Where the Wild Things Are

“Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.” —Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

Justin Pope has kayaked past the hidden town on the Tar River many times, but never suspected a thing. “The woods cover it well,” he says, gesturing with a tattooed arm.

Now that he’s here in this decades-old, secluded private playground about six miles north of downtown Rocky Mount, Pope’s eyes dance from spectacle to spectacle. Ringing a five-acre field are four dozen saloons, each with a name, theme, and well-stocked bar. Some are polished and lit up like little Vegas attractions. Others look straight out of old Dodge City. 

Concert stages anchor the two poles, the larger of which is crowned in blazing red letters: MNO. 

That’s short for Men’s Night Out, the club launched by a handful of buddies in 1984. Despite being middle-aged, MNO shines like a backwoods Broadway as the club’s 58 official members and guests arrive for the annual two-day Rollin’ on the River bacchanalia. 

That’s how Pope, 47, wound up here for the first time; attendance is by invitation only, plus an optional $20 donation. 

Inside MNO’s ring of bling, revelers mosey from shack to shack sharking cocktails and brews, Boston butt barbecue, and chicken wings, while admiring each other’s creative embellishments. 

This Old House features a stainless steel autopsy table for dining. At The Lighthouse, a pair of mummified black snakes hangs from the chandelier coiled in eternal coitus. Entering Club Miami, visitors pass under a five-pronged neon-lit crown the size of an SUV. 

“SO cool,” says Pope, a welder by trade. “I would looove to be involved in something like this.”

The satisfaction of being part of something special has kept MNO going all these years. So is the pure joy, which most of us only experience in childhood, of building something with your closest pals—a tree fort, say—and then showing it off to others.

Americans are increasingly lonely and isolated—especially men. According to the Center for Inclusion and Belonging, 68 percent of Americans report feeling a lack of belonging in their own country and 74 percent in their local community. Many cite a decline in “third places,” or gathering spots that are not one’s home or work, and a corrosive sense that one’’s talents and contributions to the world just don’t matter.

At MNO, though, those things matter deeply. Without them, this would still be a soybean field.

“It strikes me as unusual and surprising that this place exists,” says Dr. Colin Campbell, associate professor of sociology at East Carolina University, upon reviewing a summary from this writer. “It’s not a dense urban area with a lot of people to draw from to make something like this work for so long.”

But as MNO’s determined and self-reliant founders plow well into their AARP years, the fate of this shaggy Shangri-La is in question. 

Collective Can Do-ism

Robbie Wooten darts around in a muddied golf cart, gray hair flapping. He’s the picture of happiness, even if a thyroid condition has slowed him down. 

“I may not have much time left, but I’m gonna enjoy it,” he says in that flinty, all-wheel-drive drawl of Eastern North Carolina men raised around farms and heavy machinery. 

The only member of MNO’s old guard who declined to give his age, Wooten comes across as the poster boy for the psychological benefits of social connection. “There’s three things that boys still like even after they grow up: cars, girls, and camps,” Wooten crows. “Since we were enjoying cars and girls, we decided to build a camp again.”

Back in 1984, Wooten was a whippersnapper working in his family’s boat business. He joined the local Jaycees, a civic organization for business-minded young men (and later women). But the Jaycees had an age limit of 36. 

“Some of the guys were aging out,” Wooten says. “But we liked each other. We wanted to stay together.”

So Wooten and various Jaycee buddies converted an old cottage on his family’s 70-acre farm into a clubhouse and started hosting parties. They christened the group Men’s Night Out, though wives and girlfriends often joined. 

After a few years, the rollicking get-togethers, which often included local musical acts, outgrew the clubhouse. In 1991, someone suggested moving the merry-making to the soybean field by the river. “So we got a couple flatbed trucks to put the bands on,” Wooten says, “and we set up tents and whatnot around it.” Wooten’s younger brother Mike christened the September party Rollin’ on the River (the first, it turned out, of many to come).

The crisp open air, the rumble of the water, and the dance of the wind-blown pines elevated everything. As Mike James, an early member, recalls, “We all kind of looked around and then looked at each other and said, ‘I think we’re gonna be out here for a while.’”

An idea took root: a shared vision of something like Woodstock or a pirate crew’s secret island, a place where collective can-do-ism wasn’t just a concept. It would have swinging saloon doors, roofs, walls, bar stools, slow cookers, grills, blinking lights, porta-potties. Everyone had something to contribute, from pouring concrete to smoking a pig or booking a band.

And it would spring up right there in that soybean field on the river, accessible by a sharp right turn off a lonely stretch of Highway 97 into a meadow on Wooten’s family farm, followed by a short walk past the clubhouse and through the pines. 

In 1992, early member Wayne Hill, then the manager at a building supply store, got hold of a surveyor’s wheel and measured off 54 lots, each with fronts about 26 feet wide. Hill, now 76, sketched out a master plan and hurried it over to the MNO clubhouse, where Wooten mounted it on a chunk of plywood. There it remains to this day, like the Declaration of Independence on display in the Rotunda of the National Archives. 

“There’s three things that boys still like even after they grow up: cars, girls, and camps. Since we were enjoying cars and girls, we decided to build a camp again.”

Robbie Wooten, MNO founder

Members divided up the lots and got to hacking their claims clear of brush. As August melted into September, they came out on afternoons and weekends—measuring, leveling, framing, sawing, sweating. At supper time, one of the squads would cook, then ring a chow bell to summon the others, just like on a cowboy chuckwagon.

“A lot of our people were builders, electricians, plumbers, contractors, and we all pitched in together,” says Wooten. “Guys in the concrete business would help someone out and the next thing you know someone else was doing them a favor. We had all sorts of machines and equipment in and out of here.” 

The first structure took the shape of an ersatz-adobe Mexican cantina. While it may look like a bordello from The Wild Bunch, the second floor was actually designed to host kids’ slumber parties. (As swashbuckling as the MNO crew was, they were also almost all family men.)

As the individualized joints came together, so did the electrical grid. In an inspired stroke, the club’s resident electricians equipped each spot with its own circuit breaker. So if one joint goes overboard with lights, appliances, and other bling, it won’t knock out the entire off-the-map town. Meantime, the resident plumbers ran pipes from an old farm well. The water pressure can be puny, but it does the job.

To fill all the available spots, the founders invited in “lot holders” who were not full members but could rent a space, customize it to their heart’s delight, and become part of the community—as long as they abide by its loose rules. (Byran Regan, who took photos for this story, became a lot holder in 2021.)

Today those early years feel like they belong not only to another time but to a different version of the human species—one that has never even heard of a wifi connection. 

Ready for More Sinnin’

With Rollin’ on the River established as an autumn tradition, in 2004 MNO added a companion shebang every April, the Spring Fling. Outside of these tentpole events, club members host smaller parties marking birthdays and graduations or just scratching an itch to socialize. Some head to the coast for an annual MNO fishing and golf summer outing called The Snag and Drag. 

But Rollin’ on the River remains the big enchilada, and over the years members slathered on one-off stunts attempting to top themselves. 

In 1998, they hired parachutists to float down into the grassy town center; one of the three hit the target, the other two landed in a nearby cornfield. Another year, they recruited a high school marching band that made three booming laps around the town before anxious chaperones herded them back onto their bus. They investigated shooting a man out of a cannon. “We could’ve found a person,” notes Wooten, “but we couldn’t find a cannon.”

Tunes have come courtesy of just about every beach music combo to make waves on the East Coast—soul and R&B acts outside their Top 40 prime, and classic rock cover groups, including the nationally touring Rolling Stones tribute band Satisfaction this year. 

The biggest hit was George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, who drew, depending on who you talk to, between 6,000 and 8,000 revelers in 2003. “That was too much,” says Wooten. “You couldn’t move out there!”

Parties are the name of the game at MNO—the convivial, not political, kind. Politics aren’t nonexistent—there were several Trump banners and a couple of Confederate flags on display this year—but current events are not a hot topic. The club is a world apart.

A 17-foot-tall fiberglass woman in Daisy Dukes greets visitors like a home-fried Statue of Liberty. The story of how she got here tells you a lot about MNO. The statue originated as one of the fabled “Uniroyal girls,” larger-than-life promotional gimmicks once propped up outside automotive shops. By the 1970s, one of the girls had found a new life at the mid-century Shady Lake Motel near Rocky Mount, where, sporting a newly painted-on bikini, she beckoned guests to the swimming pool.

“When the motel changed hands, the new owner was gonna get rid of her,” explains Wooten. “We had a member who went to the same church as the old owner and he heard about it one Sunday. So he picked up the phone and called me and said, ‘Hey man, we want that girl?’ And I said, ‘Yeah man, we sure do!’” 

Lickity split, an MNO squad piled into a truck equipped with a crane for lifting boats. They loaded up the comely colossus and whisked her away. Another member painted the Daisy Dukes over her bikini and styled her from brunette to blond.

Another member later wrangled an eight-foot-tall fiberglass moose to stand alongside the queen like a loyal puppy. Another outfitted it with a pair of testicles the size of two potato sacks (which have since detached, though members swear to return the moose to full manhood soon).

The back-to-the-land nature of it all isn’t without its tribulations. “We hate that son of a bitch over there,” growls Hill, nodding warily to the Tar River. “That boy is bad to us.” In 1999, Hurricane Floyd pushed the river 21 feet above its banks. MNO members floated over the flood on a pontoon boat, toasted their resilience, and grilled a steak atop the sloshing waters. When the muddy tide finally retreated, they got down to repairing the ruins left behind. The damage was enough to cancel Rollin’ on the River that year. But despite plenty of storm-soaked Septembers since then, they haven’t missed another. 

“We just say, ‘The water is the Lord’s way of washing away the sin,’” Wooten philosophizes. “We’ll be all clean this year—ready for more sinnin’.” 

None of the founders are sinning as much as they were in MNO’s heyday. “We made a lot of memories out here. Hopefully, we’ll make some more,” Hill says gravely. “But we better get some more young blood involved or the whole thing will fall apart.” 

‘They’re From the Computer Age’

With afternoon dimming into twilight on the second day of Rollin’ on the River, Christen Colbert and pals pour a jello shot, and another, and another. By the trayful, she slides the tiny cups—flavored cherry, orange creamsicle, strawberry, and pink starburst—into a fridge. 

“We’re shooting for 200,” Colbert says, her blond tresses tangling over her bare shoulders and sundress. All the grilled delicacies, rich sides, and plentiful libations at MNO—save for the offerings of a Mexican food truck—are free for guests to enjoy. And enjoy. And enjoy.

With her nose and eyebrow rings, Colbert, 38, stands out among MNO’s newest lot holders, as does Tequila Sunrise, her personalized party palace. It gleams with an Instagram aesthetic: pastel patio rugs, fuschia and aqua runner lights, a fringed canopy overhanging a busy bar, and a chihuahua sometimes barking from a doggie bed perched atop a microwave.

All of this is much different than the rough-hewn place her grandfather, a member of a lot-holding team, frequented for years. Colbert first visited when she turned 21. “My Papa—that’s what I called my grandpa—he always had a good time here,” she remembers. “He would pour shots called Buttery Nipples. That’s butterscotch liqueur and Bailey’s Irish Cream. If you don’t ever experience something like this, that’s a loss.” The lot changed hands, and when the second owner wanted out in 2022, a nostalgic Colbert decided she wanted in. 

If MNO is a pint-sized version of Any City, USA, then Colbert is the flashy new developer. She and fiancé T.J. Pittman, 33, put down almost $4,000 to replace the silt and sand floor with concrete and they’re already eyeing expansion to a seldom-used neighboring lot. “That way,” says Colbert, “I can put part of my personality in this space, and another part of my personality in the new spot.”

Pittman, tending rows of chicken, ribs, and shrimp on the grill, interjects, “If it was up to me, we’d make a Taj Mahal.”

“We made a lot of memories out here. Hopefully, we’ll make some more. But we better get some more young blood involved or the whole thing will fall apart.” 

Wayne Hill, an early MNO member

Their big ideas for MNO include mixing in more contemporary musical acts and upping the number of annual throwdowns. Their experiment with an October Halloween bash—which they attended as Ricky and Carley Bobby of Talladega Nights fame—drew around three dozen costumed celebrants.

How the old guard responds to these new-fangled notions may determine how much longer the club can keep cranking. Just under half of MNO’s members and lot-holders are under 50. In recent times, the club has lost about three members per year due to, as Wooten puts it, “movin’, gettin’ too old, or dyin’.” The folks filling their spots are younger, looking to make their own mark.

This puts the club in the woods at a potentially thorny crossroads eventually faced by communities of all kinds, according to Patrick Harrison, teaching associate professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at UNC-Chapel Hill. 

“It’s a microcosm of what’s happening in our larger society,” said Harrison after reviewing notes provided by this writer. “At MNO, they’ve built something based on their shared values. They take care of each other. Now there’s a new generational identity coming up. There can be an us against them generational divide. Like on Tiktok with the ‘OK Boomer’ refrain. It’s a negotiation. What matters is if the group can consider new ideas without thinking their collective identity is threatened.” 

Wooten and the other founders aren’t wild about increasing the number of all-hands-on-deck parties. They prefer individual lot holders to put together smaller events when they want, as Colbert did when she hosted pals at a summer slip’n’slide soiree. 

But most everyone knows time looms as a threat more powerful than the angriest river. Keeping those hard-earned good times rolling requires some generational exchange. 

“Younger folks, they may not know how to be a carpenter; they’re from the computer age. I understand it,” says early member Mike Wooten, 67. “But we’ve got people in this place who can help you build anything you want.” 

Robert Davis, one of those get-it-done guys trained (as a general contractor) in making things that require hard labor, holds court a few doors down at The Station. With its non-functioning railroad crossing gate and clean, well-lit interior, The Station is one of MNO’s most buffed and burnished saloons. As he and his fellow lot-holders grill up 80 pounds of chicken, they make it clear they’re all in to keep this sprawling honky tonk hummin’. 

Raised in Rocky Mount, Davis moved to Nashville for 10 years, returning home in 2020. He and friends were wired into MNO via Davis’ father, an early member. When an opportunity arose to formally join MNO three years ago, Davis, 36, didn’t blink. 

“City life,” he says with a shake of his head. “You start to feel isolated. And when you do socialize, it’s in a niche way. It doesn’t continue. It’s not a week-to-week thing, just one bar on one night. This, though …” 

He gestures to the raucous crowd, which peaked this year at about 2,200. 

“This,” Davis concludes, “is a way of life.” 

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Billy Warden is a writer, journalist, TV producer, and marketing executive as well as two-time TEDx speaker. His work has been recognized with a Muse Creative Arts award, Telly awards, and a regional Emmy nomination. He is an avid swimmer and mixologist—though he never imbibes before doing laps.