grace of the games, The

Southern Living, Oct 1996 by Ford, Gary D

The bagpipers stand ready, tartan banners snap in the breeze, and the clans are gathered at Stone Mountain. They have come to celebrate

Beneath trees kilted with fall color, above a circle of families in tents, comes a bagpiper to begin the day at Stone Mountain Memorial Park near Atlanta. He fills the bag with three deep breaths. At first the racket sounds like the creaks and groans of an old man rising from bed. Yet from noise flow notes as clear as this October morning, and the agony of air turns into a sweet anthem-hymn.

Early risers pause to doff their glengarry and Balmoral caps to music that has followed their families from Scotland across the sea to the South. Then, as the anthemhymn dies away, the Stone Mountain Highland Games & Scottish Festival opens for the day. Yet throughout the games, this one song hangs in the air, just as it dwells deep in the souls of these Scottish Southerners.

For a year I followed bagpipes to gatherings in the South. From Florida to Maryland, to Tulsa and Texas, whole families in tartan follow these festivals like pros on a golf tour for weekends of Scottish heritage and customs. At each place they raise their clan tents and tartan banners and gather their families around them.

Now they've arrived at Stone Mountain for the 23rd year of this festival. Here the South meets Scotland among clan tents and vendor booths arrayed under pines.

The games are going on in a grassy clearing. Men in kilts, with chests like whisky barrels and legs like oaks, grunt and heave stones, weights, and hammers for distance. They loft sheaves of hay over high bars, and flip 17- to 20-foot log poles in the air for the caber tossthe glamour event of the games.

At first, athletes in these "heavy events" of the games move the way bagpipes sound-awkward and out of step-as they prepare to toss an object the size of a small person. Then comes the explosion from the muscular powder keg of legs, hips, and back, and that's when weight, body, and motion become one in a final, graceful moment of release.

The competition grows keen, but the atmosphere seems like that of ys gathered for a neighborhood competition. Amateurs in one division and pros in another (who earn uly a little money) trade helpful nts. In the legends division men their forties and fifties prove they're still as strong as middleaged oxen, and share their game experience as well.

Too bad Carl Braun of Fredericksburg, Virginia, isn't here, but e's hobbling with a broken leg. Carl has won the U.S. Championships and set the North American record in the hammer throwgreat accomplishments for someone who just wanted to keep in shape.

"I was looking for something to compete in after track and field in college," Carl recalls. "My high school coach Nick Nichols said, `Why don't you try Highland games?' And I said, What are Highland games?' And he said, `We toss telephone poles and wear a skirt.' "

Carl has competed in Scotland, where some American athletes beat Scots at their own game. But at events in Scotland, usually only officials and athletes wear kilts. At ones I visited there, I saw no circle of clan tents, no vendors selling caps and claymores. Food booths offered more hamburgers than haggis.

You can buy plenty of haggis and Scotch eggs here at the Stone Mountain festival. Vendors sell caps, kilts, ties, and other doodads designed in nearly any clan tartan. You can buy videos (Braveheart is a cult favorite among clans), bagpipes, and books on Scottish history. You can taste Scotland, hear it, then walk among the circle of clan tents to find Highland families such as Armstrongs, Frasiers, MacDougalls, Johnstones, Macdonalds, Campbells, and Macphersons.

I've come to know J. T and Lucy McPherson of Johnson City, Tennessee, at various games, and they welcome me again with their usual greeting, "Come on in. Have something to eat. How about some Lynchburg Lemonade. You mean you haven't bought a kilt yet?"

We stand under the tent among tables laden with Macpherson literature, a pot of Brunswick stew and plates of cornbread, and wee glasses of the "water of life"Scotch whisky. Outside, some festivalgoers strolling by only gaze curiously at the quaint dress of these Southerner-Scots. Others look lost, and it seems they're searching for something. At one tent they scan the sept list of family names associated with that clan, frown, then move on to another tent.

One woman with a baby stops at the Macpherson tent, searches the sept list, and smiles suddenly: "Oh, my great-grandmother was an Archibald," she says and signs the register to join as a Macpherson clan member.

Lucy nods after her. 'I he people who stop here want to be a part of a family. They want to belong. And we gain something too. All this family, we would never have met otherwise. Each game is like a family reunion. Each event makes our family larger."

Charlie Rhodarmer, curator of the Scottish Tartans Museum and Heritage Center in Franklin, North Carolina, knows why the skirl of bagpipes makes Southern men bare knobby knees under kilt hemlines. "The kilt has become a holy relic," he says. "It is the representation of who I am and who I came from."