How about the rest of your life?
If you’re visiting Moore County this week, chances are you’re here to take in the 2001 U.S. Women’s Open Championship. If not, you’ve picked a funny time to relax and get away from the traffic.
But accept some advice from a relative newcomer (four years): Between rounds of watching the world’s top women golfers play at Pine Needles, make a point of getting out and looking around the local environs. You’ll find that this isn’t just a great place to visit. You might want to live here as well.
You could do a lot worse.
When you think of Moore County, you probably think of golf and retirement. And no wonder. You could play on a different course every week for almost a year, paying anywhere from pocket change to a king’s ransom, without ever leaving the county. There’s a whole local economy built around catering to every imaginable need of everyone from the occasional weekend duffer to the top-rated professional.
Retirees, too, find everything they need here: reasonable living costs, relaxed pace, gorgeous environment, top-flight medical community, thriving cultural life, boundless volunteer opportunities and an array of metropolitan centers within a two-hour drive.
Not least, they find an amazingly diverse and stimulating body of peers. I marvel at the deep reservoir of experience and expertise to be found in Moore County’s array of retired generals, ambassadors and CEOs.
But you needn’t have a newly engraved gold watch or a bag of clubs (I own neither) to find your niche here. Newcomers and links addicts have been coexisting harmoniously with Sandhills natives for a century now — ever since Boston soda-fountain magnate James Walker Tufts bought 6,000 acres of logged-over pine barrens for $1 an acre in 1895 and created a resort called Pinehurst.
This age-old interplay between newcomer and native, this constant infusion of new ideas and new blood into the local gene pool, produces a cosmopolitan, tolerant atmosphere that your average small Southern town can’t match.
Unlike many rarified resort destinations, Moore County is a real place with real families. We have a good school system that’s getting better, one of the best community colleges on the East Coast, and 74,000 people (up 25 percent in the past 10 years) — most of whom get up and go about living their real lives without giving much thought to greens fees or time-share condos.
Actually, this is several real places, each with its own distinct flavor and socio-economic mix. Moore County is like Florida in one sense: Its northern part is Southern, and its southern part is Northern. Just look at the names of some of the busiest streets in Southern Pines: Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut.
(How many generations of new arrivals have assumed their acquaintances live on “Main,” when in fact what they said was “Maine”?)
Even the components in the lower-Moore triad of Southern Pines/Aberdeen/Pinehurst, though looking more and more like one town every day, continue to act like Siamese triplets who can’t agree on where to go, what to eat or what to wear. Each wants to keep its own character and ambience. But all are having to face the fact that, to paraphrase Ben Franklin, they’ll hang separately unless they hang together.
Moore County is grappling with an array of growth issues. No single entity has stepped forward to assume a leadership role. But a consensus is rapidly emerging that it will take an extraordinary effort to preserve the elements that make this such an extraordinary area. Making that effort succeed will require a lot of work by a lot of dedicated, imaginative, open-minded people. People who know about solutions that have worked elsewhere.
People like you, stranger.
Enjoy the Open. But if you can, take time to visit the shops on Broad Street in Southern Pines. Spend an afternoon with a Realtor. Stroll the quaint sidewalks of the village of Pinehurst. Take in a showing of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Sunrise Theater. Try the new boardwalk on Aberdeen Lake. Check out the delightful Pottery Country in northern Moore. Go antiquing in Cameron. Hike the unspoiled paths in Weymouth Woods- Sandhills Nature Center. Tour Moore’s incredible Horse Country.
And ask yourself if this sandy soil might not be just the place to put down your roots.
Steve Bouser is editor of The Pilot. Contact him at (910) 693-2470 or sbouser@thepilot.com.
This column is reprinted from Monday’s edition of The Pilot.
