Underneath a ceiling of trees, near a 30-foot fire tower and a fractured section of a 220-year-old southern red oak way bigger than a truck tire, Kevin Pittman stands in the middle of a gravel road and waits. He expects that the school bus carrying third graders from Bryan Road Elementary in Garner will rumble toward him at any moment. When it does, Pittman will become a teacher. He’ll call himself Ranger Kevin and show dozens of students no older than 9 the many practical uses of almost every forest they’ll ever see.

Off to the side stand Gracie Brindle and James Kimes, two of Pittman’s colleagues. They’ll become teachers, too. All three wear the tan-and-green uniform of the NC Forest Service. Brindle and Kimes are educational forest rangers; Pittman is a forest supervisor, their boss. Their classroom is 826 acres that straddle the Johnston and Wake county line, a former tree nursery that in 1976 became North Carolina’s first educational forest.

Kevin Pittman welcomes incoming students to Clemmons Educational State Forest. photograph by Charles Harris

Within minutes, Pittman hears the rumble of a diesel engine. He holds out his arms like a traffic cop and motions for the school bus to pull past the fire tower that stands in the parking lot. When the door opens, students tumble out — one, two, three at a time. They line up and, with the help of their teacher and a few chaperones, get ready for an academic adventure inside their new classroom: Clemmons Educational State Forest, one of six educational forests in North Carolina.

“Are there any rivers around here?” a student asks.

“There is a river to the north, but you won’t be going there,” Pittman responds. “But you’ll be going by our pond. You’ll see that. Let’s go ahead and get y’all started.”

Three groups of third graders begin meandering down the trail where they’ll hear rocks “talk,” turn wood pulp into paper, and scoop up dragonfly newts in nets and scream, “I got something! I got something! But I’m NOT picking it up!”

Class begins.

• • •

During his 25 years at Clemmons, Pittman has met students who only knew a forest through a book or a laptop. They’d never seen one in real life. A few had no idea what matches were. Some thought you created fire with the flip of a switch. One even asked, “What good are trees?”

Pittman educates them because he knows the good of trees. He earned a conservation and natural resources degree from NC State. Moreover, he grew up outdoors. He saw the woods behind his grandparents’ house as a magical place. At his childhood home, he heard his mom tell him and his older brother more than once as they bounded in and out of the house, You can be inside or outside, but you can’t keep opening the door!

Kevin Pittman photograph by Charles Harris

Pittman stayed outside because he loved to explore. He even poked around Clemmons as a student at Vance Elementary in Raleigh. He also remembers coming to the forest with his mom. They stood at the edge of a ravine and peered over, his mom holding tight to his hand. Pittman felt he had discovered the Grand Canyon.

He still carries that childlike enthusiasm for Clemmons. He might pick up a yellow-ringed millipede and tell students to lean in close and breathe in. He’ll ask what they smell, and when they can’t quite place it, he’ll tell them what it smells like to him: the vanilla and cherry almond scent of Jergens hand lotion.

Across the state, the NC Forest Service helps North Carolinians understand the ecological and practical importance of trees. Clemmons alone welcomes thousands of students each year. photograph by Charles Harris

Or he’ll walk along any of Clemmons’s four trails and tell stories of the trees along the path. He knows many. Like that of the trunk section of a 220-year-old southern red oak, secured by a cable with a pair of turnbuckles to keep it from splitting apart. Pittman compares it to a giant cookie.

That’s how he sees the forest: a place that can hold wonder and imagination.

“It’s like opening a book,” he says of introducing students to the forest. “You show them that it’s more than what you see in front of you.”

That’s exactly what Moody Myzell Clemmons would’ve wanted. This forest a few miles northwest of Clayton is named after him.

• • •

A portrait of Clemmons hangs in the ranger station, a few steps past a large terrarium holding a timber rattlesnake named Roxy.

Clemmons was raised on a Brunswick County farm that grew a little bit of everything: corn, cotton, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and, when he was a teen, tobacco. As the next to youngest of 11, he started working on the farm at age 4. Years later, he joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, a public relief program that employed young, unmarried men during the Great Depression. In a 1992 interview, Clemmons explained: “It did a lot of boys good. I mean, anybody who wanted to do something for themselves ordinarily can do it if they try hard enough, you know?”

Clemmons did try hard. He moved up the ranks, became a leader, and, in 1938, began working for John Simcox Holmes, North Carolina’s first state forester. Clemmons took a position at a tree nursery in what became known as Clayton State Forest. After nearly four decades as a professional nurseryman with the NC Department of Conservation and Development, he found out during his retirement ceremony in August 1974 that the forest he’d cared for would be named after him.

Moody Myzell Clemmons Photography courtesy of Clemmons State Educational Forest, photographed by Charles Harris

“He was surprised, almost shocked. I think he was actually in tears,” says his 81-year-old son, Charles, who stood a few feet away from his father during the ceremony. “During his 37-year career with the Forest Service, he produced virtually all the trees in the original forest by his retirement. It was his child, and he nurtured it into adulthood.”

Before he retired, a newspaper article reported that Clemmons had helped contribute to the production of more than 250 million tree seedlings for reforestation on at least 300,000 acres of land in North Carolina. He told his grandchildren the most memorable moment of his life was having the state’s first educational forest bear his name.

“He was a teacher himself,” Charles says. “And I think he would love the idea of kids coming to learn more about the forest and what it means to all of us.”

• • •

Two and a half hours later, class ends. After making paper, measuring water quality at the pond, and learning along the Talking Rock Trail how a piece of graphite could be part of their next pencil, the third graders clamber back into their school bus. When asked what they liked, their answers come loud and quick.

“The pond! You got to catch stuff.”

“Yeah, the pond! I liked the pond. I caught a round circle kind of thing that looked like a turtle.”

“Seeing those plants that looked really cool. They were like little umbrellas.”

“Learning how to make paper. It actually looked like paper, and you got to squeeze the water out [of the wood pulp], and that was really satisfying.”

Ranger Gracie Brindle, formerly of Clemmons Educational State Forest, has seen the effect of her lessons: “Some of the kids haven’t been in the woods, and when you show them what’s out there, you can see the amazement in their eyes.” photograph by Charles Harris

Brindle and Kimes, the two educational forest rangers, understand that enthusiasm. Like Pittman, they grew up outdoors. And like Pittman, they see the benefit of what they do for the youngest generation. They also know how working in a forest hits them, especially during the summer, when the dappled sunlight fingers through the trees and bathes everything in ever-shifting shades of gold.

“It’s like God’s artwork,” Kimes says. “It’s hard to imagine He created something like this. And we get to live in it almost every day.”

“It’s like a movie,” Brindle adds. “The sun comes through the leaves, and when you see it, you think, ‘This is God’s doing.’ That brings me peace.”

Unlike a park, Clemmons is a working forest, which means it’s sometimes harvested. Kevin Pittman shows students how trees can be turned into paper. photograph by Charles Harris

Pittman became forest supervisor in 2016. He’s long appreciated Clemmons’s devotion to the forest, Clemmons’s Forest, and he feels he’s a steward of this place. He’s walked much of its 826 acres, and whenever he comes across the ravine from his childhood, it reminds him of what he has come to learn: Everything looks so much bigger when you’re a kid.

Then, he remembers. The safety of holding his mother’s hand and the fun of letting his imagination soar. Some of the thousands of students he sees every year likely have that same sense of wonder. Meanwhile, whenever he’s not Ranger Kevin, or doing office work, Pittman walks through the forest, looking for ways he and his rangers can nurture the seeds Clemmons first planted more than eight decades ago.

Rangers like James Kimes follow in the footsteps of Moody Myzell Clemmons. photograph by Charles Harris

“Everything that we have here,” Pittman says, “has been built on the shoulders of others.” He gives all credit to Clemmons and to Mike Huffman, the previous forest supervisor.

In August 1996, Hurricane Fran toppled acres of trees in the forest. Clemmons didn’t see it. He died a few months before Fran hit. It would have broken his heart, Pittman says. But today, everywhere he looks, in everything he sees, Pittman spots signs of rebirth, of new growth.

After all, this place is a working forest. Managing it sometimes means harvesting acres of timber. It means the forest will continue to change over time. But its stewards will make sure it continues to thrive.

That was Clemmons’s dream. Today, it’s Pittman’s dream, too.

Clemmons Educational State Forest
2256 Old U.S. Highway 70
Clayton, NC 27520
(919) 553-5651