The View from Tom's Stand

Born a city girl, Jane Alexander was wrenched from a vibrant, culture-laden metropolitan life to a primitive woods camp in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. There on a little flat surrounded by towering oaks and hemlocks she spent six-weeks every summer with her husband Tom and their two small children building a simple, old-timey log cabin with proper dovetail joints, mud chinking and hand-built stairs. With no roof over her head, no plumbing, no electricity she eventually got into the rhythm of rustic living and the wilderness became part of her soul. \nHiking the Smokies, the Blue Ridge and beyond she came to know more about the native Smoky Mountain plants than many of the locals. In her spare time she learned to cane chairs, to weave, to paint and to make haunting photographs of the gorgeous mountains around her.\nThis came after a successful career as a journalist in New York and Washington. One of the few women of her era to hold a professional job, she rose through the ranks to become senior editor at Time Life Books and at Science 80-86. \nShe recalls her happy childhood in upstate New York where despite the onslaught of World War II, she and her friends roamed free, walked to school and, in lieu of television, took Sunday drives with their families.\nMeanwhile her husband Tom who won awards for his incisive reporting at Fortune magazine retired early to resume the mountain ways he had learned as a boy—those of carpenter, plumber and electrician. \nSon Ames and daughter Amanda who contribute to this memoir hope it will illuminate their father’s insatiable curiosity, stick-to-it-iveness, and his drive to ask, “Why?” Their mother, they note, did not have the luxury to ask such questions since she was kept busy trying to maintain a career and a family while her shelter was either being demolished or expanded, depending on Tom’s fickle moods.