‘Star Wars’ Fans Face The End

When the credits roll today, it will end a two-decade journey that captivated millions

Upon us, the end of an era is.

The end of Obi-Wan Kenobis and Darth Vaders sparring with plastic lightsabers as they camp outside the cineplex to secure the premium theater spot — 10 rows back and seven seats to the middle.

The end of Lando Calrissian Burger King glasses and cutting UPC codes off boxes of Crispix to earn the free R2D2 cereal bowl in the mail.

The end of a generation's worth of anticipation after anticipation.

For faithful believers, both young and old, the mere mention of "Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith" is a point of both anxious excitement and gloomy finality.

The very moment the operatic music crescendoes to its climax and the distinctive faded-blue text reading "Directed by George Lucas" appears in the closing credits, even a supreme knowledge of The Force couldn't change reality: the promise of a new, unexplored "Star Wars" experience will be no more.

"It's so sad to me, because I feel like that was an important part of growing up," says Jeanean Bartley, who remembers her first "Star Wars" experience as a seventh-grader in 1977, when the first film was released. "You could always look forward to the next one, and that's not going to happen anymore."

As the end of a cultural touchstone creeps upon us like the shroud of the Dark Side, we reflect on our childhoods — and those of our children who today cut out their own UPC codes.

The promise of "Star Wars" is that we grown-up children might tap into timeless myth and enjoy perpetual youth.

For those of us who remember 1983 and watching through little eyes as Darth Vader triumphantly throws the evil Emperor into the abyss in "Star Wars: Episode Six — Return of the Jedi," we can only wonder if our excitement at seeing the man behind the mask will be the same as seeing how he put the mask on.

After all, that's what "Revenge of the Sith" is all about — a glimpse of how your father became who he is.

We swore 20 years ago that by the year 2005 someone would have figured out how to make a real lightsaber instead of the kind you make by turning on a flashlight in a cloud of smoke billowing from the grill.

We didn't always pick up the Darth Vader cereal and check the carb count; like our children today, we once poured the sweetened oats into a bowl and picked out Droid marshmallows.

We once summed up a lightsaber duel as simply "cool" — and that was far more insightful than, say, "a modern interpretation of the elegant swordsmanship of the samurai, in keeping with the various mythical and historical archetypes George Lucas drew from to ensure his vast universe resonated."

Like "Star Wars" disciples — both young and old — we acted out innumerable prequels and sequels with action figures nightly on the living room carpet.

"This is one of those things that has spanned an entire generation," says Robert Thompson, a Syracuse University pop culture expert. "It stretches over, in some cases, people's entire memories. When something like that has been part of one's life for so long, when it goes away, there is a sense of loss — and not one to be made fun of."

The first English-language movie Jerry Zayas saw was "Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope," when he was a 5-year-old in his native Puerto Rico in 1977.

He could neither understand the words of Luke Skywalker and Han Solo nor yet read the Spanish subtitles. But the 33-year-old Easley father says the story, so visual and so epic, transcended language.

Shortly after "Return of the Jedi" left theaters, Zayas says he read a quote by Lucas that the creator/producer/director intended to someday translate onto the big screen the three previous stories he had written of how once-virtuous Jedi warrior Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader.

The promise of a new "Star Wars" experience was always just over the horizon where the two suns of Tatooine set. After today, those suns set for good.

"I've been waiting about 25 years to see this movie," says Zayas, who by his own admission has "brainwashed" his 5-year-old son, Nathan, into the Jedi Order. "When it cuts to the credits, my first thought will be, 'When will the wife and kids let me come back?' Once it goes off the screen and I've seen it plenty, from now on it's DVD. Depressing."

And the sense of loss isn't just for those who have lived 20-some-odd years with the assurance of a new "Star Wars" adventure. Ten-year-old Austin Teel finds himself playing the roles of characters, both old and new, with full knowledge that there will be no more new movies.

"When I heard it was the last 'Star Wars' movie that was coming out, I was a little disappointed," says Teel, a Camperdown Academy fifth-grader. "I'm just glad that they're going to do this one. Something is better than nothing."

Nothing is what Dale Hathaway is afraid of.

He is a member of the 501st Carolina Garrison of Storm Troopers. He knew from the moment he saw the opening scene of "Star Wars" in 1977 that he wanted to be one of those homogenous foot soldiers dressed in white armor, who both shoot inprecisely at the good guys on the big screen and show up at movie theaters to bring a bit of fantasy into reality.

He worries what will become of his comrades in arms after today and as the movie slowly fizzles away with the summer heat. "What are we going to do?" the 37-year-old Mauldin father of four says. "Are we going to be doomed to doing birthday parties?"

(A small consolation: The faithful who attended the "Star Wars" convention in Indianapolis last month learned from The Creator himself that two television series based on the saga are in the works and that he intends to re-release to the big screen all six episodes in 3-D).

Hathaway will be in uniform today — as he is for conventions and charity events — at Hollywood 20 with his fellow role players. He does it, in part, so the kids of today can experience the human spectacle of a new release just as those before them.

Hathaway has marveled at his two sons, 7-year-old James and 16-year-old Allen, as they have grown into "Star Wars" in their own ways. Longtime followers who remember the camp and technical jerry-rigging of the originals tend to see the prequels as overwrought, he says, but children of his sons' generation tell a different story.

One thing is certain: A grown-up child of the 1980s will dress as a storm trooper outside the theater for three days before he sees the movie Saturday.

"The adults, I'm sure you'll see some of them laughing and smiling when the show's over with," he says, "but I'm sure you're going to also see some of them shed a tear: 'This is the end. I've seen them all.'"

And so ends an era.

THE DAY AFTER

Star wars fans' Sith sense creates force to be reckoned with

Crowd forms early to be first to see final installment

Darth Vader and his red lightsaber retreat in fear as the imposing figure of an Imperial Storm Trooper reaches out his hand.

Quite a turn on convention, it is: The sinister masked villain cowering at the sight of the foot soldier he typically commands with the fear that even the most-trivial of mistakes could lead to the infamous death by "force choke."

Of course, this Vader is 3 feet tall, so forgive him if the sight of a full-size Storm Trooper extending an invitation to mug for a picture is unsettling. In the eyes of a 4-year-old evil Sith lord — real name Brent Webb — this spectacle outside the Hollywood 20 theater for the midnight premiere of "Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith" is all too real.

Imperial Trooper TK 27-12 — who when he's not slaying rebel scum is 37-year-old John Talbert of Taylors — explains the reactions he gets whenever he marches around in his menacing white evil empire-issued uniform.

"The more of a fan they are, the more apprehensive they are," TK 27-12 says, as he surveys the crowd at Wednesday evening's pre-"Sith" extravanganza.

The Storm Troopers, the Darth Vaders and the Boba Fetts camping out in line and comparing costumes are all playing roles in what has been a cultural tradition for 28 years, when the first "Star Wars" blasted onto movie screens in 1977.

It is a rite of passage in American pop culture, one shared by both young and old as the "Star Wars" saga comes full circle with the revelation of how once-virtuous Anakin Skywalker became the masked Darth Vader.

Brent and his 6-year-old brother, Ryker (playing the role of a young Obi-Wan Kenobi), are the subject of countless inquiring point-and-shoot cameras tonight. It must have something to do with the fact that their fierce plastic lightsaber duels spirits grown-up children back to a time before they had grown up.

The boys' father, Brooks Webb, has brought them out to Hollywood 20 not to see the movie (the only one of the six episode epic rated PG-13), but to drink in what will be the final, uncharted "Star Wars" experience.

Webb, 35, remembers seeing the original "Star Wars" seven times as a child with his brother, Chad, who also camped out with him for the premiere of 1999's "Episode I — The Phantom Menace."

"It is the end of era, because you could always look forward to the next one," says Webb, of Greer. "I joked with someone recently who suggested that I buy life insurance. I said, 'I hope I don't need it before the last 'Star Wars' comes out.'"

Made it alive, he did.

A theme of anxious anticipation mixed with mild melancholy is present here in The Line, where faithful followers jockey for the coveted middle seat inside the theater.

Steven Neitz and his buddy Bryan Hutchinson are first in line, camping out since 2:30 p.m., not necessarily to secure the best seat, but to sit down, drink sodas, wipe their mouths with "Star Wars" napkins and talk about the end of an era.

The only rule: Neitz, 26, a voracious consumer of online "Star Wars" information that reveals key plot twists in "Revenge of the Sith," cannot talk with his comrades about the spoilers bouncing around his brain.

Neitz and Hutchinson have done the hard work. Neitz's fiancee, Bethe Kitchen, has arrived late and deftly cut in line (albeit well before the line stretched into the Greenville Mall parking lot). Kitchen — whose toes are painted with the Imperial insignia on one foot and the Rebel insignia on the other — has bittersweet feelings about the movie she is about to see.

"It's always been something to look forward to, but at the same time it's really great to see George Lucas' vision complete," says the 35-year-old Kitchen, who points out her goose bumps at the mere mention of her first seeing the original "Star Wars" as a 7-year-old.

Perhaps the most-steadfast "Star Wars" disciple today is Geoff Mitchell, who has been in line since 10 a.m. at the new Camelot Cinema at McAlister Square.

A 12-pack of Dr. Pepper rests under his portable chair, and his black "Revenge of the Sith" T-shirt is OK in the balmy mid-May breeze.

The 23-year-old Furman student has spent 14 hours outside the theater today (in reward for his dedication, ownership has allowed him to tour the new, digital-screen theater and reserve his seat).

What more momentous occasion to skip class?

"Just waiting in line is part of the experience," Mitchell says. "The energy in the line is just really cool. I didn't have anything to do today, and I skipped school because I'm graduating anyway."

Mitchell's friend, Michael Freeman, had meant to join his fellow true believer in the morning. The decision was tough (this is the last "Star Wars" after all), but he attended to his prior engagement and made it to the campout at 3 p.m.

"What can I say?" Freeman said. "I had a job interview."

Underneath The Lake’s Tranquil Waters Lie Jocassee Memories

Divers have found Attakulla Lodge largely intact in lake's cold waters

A young couple's rented kayak cuts a subtle wake across the calm, emerald waters of Lake Jocassee.

Beneath the leisurely paddling of their oars a pastoral Atlantis rests in an endless sleep.

Debbie Fletcher knows what ghosts haunt the desolate bottom.

As tiny waves wash spring pollen onto the Devil's Fork boat ramp, tears well in her eyes at the thought of what ceased to be more than three decades ago, a casualty of hydroelectricity.

Looking over the water toward the kayakers destined for Double Springs, she can almost see where the Whitewater River once carved Jocassee Valley, a community that provided sustenance for farmers yet to join the Industrial Revolution and, years later, refuge for town and city folk escaping the summer melt.

The Whitewater converged like fingers on a hand with four sibling streams that are lost, now nothing more than an unseen source of pristine reservoir providing scenic mountain recreation and power for progress.Today, Fletcher has found a measure of peace with her loss, 32 years after Duke Power dammed the valley's rivers to create the Jocassee Hydroelectric Station. Her comfort resides far below the shimmering waters that give way to pitch black night and stirred powdered soil.It is a relic standing three stories high, preserved by the perpetually frigid temperatures of the deep, defying time's merciless erosion of the valley's history.

It is her home. And divers have found it.

Ten years ago, Fletcher swam in Lake Jocassee for the first time. She quickly jumped out, because, she says, "it felt like a graveyard."

Now, a measure of bitterness has been removed from bittersweet memories.

"It's easier to come here now that I've found the house," she says.

Heart of the valley

The Attakulla Lodge was long considered the heart of the Jocassee Valley community, says Fletcher, who spent summers in the lodge her family owned and wrote a history book, "Whippoorwill Farewell: Jocassee Remembered," about the valley.

For half a century, the sprawling wooden lodge operated as a bed-and-breakfast and stood as a beacon for any who desired rest 20 yards from the river's aqua waters.

Fletcher's grandfather closed the lodge to the public in the 1960s, except for friends the family would invite for weeklong summer getaways in the valley.

She spent her adolescence galvanizing memories of the lodge, before 1973 when the dam forced the Whitewater River's waters to flow upstream for the first time.

Fletcher remembers floating downstream atop inner tubes as trout nibbled at her toes; keeping Coca-Colas frosty in the not-cool-but-cold river waters; lying in her bed studying the horizontal slats in the lodge's walls and wondering why they didn't look like the walls in her Columbia home.

The children would bathe in a galvanized tub filled with water heated on the stove, then slide beneath piles of handmade quilts and blankets on cold evenings because the wood stove in the kitchen didn't give off enough heat.

A small bowling alley next door provided entertainment. Its pins had to be reset by hand.

Fletcher's grandfather had bought the lodge in the 1920s from the Whitmires, a preeminent family who first settled the valley as German immigrants. It isn't certain when the Whitmire family built the lodge (presumably sometime in the late 1800s), but it first opened for business in 1904.

The lodge was named after Cherokee Chief Attakullakulla ("Little Carpenter"). He was the father of the famed Princess Jocassee ("Place Of The Lost One"), who, legend has it, drowned herself upon learning of her lover's death.

By the time the Whitmires and other white settlers staked their claim at the turn of the 19th century, the Cherokee natives had been forced deeper into the hills and onward to the Oklahoma plains. The Cherokee lost their land to settlers; the settlers lost their land to water.

A continuous cycle of claims made and yielded.

Deep roots

The Attakulla Lodge was but one piece of Jocassee Valley.

Not far from the lodge, the Victorian-inspired Whitewater Inn provided comfort for travelers before it became Camp Jocassee, a private camp for girls, in the 1920s.

"The population of the valley would triple when the girls would come in, because sometimes they'd have as many as 100 campers," says Claudia Hembree, a descendant of the Whitmires who grew up in the valley until 1957 and wrote, in longhand, "Jocassee Valley," a history of the area.

Summer days in the Jocassee Valley dawdled by.

Not many pictures were taken during the Great Depression, Hembree says, and memories are simple, defined by the placidness of it all. She recalls taking long walks along the river in the early spring as the rare, indigenous Oconee Bell was brave enough to show its petals in the still-cold air.

"It was always a tradition for the kids to take a walk and see who could find the first Oconee Bell bloom," Hembree says.

She holds onto the flower as a symbol of what the valley represented. Like the fickle flower that doesn't like being moved, those few who remained in the valley when Duke Power came weren't eager to leave, she says.

In the 1940s, Duke Power had begun to research building a power station in the neighboring Eastatoee Valley, where Lake Keowee now entertains pontoon boats and lakefront homes, says Shirley Partain, a Duke Power spokeswoman. The valley was flooded in 1965, followed by Jocassee.

The Eastatoee Valley is where Dot Jackson spent her summers. Like Jocassee, it was, Jackson says, a "kind of idyllic place" where farmers lived off the land and had little use for money.

"These people didn't just own, they loved the valley," she says.

Jackson remembers her mother telling her of the story of how she married her father in 1922, 10 years before Jackson was born. Her mother's uncle objected to her mother marrying Jackson's father, because he was seen as stepping on the lower rung of the social ladder. The uncle shot her father.

It would be years before the couple could return to the valley.

Life in both valleys would not last much longer upon their return.

A local surveyor from Clemson had come in to study the feasibility of building dams in both valleys, Hembree says. Life along the Whitewater River always felt temporary, she says, when her father talked of the survey.

"Somewhere in my mind, I knew it was going to happen," she says. "I remember, even as a young child, my dad talking about that survey. He said, 'One of these days they're going to come in here and put a dam on this river, and it's going to be gone forever.'"

Beneath the deep

In preparation for Duke Power's 385-feet high dam, the company bought land, sold the timber and razed everything in its path to remove potential obstructions.

But the Attakulla Lodge was one institution the bulldozers spared. Fletcher says only after the valley flooded did her family agree to sell 20 acres of the land on which the lodge sat. Duke Power couldn't tear down what it didn't own.

As a result, the lodge stood as the waters rose. Unlike visions of water rushing in furiously as depicted in the movie "O, Brother, Where Art Thou?", the valley flooded slowly, allowing the lodge to stay largely intact.

Fletcher didn't watch as the waters rose to create the 7,500-acre lake with 75 miles of shoreline, but she says her Uncle Fred reported seeing from an airplane what looked like the roof of the lodge floating away and shards getting tangled up in trees. As it turns out, that wasn't true. It most likely was the roof of the building that housed the bowling alley.

Two years ago, professional diver Bill Routh called Fletcher in Columbia to ask her about the lodge. Routh, who owns "Off The Wall" charters on Lake Jocassee, had been picking the brains of anyone who researched the valley's history.

Earlier, Routh had found the site of an old cemetery. His group of divers found artificial flowers piled near a tree at the lake bottom, and they spent time during the dives propping up headstones.

They also discovered the stone columns framing the girls camp, as well as a Chinese boat sunk in 65 feet of water, a popular spot for diver training exercises.

Central to Routh's belief that Attakulla could still be standing was the fact that the lodge had a masonry chimney that was anchored in the ground and rose through all three floors. That, he thought, would provide enough support to withstand the tide.

Using GPS data culled by comparing survey maps, Routh took an Aug. 4, 2004, nighttime boat ride to the general area where he thought the lodge might be. Using a remote camera from the boat, he found the lodge and videotaped it, and shortly after gathered his diving buddies to explore the lodge.

Only an incredibly skilled diver can swim down 300 feet. The trip takes 21/2 hours, and only 20 minutes of it is spent actually touring the lodge. The descent is a mere five minutes, but to avoid suffering a deadly case of the bends a diver must ascend slowly over the course of two hours, using a guide line to make sense of which way is up.

What the divers found was a building largely preserved, down to the paint on the handrails. The frigid temperatures and lack of oxygen had helped slow the decomposition process. They had landed on a portion of the lodge's roof.

Fletcher had always regretted not grabbing some piece of her beloved home, even if it were just a doorknob. While swimming around the lodge, a diver, Charles Johnson, pulled loose a wooden panel, a piece of a sidelight that had been mounted next to the front door. He brought it with him to the surface.

It now hangs in Fletcher's dining room.

But there was one other piece missing: a way for Fletcher to connect from above with Attakulla and its eternal resting place.

After years of compiling information, Fletcher had published a book in 2003 that recounts the history of the valley, the lodge and memories of family. The book has been updated to recount Fletcher's underwater reunion with her home.

A month after the first dive, the group headed out again, this time to set a copy of Fletcher's book — sealed in Plexiglas — on the front porch of the lodge.

Attakulla has lost countless memories in the deep where a beloved valley slumbers.

But it has been found.

And memories begin anew.

Show Me The ’90s

The decade that brought us 'Forrest Gump' and clear soda is so over, and already we miss it

We Americans are known for our short attention spans, our oftentimes myopic obsession with ourselves.

So it should come as no surprise that in our state of ADD – appropriately the fad diagnosis of the 1990s – we readily engross ourselves in the nostalgia of the bubble decade, like opening a can of Crystal Pepsi before it's had a chance to age.

Consider that VH1 has launched its "I Love the '90s" deconstruction of pop culture, the third in a series of minutae-driven retrospectives that also helped us to relive the '70s and '80s.

And picking up on the trend, Hasbro is marketing a new Trivial Pursuit game dedicated to '90s nostalgia.

Suddenly – a mere five years removed from the New Year's Eve when we panicked over Y2K being the end of the world – the '90s are all up in our collective grills.

Ummm, hellooo … like, whassup with that?

Robert Thompson, a pop culture guru at Syracuse University, says the decade of the '90s has been able to jump the nostalgia gun by about 10 years because the cultural climate changed so drastically after 9/11.

What we consider the '90s begins, he says, with the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, signaling America's victory in the Cold War, and ends on what was otherwise a nondescript Tuesday morning nearly three years ago.

"It's a really distinct period when the cloud of nuclear destruction goes away and we have these sunny skies until the cloud of terrorism comes in," Thompson says. "While it hasn't been that long since we left the period of the '90s, a lot of stuff has changed in dramatic ways."

Yes, life was like a box of chocolates.

The Internet seemed to make the world smaller, until we learned once again how big the world really is.

A war in Iraq was a Desert Storm, an in-and-out affair that took less than two months to complete.

Money management was like a magic show: Putting $20 into a mutual fund turned into $200 almost overnight.

Was Tinky Winky the "gay Teletubby"? Oh, the scandal of it all.

No wonder we're straight trippin' to relive America's decade of blithe narcissism.

The '90s were all that and a bag o' chips. As for the dawn of the new millennium … well, talk to the hand, we don't even want to go there.

So what, exactly, is it that we remember?

In preparing the new Trivial Pursuit (could any decade be more trivial?), marketing suits conducted a survey in mid-June of 1,033 people of diverse backgrounds and ages.

Here's what they remember from back in the day:

– Cooking shows like "Emeril" were the third-most-impactful trend of the '90s, topped only by the Internet and the cell phone.

– Four out of 10 Americans surveyed named Forrest Gump's "box of chocolates" bit of pop philosophy as the most memorable movie/TV line, followed by "Show me the money!" of "Jerry Maguire" fame.

– Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" stuck most in the minds of one-third who participated in the survey, with MC Hammer's "U Can't Touch This" and Vanilla Ice's "Ice, Ice Baby" trailing behind.

– In the category of non-sports sporting moments, Roseanne Barr's irreverent rendition of the National Anthem before a Padres game tied with George Foreman's introduction of the George Foreman Grill.

Kevin Griggs, a 22-year-old Greenville native enlisting in the Army, remembers when the '90s decade was in its infancy.

He remembers TGIF on ABC, with "Full House," "Step By Step," "Boy Meets World" and "Family Matters" (you know, the one with that nasally Urkel kid).

At recess, Griggs and his friends played Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. A few years later, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers would seem so wack, like Pokemon compared to SpongeBob SquarePants.

But, he wonders, is it too soon say buh-bye to yesterday?

"How will we look back on all this 20 years from now?" he says. "What seems normal now might be funny years later."

Stephanie Adamson says she sees a certain demarcation line drawn in the mid-90s, separating what seems ancient (MC Hammer's genie pants) from what seems too recent to pine over (cell phones).

Adamson remembers watching MTV's "The Real World" in middle school, when "we were watching MTV when we weren't supposed to."

That self-indulgent '90s precursor to today's surplus of reality TV (remember surpluses?) feels out of step now, she says, like some kind of outdated vanity overkill.

So very dope when things should no longer be dope.

Robert Meek, a 41-year-old country music fan from Mauldin, heard a lot of rap music in the '90s — thanks to his kids.

Admittedly, Meek never was much of a playa and he never wore much bling-bling. He spent more time listening to what he considers the pop-ification of country music, "when singers changed what country music was into what it is today."

Something about all this '90s nostalgia is unsettling, he says. First the '70s and '80s. Now this?

"For us older people, it makes us feel so … old," he says.

Carol Phillips can feel that.

Phillips, 47, has worked for the Furman University post office for 13 years. In 1996, the post office made the switch to e-mail. That's about the time when all those who weren't "computer persons" learned the painful lessons of evolution.

"I called the computer many, many bad names," says Phillips, of Travelers Rest.

You could say she almost went postal.

Ahh, yes. Going postal.

For 29-year-old Tuan Tran, the '90s weren't all bulging 401(k)'s and "Friends" chatter over comfy coffee in its comfy cups. In other words, as Chuck D said, "Don't believe the hype."

For certain, Michael Jordan was indeed superhuman and the evil commies didn't appear to want to nuke us anymore.

But then again, there was Michael's little baseball escapade and the Los Angeles riots were the genesis of what would become sustained presence of brutality depicted in most every form of media.

"The '90s kind of numbed us to violence," Tran says. And oh yeah, he says, O.J. did it.

Nevertheless, our appetite for reliving recent history doesn't show signs of going the way of the grungy flannel, says Thompson, the pop culture expert.

"You go through most of your life and you play dumb games and eat Count Chocula cereal, and nobody ever brings that stuff up," Thompson says. "This is the stuff that was really part of your daily life."

Word, professor, word.

Leaving ‘Cool’ In The Dust

That first minivan comes loaded – with the realities of parenthood

Once upon a time, we were cool. Or at least we thought we were.

This is before we learned the names of all four Teletubbies, before juice stains became a fashion accessory, before PG-13 seemed soooo risque.

Slowly, we rode the gradual decline of cool. And then, abruptly, the ride stopped, crashing into a sudden, late 20s/early 30s austere reality.

"Honey, I'm sorry, but we need a minivan."

A what?

"I had to convince my husband to get this," says Angie McCullough, 30, who is trying to shoehorn a stroller into her Chrysler Town & Country with her two sons and her friend's two daughters. "When we got married, he said he would never drive one of these things. Well, that changed."

Ahh, the dreaded "M" word, the modern-day equivalent of the lusterless "station wagon."

What was so foreign a concept when we were romanticizing about our children on our honeymoon is now staring at us, grill to grill.

We are now forced to answer difficult questions:

How did it come to this? When did my parents get to be the ones to drive a convertible and not me? Am I even qualified to judge whether it's cool to call things "cool" anymore?

No matter how you spin it, how they advertise it, how a couple with young children tries to reach back into their parents' pop culture nostalgia to a time when a VW bus was groovy, man … minivans are about as stylish as going bald.

If you hear a whistle, that most certainly is not an admirer calling at you, because you are either a.) conspicuously domesticated or b.) driving your parents' minivan.

The car companies are beginning to avoid the "M" word the way restaurants do the "E coli" word. For one, General Motors has announced it's changing the names of its minivans to "crossover sport vans," whatever that's supposed to mean.

Anything to make the inevitable easier to swallow.

Counseling, with purchase

When answering a couple's question about the minivan, Paul McCleod often finds himself in the position of being a sort of "you're-getting-older-but-it's-OK" advisor.

McCleod is the new-car manager at Crown Nissan on Laurens Road, where, if you're looking for space for your kids, you're looking either at the Quest minivan or the hulking Armada SUV.

If you have a ballooning family, the only way to avoid a minivan sentence is to either accept cramped quarters or invest in the largest — and most expensive — of the SUVs.

McCleod says he hears the term "soccer mom" regularly when showing potential buyers the Quest, which along with other newer models of minivans has made an effort to bring a stylish look to the line, with rounder, sportier edges and even add-ons like rear spoilers.

"The biggest thing I hear from parents is, 'I don't want a minivan because I don't want people to think I'm a soccer mom,'" he says.

Then comes the needle dose of reality.

"Of course," he says, "my answer is, 'It doesn't matter what you drive or what you look like. When you pull up to the Wal-Mart, open the door and your five kids get out, they're going to know you're a soccer mom.'"

The label "soccer mom" was first assigned to the young mothers in the 1990s who could swing a presidential election. But somewhere along the way it took on a life of its own, becoming a synonym for unfashionable that seems to go hand in hand with the minivan.

The fear of stereotyping — motivated a great deal by how automobiles are marketed toward age groups and lifestyles – is central to the decision of whether to buy a minivan, McCleod says.

SUV vs. the minivan

It comes down in large part to personality, and what you buy might say a lot about how you are accepting your changing life role.

In his 2002 manifesto on SUVs, "High and Mighty: The World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way," author Keith Bradsher pointed out how automakers study the differences between minivan and SUV buyers.

In interviews with market research analysts at major automakers, Bradsher found that, overall, minivan owners are more comfortable with being married and being parents.

At just more than 1 million sold each year, minivans seem to be OK with plenty of drivers. The genre has even seen a resurgence in the first five months of this year after three years of steadily declining sales.

Minivan sales jumped 7.2 percent from January through May compared with a year ago, according to industry researcher Autodata. That's still behind overall SUV sales, which grew 9.3 percent, but well ahead of the 3.2 percent sales growth for the auto industry as a whole.

Jamie Dagenais and her husband, who drive a Jeep Grand Cherokee, had always told themselves that they would just "drive a big enough SUV" because of the stigma attached to minivans.

But now that their two girls, ages 3 and 1, are starting to take up more space and now that gas prices are higher, she's leaning toward buying a minivan.

There comes a time, the 30-year-old mother says, when reality catches up with you.

"I don't think I mind so much now," she says. "I'm not getting any second looks getting out of the car now anyway, so it doesn't matter if I get out of a minivan or a sports car."

Coming to terms

If you choose to drive a minivan, fellow owners will tell you the best thing to do is simply accept that you have, indeed, become a minivan driver. And that's not so bad.

No, really.

"Whatever my sisters say about my minivan, I don't care," says Joan Land, 28, who has become accustomed to the ribbing that goes along with driving her 2002 Ford Windstar.

The Land clan used to drive around in a 1996 Chevy Impala before switching to the Windstar. Land says she looked at SUVs, but they either sucked too much gas and rode like trucks or weren't really any roomier than a car.

Like so many others, she doesn't have to drive a minivan, but she does because it just makes too much sense not to.

Land says she thinks it comes down to personality and a willingness to accept a new phase of life. She can't quite understand why her sisters insist on cramming their kids into a car.

"I've never cared what anybody thinks," she says. "What I drive doesn't make me. I care more about how comfortable my kids are."

There is a light at the end of the tunnel. For minivan drivers, there is the solace that you won't have to drive one forever. Call it a reason to look forward to turning 40.

Joey Bearden, fleet manager for Benson Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep in Greer, says he's seen the cycle firsthand, both with customers who come to the lot and with his wife.

Now that his kids are grown, Bearden says his wife has completed her minivan years and is now driving a sporty, convertible Chrysler Sebring.

But, he says, the cycle is not yet over. With a new grandchild in the mix, Bearden says they are now looking to trade the Sebring for a sedan.

"It's a continuing, changing thing in life," he says.

Such is the way of the minivan.

Your vessel on that self-sacrificial journey to and from the land of uncool.

Saturday Night Fervor

Life at the speedway is a world of its own

A mere fence is all that stands between the rubber-smudged oval track and the modern-day Roman spectators sitting atop their parked chariots, eating boiled peanuts and drinking Natural Light. Here on the other side of the fence, removed from the gladiatorial battleground of speeding metal, are the bulldozed fringes of the Greenville-Pickens Speedway backstretch.

This is where the true chaos and bedlam is.

Where pick 'em ups are jacked to the heavens, where Public Displays of Affection are very public and very affectionate, where the sober and the drunken co-exist in a distinct kind of tailgating symbiosis.

Here where parked vehicles are portable bleachers, the scent of venison grilled over an open flame mixed with the distinct odor of racing fuel makes for an exotic cocktail.

It's opening night at the speedway, the first day of spring, a fitting beginning to what is already an abrupt, loud, unpredictable season.

There's an explosion of noise as all manner of stock cars — late model, super, charger, renegade — flash by in warm-ups. (The roar is outdone only by Mother Nature's thunderous wash-out later in the evening.)

Somebody heard tell that pro wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin is in the pit tonight, but the rumor is quickly quashed: "Maaaan, he ain't down there," a voice of temperance retorts.

For if the champion of all that is rugged and cantankerous would set up shop anywhere, it would be here along the backstretch.

Certainly not across the way in the grandstands, where the spectators who arrived in Camrys, Aerostars and Beamers are encamped.

And not down inside the oval, filled with critics whose attention is transfixed on the strategies of speed and maneuvering.

"There's a little bit of everybody," says Edward Parker, who builds decks during the day and on warm Saturday nights mans the admission gate, where he meets church groups, lawyers, real estate agents, convenience store clerks and any manner of folk who claim no status.

This gate is its own entity, a collecting point where Abercrombie & Fitch meets camouflage jacket, Michelob Ultra meets Busch, Outkast meets … well, Outkast isn't here to meet anybody.

A middle-aged woman with teased hair rolls up crooning Kid Rock, adding forceful inflection to make sure everyone around her knows that she "saw your picture today/sat down and cried todaaaaay-hey-ay-ay-yah."

Will she head to the grandstands? Or will she cast her lot on the backstretch, where others might be more willing to join in her song?To immerse yourself in the more-carnal aspects of the speedway, you must drive your stake into the hallowed ground of the backstretch, where, Parker says, nothing is really weird because … everything is a little weird.

It's here that everything is wrapped in a warm, familial sense of appropriateness, a consensus that this is the way things are done.The burnt rubber and the burnt hot dogs; the walking advertisements for Tide detergent in the guise of NASCAR gear; the looming sign with a No. 3 that serves as a monument to racing's ultimate martyr.Amid the roar and thunder, there is a place for everyone, and 'most everyone has been coming since God knows when.

Mark Price and his son, Graham, have been coming to the speedway for four years now. Graham is 4.

Graham is wearing his oversized headphones over his Dale Jarrett hat and his ears. It takes just enough edge off the intrusive shriek of mechanical muscle.His dad explains the procedures for handling a pre-schooler whose interest in cars lapping a track for hours has waned. In the van is a DVD player, where Graham will often fall asleep watching "Looney Toons."

"He likes SpongeBob Squarepants," Mark says, "but I don't have that on DVD."Graham lifts his headphones with a scowl."No, Dad, I like 88; that's Dale Jarrett's number," he says with a cherubic lisp and a "what-are-you-thinkin'?" inflection.

On days like this, SpongeBob takes a back seat … if there were one in a stock car.

From the plywood platform mounted on his truck, Randy Scott and his 10-year-old "grandbaby," Jeffrey Brooks, can see everything:

+ The boiled peanut shells they've strewn — like they always do — onto the red-dirt ground around the truck.

+ The proliferation of shining-new Thermos cooler/grills bought especially for Opening Night.+ The smiley face etched with lime green and fluorescent pink sidewalk chalk along a walkway, drawn in a tamer hour, before the roar and the smell of hot rubber took over.Scott is a roofer by trade, so his 1979 powder/primer blue Ford truck is fixed with a metal frame above the truck bed to carry any manner of roofing paraphernalia.

Atop the platform is a plywood board supported by two 2×4 planks that rest on the metal fixture, an invention tailor made for just this ritual.

It's a tradition that began when he would travel down from the Cherokee, N.C., Indian reservation where he grew up.

Scott, who now lives in West Greenville, is only two years younger than the speedway, now in its 59th year, and he's been coming since as long as he can remember.

Even when, three decades ago, he was living in Moncks Corner and each Saturday would drive up to the speedway and back to the Lowcountry that same night.

Inside the truck, a Tony Stewart racing card is wedged into the passenger-side sun blinder, and on the back window is a No. 74 sticker. It's the number on the go-cart his grandbaby used to race in Dacusville before, as Scott says, he "wore the new off of it."

It is from this lofty perch that the pair can drink in all that is the speedway, both on the track and among their own.

To walk among the crowd is to become an exhibit for the people-watchers. But exactly who is on exhibit is not for sure; the gawkers atop their metal thrones in turn become exhibitions themselves.

The backstretch is terraced into three levels, like stadium seating made of dirt — for cars.

At the highest level, the third terrace, are Don and Sheila Coleman, who like to keep themselves above the fray. Sitting in their nondescript modern trucking vehicle, the two don't make a big show of themselves. They could just as easily be watching a drive-in movie.

Tonight is quite the human spectacle (Opening Night and the Fourth of July are like that, Don says), and the couple can't see the track quite as well.

There's a trade-off here. Which will be more entertaining tonight? The show on the track or off it? You never know from Saturday to Saturday.

For the Colemans — avid race fans but not quite enough that they want to set up camp inside the oval — the off-track exhibition rarely measures up to when the "renegades" take to the track.

"You can tell who they are right away," Sheila says.

These are the amateurs, the erratic swervers, the raw newness of ultra-fast, perpetual left-hand-turn daredevilness.

They are the crashers.

Ah, yes, the crash.

Everything has its primal apex: the home-plate collision, the face-melting guitar solo, the Act III thunderclap.

Inside the oval — "in the action," as race fan Mike Doyle calls it — a collision is an intimate, visceral experience.

He's in the oval tonight, but Doyle knows the real show is on the other side of the fence. His finger points to the backstretch, where the roof dwellers hold onto their seat cushions for a truly satisfying crash."It's fun to watch the people up on the hill when there's a wreck," he says. "They go crazy, crowd the fence and hoot and holler."Up on that hill, from the truck bed of her boyfriend's 1980 Toyota — raised six feet off the ground on a virile foundation of 44-inch boggers and 11-inch suspension — Brittany Page is a connoisseur of every spectacle, both metal and human.

The drunks, the 18-year-old says, are funny, but nothing beats the crashes.

The car with the smiley face immediately comes to mind.

"Remember that smiley-face car?" Page asks her boyfriend, Tim Lollis, a racer himself at the Anderson Speedway.

"I think it was Marty Ward," he says.

"Nah, it wouldn't be Marty Ward," she says. "Anyway, the other guy hit the guy with the smiley face. He wasn't smilin' after that."

There is something good and basic about racetrack humor; irony at its most fundamental.

Out here everything is that way. Nothing is ever really complicated . Lollis, a 20-year-old delivery driver, has come here on Saturdays since he was 4, when his older cousin Rick would bring him.

He comes to one simple conclusion as he searches for the words to describe his love for the speedway, on a night like tonight, when a flannel shirt with a pack of Marlboros in the front pocket feels just right.

"I ain't havin' to carry anything," he says.

But there's something else.

It's a search deep down for something simpler, even more quintessential. Something that reaches way back into the childhood senses and never seems to change.

Then, as the cars roar past, it hits him. It's the sound.

"And …" Brittany says.

Then Tim finishes her sentence. "… The smell of the fuel."

"Uhn hunh."

More Tooth Than Fiction

Payment for gaps in their smiles burning holes in their pockets

That tooth fairy is such a secretive little nymph; a winged, magical, late-night barterer conducting her business under the cloak of darkness.

Why, exactly, does she want so many teeth? What does she do with them? Why only the baby teeth? And, most importantly, how does she settle on a price?

There seems to be a protocol, an innocent faith that if you put your little tooth under the pillow, the compensation will be to your satisfaction.

When it comes time to explain the tooth fairy – and settle on a price – so many new parents are at a loss.

For most, there is a 20-year … er … gap between the last time they stuck a tooth under a pillow and the day their kindergartner's mouth starts resembling that of a hockey player's, and they become the tooth facilitator.

The tooth trade

It would appear that parents are the middlemen, but when it comes to answers, oftentimes they don't have a whole lot.

Kimberly Bailey isn't sure how she will explain it to her son, 5-year-old Cameron, when he starts to lose his teeth. He'll probably get $3 a tooth, but the rest is murky.

"I'll tell him that she has a collection," says Bailey, 32. "Why? I don't know. I hope he doesn't ask."

But those children … you know they surely will ask.

In Andrea Sharpe's household, the contract between tooth fairy and parent stipulates a relationship of mutual benefit — a sanitization service, if you will.

"The tooth fairy cleans them and gives them back," says Andrea, 6. "She gives my mama the money. Mama just says, 'Give the money to me, and I'll make sure to give it to her.'"

And, apparently, Mama meets with the tooth fairy regularly and can give a general description — wings, magic wand, about the size of a first-grader's hand.

The tooth fairy, it seems, is a shrewd businesswoman.

That is, if Jaylon Tolbert's suspicions are correct. Jaylon has lost eight teeth all told, his upper row virtually nothing but gums. For each tooth, he gets a dollar.

Jaylon says his understanding is that the tooth fairy sells teeth (possibly, he says, to help make clocks) at a whopping price of $100 per tooth.

When asked about whether he should be due a little kickback on the profit, Jaylon doesn't know whatever in the world that means, but, he says, smiling, "yeah, sure."

The price ranges differ. Some kids get a silver dollar, others $2 and some upwards of $5, says Sangrita Vakharia, a Greenville dentist.

But what children might not understand, as they see their classmates getting two to five times more than they got from the tooth fairy, is the economics underneath it all.

Tooth fairy inflation

In 1979, when he was a 6-year-old kindergartner, University of South Carolina research economist Don Shunk says he got 25 cents a tooth.

If you were to apply that 25 cents in 1979 into today's inflationary terms, that quarter would be worth about 54 cents, Shunk says.

He has settled on $2 a tooth for his 7-year-old son, and the same for the three younger children yet to lose their teeth. That means Shunk's son is getting nearly four times the amount his father did versus inflation.

While not quite as volatile as Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or even Mom and Dad on a birthday, the tooth fairy claims no immunity from inflationary pressure.

When it comes to gift giving over the years, adults have tended to round up in whole dollars, so much so that Grandma is paying $20 when she used to pay $1. The inflation involved there is off the charts.

So why is the price going up when the supply-and-demand equation doesn't play out?

"As the population grows, there's an ever-growing — and apparently endless — supply of teeth," Shunk says. "You would think that would put downward pressure on price. But I guess you have to think about what exactly the tooth fairy is doing with all these teeth."

That leads the young economist to only one conclusion: There must be a demand for teeth that either meets or exceeds the supply.

Carley Calhoun thinks it's simple: There is a never-ending demand for tooth necklaces.

"She puts them in her bag, then she makes a necklace," says Carley, 7, who always gets a crisp paper dollar bill in return.

Actually, that would be in keeping with the history of the tooth fairy, whose roots are traced back to medieval Europe.

In Viking culture, warriors believed that children's articles held a certain value for strength and luck. Adults would pay children for their teeth and string them onto necklaces to wear into battle.

In English culture, it was believed that teeth, like fingernails, held much power when in the hands of a witch, so parents would have children drop their teeth into a fire.

Throughout the rest of Europe, the teeth would be buried, both as a symbol of hope that permanent teeth would grow in and a means to keep them away from the witches.

The tooth fairy, however, as manifested in the miniature, winged, sprite figure, first emerged in America.

A truly capitalistic beginning.

Baby teeth only, please

No matter her origin, one thing is clear: The tooth fairy has no desire to enter the permanent-tooth market.

If anyone would know, Ryan Stewart would.

As a hockey player manning the left wing for the Greenville Grrrowl, Stewart has lost two teeth. Actually, he didn't lose them. They were right there on the ice after an opponent knocked them out.

The tooth fairy, he says, is never happy that he refuses to wear a mouth guard, despite the fact that he has trouble breathing through it while playing.

The tooth fairy entertains no excuses, leaves no money. And she's quite the proactive, Victorian lady.

"She always leaves me a scolding letter about not wearing my mouth guard," says Stewart, 29, insistent that he's never tried to put a knocked-out tooth under the pillow.

And then, too, there's the other tooth person to face.

"We always get in trouble at the dentist's office, walking in sheepishly, trying to explain how you lost another tooth," he says.

It's not surprising that the dentist and the tooth fairy would be of like mind, says Dr. Vakharia.

Both are dogged champions of proper tooth care, whether it's a lecture on the benefits of preventing cavities or on avoiding insanely high-contact sports where teeth are referred to as "Chiclets."

"The tooth fairy would prefer that you take care of your teeth and keep them in your head for the rest of your life," Vakharia says.

Is Anyone Giving Cupid A Shot?

How far Cupid has fallen in majesty and dignity, perhaps a sentence ordained by the gods for all the little archer's mischievous plots of unrequited love.

Once a stately, fully matured, celestial Greek god — the incarnation of all that was masculine beauty and passionate love — Cupid today is a toddleresque, bare-bottomed matchmaker.

How did it come to this, oh venerated son of Venus and Mars?

When did the esteemed, paradoxical god of love and war become a spokesman for a commercial holiday? And when did he cast his lot with the lower-tier of holiday mascots, the likes of Baby New Year and (gasp!) the Groundhog?

"If I saw a little naked baby flying around with wings and arrows, I'd call the cops," says Matt Cantrell, 18, of Walhalla.

How hard the mighty fall.

Once upon a time, an arrow from Cupid's bow was sufficient explanation for the mystery of unquenchable romantic passion.

But in today's world of online computer matchmaking and assessing your five-year plan before making a commitment, Cupid has gotten the shaft.

"I don't believe in Cupid," says Dannyalle Houston, 23, of Mauldin. "I just think the right person comes at the right time and you choose him."

Indeed, Cupid's fall from popular romantic theory — he was exalted in Shakespeare's sonnets, but rap duo OutKast sings that Cupid gets no respect — mirrors how society's view of love has changed.

Too often these days, lonely, would-be lovers are trying to pick when they will fall in love, shunning Cupid in favor of a modern-day contrived formula for partner procurement, says Hadley Mullen, a marriage counselor at Compass of Carolina.

"The whole dating thing has completely changed," Mullen says. "It appears to be more methodical and planned."

Tradition has taught us about love at first sight and happily ever after, and that isn't entirely a relic, she says. But people seem more these days to try to force love and commitment rather than leave it up to chance and fate.

So many seekers, she says, are overly committed to the mission of acquiring a mate, which oftentimes seems a commando raid carried out at a properly designated time.

People are becoming increasingly creative in how they seek out a mate, Mullen says, going to civic clubs and shopping online for love.

Cupid is not allowed to work his magic, she says, and the overzealous and overprepared often find that "when you look too hard, you don't find it."

But Cupid?

Beth Davis just isn't buying it.

Whatever fate there is in the grand scheme of amore, says Davis, 18, of Walhalla, it lies in the hands of a power much higher than a frisky cherub. To find a lover is to find a soulmate, she says, citing a far more spiritual outlook on love.

And that divine love includes looking at Valentine's Day differently than the ancient ideas of passion. The notion of Mom and Dad and Little Sister being struck by Cupid's arrow for your sake on a day like today is kind of … well, weird.

"It's important to share Valentine's Day with all the people you love — and not just in a romantic way," Davis says.

This is not what Cupid once represented, classical literature historians say.

"We view him today in one facet, when really he's multifaceted," says Noelle Zeiner, assistant professor of classics at the College of Charleston.

Cupid's beginnings are found in early Greek mythology and under a different name, Eros, Zeiner says .

At first, she says, Eros was an abstract universal incarnation of the powerful, life-giving force of procreation.

As the story goes, she says, Eros was the son of Aphrodite (the goddess of love and desire) and Aries (the god of war).

When the Romans adopted the Greek gods and changed their names, Eros became Cupid, Aphrodite became Venus and Aries became Mars.

Cupid, the embodiment of masculine beauty, was an indentured servant to his mother, carrying out her will to inflict love on those of her choosing, far from the free-willed assassin of today.

By the 4th century B.C., the harsh, militaristic undertones of imperial Rome transformed Cupid into a winged warrior of love replete with arrows.

Love, in Roman terms, was a force to be feared and reckoned with, one in which raging infatuation could mean disaster, says Alan Miller, professor of classics and comparative literature at the University of South Carolina.

"Desire can be violent, hence the arrows," Miller says. "That's the way the ancients thought of desire."

Romanticism went on hiatus in the Middle Ages as church leaders shunned such vagaries, he says.

But with the revival of romance and the rediscovery of love poetry during the Renaissance, Cupid returned to his rightful occupation: a playful image of winged desire.

This image is carried on into classic literature, with the likes of Shakespeare, who pulled from archetype of Cupid to create characters such as the mischievous, match-making Puck in "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

Today, in modern American culture, Cupid has lost his once-glorious luster and has instead become a gimmicky, marketable caricature to sell Valentine's Day gifts.

"In Greek myth, he's not the kind of baby Kewpie doll thing," Miller says. "The resonance of the image has lost its meaning."

Even if Cupid is a shell of himself, his arrows still may penetrate, at least in metaphorical terms.

Though love may no longer bow to the whims of a winged archer, says Houston, the unbeliever, the spirit of Cupid isn't entirely lost in commercial oblivion.

"In a way, you are Cupid," Houston says, "because you are the giver and you make the choice."

Not quite a naked cherub with wings and a bow, but perhaps enough.

French Accent

Stroke changes Southerner's speech Patterns into something a bit more exotic

Berley Stabler had always fancied himself something of a romantic, a fighter in the world of sales, but more so a lover of the trumpet.

These days, though, the home-theater sales rep, a Simpsonville resident born and bred in rural St. Matthews, S.C., is no longer a lover.

He's a "lah-vah." And, playing the "trom-PET" is his "lahv."

Stabler went to bed the week before Christmas a Southerner, and by the time he came home from the hospital on Christmas Eve, he had become a Frenchman.

Or at least, a Southerner with a French accent.

Stabler's sudden change in accent is the result of what he learned later was a stroke.

His new speech pattern is described by doctors as an extremely rare condition known as "foreign-accent syndrome," a phenomenon that has been documented only a little more than 20 times worldwide since 1919, experts say.

So, when Stabler talks about grits and lightnin' bugs, he sounds like an emigrated Frenchman learning alien Southern terms.

And, despite the difficulty in getting strangers to believe he is a native South Carolinian or convincing family that it's not all a joke, his new dialect is fine by him.

"I feel like one of those European romanticists," says Stabler, 45. "I enjoy things more. It doesn't particularly bother me. At first, I couldn't speak, so I'm glad the good Lord allowed me to."

Overnight, a stroke

Indeed, at first, Stabler was speechless.

He had finished an evening of reheasal with the Hosanna Brass, a small orchestra he plays in as a hobby and an expression of his love for music.

He had suffered headaches off and on for a week, and that night it was particularly bad. He went to sleep only to awaken at 5 a.m. with a strange feeling in his face.

His wife, Shari, told him he was simply tired and needed to go back to bed. At 7 a.m., he awoke again and stared into the mirror in amazement. His speech was nothing but indecipherable slurring.

His wife called an ambulance, and as paramedics treated him, he noticed that his speech was returning but sounded different. By 9 a.m., his speaking pattern was completely transformed. Those who knew him before were baffled.

When Stabler's family practice physician, Dr. Larry Berglind, first saw the patient he has known for more than 10 years, he asked, "Berley, why are you talking like this?"

It wasn't until his neurologist, whom Stabler hadn't known before his stroke, asked where in Europe Stabler was from that he was diagnosed with foreign-accent syndrome.

Although the accent has presented challenges, Stabler knows he's lucky. Stroke is the third-leading cause of death in the United States, behind heart disease and cancer, according to the American Heart Association.

In Stabler's case, stress from the holidays, a death in the family and beginning a new job after a layoff had contributed to high blood pressure, 218 over 146. Stabler also had a history of hypertension, and it didn't help that he has diabetes.

He is working to strengthen muscles on the right side of his face, but otherwise, his accent is about the only noticeable sign of the bullet he dodged. Doctors termed his stroke "mild."

Six days after his admission to the hospital, Stabler was back home, with a new way of speaking … and a lot to explain.

A new Berley

"The way he was talking just flipped me out," Shari says. "So many people think it's a put-on, because it's such a good accent."

His longtime friend, Brian Beam, owner of Cinema Quest, where the two now work together, says he wasn't sure at first if the whole thing was a practical joke.

The two have been known to call each other when one is at a house installing a home theater, playing the part of an angry homeowner who questions why someone is in his house.

The accent, Beam soon learned, was no joke.

"It's this new accent with the old way of saying things," Beam says.

The easy part for Stabler was convincing those closest to him that his French accent was real. The challenge has become selling it to those strangers he meets and the old clients he comes in contact with.

"When I call old clients, they have no idea who I am," he says. "I find myself trying to speak distinctively with my old clients, but then I just have to let it go."

Speech therapy has done little to change his accent. Rather, it serves more to help strengthen the muscles on the right side of his face.

He hasn't suffered major paralysis of the face and limbs as many stroke victims do, but he does have a little trouble playing the trumpet, though that is improving.

"Speech therapy is 'TOHR-cha,' I tell you," Stabler says.

The mysterious brain

The accent — and possibly the heightened senses of vision, smell, hearing and taste he reports — are a result of the brain reorganizing its circuitry to heal and perform old tasks, says Jack Ryalls, a professor of neurolinguistics at the University of Central Florida who has taken a lead role in studying foreign-accent syndrome.

Ryalls likens the way a brain works after a stroke such as Stabler's to that of a lamp that flickers: It still illuminates, but in a different way than when the circuitry was wired correctly.

"The brain reorganizes after a stroke, tries to find new pathways to accomplish old motor tasks like speech," he says. "Sometimes, it overcompensates or does it imperfectly."

Ryalls, who recently worked with a woman in Sarasota who awoke with a thick British accent, says speech impediment in stroke victims is a mysterious hurdle, as are many phenomena of the brain.

Therapists, he says, have been known to hold up a card with the word "blue" on it, only to have the patient unable to speak it and give up trying.

However, when the patient gets upset, oftentimes he will blurt out: "Darn it, I can't say 'blue.'"

Since 1919, about 20 cases of foreign-accent syndrome have been documented, Ryalls says.

Stabler's case is the first that Berglind, the family physician, has ever seen.

"It's probably something I will never see again," he says.

After recent media exposure of the Sarasota woman with the British accent and a Philadelphia woman who appeared on numerous television talk shows, Ryalls says 10 more possible cases have come to his attention, which he says demonstrates that the syndrome is woefully underreported and seldom diagnosed. In so many ways, the medical community doesn't fully agree about what foreign-accent syndrome is, how to diagnose it or why exactly it happens.

In many cases, he says, doctors are simply shooting in the dark.

However, there are four basic criteria — simple criteria — that neurologists follow to diagnose the syndrome: the patient must sound foreign, have suffered a brain injury, sound unlike his or her previous accent and have no background or significant exposure to a foreign country.

And, Ryalls says, there seem to be, in the limited number of cases reported, more women (68 percent) diagnosed than men.

Those who exhibit symptoms have damage to the left side of the brain (where the mind performs speech functions); left-side brain damage affects the right side of the body.

In Stabler's case, a lesion on the brain caused by the stroke affects his speech pattern. Stabler's particular lesion is small, Berglind says.

In trying to break down the various accents that manifest themselves through the syndrome, experts are finding that the accents might be nothing more than a listener's perception.

In other stroke cases in which speech is affected, the same part of the brain is damaged. The only difference, says Jennifer Tooley, a speech-language pathologist with the Greenville Hospital System who is working with Stabler, is that most stroke victims' slurred speech doesn't sound "normal."

It's more likely, she says, that a foreign accent is only a particular kind of slurred speech — a sound that is picked up by the listener as an accent when it is nothing more than a change in pattern unrelated to culture.

"It's very exciting to study," Tooley says.

From German to Greek

Sometimes, Stabler's voice sounds German, other times Greek. One person told him he sounded like an Iraqi.

But for the most part, he's told he sounds French ("oh-kai" for OK; "BUH-lay" for Berley).

"I tell people I'm working my way across the continent, back to America," he says.

In describing what he thinks a German accent sounds like, he seamlessly alters his accentuation to sound distinctively German.

He's at a loss for why he can force himself to speak a convincing German accent and not speak common American English.

Speech therapists seem to agree that Stabler's accent is German. When he's tired, and his speech slurs more than during the morning, Stabler's voice sounds more Greek, his Greek clients say.

Ryalls says that French accents are more common, and he believes the sound is a result of timing and irregular accentuation on syllables.

When such aberrant accents are broken down to their smallest parts, linguists find that the speech pattern is more an odd mixture of sounds than anything else. Stabler, in some sentences, unconsciously speaks a few words that sound Southern.

"If you look at the detail of it," Ryalls says, "it's not really a French accent. Some people believe it's partly in the ear of the beholder."

A Frenchman at heart

The ear of the beholder is all that matters in the world of Berley Stabler, because that's why he must answer question after question about his new voice.

No matter how hard he tries, Stabler can say only two words in his native, Southern vernacular: "Marvin" and "aunt" (pronounced "ant").

He has no idea why those two words come to mind.

To speak them, he must concentrate, closing his eyes for about five seconds before he blurts out an eerie "typical-Southern-white-guy" accent.

His change in speech has had one particular side effect that has helped him: His singing voice is purer.

As he sings in the Simpsonville Methodist Church choir, Stabler has amazed choir director and voice coach Elaine Fowler.

In working with most Southern-accent speakers and those from the Northeast, Fowler says, she must train them to enunciate "pure vowel sounds."

People with distinct regional American accents need coaching to sing differently than they talk, she explains.

However, Fowler says that Stabler suddenly gained the ability to speak and sing pure vowel sounds almost flawlessly.

While his speech pattern will fade over time, Berglind says, his odd, blended European accent likely will never disappear. If his speech hasn't cleared up in two weeks, the change probably will be permanent, he says.

Ryalls, however, believes that because Stabler has recovered so quickly thus far, his accent eventually may fade.

Either way, Stabler has begun a new regimen of walking — both to improve his cardiovascular health and to create endorphins to help his brain heal. Doctors tell him the exercise will help immensely with health and speech.

Even so, Stabler's not sure he's ready to yield his exotic brogue just yet.

While his wife quips that her husband's appetite for French or European cuisine isn't any different than it was before, Stabler says he can't help but think his trumpet playing will take on a more romantic tone.

He says he will embrace whatever voice he's left with, as long as he can talk … and play the trumpet.

And if the voice that speaks to his romanticism is to fade, well, he says, that's life. Or, as his newfound countrymen might say, "c'est la vie."

—

February 28, 2004 

Scientists study stroke victim's brain

Berley Stabler's stroke-induced venture into the French dialect has taken the good ol' country boy on an unlikely journey.

First, it was waking in a hospital with a French accent, then convincing family and friends he wasn't faking, and all along the way enjoying the novelty of it all.

Now, Stabler – who, as the result of a stroke, has been learning to deal with an extremely rare condition called "foreign-accent syndrome" – is contributing his experience to science.

The home theater sales rep from Simpsonville recently traveled to Charleston to undergo a brain scan that experts say reveals groundbreaking information in determining what causes foreign-accent syndrome.

"What everybody is trying to figure out is, what is this?" said Dr. Julius Fridrikson, a communication and disorders scientist in the University of South Carolina's public health department who headed the research effort.

"What we found, nobody has ever found," said Fridrikson, who along with colleagues is rushing to get the findings published in medical journals.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging – a type of MRI used to determine brain function – Fridrikson said he was able to confirm finally, what researchers have long thought about the syndrome.

Scientists have theorized that a lesion on the brain caused by stroke, and the location and severity of the brain damage, is what causes someone like Stabler to suddenly develop a foreign accent.

Now, Fridrikson said, that has been confirmed, and with more study, he and collaborators from Nottingham, England, who were present for the scan, hope to gain more insight into exactly how victims recover and why some don't.

A new way of talking

Stabler suffered a stroke the day before Christmas.

While he escaped some of the more debilitating after-effects of stroke, such as full-scale paralysis and memory loss, the stroke immediately affected his speech pattern. His normal Southern drawl was replaced by what sounded like a French accent.

The accent is actually a mix of the typical slurred speech stroke victims suffer and a change in verbal accentuation.

Since 1919, only about 20 such cases have been reported in the United States, said Dr. Jack Ryalls, a University of Central Florida neurolinguistics professor who is a nationally recognized expert on the syndrome.

Ryalls, who learned about Stabler during an interview for a story that appeared in The Greenville News last month, encouraged him to undergo the scan.

Brain 'working overtime'

During the MRI, Stabler was asked to identify pictures and to recite words on command. The test showed how increased blood flow to a certain section of the brain helped him speak.

Fridrikson said he found that the section of Stabler's brain that helps control motor and speech function is "working overtime" to compensate for brain matter that was destroyed as a result of the stroke.

Much like an inexperienced runner receives more blood flow to his muscles than is required for a marathon runner, the speech section of Stabler's brain is receiving markedly more blood flow than in people with normal speech.

"This process can tell us which telephone lines are in place," Fridrikson said. "His brain is compensating for this stroke by increasing its effort."

The functional MRI scan has been used in brain research to study everything from schizophrenia to blindness. This is the first time it has been used on someone with foreign-accent syndrome, Fridrikson said.

Recovery coming, slowly

In the time since his stroke, Stabler's voice has gradually begun to return to normal. His voice sounds, here and there, more akin to his background as a lifelong South Carolinian.

Fridrikson said Stabler is recovering well because his lesion is small and because, at 45, he is relatively young for stroke victims.

Because Stabler is recovering so well, Fridrikson said a follow-up scan in late June could make headway in determining exactly how those with foreign-accent syndrome recover.

Stabler said he learned something valuable.

During the testing, Fridrikson showed him a scan of a woman who had suffered a similar stroke in the same part of her brain.

But instead of a change in speech and mildly decreased motor skills in the face, as Stabler has, her injury has left her severely debilitated.

The change in accent has been kind of fun, Stabler said, but "this made me really take hold not only how precious life is but how fortunate I am to be showing good recovery. I guess it hit home even harder."

 —

February 18, 2005

Berley Stabler strives to stay fit while battling new obstacles

Berley Stabler is a Southerner once again; his flirtation with life as a Frenchman is but an exotic, bittersweet memory.

A "trom-PET" is again a "TRUM-pet"; "JEH-zus" is "JEE-zus."

Stabler has returned to his native South Carolina accent after a strange, yearlong odyssey during which he spoke with a French accent as the result of a rare, stroke-induced condition known as "foreign accent syndrome." Only 20 cases of the syndrome have been reported since 1919.

Rarely does Stabler miss the French accent he acquired after suffering a mild stroke in December 2003 and the attention it brought him initially from friends, family, the media — and physicians across the globe who were fascinated at the prospect of studying his case.

Soon enough, the novelty wore off.

After all, the Simpsonville salesman is still, at the core of the whole ordeal, a stroke survivor.

He had to endure rigorous speech and physical therapy, reverse a lifetime of poor eating habits and take a daily cocktail of medicine for the purpose of lowering his blood pressure (medication he no longer has to take thanks to improved health through exercise and diet).

But his trying experience could provide a substantial benefit for other stroke patients.

Stabler's foreign accent syndrome has now faded almost completely as a result of his brain's successful mending, and doctors hope that the studies they have conducted on his brain over the past year will yield new knowledge about how to help other stroke victims recover.

A University of South Carolina neurology professor has been studying Stabler's brain with a powerful MRI device in Charleston, tracking how the brain heals the damage a stroke inflicts and how that healing process could lead to better treatment methods.

And a British medical journal is set to publish Stabler's case history to document the rare syndrome.

Two British neurologists as well as a foreign accent syndrome specialist from the University of Central Florida will meet Stabler in Charleston in March for one last scan.

A trying time

Where once he quipped about a latent romanticism unlocked and reveled in the new-found ability to sing whole vowel sounds in the church choir, Stabler now is ready to put the whole accent thing behind him.

There was something intriguing at first about waking up after a nighttime stroke with what sounded like a French accent.

Of course, it wasn't actually an accent of any nationality, but rather the ear's interpretation of a distinct form of the slurred speech that most stroke victims exhibit.

Either way, Stabler says he soon tired of speaking so slowly.

"It was fun at first," he says in an unmistakable Southern drawl. "But it started getting frustrating."

Eleven months after his stroke and the onset of the French accent, around Thanksgiving, Stabler's voice began to return to normal.

Today, he is a man determined to avoid another stroke. That means a regimen of walking — three miles each day at the Simpsonville Activity Center — and weightlifting to build on the past year's rehab work.

He's lost 46 pounds since he suffered his stroke Dec. 18, 2003, and his blood pressure readings are right in line with what defines a healthy cardiovascular system. He's found himself renewed — and the stroke isn't the only force that has driven him.

In April, Stabler's wife, Shari, passed away suddenly. About the same time, the home-electronics business he helped run with a longtime friend folded.

It was a difficult, painful time, a period in which he says he had to reach deep down for faith in order to press on.

Over the summer, Stabler decided to honor Shari's life by working in a nursing home, remembering how fond of the elderly she had always been. Just before Christmas, he was laid off from that job.

Out of work, Stabler entered 2005 hoping for a better year than the one that had just passed. Yet, only a few days into January, he found himself suddenly paralyzed.

 Steadily throughout that day, Stabler lost feeling in his limbs and soon had trouble breathing.

The doctor told him he had a burst blood vessel on his upper spine (not the result of a stroke) and gave him a choice: life-threatening surgery that might or might not work, or spending the rest of his life as a quadriplegic.

He had two minutes to decide. He thought of the late Christopher Reeve. He prayed: "I said, 'God, if you're ready to take me, I'm ready to go.'"

His decision is clear in the thick, 6-inch-long scar scaling his lower neck and back and the furious power-walking he engages in every day.

Lying in the hospital bed, though, he got a call on his cell phone. It was a job offer to get back in the home-entertainment business at Tweeter Home Entertainment Group. Stabler told the prospective employer he was in the hospital, that it might be a few weeks before he could clock in. They held the job for him.

This week, he started his new job … just as he returned to work mere weeks after he suffered his stroke.

The Hosanna Brass ensemble Berley plays trumpet in has joked with him that he should change his middle name from Jacob to Job, says Terry Layne, who has played tuba with Stabler in the brass band for five years.

"I've never met anyone like him," Layne says. "How many people do you know who could do or would do what he's done? For someone who has lost as much as he's lost, he's retained the very best human traits."

An opportunity

Stabler's recovery from the stroke was an opportunity that researchers couldn't pass up, not only because of the rare chance to study a patient with foreign accent syndrome, but also because of the ease with which they could watch how his brain recovered.

The stroke left a small, conspicuous lesion on the part of the brain that governs speech, making healing easy to monitor, says Dr. Julius Fridriksson, a neurology professor at the University of South Carolina's Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders.

Stabler's peculiar side effect — the accent — was the type of symptom that was easy to compare alongside the improved blood flow in the damaged area of the brain, Fridriksson says. That made it so that doctors could distinctly link healing to improvement.

"It's a clearer picture," Fridriksson says.

Dr. Jack Ryalls, a professor of neurolinguistics at the University of Central Florida who has taken a lead role in studying foreign accent syndrome, says Stabler's is the first case that could be studied in such detail.

What researchers found, Ryalls says, was that Stabler's brain was routing blood flow to the damaged area of the left frontal cortex (where speech is generated), overcompensating so that he could speak.

Over time, the damaged area healed and blood flow began to work more conventionally.

Ryalls recently has studied a Sarasota, Fla., patient whose stroke led her to speak with what sounds like a British accent. Her damage was more extensive, and her speech hasn't recovered at nearly the rate Stabler's has, making his case all the more rare, Ryalls says.

In the last brain scan in March, Fridriksson says he and British doctors expect to find Stabler's brain has reorganized its circuitry and reached equilibrium. Studying Stabler's recovery, Fridriksson says, is a valuable piece of the puzzle in trying to develop new drugs to heal the damage from strokes.

Stabler couldn't be more pleased.

"That was the whole reason I participated in the study," he said. "It was all worth the effort if other people are helped. We made lemonade out of a lemon."

No Boundaries

In art, determined teen, dedicated teacher find a world without limits 

The classroom is abuzz with a creative energy that is here but not here, as artists absent from this world, lost into their own, hunch over their work.

As so often he is, Ryan Crum is the exception in this senior advanced-placement art class at Easley High School.

He, too, is lost in another universe.

But his gaze is forward, his mouth occupied with the task of grasping a paint brush and stroking it back and forth on the canvas with dexterity surgeons would envy.

It is his only way.

Without the use of any part of his body save for the limited motion of his head, Crum, a 17-year-old quadriplegic, must improvise to have any chance of pursuing his love of art.

The love he had before he was paralyzed in a hunting accident three years ago.

His determination has brought him not only personal fulfillment, but a legitimacy as an artist that he had never before experienced.

Ryan has defied convention.

He has redefined the bounds of how art is taught for the teacher doggedly committed to enabling his student's unique exploration.

And he has inspired the peers around him who are reminded, despite the blithe invincibility of teens, how vulnerable they are.

Ryan not only creates art. He him-self is a work of living art in the way that true art defines human life — the imperfection, the defiance against expectation, the daring, the suffering.

"I got one piece, man, ahhhh … it looks so great," he says in a muted country drawl that speaks to his calm, reflective demeanor.

His assessment of his work, by all accounts, holds true in comparison to the work of more-mobile and even professional artists (he's recently sold one of his original pieces for $5,000).

Nowhere is Ryan's struggle manifested in his art more than in an abstract landscape he aptly named "No Boundaries."

Its visual beauty is magnified by the depth of its context.

In the foreground is a quilted riot of colors, meant in physical terms to be the understory of an open pasture, with Appalachian foothills in the distance.

Ryan not only loves nature, he's obsessed with it.

In his painting, in between the chaos of pigments and the calm of the mountain range beyond, is a line of fence posts.

As he pondered how to add in the fence, Ryan says the meaning of his painting began to find its center.

There is no fence, only the posts, the symbols of the boundaries that could exist, but don't through his unique perspective.

He likes the original, poster-sized version better than the portrait-sized prints. Somehow, Ryan says, the prints hem in the vastness of what he intends for his creation.

An end and a beginning

Dec. 27, 2000.

Ryan recites this date almost robotically, as he would if a DMV clerk were asking his birthdate. In a way, it is — the day he ended one life and began another.

Ryan, then a 14-year-old Easley High freshman, his father, Roger, and a cousin had taken the Wednesday after Christmas to travel just across the Laurens County line into Newberry County for a deer hunt.

Ryan's older brother had piqued his interest in hunting. It seemed to mesh with Ryan's love for the outdoors, though he and his dad weren't terribly experienced at it.

Wearing the orange safety vest required while deer hunting, Ryan split from the group.

About 70 yards away, through thick brush and briars, Ryan's cousin saw movement and fired a shotgun blast.

It was Ryan. A single buckshot pellet pierced through the left side of his neck. His father carried his youngest son 200 yards to his vehicle and got him to Self Memorial Hospital in Greenwood in time to save his life.

The next day Ryan was moved to Greenville Memorial Hospital, and two weeks later, he was transferred to Atlanta's Shepherd Center, a physical therapy clinic that treats catastrophic injuries.

It took Ryan two months to recover enough to simply breathe, speak and move his head, his mother, Tana Crum, says.

While he was still on a ventilator, hospital staff asked him what he was interested in. He told them art.

An integral part of paralysis therapy is engaging patients in hobbies they love to get them on track.

Without a love for something, patients in Ryan's position can get sicker because of a lack of exercise and depression, both of which weaken the immune system, says Susan Skolnic, manager of therapeutic recreation at the Shepherd Center.

Some never come around, Skolnic says; others take to adjusting to their new life almost immediately.

At the Shepherd Center, Roger watched an older man who was also paralyzed fail to get off a respirator. He had lost the will to. He feared his son might suffer the same apathy of spirit.

"I didn't know how he would react," says Roger, 53, a tool and die maker for textile accessories manufacturer Steel Heddle in Greenville. "Some people just draw back into a shell."

But immediately it was clear that Ryan was not ready to draw into any shell. Rather, he wanted to draw on an experience he had dabbled with before. Really, he just wanted to draw.

"I did art, but I didn't take it as seriously," Ryan now says.

It was tough going at first. He was on a ventilator, and his neck had yet to gain the strength necessary to perform even the smallest of tasks.

He was determined.

Breaking new ground

Ryan returned to Easley High and the 1,500-student body his sophomore year — after getting credit for his schooling at the Shepherd Center — unsure of where his path would lead.

The Pickens County school district assigned him a permanent adult "shadow," Sissy Galloway, to help him through school.

He soon met Russell Jewell, his art teacher. By the end of his junior year, Ryan had qualified for Dr. Jewell's advanced-placement art class, a class difficult enough to warrant college credit.

As the weight of such responsibility — teaching a quadriplegic artist at an advanced level — weighed on Jewell's shoulders, he spent the past summer preparing, unsure of what he could possibly do.

Jewell brainstormed. He researched on the Internet. Nothing he found would guide him as to how a paralyzed artist could grow as an artist, rather than as a patient merely using art as therapy.

There was no map to be found. That's when Jewell decided he would figure it out for himself.

On the Google search engine, he typed in "superman." He found the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation and an opportunity to secure a grant for a new art curriculum, with Ryan at its center.

He asked for $800. He got $1,500.

Jewell's classroom is a study in the right-brained artist stereotype, reflecting his personality: somewhat disorganized yet purposeful. All around are signs of a work in progress that is his curriculum for Ryan.

A few strands of crude twine from the ceiling hold up a sheet of foam insulation on which the teacher mounted a hanging drill for Ryan to carve out a piece of Styrofoam.

He mounted an old record turntable sideways and attached a canvas for Ryan to paint with a blow pen. Masking tape holds together much of the invention.

Jewell even set up a paint gun for Ryan to shoot at a canvas, readdressing in a constructive way, he says, Ryan's hunting accident and his general interest in hunting.

And Ryan's art isn't just confined to what he can do with his mouth. Jewell set up a device that attaches to Ryan's wheelchair and allows him to use a paint roller with back and forth motion.

When the device initially proved too light, he tied on a weight.

In 21 years of teaching art, Jewell says he has never been more challenged to find new ways of expression.

"He comes along, and it's looking at art a whole new way," Jewell says.

And so, in that way, Ryan exists in a universe where imagination runs free, without legs, even if that universe is confined to a classroom.

The painting has helped strengthen his neck, but more than that, he says, it provides a release he can't find in anything else. It calms the nerves that often wreak havoc on his body.

"Whenever I'm doing art, it physically relaxes me," he says. "It helps me with my nerve pain."

When painting, Ryan is free. His imagination is limitless, emancipated from his body.

Like Ryan, Jewell says he is free, to invent, to learn, to push past the boundaries that Ryan has already broken through.

"I'm not sure where we're going," Jewell says. "I'm not sure if we're breaking new ground. We're just seeing where we go."

No boundaries

Everything in Ryan's life almost always finds its way to one central idea and love — nature — not only in his landscapes, but in his limited time for activities.

Ryan attends physical therapy after school. It takes him considerable time to get dressed, to eat, to get from class to class. Whenever he gets free time, his mind always wanders back to nature.

Months after the accident, Ryan and his dad were invited by a church friend to attend a hunt, one purpose being to face the past and put it behind them.

Roger agreed to go, but he says he refused to take a gun.

However, Ryan insisted that his father take a gun. It was a hunt after all. So he did. It was Ryan strengthening not only himself but others.

It's also the only time Roger has been hunting since his son's accident.

After relief from the immediate fear over whether his son would live or die, Roger says he has learned to appreciate how his son has handled life since Dec. 27, 2000.

Underneath his gentle, resolved spirit, the burden of a teen living in a bodily prison peeks through.

"It's something you never get used to," Ryan says.

He holds on to the hope, the slim but possible medical odds, that he can one day walk again.

In the meantime, Ryan is slowly and steadily re-integrating his previous life into his current one.

A few weeks ago, he went on a hunt with a group that takes others with similar disabilities. On his next such hunt, he plans to mount a gun that he can fire with his mouth.

His wheelchair, adorned with a brown-based camouflage book bag, has become multipurpose like an SUV, except that he actually uses his vehicle in the wild.

"I take it off-road," he says. "I don't know if you're supposed to, but I do anyway."

Ryan still enjoys his bass boat, and he's planning to take up fishing again with the aid of a special rod.

In his boat, strapped into a five-point harness, he feels the freedom of the breeze in his face, the openness of the water. As he relates this, he would surely stretch out his arms if he could.

His sense of freedom is infectious.

"He is one of the most positive things we have going in this school," says Easley High assistant principal Danny Merck. "We see him leave early for class, he's always got a smile on his face."

When the faculty first saw one of Ryan's paintings, Merck says "everybody wanted it." There is something in the art that speaks to the soul, that calms the ills of a world caught up in achievement.

"At a time when accountability and the stress is getting to the teachers, we just look at those pictures," Merck says.

Ryan's determination and calm acceptance of the cards he has been dealt acts as a spark to everyone around him.

Brittany Morgan, 17, a classmate who has been friends with Ryan since their freshman year, says she remembers a completely different person before the accident.

A more average, typical teenager by those narrowly defined high school standards.

"This has made him one of the most extraordinary people I know," says Morgan, who plans to study biology at the University of South Carolina and minor in art. "He's almost got a completely different outlook on life. He's the center, the core of this class."

Ryan's work and dedication have been a boon to the Easley High art department.

A Greenville mortgage firm that annually buys student artwork has purchased one of Ryan's pieces, "Field of Flowers," for $5,000.

Half of the proceeds will go to the art curriculum, a blessing that Jewell says comes in a time of need as ongoing budget cuts gut programs.

But such things are ancillary to what Ryan provides in spirit, Morgan says.

Even without the context of his life, absent the knowledge of the deep place his work emanates from, Morgan says she believes, like others, that his art stands on its own merits visually.

Like Ryan, she considers herself an artist with expressionistic leanings, an interpreter, one foot in the abstract and the other kept in the real world only out of necessity.

Art is where the two meet on equal grounds, and Ryan, she says, passively teaches her and others around him the hard-fought lessons of life so often overlooked by teens.

"Most of us right now feel like we're invincible," Morgan says.

Ryan is long past accepting that falsity so ingrained into teen life. His father says Ryan "understands his limitations."

Some things are not meant to be. Ryan had long wanted to be a game warden after he graduated from high school. That no longer is practical, he says.

He wants to go to college, but doesn't know which one or what he would study. He's earning a college credit in his class, but he's not sure he could afford to go to college if he wanted to.

The real world is one of limbo, a state of inertia that spreads through every aspect of his life.

Except for one. A world of art where there are no wheelchairs.

Where there are no fences and no boundaries. "In art," he says, "you can just go anywhere."

Wookie Here, Chewbacca’s In Town

Science fiction show today

Just so you know (and, chances are, you probably never knew you wanted to), the Chewbacca of "Star Wars" fame speaks more than just fluent Wookiee.

As for his second language — that curiously pervasive standard English most of the characters spoke a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away — it sounds strikingly … British.

Even stranger: Furry bilingual alien warriors, it turns out, aren't put out to pasture when the war against the galactic evil empire is won. They live in suburban Texas, when they're not on tour in places such as Greenville doing sci-fi conventions.

At least, this Wookiee does.

Thanks to the loyal disciples of the "Star Wars" mythos, Peter Mayhew has made a lifelong career out of his role as the lovable-but-mighty Chewbacca.

The 7-foot-3, British-born actor appeared in the original three "Star Wars" movies in the 1970s and '80s and will return as Chewbacca in the May 2005 final installment of the "Star Wars" prequels, "Episode III."

This evening, he will be at the Palmetto Expo Center as part of the "Shock & Awe Sci-Fi Road Show," a traveling band of former sci-fi stars and one cosmic voyager who actually has traveled in a space ship, Rick Searfoss, commander of the late space shuttle Columbia and pilot of Atlantis.

Mayhew, 59, took time this week to talk by phone about his role as the growling co-pilot of the Millenium Falcon.

A gag order imposed by creator/director George Lucas keeps Mayhew from saying too much about "Episode III," but he freely shares his experience behind the mask:

News: Which of the five "Stars Wars" movies thus far meant the most to you personally?

Mayhew: "The Empire Strikes Back," because Chewy was involved in the original "Star Wars," but he had a lot bigger part in "Empire" than he was ever expected to because of the reaction of the fans.

News: What about the newer films, like "The Phantom Menace" and "Attack Of The Clones?" How do they measure up?

Mayhew: I think they're getting better. When you look at the first one ("Phantom"), it's the first chapter of a book. You've got to introduce a lot of characters. The second one was far, far better than the first one. From what I've seen, the third one is going to be really good.

News: Chewbacca's voice is a bunch of baying and growling. The voice in the movie is dubbed, but have you mastered it yourself?

Mayhew: I can do an impersonation, but I'm not going to. Usually at the Q&A, someone will come up and say, "Either me or my friend do a good impersonation." I listen to that and give them back what I think is an impersonation. So it works both ways.

News: How do you bring to life a character who is played from behind a furry suit and whose lines you don't speak?

Mayhew: You've got four actors on the set. I just react. Chewy reacts. The only thing he can't do is talk. He's like an actor that's not got any lines at all, so he has to express himself in concern with what's going on around him. Chewy's reaction is, "Hmmm, I can hear this, I can understand it. What am I going to do about it?"

News: It helps to have Harrison Ford to bounce off of, right? He was the only one who really understood the Wookiee language.

Mayhew: We had a very good working relationship, which shows in the movies.

News: You must have some funny stories from filming that no one saw. What's one that you haven't told a million times?

Mayhew: When we were in Norway doing the Hoth scenes, I was the warmest person out there. They asked me to roll around in the snow. I'm covered in snow, I've got a costume on still, with no way of getting out, and it starts melting. You can imagine it's very nasty and messy.

News: A lot of hair and snow.

Mayhew: There's a lot of hair and a lot of snow. I said, "Unzip this damn suit, because it's starting to leak." I dropped it and it looked like a cat coming out of a washing machine, sitting on the floor."

News: Not too majestic for a brave warrior, huh?

Mayhew: Not like Chewy was a few minutes before. This thing looked like a drowned rat.

News: OK, how about "Return Of The Jedi"?

Mayhew: We filmed the Ewok scenes in Oregon. I was told not to leave the set in costume. I didn't realize that that part of Oregon is where Bigfoot was believed to be. I didn't want some hunter with a double-barrel shotgun taking potshots at me. I wore a red T-shirt and a blue pair of jeans just so I could be recognized. It seemed strange that I was restricted where other people could go, but I realized the Chewy costume looks a lot like a Bigfoot. That was one thing that I obeyed to the letter.

News: What's up with the fans? What do you think makes them so loyal to you?

Mayhew: We've got fans from 2 to 70 years old. They identify with it. Some people say Chewbacca was a teddy bear. Some people enjoy the mime part of it.

Everybody has always come up and said, "I enjoyed your work." What they mean by that, I don't know. I always try to pin them down: What did you really mean by that? You, say, get 12 people together, everybody's got a different view of which character is their favorite.

News: How about this whole sci-fi thing? Why do fans who attend these shows seem to go more crazy over a fictional space traveler than a real astronaut like Rick Searfoss?

Mayhew: That's something I never really thought about. You take your guy who goes up in a rocket. It's something I wouldn't do. Playing a character in a movie comes naturally to me. Everybody has their own job they can enjoy. Every fan has their own heroes, whether they be actual sporting heroes, space heroes or movie heroes. There's so many different versions of heroes. If everybody were interested in the same thing, life would be boring.