Black Mountain was freedom.
And within that freedom I and others developed a discipline in drawing and writing that involved listening and seeing with such continuous and every day, as it ever was. Black Mountain was not something you grew out of. Like freedom, you grew into it.
The pure open space we lived every day, was a lot like Paradise: not involved in the accepted world, the understood geopolitical sense of reality. Black Mountain was the people who were there, which explains its sudden changes. From 1950, or for sure ‘51, it was [Charles] Olson’s until it closed. Very different than Albers’. . .
We had to go to classes or face the wrath of the teacher: there wasn’t any kidding around. . . Classes were tough, we couldn't miss them — homework, heavy as it was, then doubled . . . it may have been free of academic rules and regulations, but that made it worse, the whole burden on us, and the faculty maybe getting plastered with us the night before no matter, we had to produce.
— From The Black Mountain Book, rev. ed., by Fielding Dawson (Rocky Mount: North Carolina Wesleyan College Press, 1991), 7, 205.

Often, at night, the camp director, a really pretty widow, would come up and talk to us about her religious beliefs, speaking with utter sincerity and simplicity. She always prayed for us aloud before we loaded up in the truck bed and went caroling away on one of our Saturday trips to the Biltmore Estate or some other place too distant for hiking to. She would read a Psalm about the Lord preserving our going out and our coming in for now and evermore. It is easy to see that she lived with the worry that someone might fall off a mountain or get snake bit. A tragic accident was about all that was needed to upset her precarious financial balance. She could often be observed in her rooms with her bright head of hair bent down over account books. At any rate, the Lord heeded her: we all lived.
In the middle of this sojourn, so kindly conceived of as the place I was to improve my health, meet new people, gain weight, have fun, a letter arrived announcing that my mother, brother, and two aunts were on the way. A terrible pretender, I had written glowing letters home about how wonderful everything was, but another, truer message had somehow got through between the lines of the awkwardly written missive. I was thought to be homesick. The idea! I replied. Nevertheless, when, a week later, the family car pulled up the twisting road from the lake, I felt the key strike the prison door. No more ice water or wearisome clambering over slimy moss. No more shouting songs with silly words. No more scheduled play. Liberation was at hand.
It may be that my mother and aunts had invented the whole plan of my rescue from homesickness in order to get to North Carolina. At any rate, I joined the party, and the mountains took on another aspect entirely, as the view was now something not demanding to be hiked through. My mother and aunts would never have dreamed of climbing anything beyond the steps with balustrades, and my brother never mentioned it either. We were tourists in a beautiful land, which I could see for the first time without thinking how not to cry. Little Switzerland was a day trip, and Chimney Rock another; the camera was often out. The mountain air they delighted in became wonderfully breathable to me as well, “pure ozone,” as they called it, and we followed twisting roads both up and down, dizzy with daring and danger, hoping the car would make it and the radiator would not explode.
These then, that summer, were the Smokies, my first mountains. I came back to say good-bye to my friends at camp and be present at the closing night banquet where many tears flowed freely from those parting with such dearly loved friends. I wonder how much of this outpouring was not simply the adolescent need to have as many emotions as possible. I loved everybody there the minute I didn’t have to see them any longer...
It was the mountains that lingered with me. Their lofty outline against evening skies, the rosy corona the sunset left as it faded, seemed when I withdrew from it irreplaceable. Surprising myself, I longed to return, to have it back once more. For both air and atmosphere are singularly different up there in that region around Asheville. And Asheville itself grew importantly larger for me as I read more and found one afternoon, absorbed beneath the trees in the front yard in Mississippi, how a young man named Thomas Wolfe had grown up there, lived along its streets, known its people and climbed into the sunlit mountain stillness hand in hand with his first love.

— From Close to Home: Revelations and Reminiscences by North Carolina Authors, ed. Lee Harrison Child (Winston-Salem: John F. Blair, 1996), 48-50.