The most fateful day of my life…

January 1 is an anniversary of sorts for our family.  It is the day we moved from Atlanta to Wilmington, NC…ten years ago.

Destiny; fate; divine intervention – do you believe in these concepts? I do. There was a time, when I agreed with them in my head, but had yet to experience an event that would convince my gut of their reality. Actually this is not even a story of one event but instead of several, what seemed random, events over decades that culminated in our move. This is the story about our “billboard from God.”

In August of 1989, we moved to Knoxville, Tennessee. Sandie and I had been married for not quite two years. We were moving our young family from the region where she grew up in Memphis all the way across the state – from the Mississippi River to the Great Smoky Mountains. It was there I was enrolling at the University of Tennessee as a 24-year old freshman in the School of Architecture.

The fact that I was a 24-year old freshman at a university deserves some explanation here. Sandie and I had met in 1984 at a 2-year liberal arts college located in Texas – I was a sophomore and she a freshman. We quickly became very good friends. At age 19, I hadn’t yet figured out what I wanted to be “when I grew up.” But, I did however know beyond any doubt with whom I wanted to spend the rest of my life. You are, after all, supposed to marry your best friend. So only after… graduating, followed by a couple of unsuccessful years of trying to find work with a 2-year degree that would support a family back home in Atlanta, then moving to Memphis and working with Sandie’s father in construction, finally getting married, working 40 hours a week and taking a drafting program at the local technical college every weeknight, did I finally figure out what I wanted to do – and that was to pursue five years of design school to put myself on the track to becoming an architect.

The study of architecture is all-consuming (time, energy, mental-capacity). On campus, the design school building lights are always on – and there are always students there working at all hours on their sacred projects –  semester-long design exercises for make-believe end-users. The program encompasses the history of building, the structural engineering of building, the systems of building, the materials of building, and above all else, the philosophy of the design of building. And here is the mantra that you are fed, not quite intravenously, in every lecture, critique and classroom discussion, whether you want to nod in agreement or no – ENVIRONMENT CAN CHANGE BEHAVIOR.  Under this dogma, you are trained as the next saviors of the world – your design can affect human action and thus you can, with your own pencil and a little creativity, create everlasting world peace among the nations!

Because of this environment (it was almost a self-fulfilling prophecy) the architecture students became a bit cult-ish. After all, you are the chosen few of the next generation of little Frank Lloyd Wrights. And you get to know your entire class on a first-name basis. The UTK architecture class of ’94 started out with about 120 students and by the time we walked across the platform at Thompson Boling Arena in our caps and gowns, we were down to about 50 or so. The point is you know these people because you’ve spent hours in design studio, lectures and semester-end critiques – where your designs are either praised or lambasted in front of your peers by real, working architects or more tenured design professors. You know who is dating whom, which classmates are “old” married students (that was me), which one threw her building model off the 5th floor atrium at 2am one night in a screaming frenzy of frustration, which ones had jobs with local firms, which ones where part of the military’s active reserve, which ones were smart, which ones were barely making it – and who you figured would never make it in the real world, which ones were alcoholics, etc. ad nauseum.

After my graduation in ’94, Sandie and I moved to Atlanta, where I had grown up. My family was there and the job market, at the time, was much better following the recession of the late 1980’s. We settled in, bought a house and by 2000 had two beautiful daughters. But Atlanta was no longer the “up and coming” city I knew as a teenager; it was now a full-blown metropolis of 5 million people – a Los Angeles “wanna-be” complete with daily traffic snarls, major sports teams, rapid transit and big city crime statistics. I worked in midtown where most firms were located but we resided in the suburbs. The Atlanta traffic put me at a minimum of 2 hours per day in the car. Even on Saturdays there were traffic jams just to get to the grocery store. The traffic, the pace of life, everything lived up to the age-old adage of the rat race. And we both felt like rodents running a marathon to nowhere.

Before our girls arrived in our world, we were giving the race a go. We believed if we stuck it out we could live the American dream too – and we were on our way with a mortgage, two new car payments and a schedule doomed to quench the life out of us. But once those precious girls arrived we started facing the disillusion of it all and began to entertain discussions about moving away to a place with a much slower pace – our own Shangri La.

One day on a visit to the local bookseller franchise, we stumbled across a book called “50 Fabulous Places to Raise Your Family.” Given our current mindset, I had to pick it up and start browsing through its contents. Here for the price of a Taco Bell dinner were details about fifty Shangri La’s – all in the good ole US of A. We purchased it and started reading it out loud to each other in the late evenings after the girls were out for the night. Could there be a place for us within these pages? There was Tucson, Arizona with its cosmopolitan, yet friendly, small-town feel set among breathtaking mountain scenery. Too far west. Then there was Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania, an exciting suburb of Pittsburgh. Too far north. And Fort Myers, Florida with (what was then) a hot job market and gorgeous Gulf Coast beaches. Way too humid!

For some reason, call it fate if you must,  we stumbled across a place which captured our attention. On page 235, to be exact, we found it. Wilmington, North Carolina. We had, up to this point, never even heard of the place. But as we read its “charming” description, it became more and more intriguing. Located in the South, where both Sandie and I grew up and which meant it wouldn’t be too far away from family – check; a historic downtown, a nice treat for someone who studied architecture – check; a growing economy – check; the perfectly-sized town where it was big enough to support a wide range of industry (tourism, manufacturing, shipping, even movie studios) but yet small enough to where you typically saw folks you knew when you were out and about – check; a university campus, UNCW, which we knew meant arts and cultural events – check; and the trump card – some of the most beautiful beaches on the Atlantic north of Florida – CHECK. We both remembered as kids the beach as a magical, annual event that never lasted long enough. But to think you could live within minutes of the ocean? It was nearly too good to be true!

Out of all those fifty places Wilmington became our Shangri La.  We had still yet to visit this destination, but we started inserting phrases like, “one day when we move to Wilmington,” into our conversations, accompanied by a sly wink to each other. I would come home from fighting traffic and shout, “OK, pack it up! We’re moving to Wilmington!” I think it gave us hope as we were still trudging through the metro rat race – a glimpse of light that the darkness just might not last very much longer. Our girls would hopefully have a chance to be “raised” in one of those 50 fabulous places. But as of yet, we still had no clue how this might come about. It was still just a dream.

In May of 2002, the American Institute of Architects held their annual convention in Charlotte, NC. Held in different cities around the country each year, the three-day event gives 8,000+ industry attendees a chance to see what is going on at the cutting edge of place-making. It also allows one to garner required continuing ed credits, a multitude in fact, in a condensed schedule. But its an expensive trip. Even the registration fee alone is around $700.  Then there’s the travel, hotel, dining. It adds up quickly. So after 8 years of practice, I was a fully-licensed architect, but still had not been able to attend a single convention. However, that year the distance was drivable, a few hours from Atlanta, and my company would pay the registration fee. So, why not? It wouldn’t hurt and it would be good to get away from the gritty details of construction drawings and see what was going on in the design world.

On the very last day of the convention, at the conclusion of the very last continuing education seminar I attended, I saw a familiar face coming down the aisle toward the exit. It was LeeAnn Mitchell, a pleasant Southerner with an expected drawl who was one of my classmates at UT. We hadn’t seen each other since graduation day. We talked about our families. She had married her high-school sweetheart Brian Lawrence, her name now changed, whom she had dated the entire time our class was going through the obstacle course of design school. I told her how Sandie was doing – most of my classmates knew Sandie because she would always come to rescue me from design studio at 5:30 pm and take me to our off-campus residence – my sanity away from all the craziness. I told LeeAnn about our girls and that we now lived in Atlanta.  I then asked where she lived. Her answer completely dumbfounded me – Wilmington, North Carolina! After all of our dreaming about Shangri La, here was a tangible connection to that place Sandie and I had only dreamed about. Here was someone who actually lived there. Wow! So I briefly mentioned our dream to move there one day. We said our goodbyes and good lucks.  It was a conversation that lasted no more than 5 minutes and after relaying it to Sandie, I nearly forgot about it and never realized how fateful it would become. Out of all the convention destinations, out of all the attendees, out of all the seminars, Wilmington reached out from the boundaries of a dream and grabbed us by the shirt collars.

Fast-forward to October of 2004, over two years later. I walked in the door of our Fayetteville, GA residence after a typical hour-long battle of brake lights, lane changes and horn honks ready to relax with my girls. Sandie greeted me with a quick kiss and then a smile, but it was the “something-I-can’t-wait-to-show-you” kind of smile. She took my hand and led me to the kitchen where our land-line answering machine sat on one of our counters and stated, “You have to hear this message!” She hit the “play” button and a female voice with a distinct Southern drawl started speaking in an uncertain tone but with an urgent message:

“Hey there! This message is for Mark Loudermilk. I’m not even sure this is the right Mark because I had to look the number up on the internet. But if you are the Mark Loudermilk who studied architecture at the University of Tennessee, this is LeeAnn Lawrence. I wanted to tell you that our firm here in Wilmington is in desperate need of architects, so if you’re ready to move to the beach please call our office immediately.”

Sandie and I looked at each other in excited disbelief! Was our dream about to come true? The magnitude of all those tiny little instances occurring over years intersecting into this one moment was staggering.

We came to learn afterward that in late 2004, Wilmington was in the midst of a gigantic building explosion. It was in fact, one of the new destination cities for retirees from the north – attractive because it had all the same benefits of Florida without the extreme climate or the excruciatingly long drive back to the north to visit family during the summer. And LeeAnn’s manager, searching for a pool of talent outside the Wilmington area, had asked his employees to think of people they went to school with as potential hires. It was then she remembered our 5 minute conversation at the very end of the convention in Charlotte and started digging for our number.

In the few months that followed, I flew to Raleigh and drove a rental car to Wilmington. The first time I crossed the intracoastal waterway drawbridge heading toward the Wrightsville Beach office of the firm who would eventually hire me, I saw all the boats and the seagulls and smelled the salt in the air. The chills ran up and down my spine. Here at last, was our Shangri La. Brian, LeeAnn’s husband, took the day off from work and showed me around the area. Here were the places I had only read about with Sandie. It was perfectly surreal. Back in Atlanta, the countdown began and I placed a large map of the southeastern North Carolina coast on my wall at work, annoyingly showing all of my coworkers where I was about to move. We put our house on the market in the worst possible time (it sold within three weeks of our move). I took one weekend to finally bring the girls to see where we would be living and to find, in one Saturday, a home to rent. And on New Year’s Day, 2005, we packed our belongings, our girls and our dog into our vehicles and made the 7-hour trek eastward to the Cape Fear coast. What God had in store for us, we had no idea. But we knew beyond any doubt one thing: that He had placed a billboard in our path along the rat race freeway and had orchestrated a way for us to navigate an exit – an exit to our own little Shangri La.  Sure Wilmington is not perfect, but the pace here is exactly what we anticipated. And the years that followed brought even more exciting stories and events for our family, but those are for another time to tell.