An escapee from the world of selling technology, now living on North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks where life revolves around sun, sand, and water.
I work at WideOpen Networks helping communities get fiber to their homes. In my spare time I am a photographer, writer, boater, fisherman, kayaker, swimmer, and walker of the beaches.
My First Home on the Bay of Fundy after a year’s work
I was gone most of the summer of 1970, it seemed like the most logical thing to do after all the college protests. A roommate and I drove to Alaska and we returned barely ahead of the snow and just before school started. When we came back I was determined to find some land away from the big cities of the East. In the spring of 1971, I wrote to the Longmire Real Estate agency of Bridgetown, Nova Scotia, about a farm and land on the shores of the Bay of Fundy. The property was advertised in the Sunday Boston Globe. At the time there was only a print version of the paper and reading the Sunday paper was something many of us really enjoyed. The trip to look at the place sealed the deal.
Though the details took time to work out, I ended up the owner of 140 acres, a two hundred year old house, barn, and carriage house in Saint Croix Cove. That first piece of land and buildings cost around $7,000. The view of the Bay of Fundy was spectacular. The picture at the top is the house after a year’s work. This what it looked like when I bought it.
First Home when I purchased it in 1971
When I bought the house, it was in a sheep pasture and had not been lived in for years. The old chimney went quickly. We also tore out the insides down to walls and hand-hewn, pegged six by sixes that framed the house. It was a huge undertaking Still after a year it looked a lot better, was insulated, had heat, hot water, a new kitchen and a shower
Even with all that work I am not sure it looked like someone was living there all the time. My mother and her sister came up and worked on the house during the summer of 1972 and stayed with us for a couple of weeks but most of their time was spent on canning and freezing produce from the garden.
My Mother and Her Sister Visiting in 1972
The next summer, I made a trip to Boston to help an old college roommate get married. Then I headed south and stopped in Washington, DC to spend a short time with another college friend that I enjoyed. From there I went home to Mount Airy, North Carolina. My mother was always scheming to keep me at home a little longer. She arranged a blind date with Glenda, a young lady from UNC Greensboro.
It was one of those love at first sight dates. I cooked Lobsters for our first dinner together. The next day we picnicked on the Blue Ridge Parkway. When she headed back to her apartment in Greensboro, the plan was that she was going to drop me off at the airport on the way but few other than my mother would be surprised that we never stopped there. We spent a magical few days in her apartment. About sixty days later after Glenda made a trip to Nova Scotia to check things out, we got married. She wasn’t in Nova Scotia long before she started making our home look like someone was living there.
My wife, Glenda’s first flower bed in St. Croix Cove, Nova Scotia
It didn’t take long for flowers to be added. During my mother’s next trip, Glenda and my mother decided we needed a lawn mower which they got on a trip to town by themselves. In short order the yard look like a normal yard.
Our St. Croix Cove home after Glenda had tamed it and won the hearts of Tok and Fundy
We moved from the green house on the shore road in the fall of 1974. We needed better farmland if we were going to be successful. It was less than a year before our next house looked like someone was living there.
Our Tay Creek Farm House the first summer there 1975
The picture above was taken in 1975, almost fifty years ago. If you stretch your imagination, you might come close to imagining how many flowers have been planted in the name of making our houses look like someone lives in them over those forty-nine years. Last summer’s (2023) flowers are pictured below.
Summer of 2023’s front flower bed at our home in Mocksville, NC
My mother was probably 84 years old when she had to give up planting flowers and tomatoes. For the next six years until mother moved in with us, Glenda would go down in the fall and plant a huge bed of pansies that my mother could watch grow from fall through spring. It was something that made mother smile. When we are in our eighties, I hope we have someone willing to add a little beauty to our lives when we can no longer plant it ourselves.
My Glenda amending the soil in Nova Scotia with some well-rotted chicken manure
My mother watering her azaleas in the seventies when she started renewing the gardens
Years ago people ate what the cook, usually the mother of the family, put in front of them. When I was at boarding school, you ate what was on the table or went for the jar of peanut butter. It is interesting look back at not only what we ate but how our tastes have changed. Driving around the country in my teens taught me you could have ketchup with you eggs. Going to military school in Tennessee introduced me to grits and unfortunately powdered scrambled eggs.
A lot of today’s foods weren’t around when I was growing up. I still remember my first fast food restaurant, a Burger King, near Winston-Salem in the late fifties. Mostly we ate at home which in the South meant fried chicken on Sunday and lots of vegetables during the week.
My mother canned a lot, and she also froze some vegetables. We had relatives with bigger gardens and freezers than ours so we were never out of vegetables We ate a lot of Pinto beans and cornbread. I learned to love cabbage. Excitement when I was young was a Chef Boyardee Pizza kit. I didn’t have a real pizza until freshmen year in college.
After college on our farm in Canada, my wife and I were lucky to grow most of our food. I was the seventies and early eighties. There were hippies afoot but we were serious famers with tractors and lots of cattle. When we lived in Nova Scotia, we picked broccoli in five gallon buckets and rushed fresh picked corn to already boiling water in the kitchen. We gambled on tomatoes but ones ground on the shore of Nova Scotia were nothing like North Carolina tomatoes. New Brunswick had more heat which better tomatoes, more reliable corn and less broccoli.
Eating out when you were running a farm far from town and have three kids was maybe a trip to the one McDonald’s on a run to town or a stop by the Chinese restaurant that was usually deserted enough for the kids to run around and play. With a farm there was always beef in the freezer and my wife put up something north of one fifty jars of vegetables each year and froze plenty to go with that and fill our two big chest freezers. We hauled out of the cellar each year four times the number of potatoes that we ate.
My early years in North Carolina were different than when our kids were growing up. I never remember asking for something different than what was on the table. When our children grew up in Virginia, there were so many grilled cheese sandwiches and dippy eggs that I sometimes felt like a short order cook.
Our tastes started evolved as we started grilling salmon but we never gave up on canned salmon cakes which were always a staple when growing up. I never gave up on Codfish cakes, but my wife never took them and always maintained they were just an excuse to drink a lot of beer. When we could get good seafood, the years in Nova Scotia and our sixteen years on the North Carolina coast, fresh seafood was included as much as the budget allowed or my angling skill would put on the table.
I have always done some of the cooking. My wife claims that she has never cooked my breakfast in over fifty years of marriage. Even the very few times we had pancakes, I always cooked the breakfast meat. Now I am semi-retired, working only three or four days a week, and my wife is unable to do the shopping. I try watch my carbs and my wife has to watch what she eats because of her kidneys. We also have an adult mid-forties son living with us. He will not eat chicken, turkey, or fish. He eats limited amounts of pork, beef, and hotdogs. My wife and I love beans and soups. We have expanded beyond Pintos, eating Anasazi beans and whatever we see that catches our eye on Rancho Gordo’s site. We have older relatives who supply us with a localized version of Crowder peas which we call Joe’s peas since his family has been growing them and saving the seeds for over one hundred years.
We are also fans of cabbage, broccoli, and whatever else that can be sourced locally. My wife and I love local berries and all sorts of apples. Our son will only eat honey crisp apples preferably from Whole Foods. We grow our own tomatoes during the summer and readily admit to loving either plain tomato sandwiches or BLTs.
I am a huge fan of country sausage, country ham, and true country bacon, but the breakfast meat that I eat the most is turkey sausage which no one else in the family will touch. I also love country fresh eggs and rarely buy any from the grocery store.
I started baking sourdough bread in the seventies and my wife took over the bread baking in the eighties until we moved back to the states. I took up sourdough baking seriously again fourteen years ago. Recently to save time and mess, I have been using the Wildgrain par-baked frozen bread service. When I want a loaf of bread, I put a frozen sourdough loaf from the freezer into the toaster oven. It bakes for 21 minutes in the oven and finishes baking another twenty minutes outside the oven. It is very good and very little different in price from the bakery bread I sought out when I didn’t have time to bake.
I enjoy grilling, my favorite food to grill is half-chickens. We have consciously given up on the big steaks that I used to carve up into fillet mignon and a strip steak with a bone. I would buy a couple on special, my wife and son would eat the fillets. I would eat the strips, first hot and then cold sliced in wraps or on a salad. I am also a big fan of smoking food and chicken thighs would be my smoked food of choice.
This is North Carolina so a good third of meals out revolve around barbecue. We try to limit out eating out to one or two meals a week. My wife and I often split a Jersey Mike’s sub while our son can do in a whole one. We sometimes do fried flounder at one the local restaurants and maybe once every three months, I might get some Chinese food and try to go light on the rice.
My wife loves ice cream which I try to avoid but I did have a Dairy Queen cone with her the other day. It was the first Dairy Queen we had seen in the three years that we have been here. That Dairy Queen in Salisbury, NC has been operating in the same spot for 75 years.
Given all that, meal planning and the shopping to make those meals is challenging. My son is always up for a taco and since I have found some good low-carb wraps, I can live with that. My wife makes a great turkey meatloaf based on the Barefoot Contessa’s recipe, I can eat that hot or cold, breakfast, lunch or dinner.
Given all this history perhaps the hotdogs and steak at the top of the post make a little sense. My wife and son had hot dogs and I ate a grass-fed sirloin steak. Neither of them like sirloins. I have one eight ounce steak a month from the Pre company. It usually costs $7.99 on sale which I consider reasonable for the quality. It took me a little experimenting to get it right but I can now cook it perfectly to my taste. In the continuing effort to improve the quality of what we eat, I added red Quinoa to my spinach salad. Usually by this time of year I have switched to the spinach from our garden but something has eaten most of it and the weather hasn’t been kind to the rest of it.
However, Sunday April 28, we had a big lettuce harvest with a small bag of spinach. With an upcoming week of heat, we figured it was time to take what we could and hope for a better season next year. It turned out to be a pretty nice harvest.
This afternoon it was time for another food compromise. My wife was worn out from processing all the lettuce we picked. I had hoped to grill some chicken thighs but I ran out of time. I agreed to a simple dinner. We stuck a frozen baked ziti into the oven. My wife made fresh Caesar salad. A baked a loaf of sourdough from Wildgrain and made some crouton from hotdogs buns. Normally I would veto a pasta and fresh bread at night but I considering the circumstances I went for it. Tomorrow, I will really have to watch my carbs but not until after breakfast.
Back in the not so good world of the fifties when we feared polio and practiced hiding under desks to keep us safe from nuclear war, connecting with the world wasn’t optional. There is a good chance you walked to school. It was likely played dodge ball or kick ball on the playground in the morning. After getting home, many of us headed to the woods to maintain our forts and dams. Then there was mowing yards and even some garden work at times. Digging worms certainly connected me to Mother Earth and to the wrath of my mother if I got too close to some of her flowers.
Weekends were often devoted to Boy Scouts and camping on a nearby by farm. Our water came from an old hand pump. We pitched tents and cooked over open fires. We usually had an adult with us but in the early days when there only half a dozen of us, we often camped without one. No one feared the dark or worried about crazies with guns. When we weren’t in the woods with other Scouts, we were sometimes chasing squirrels with rifles and shotguns.
Fishing was a much more successful endeavor. It was not unusual for my mother to drop my best friend, Mike, and me at my some fishing ponds in the next county. She wasn’t an irresponsible mother, we were responsible kids who knew out to swim and take care of ourselves. I cannot even count the number of days we spent fishing without seeing another person before we were old enough to drive. We did catch fish and we ate them.
We still lived in a world where there were more country stores than supermarkets. People had big gardens. When the weather got cold in the fall, some relative would always bring some fresh country sausage. In the summer mother would can tomatoes and beans and freeze corn.
As we got older I went away to military school and then to college. I did not come back to stay for sixty years, but the connections to the natural world had already been made.
By the time I got to college, I was desperate to get back to the woods. Even spending the summers camping and traveling to Alaska wasn’t enough.
So Maine it was during college and then Nova Scotia and eventually Newfoundland. There were float plane trips into the bush, rides on an ice breaker that got stuck in the ice, and wandering the woods where it was nearly impossible to know where you were without a map and compass.
While my love of the outdoors almost got derailed by the toxic work environment at Apple, I eventually escaped to North Carolina’s Crystal Coast which my oldest son claimed was barely clinging to civilization because we had no Chipotle.
There might have been a shortage of chain fast-food, but it was a place where a kayak or a skiff could take you to natural worlds that stretched your imagination. Over time those placed healed my soul and helped me to reconnect with the world beyond our houses.
By 2017, I was walking 10,000 steps a day for a whole year which is equivalent to 69 marathons a year. I had piloted our skiff over 500 hours, paddled and biked endless miles. We managed to compost all our household waste and grow far more vegetables than we could eat.
All that helped me recover from Apple and get the strength to complete the circle and move back home. It has been a successful trip home. We’re back to gardening and I still hike some.
However, I worry about the generations after us that never forged the link with the outside world. They never camped and fished their way through childhood and even if they did, the screens and phones seduced them. We were immune. There is no meaning to be gained from screens. There might be important words on the screen but if the words just lead you to another screen you have gained nothing but more screen time.
Yet if your hands have ever worked in dirt, even it they have been clean for a long time, the dirt will welcome them back and it won’t be long before the long suppressed memories guide the hands back to growing things. Those growing plants will remind you that you are just one of many living things that are all interconnected. If you can get to that point, you are on the right track to a worthwhile relationship with yourself and the world.
Living near the tidal waters around Swansboro, North Carolina, was one of the true pleasures of my life. Pictured above are the marshes between Swansboro and Bear Island. Those marshes had some of the most spectacular scenery along the coast and some prettiest waters that I have seen anywhere. They were less than a fifteen minute boat ride from our house.
I was reminded of how wonderful living on the water is each morning when I looked out towards the River from our dock on Raymond’s Gut. Part of my morning routine is to check the tide level on one of the dock pilings and survey the water’s surface. Our home was very close to the water as you can see from this picture taken from my kayak back before we built a small house on the back deck
After checking the tide, I tried to gauge the winds out on the river. If it is really windy out on the river, it is pretty easy to catch on from the visible whitecaps. However, it can be very calm in our inlet and still windy on the river. Or it can look calm on the river and still be pretty windy on the river once you are out there. About the only way to really know how windy it is on the river is to get in the boat or kayak and head out to the river.
There were mornings when the air, wind, and tides just seemed to tell me to get in our skiff and ride down the river. It was one of the urges in life that I never tried to resist.
Many mornings I could actually take the boat down to Swansboro and be back before my wife even got out of bed. Usually early in the morning, even in the summer, the river mostly belongs to solitary boaters. A typical trip might look like the one shown this Google map.
Once in a while, there is an another early morning fisherman or someone checking their crab traps, but mostly an early ride down the river is a solitary experience that lets you really enjoy the pleasure of being on the water.
There are couple of reasons that the traffic on the White Oak is so light. One, there is plenty of other water for boating down here, and two, there are oyster beds in the lower river which require you to pay attention while boating. The channel is well marked, but if you aren’t used to following buoys it can be challenging especially if the light is bad. Many boaters would rather not pay attention since they are accustomed to boating in lakes where there are few if any marked channels
If you are lucky enough to have a GPS and can follow someone up the river who knows where they are going, it is pretty easy to establish your own road map. Most people going up the river know where they are going, but once in a while someone who seems to know where they are headed will venture off into shallow water and start looking lost. You can get into trouble on the White Oak quickly and it is not unusual to hear a boat scrapping its bottom on oyster rocks.
This is a photo of the oyster rock that runs across much of the river near where we lived. The picture was taken at low tide. At high tide these rocks are sometimes covered by as little as six inches of water. Hitting those oyster rocks at high speed makes a terrible sound. The boat bottom always loses.
However, with the right conditions, a little forethought and attention to the marked channel, I can think of nothing that I enjoy as much as my early morning boat ride. It sure beats mowing the lawn or going to a sales meeting.
I have a number of maps of the river posted, but this Google maps one shows the most challenging part of the channel between Bluewater Cove at Red Sixteen and Jones Island just before the Swansboro Harbor.
The river is a great place to enjoy the water, but it also leads to lots of other places like the marshes pictured or even Bogue Inlet and out to the Atlantic Ocean. Once you get to know the waters along our coast, they are not such a big puzzle.
Living by the water was a great adventure and the main reason I lived at the coast for sixteen years. I did even start boating until I was fifty-seven and I did it safely for sixteen years until I sold my boat.
Eleven years ago I wrote what I fondly call my snippets of life book, The Road to My Country. It is far from a complete autobiography but it has a lot of background information on my life. I wanted to get it out because I suspected North Carolina’s image was going to take a hit when the republicans (I no longer capitalize republican or gop as long as they remain a cult) gained control of the NC House and Governorship. That did happen with the bathroom bill and my nearly invisible book did nothing to help. My way of dealing with a crisis is to work it out with a keyboard even if no one but me reads it. Still we recovered and elected Governor Cooper who has held the crazies at bay.
Both my wife and I were born in North Carolina in 1949. My mother’s family has been in North Carolina since just after the revolutionary war. My wife’s family has been here longer. My father arrived in North Carolina around 1900 at the age of 25. Both our families have deep agricultural roots in the state. I grew up around farming and my wife even worked in tobacco as a teenager. I went away to military school in Tennessee at the age of fourteen in 1963. While I was home in NC most summers and some holidays, I mentally left the state in that same year, 1963. I wasn’t running from North Carolina, I was trying to put distance between myself and my family. I did not have a terrible childhood but there were some demons loose in the family and the only to avoid them was leave until they were conquered by the only ones who could do it.
With that in mind, when I left for college, I put my suitcases and typewriter in the car and headed off to Cambridge, Massachusetts to become a Harvard freshman. That year, 1967, I was one of three students in the class of 1,200 who called North Carolina home. Harvard wasn’t a place where you had to defend your state, but you did have to defend yourself with your wits. I didn’t have any trouble doing that since freshman year was my fifth year away from home. Other than visits and business, I would not come back to North Carolina as a resident until 2006, thirty-nine years later when we bought a second home along the shores of the White Oak River near the beaches of Emerald Isle, North Carolina.
I left with visions seen by the eyes of a fourteen year-old teenager. I came back as a survivor of ten years of farming and over twenty years of selling Apple’s computers. By the time I got back and wrote the book, I had visited all fifty states, ten Canadian provinces, Ireland, England, France, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand. We had owned homes in two provinces and three states. We had lived in everything from the tiny village of dozen homes in St. Croix Cove, Nova Scotia to the big city of Halifax and halfway between Washington and Baltimore. I spent the last five years of my Apple career working the federal government from inside the beltway to Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Labs. I had set in on Congressional hearings and dealt with many politicians. The fifty-seven year old corporate survivor who moved to North Carolina in 2006 was very different than the youngster who could see little besides an escape route north.
Back in 2021 during the pandemic we made a move from Carteret County, North Carolina to Davie County, North Carolina.
We were ready to walk on ground that wasn’t squishy even though we had grown to love the salt marshes where we lived. We wanted to be close to the few relatives we have remaining and be a part of the lives of our grandchildren who continue to grow faster than we can comprehend.
The North Carolina that I left with its small patches of tobacco allotment was long gone. There were 4.7 million people in NC in 1963, today the state population has more than doubled to 10.8 million. The state is still full of a lot of very good people who would do almost anything to help you even if a MAGA hat has been on their head at some point.
When we moved back from the coast, we knew we were moving to solid red Davie County from solid red Carteret County. The only obvious advantage was that in Davie County, I no longer had a daily drive by the sign saying, “Welcome to Carteret County, Clinging to Our Guns and Bibles since 1760.” (See attached election results)
We have been in Davie County three years and three months and I have had one run in with a couple of red hats who were ranting while they shopped in a tiny store about how much they loved the former guy. It lasted two minutes and I have never seen them again.
We regularly go to eat in a small restaurant in the most rural part of the county, I have never see any red hats there. We are regular visitors at all the farmers markets and I haven’t been kicked out of one yet. There are few farmers I don’t farm a little with while my wife is shopping. I know of maybe two or three signs for the former president.
What I can say is that there are redder counties around us. A few have had contentious school board meetings but I don’t think it has become normalized behavior yet.
We don’t have a massive number of blacks in our community but we do have a lot of Hispanic people. Our house cleaner is one of them and we are very proud that she went to her citizenship ceremony last Friday.
I can categorically say that I have had far more HOA political battles (down at the coast) than ones with local republicans. While there might be little hope of Davie County turning blue, I like to think that given the chance to have a civil conversation, people here will listen, maybe not change their mind today, but possibly in the future. The young people already have more open minds.
The biggest problem we have In places like Davie County are the politicians like Virginia Foxx who mock our form of government by refusing to acknowledge the validity of the 2020 election. Foxx once said that Obamacare was a bigger threat than terrorists. She seemed to think it was funny to shout down a reporter’s question with “SHUT UP.” I can respect Foxx humble beginnings but I have no respect for someone who weaponizes the House Education Committee like she has. Politicians like her are the problem, not the solution.
When the founders cobbled together our constitution, their fervent hope was that we would have leaders who tried to bring out the best in their constituents. The hope was that government and the shared goal of making things better for as many people as possible would temper the bad human tendencies. What we have today are hack politicians who try to mine political benefit off of problems instead of trying to solve them.
Foxx and her republican buddies had a chance to make things much better at the border but they decided to pass up the once in a long time opportunity to get the Democrats to agree to stiff border measures for the opportunity to campaign on border problems. They had a sham impeachment against a cabinet member after denying him funding to try to solve the problem they used for impeachment. These people just want to stay in power. They care nothing about any of us unless we write big checks for their re-election. They actually favor Russia over Ukraine, our struggling democratic ally. They live in some fairy tale world where Putin is not the murderous thug everyone knows him to be.
These are the same politicians who fought Medicaid expansion, deny climate change, and tell their constituents year after that tax breaks to the rich will benefit them. That has yet to work even though they have been saying it for decades. When is the last time someone from the gop supported an increase in the minimum wage?
The $28 Billion that Trump had to spend on farmers to compensate for his tariffs on China gets spun into something good. Wouldn’t it have been far better to let the farmers keep their markets and not have to spend $28B of taxpayers money to cover up a policy mistake of his own making? (See attached table)
I know there are plenty of good people in Davie County. They aren’t that different than me. I worked the soil for ten years and had 200 head of Angus cattle. I still have a shotgun in the closet. I eat country ham and chicken stew. I have butchered hogs and had a garden big enough to feed my family. I drive a car nineteen years old. I have spent more time on a tractor than almost anyone that I know.
What we need to do more than anything else is to restore rural residents’ belief in our government’s ability to solve their problems. We should show them how makes this is a great place to live. We have libraries, streets, schools, police, and a thriving economy. Government plays a part in that.
People who treat politics as war do no good for any of us. I would like to invite some government advocates to come talk in Davie County but stop by for a visit with me first so you know that you do have friends in the County.
You can get more government supporters if you made it clear what you are doing to help the people in the County and listen to what they need. Maybe it is time for free community college education. It would be a great thing to lift up any rural community.
We all grow up in something of a bubble of our parents’ opinions and the ideas that surround us. I am grateful that I had Chet Huntley and David Brinkley instead of FOX News. I am also pleased that my mother would often take the opposite side or opposing candidate just so we could debate. Still race was something of mystery until I was well into my teenage years. As an elementary school student I once rode the bus to Winston-Salem. When I got on the bus, I ran to the back of the bus to sit in the back seat only to be told I couldn’t sit there because I wasn’t black. I can remember when I was fourteen flying back from my all-white male boarding school in Tennessee. It was the first time that I would be heading back to my dad’s big house in Mt. Airy instead of my mother’s small ranch in Lewisville. Alfred, the husband of dad’s maid, Mertha, had driven my mom to the airport. We stopped in Winston-Salem for lunch at the K&W Cafeteria. As my mother and I were starting to enter K&W, Alfred, who was black, turned and started to leave. I asked him why he wasn’t joining us for lunch. He said he was not allowed to eat there. I was floored. Over the next week, Alfred, his wife, Mertha, my mom and I had most of our meals together at the kitchen table. Obviously, I was still clueless about race with one set of rules at home and another out in the world of 1963. Three years later I took my first trip around the country. The first trip taught me more than you could eat ketchup with eggs. It was a big country with lots of different people but it was unlikely that I was going to meet any of the different ones at McCallie, the all white military prep school my parents had shipped me off to in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I would, however, meet some at Harvard. There was probably not a more privileged place to be in 1967 than Harvard. We figured it out pretty quickly. Someone would ask where you went to school and you would say Cambridge. Most times it didn’t work and people still knew immediately where you went to college. Still Harvard was a very different world than McCallie, beyond the sprinkling of different races, we went to school with Radcliffe ladies. Boston and Cambridge were a different world than Chattanooga which was decades from its rejuvenation. McCallie was on Missionary Ridge just a few miles from downtown, but downtown was often hidden in smog and smoke from the factories. At McCallie the only way to get from one stop to another was to hitchhike. At Harvard, I had my car for longer trips but the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) subway was a revolution. You could go downtown, to the airport, and all sorts of places for little money. Being on the Red Line even though it rattled our room in Wigglesworth freshman year was still eye-opening. Just walking through Harvard Square exposed you to more diversity than some see in a lifetime. There were three things that really opened my eyes once I got settled in Cambridge. The first was having a car to go places in New England. My sophomore year, I came back with an original Ford Bronco that my uncle had helped me buy secondhand from a vet in Michigan. I had gone with him to Michigan to buy it and drive it back. Traveling with my uncle Henry was almost as eye-opening as a couple days in Harvard Square. He didn’t believe in motels and had private homes where he could rent a room when passing. We stayed in one on the way up. I came close to freezing that night. Still once the old Bronco got to Cambridge in the fall of 1968, it and some stop-leak for the radiator were to be the keys to exploring a lot of places including Nova Scotia, Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts even where there were not roads. The second thing was going from being a barely politically interested student to one who felt like politics had the potential to save us or destroy us. The anti-war unrest kicked off at Harvard in the spring of 1969. As kids of the sixties we had already been through more heartache than some could take. Still in the days before cell phones and social media, we were oblivious to what was happening locally when University Hall was seized by around fifty students. University Hall is in Harvard Yard. Only freshman live in the Yard. Upper class students live in Houses or dorm complexes sprinkled around the area between Harvard Yard and the Charles River. That evening the students took over University Hall, four of us were walking from Quincy House up Plympton Street towards Massachusetts Ave. with the plan that we would go to Barley’s Burger Cottage. As we turned right, our peripheral vision caught a line of charging Massachusetts State Police with riot shields and billy clubs. We were obviously in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was chased into the doorway of a nearby bookstore where I got a couple of whacks on the back before I escaped and started running back to Quincy House. We all got back to the dorm with the police not far behind us. They tear gassed our dorm’s courtyard. We were fortunate to have a fourth floor room. It was chilling to hear the sound that we all know, shotguns with shells being chambered. We’re lucky no one died that night. The campus was energized with anti-war/anti-administration sentiment. People could not forgive the college administrators for turning the police loose on students who had done nothing. It was a lesson in how it feels to be attacked when you have done nothing wrong. I haven’t looked at peaceful demonstrations the same way since then. The third change happened my senior year when my roommates and I became part of Harvard’s coed experiment. Fifty male Harvard students were moved to Radcliffe. Our dorm was the brand new Currier House which housed 275 Radcliffe students. We were spread out throughout the dorm. One roommate and I had single rooms sharing a bathroom. Adjoining rooms housed Radcliffe students. Our floor had everything from first year students to juniors. It was a wonderful experience, I met more people who have become life-long friends there than in any other similar timeframe. I have more female friends from Currier House that I keep up with fifty-three years later than I do male Harvard friends. The next year, my junior year, with the invasion of Cambodia, the campus exploded again and classes were canceled for the rest of the semester. We went home hoping to convince people the war had to end. People in North Carolina didn’t want to hear it from us. They had already seen enough on the nightly news. By mid-June, I was packing my Dodge PowerWagon for a trip to Alaska. The PowerWagon would also change me.
This history on viewing video was a result of being asked to review a Google Fire device and compare it to the Apple TV device. As you might guess from the picture I will get to a review of the Fire Cube and Apple TV but it is at the end of the article. If you are looking for a very technical review this won’t be it. However, if you are looking for a review by someone who uses both and has no iron in the fire, this might be it. We have both hooked up to our LG television and we regularly switch back and forth.
I have been watching television since I was seven or eight years old. I feel fortunate that television could not compete with the outdoors when I was growing up and my high school years were nearly devoid of television. I went to a military boarding school starting in the fall of 1963. Our television was limited to fifteen minutes after study hall in the evenings. I never got hooked. We did end up with three children born while we were living on the farm and they were fond of Sesame Street among other shows. Television there was limited to two channels which we picked up with an antennae. It sort of matched the newspaper, the Daily Gleaner, that we received in the mail the day after it was printed. We listened to a lot of CBC radio.
In the snowy winter of 1984, we had enough cash to splurge on a Panasonic VCR. Even though the Betamax – VHS war had yet to be settled, I bet on VHS. After all I was in the technology world selling Apple computers. We paid just over $700 Canadian for the VCR. It was easy enough for me to pick up some movies on the way home and bring them back in a day or two.
Five years later after we have lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Columbia, Maryland, we moved to the side of a mountain in Roanoke, Virginia. There we had easy access to a Blockbuster Video store among others.
By the mid-nineties changes were afoot, as DVDs took over from VCRs rather quickly. The only reason to keep your VCR was for dance recital tapes. Recordable one session DVDs were incredibly expensive when they first came out sometimes costing over $20 each but they easily beat the LaserDisk competition. By the end of the decade (1999) Apple had iMovie software out for creating great personal movies. By early 2001 Apple released iDVD for authoring DVRs using movies created in iMovie. It had limitations but it was a great tool and I made a number of DVDs until the product was discontinued in 2011.
When we moved into our new house at the coast in 2006, it was the peak of the tower babel for video. We had a Sony-DVD-CD player and a Sony VCR hooked to a whole house system of speakers in each room. Each room had port where you could plug an iPod. We might have used one of the original iPods that I won at Apple on the system once or twice but that was it. The times were a changing. Our system was probably out of date before we finished paying for it. As people started streaming media on the Internet, interest in DVDs and even creating them dwindled. Sometime in late 2010, Apple introduced the last iDVD software with its iLife series. Steve Jobs had lost interest in it so iDVD was part of iLife but not promoted.
Not long after that we got our first Roku and started experimenting with streaming alongside our cable Television. Prime Video came along in 2011 but the first series to really get us to bite on streaming was Netflix’s House of Cards in early 2013.
In 2018, we did a refresh of our household video equipment. The driving force was our twelve-year-old cable box needed almost daily rebooting, We took the opportunity to send the dead Sony CD-ROM/DVD player and dead Sony VCR to electronics recycling, We added a Sony streaming box with a Blu-ray Disk player. I also rewired everything so I could get rid of the extra HDMI cables that showed on the mantel. It made my wife very happy. By rewiring and adding an HDMI switch I could add a Chromecast to our Roku and Sony box. The biggest challenge was getting our new cable modem to work. It was quite the saga We also took the opportunity to add a streaming only television to a newly constructed upstairs room
I just checked Amazon. After the installation of the new BlueRay DVD player, I bought exactly one BlueRay movie, Second Hand Lions.
While this was all going on, I started making YouTube videos. I made my first ones in 2009. While I haven’t uploaded a new one since 2020, I have 153 videos that I made on my YouTube Channel. I started doing videos on Google Photos eleven years ago in 2013.
In 2021 when we moved to North Carolina’s Piedmont, we signed up for a fiber connection with the local telephone Coop. While I work for a company that builds fiber networks, we don’t have one in North Carolina. We never even hooked up the available cable outside our house. A year after moving here, I was comfortable enough to write an article, How to be a sensible streamer.
So here we are forty years after buying that first VCR. We are on our second Fire Cube. After two years the first one got cranky as electronic sometimes will do. We bought a new one in February 2023 and it has been great. Our company is considering a promo where we give away an Apple TV streaming box with new signups. I offered to buy and test The Apple TV since I have more experience streaming with fiber than anyone else in the office.
First off they both boxes offer all the bells and whistles that you need to get high quality streaming. Their user interfaces and how some things work are the main differences,
It you are used to the Apple ecosystem and have either an iPad, iPhone or a Mac, you will likely be very comfortable with the Apple TV. The controller which has a tiny touchpad takes some time to get used to using but it is something most people master in a few minutes. As a bonus Siri is really good at turning on closed captions and finding apps. The Apple TV user interface is more pleasing that Amazon’s. Amazon uses its interface to try to get you to buy content. I don’t get the feeling that Apple is pushing me to buy a particular show. I also like how Apple TV keeps track of what I have been watching even if I was watching Britbox on FireTV. Every app, Britbox, Acorn, Disney, Prime Video, or Netflix looks better and more consistent on Apple TV.
If you are not an Apple user, the authentication required to download an app might be something new to you. When you install a new app on your Apple TV, you will be asked to authenticate with your Apple ID password (it is easy to create if you don’t have one). Because I had an iPad in the room with the Apple TV, it sent a notice to the iPad which verified who I was with facial recognition. I still had to confirm the download by doing a double click on an iPad button. Then and only then can you sign into the service.
Fire TV does not ask for the authentication before downloading, you move directly to entering you password for the service.
The only quirks we have noticed are the FireTV regularly hangs on trying to load Britbox. On the Apple TV side, we have been unable to find our local news to stream. Currently we just switch over to FireTV and for some reason local live TV is available there. One question which might come up. We have our Apple TV hooked up with Ethernet but we are using WiFi for the FireTV Cube. First the television is hooked up by Ethernet. Second the Fire Cube has a limited Ethernet connection which is slower than wireless. The Apple TV has a 1 Gb Ethernet port. From what I have been able to learn that makes no difference. Most reports state that streaming only requires 100 Mbps.
While I was growing up, it would have been a dream come true to find a snowy scene as beautiful as the one above taken near our old farm in Tay Creek, New Brunswick. Tay Creek had more snow than even I bargained for when I set off to raise cattle. My youth was not snow deprived. I feel fortunate that my childhood took place in the fifties and sixties in North Carolina. We lived in a small, rural town just west of Winston-Salem. My first distinct memories of snow are from when I was in the fifth grade at the Lewisville School which housed grades one through eight. In March 1960, it started snowing on my birthday early that month. They sent us home from school before lunch which wasn’t a big deal for me since I walked to school. Like many in those days we lived on a dirt road. We were lucky. Our home was only one hundred feet from pavement but there were others who lived miles into a red dirt road. Snow made a mess of those roads so school was often called off until the dirt roads dried up. We hardly went to school that March 1960 because it snowed for three Wednesdays in a row. It was a very unique weather event. My life after high school could be summarized by saying, “He started going north and didn’t stop until the roads were blocked with snow.” As a result we spent years in snow country (Canada) before turning south and finding the mountains of Southwest Virginia. There was enough snow and ice there that we eventually ran from it after seventeen years and ended up living for fifteen years on the North Carolina coast. We now live in the foothills on the western edge of the Piedmont about twenty-five minutes southwest of where I grew up and enjoyed that snowy month without school in March 1960. In our fifteen years on the coast, we had a few snows that mostly disappeared by noon. The most impressive one and probably the last one the area has seen came in January 2018. At our current location the last snow was January 18, 2022. Snow has not completely disappeared from the Carolina Piedmont, it is just getting a little more rare. It is climate related I am sure so there is little that we can do in the short term. However, we are entering a patch of very cold, even record-breaking weather for some areas. All we need is moisture and snow will be back in our yards. If we are on a trend to have more infrequent snows, we all should be a little sad and not just from the climate change that it represents. The excitement of snow day when you were in elementary school in the fifties is hard to convey. The authorities did not make it easy to get excited because they refused to announce school closings until early the morning of the closings. We would crowd around the radio hoping to hear our county’s name included in the list of closings. There were no text messages, emails, or web sites to check. Once school was closed, it was like someone had added a day to your year and said happy birthday, this is your day. All pressures were gone, any tests had vaporized, and your neighborhood was a giant snowfield ready for you to make your mark on it. I am not sure there are many times in life that you get to enjoy that kind of freedom. The one thing that could be guaranteed is that a taste of that pure freedom made you crave more. In 1960, it never seemed to end. In 1963, I went off to boarding school and you don’t get snow days there. You also don’t get snow days at college. At least we didn’t in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I completely understand that a snow day sixty-four years after that wondrous March 1960 is a lot more complex. Parents have to make child care arrangements instead of letting the kids join the free-roaming herd of neighborhood children. Businesses don’t want to get sued for someone slipping on ice or lose sales by closing down for a day. I guess my point is that snow days are something of a symbol of a simpler time. I can remember getting snowed in on the mountain where we lived overlooking Roanoke, Virginia. The kids went outside and played with all the neighboring kids, and we were not that upset that we didn’t know exactly where they were. We knew they were on foot, sliding down hills well-covered with snow. They always came back soaked to the bone, frozen and ready to sit around the fire and recharge their batteries from the exhaustion of pure play. Even after our the children were gone, my wife and I got snowed in there just before Christmas in 2009. It was an impressive snow as you can see from these pictures. I am pretty sure there hasn’t been a snow as impressive or at least as difficult to shovel since then. There are lots of areas in the country that rarely if ever see snow and I am sure they produce lots of well adjusted adults, but I feel sorry that they have never gotten to have a real snow day. I am pretty sure that there is a group of kids in our subdivision with the freedom to really enjoy a snow day if we got four or five inches of the white stuff. Everyone deserves to have a snow day or two in their life. May you get one this year and figure out how to really enjoy it.
My Mother Working On Flowers In Handmade Flower Boxes
We all go through life differently. That much I know from being around this long. I have known people who could hardly use a screwdriver. I have also known some who could do almost anything with nothing. Human society is trending towards those who might not even recognize a screwdriver unless their smartphone can show them a picture. Last summer finally convinced me that most people would rather have food out of a grocery store than a garden. That comes after many years of giving away produce from our garden. Giving away produce is not just picking it from the garden and handing it over to someone. Often you have to clean it up, sort it, wash it multiple times and sometimes even prepare for the table. You have to make it look like it came from the produce aisle. There are not many people I could tell, “Just go cut whatever head of lettuce you want.” There are even fewer people you hand over a plot of land and have them successfully plant a garden and harvest food from it. In a little over a hundred years, most of the people in the country have gone from living close to the land to living in the city or the suburbs and divorced from everything but their yard. Of course it is not just gardening. There are plenty of things that people used to do for themselves that they cannot or choose not to for themselves. There are a lot of professional out there who make a living filling in the gaps. At a certain age there are things that you are better off not doing. Just before I turned seventy, I quit using the push mower to mow my yard. It was a two miles walk and a couple of hours of hard work in the coastal heat. We hired someone to do it but I continued to do some of the fussy mowing. I would probably still be doing that if we had not moved. I am one of those people who went back to land after college. I did not become a back to the land hippie, I became a farmer or actually a cattleman with two hundred head of Angus. During the decade after college I learned everything from doing copper sweat joints, making cabinets, welding and wiring a house to building barns and growing all the food we needed. We had a milk cow, chickens, and even pigs once. I know where and how meat gets from the pasture to the table. In 1972, two of us killed a steer and hung it in our root cellar with the salt pork while we cut it up by hand. It was a lot of work. We went with the butcher the next time. I have managed to build a few things over the last years including the desk in my office. I know there are still people out there who build things with their hands but I also know their number is shrinking. A lot of the things you learn long the way lose their significance. Very few people probably even remember what a distributor did much less how to make sure it is set to specifications. The distributors are no longer in cars. A car today is much more likely to have a computer problem than something feeding electricity the spark plugs. Even with computers a lot of what I have learned is worthless today even though it was critical knowledge at the time. I still remember how to make an Apple III work. That has to be high on the list of useless things to know. There are thousands of people who know how do things who had different life paths than me. Each one of those people picked up unique skills that may or may not be relevant today. There are a lot of stories there worth telling- maybe a new Foxfire series. I would read it. As people recede further and further into their cocoons insulated from the real world by today’s service economy, those of us that remember how to do all those things can often no longer do them ourselves so it is good the service economy is there. Maybe I will hang on long enough to remind some of the more able people what they could do it they would.
I like white button mushrooms. They are a favorite in omelets, salads and all sorts of things. Six years ago we were living on North Carolina’s Crystal Coast which is roughly defined as the area from the White Oak River in Swansboro to Town of Beaufort. It is a very unique area because most of the year there are less than 70,000 people in residence but for six to twelve weeks during the summer, the population more than doubles. In order to feed all those people staying in rental homes, the area has an abundance of grocery stores.
Yet for our first eleven years on the coast, button mushrooms remained relatively expensive. Whether you went to Harris-Teeter, Lowes, Publix, IGA, or Piggly Wiggly, button mushrooms seemed priced higher than I expected.
Then almost simultaneously Aldi and Lidl opened stores in the area. Instead of paying $2 to $3 a box for mushrooms, you could get a box for ninety-nine cents. It was a welcome change which I expected to go away, but it didn’t and to this day, white button mushrooms are more competitively priced than were before Aldi and Lidl came to town.
Studies show that less than ten percent of households in the United are not connected to the Internet. However, a larger portion of those connected people in effect only have one provider that delivers anything close to the speeds needed in our wired world. Usually those with only one option find their Internet is more expensive than what can be found in areas with competition.
Much like my expensive button mushrooms, it doesn’t really matter if you have five grocery stores in your community if they all charge similarly high prices. What it took to get the price of mushrooms down was a different kind of grocery store with a different pricing model.
There are a number of factors which affect competition for Internet services. Much like the grocery stores that all sold mushrooms at a similar price, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) often set their pricing to be very close to other ISPs. Some providers even charge people with slow Internet the same as people getting faster Internet. That is the classic definition of tier flattening.
Fiber Internet connectivity is the gold standard for home Internet. In general national providers are competitive with their fiber pricing. Competition for new fiber customers is fierce right now with some great offers and pricing that is unlikely to stay that low without competition.
It is really a golden age for faster Internet because fiber is more widely available in more neighborhoods and there are more fiber providers. Fiber Internet service providers have figured out that very few fiber customers change providers once they get on fiber. The reason for this is two fold. One is that fiber Internet is so much better than other copper-based or wireless Internet services that few will ever go back to slower cable, DSL, or wireless. The second reason is very few areas have a choice of two fiber service providers.
In most communities, the ISPs have a captive audience—a local monopoly. It is very difficult for a second (competitive) provider to make a business case to build a second fiber network in community where there is already an ISP offering fiber Internet. According to a recent study only 12% of homes have access to two fiber providers.
Unlike copper-based cable and DSL Internet, a fiber network can easily carry several competing Internet services. Cable and DSL are like a two lane road. They can only handle a limited amount of traffic. Fiber is like a superhighway with unlimited lanes. You can have multiple service providers offering services over the network—this is known as the “open access” business model.
We have built networks that have six service providers offering service from a single fiber network. Service providers can focus on delivering differentiated services without the immense capital costs of constructing a second (or third) fiber network. In this scenario, one party owns the network—it can be a local government, a nonprofit, or a for profit company. Service providers can each sell their own services, Internet packages, and offer their own pricing on the single high performance fiber “road.”
Amazon, UPS, and USPS do not each build a road so they can deliver packages; the government builds roads and all public and private businesses use the one shared road system to deliver goods and services.
Until recently, most Internet Service Providers have resisted this “shared network” model because they prefer having monopoly control over customers and pricing—that is, they do not want to compete.
Currently, some state and Federal grant money is being channeled directly to ISPs, which enables them to expand their monopoly network to more customers. A better solution is to use state and Federal funding to build open access networks. Some local and regional governments have embraced this model and have a long track record of success. And there are now ISPs that recognize open access networks as a business opportunity.
Modern fiber Internet networks are easy to build and to operate. Local and regional government that adopt the open access model create private sector jobs and business opportunities, and help keep the cost of Internet affordable for businesses and residents.
Design Nine has been a pioneer in assisting with the development of open access networks. Visit our website Designnine.com for info or send me an email: dsobotta at designnine.com or dsobotta at wideopennetworks.us .
1TIER FLATTENING: AT&T and Verizon Home Customers Pay a High Price for Slow InternetJuly 31, 2018- National Digital Inclusion Alliance – by Bill Callahan and Angela Siefer
2Fiber Broadband Association Reports North America Hit Highest Annual FTTH Growth Record- Fiber Broadband Association -December 11, 2023
Our technological infirmity 
