They could have been heading to Talley's Green Grocery or to another meeting about dirty air, polluted water or suburban sprawl.

The Bryants, as much as anyone, are the faces of environmentalism in Charlotte. Now they are leaving, selling their Myers Park home and settling onto 170 acres of woods and cornfields along the Pee Dee River on the far eastern side of Stanly County. Ron and Nancy are riding the crest of an environmental wave.

Growing numbers of Americans worry about the Earth, polls show.

Recent covers of Newsweek and Vanity Fair trumpeted the "greening" of America. Former Vice President Al Gore's movie on global warming, a potentially sleep-inducing pairing, has become the fourth-highest-grossing documentary in U.S. history.

Consumer choices reflect the shift. Two-thirds of Americans now buy organic products at least occasionally. Sales of hybrid gas-electric cars roughly double each year. Nearly 8,000 N.C. residents buy alternative-energy "green power."

But those are baby steps toward eco-consciousness. The Bryants are taking a flying leap.

At ages that entitle them to a relaxed retirement, Ron, 63, and Nancy, 66, will instead live in an energy-efficient "round house."

They'll stack solar panels on the barn roof. Grow much of their food. Tend chickens, beehives and, maybe, goats. Perhaps cultivate switch grass, an ethanol crop, and hemp for fiber.

To a farmer, their gently sloping acres are crop land. In the parlance of environmentalists, the land is open space that needs saving. By permanently protecting it from development and restoring its natural character, the Bryants intend to act out their beliefs.

"Ron always says this is our last big adventure together," Nancy says.

It will unfold 50 miles east of Charlotte, in southeastern Stanly. Directions to the Bryant land wind through Locust, Oakboro and Aquadale, each community a bit smaller, each turn at a little white church or tractor-warning sign a step removed from city life.

Charlotte "just sort of fades away" on the drive, Nancy says as she walks the raw red clay where their homestead is sprouting.

The Bryants, spiritual people, feel called to the place. On their second visit, more than a year ago, a bald eagle flew up the Pee Dee, they say. Minutes later, a second eagle glided downstream. Then a third bird, perched on the far bank, dropped out of a tall pine and flapped upriver.

"That's the sign of the cross," Ron says. "It was the first big sign." They call the land 3 Eagles Sanctuary.

Neighborly spirit

Ron and Nancy met at St. Mark's Lutheran Church in the mid-1980s. She invited him to a breakfast of baking-powder biscuits at the Morehead Inn, which she founded. They married a year later.

"They were always drumming up things in the neighborhood," says friend Blynn Field, their former neighbor on Ardsley Road.

"They were the ones to sponsor a neighborhood party if nobody else had for years -- that's just the kind of people they are. They make their mark."

Ron, a retired fiber physicist, is quiet and measured, a smile turning his eyes to beaming slits. Nancy, direct and assertive, speaks her mind.

"I like adventures," she says. "I'm not afraid to plow ahead, sometimes to my sorrow, in what I do and say."

Ron says Nancy nudged him into environmental advocacy. She spent her career as a teacher of Spanish and English as a second language, but a college aptitude test said she should have been a forest ranger. She joined the Girl Scouts in second grade and stayed involved for 38 years.

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