The Wolf Suite
The things you can find on Craig’s List!
It wasn’t easy for this Chicago songwriter to find an apartment in Nashville. For weeks I had explored and found a very inconsistent and quite obtuse response to my inquisitions.
Finally, I saw an ad for a place that was so unusual I’m absolutely certain I’ll never see its like again.
To say the Wolf Suite was unique would surely be understated. Imagine a long cabin suite, basically a huge room, built by a successful Nashville musician decades ago. Hand-carved Cowboy art was in as well as on the walls, the floors and along were fortified with planks and huge beams of varnished softwoods, and even the bed was a massive pine platform!
I had a deck outside my door and a swimming pool in the middle of the Tennessee woods! Sure, the internet signal was awful and the power went off several times in a few months I was there, but hey, sacrifice that material world for the Country Muse of Pegram, Tennessee, man!
The Wolf Suite was so-named because the owner of the grand log cabin home that stood in the middle of the property had established a sanctuary for older Wolf-Dogs he had rescued from around the country. The wolves were a separated and docile lot, but certainly a majestic group in their pens.
He called this project, Sojourn.
Unfortunately, my experience in the wild of Tennessee was short-lived as that owner (a very decent guy), and I didn’t see eye-to-eye on some essential things that constituted apartment living and, quite quickly, this songwriter was off to seek his fortune in the nearby town of Brentwood. There I found a nice enough apartment three floors up in a patch of old Tennessee they called Nippers Corner! Everything paled in comparison to the Wolf Suite (except my privacy), but it was there that I landed after a few initial months in the American South, and I was happy to have the place.
Pegram was no urban metropolis. In fact, I had to drive about seven miles into Bellevue to shop for anything besides gasoline. But it was a true slice of the Tennessee woods that I had never experienced before. To say, I was a greenhorn would be another understatement.
I saw my first wild turkeys on the side of the quarter-mile gravel stone driveway I had to enter and exit–at a 30° angle–each day, I heard bullfrogs at night, and of course, one of the wolf dogs kept on the premises howled at night and in the morning. Pretty cool.
A rambling creek ran through the property. At night, the stars and moon gleamed off the slowly moving water but gave little illumination. Once the Tennessee sun disappeared, the woods surrounding the Wolf Suite went almost pitch black. When it rained, it was like the tropics in the downpour.
I’ll miss the Wolf Suite, for sure, but I’ll always remember it as my landing place upon my sojourn to Nashville.
