sometimes the woods would be just woods- beautiful and worth exploring. Sometimes they were dark fearful places, haunted by the ghosts of travelers gone astray and the evil intentions of swamp witches and creatures.

Melissa, and later on her younger brother Kirk, grew up in this vast isolation- learning to play with pets and their parents and to amuse themselves. Unlike their mother, the creepiness of the country never seemed to touch them (as a baby Melissa once held down the head of a copperhead with her foot and called for her mother to come tell her what it was). But their mother was not so innocent- copperheads and wild bears were not rare and appreciated sights to a woman with two young children. They were as dangerous as they were awesome. Miller may have lived in a house with running water and electricity, but with fifty miles between herself and the nearest neighbor, she was very much a pioneer.

The country was simply wild- there were threats of forest fires, and floods, and swarms of holy rollers who tried to baptize all the park visitors in the dark water. The inhabitants were few, and equally mysterious- three black sisters who lived miles from town, a young boy who played war with a plastic rifle, and once, incredibly, a transvestite who watched his car sink into the mire- standing still for nearly 12 hours as it disappeared from view.

Crusoe’s Island is a vivid book that brings the landscape to life without it ever losing any of its mystery. In the end, the thirteen years that Heather Ross Miller spent at Singletary was but a flash in a place where change seemed to occur at a geological pace.

Singletary Lake State Park has since been reopened, but Clyde Miller is no longer the superintendent. He died in 1991- his wife and children returned his ashes to the place that had made them the family that they were and remain to this day. Miller’s memoir is a tribute not just to the landscape but to the family that the landscape formed, almost like the wind is said to have scooped out the lakes themselves: slowly, patiently, and indelibly.

… (plus d'informations)