Can you imagine if this building was not property of the park, but instead, your vacation home? Imagine waking up to nature’s display of swirling clouds, lifting fog, swaths of the mountain lit up by the morning sun as clouds roll past it. What a morning, what a life that would be.
Built in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps, today’s photo is of the picturesque and perfectly-placed old lodge at Table Rock State Park in South Carolina. The park was opened in 1938. It has two lakes and numerous trails, including one that leads to the top of the mountain in the background. Although I would love to see the view from the top of Table Rock, that ain’t gonna happen. Several years ago I began the trek up that trail, but turned around after about 15 minutes. I knew my legs were never gonna make it to the top, much less all the way back down.
The old lodge was closed for a while in 2003 and restored to the original specs as much as possible. The first time I saw that incredible building and that view I felt an old memory tugging at me. It took me a while to figure out what my subconscious mind was trying to tell me.
Right now, the lodge is rented out for special events. But many years ago, it was an active restaurant. And that is what I was trying to remember. I do not know exactly how old I was, but my grandparents were still alive when this happened. It was probably around 60 years ago when members of my family, on my mother’s side, took me and all my cousins to enjoy a meal in that restaurant.
For a kid who had only moved off his father’s sharecropper’s farm a few years earlier, for a kid who had never been in a restaurant, this was quite an experience, an experience of which I have no specific memories. I only know, or at least believe, that it happened. As I try to look back, tiny still scenes flash in my mind: the massive rugged interior, the big wooden tables, the faces of cousins … all ghosts of a lost past, ghost photos locked inside my memory, ghosts memories that may be real or imagined.
A few years ago I sent an email to the park manager, and he confirmed that the old lodge was once used as a restaurant. I have tried many times to picture myself as a kid, sitting at one of those wooden tables with my family around me, enjoying my first restaurant meal. I’ve tried, but I can’t make it happen.
That’s one of the problems with getting older. That’s one of the problems of a lack of nostalgia during younger years. I am not a collector. My life is almost void of memorabilia. And that’s a shame. Because the few things that I do have to remind me of my past are quite precious to me. And they let me think back to a simpler time, long before I fully understood what it meant to be poor.
And though I know it will likely be in vain, I will still occasionally look at this photo of the old lodge, as I did today, and strain to remember how it felt to be a child in the company of a loving extended family in a special place overlooking an amazing view of Table Rock.