By Scott Graber
It is Saturday morning, and I’m in the chestnut paneled lobby of the Fryemont Inn. This morning I’m sitting in a small pool of lamp light at a planked table normally used for Scrabble, Dictionary and the conversation-assisted assemblage of 1,000-piece puzzles.
This morning I’m warmed by a nearby fire and entertained by Steve Howell (a/k/a “Big Steve”) — a big, bearded man who tells me he is “tard” (tired) — who is also the night manager.
Steve says he was raised on a dairy farm, did a stint in the Marine Corps, but his real love was operatins bulldozers — an ability that took him to construction jobs around the world.
When I tell Steve that we live just across the water from Parris Island, he tells me the story of a local woman who went to seven graduations at Parris Island.
“One of her boys was killed in Korea; two others in Vietnam.”
Steve has made a pot coffee and we drink his coffee while talking about the Cowee Tunnel near Dillsboro, N.C. Steve tells me about the gold buried by the man who started the digging; about the slaves he thereafter murdered; about the chain-ganged convicts who were drowned in their efforts to finish the tunnel.
As we talk guests make their way into the lobby and sip Steve’s coffee while waiting for the dining room to open. Fryemont’s forthcoming breakfast will include biscuits, bacon, grits and scrambled eggs. It will feature young, cheerful waiters who will try their best to get us a table next to the dining room’s huge stone fireplace.
Breakfast at the Fryemont is designed to get one ready for a 5-mile, cable-assisted ascent on the Alum Cave Trail; or a less rigorous climb up Deep Creek Trail. And breakfast at the Fryemont will be in dramatic contrast to yesterday’s frantic, big-screen accessorized scramble for pre-cooked waffles, pre-wrapped sausage biscuits and tangerine-colored eggs in Columbia.
A better way to describe the Fryemont experience is to describe what it is not.
It is not a television, refrigerator or a small stash of overpriced mini-bottles in your room. It is not shampoo, conditioner or body lotion in plastic containers attached to the shower wall. It is not mints on your pillow, a wake-up call, or movies on demand. None of these amenities are available in their wood-paneled guest rooms.
It is not required that you assemble a puzzle, or read a John le Carre’ novel as you sit next to their fireplace. But if you want diversion with other guests, you’ve got to go to the lobby. And thousands of guests have gone to the lobby — and then to rocking chairs on the adjacent deck — since Amos Frye built this rambling poplar-shingled building.
Big Steve tells me that the swimming pool was built first — just after the pool that was built at Vanderbilt’s Biltmore. It is a pool that is fed by a spring and it is very, very cold. But after hiking the Deep Creek Trail, or scrambling up Frye Mountain, it is an appropriate if slightly painful reward for that effort.
The Fryemont was built by Amos and Lillian Frye in 1923 and it somehow survived the Great Depression in the 1930s. I know this because there is fading, plastic protected correspondence from the Gulf Fertilizer Company, the New York State Retirement Board, the North Carolina College for Women and from tennis great, Bill Tilden, asking about room rates. Those rates were 5 dollars a day and 30 dollars for a week’s stay. Those rates included breakfast and dinner and the opportunity for strenuous uphill hiking; swimming in glacier-like water, and rocking on the deck while re-imagining one’s life. The Frye formula survived the Depression, World War II and continues to attract guests from around the country.
Tonight there will be a reception given by owners, George and Sue Brown, We have been asked to dress-up in the style of the 1920s. My wife Susan reminds me that our current wardrobe more or less mimics that era — I won’t have to rent a tattered, narrow-lapeled tuxedo and she has a long, black dress that might have been favored by Eleanor Roosevelt.
We are told there will be champagne celebrating 100 years of service. But we know the entertainment will be our fellow guests — and their tales of hikes, chess with their children and breakfasts next to the hearth.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
