Family History – Page 2 – Our technological infirmity

Not Enough Wilderness To Save Us

Sunset on White Oak River Near Swansboro, NC

Towns are magnets and they suck people from the countryside, especially the young and talented. We noticed this happening when we returned to New Brunswick in 2012.We farmed there in the seventies and early eighties. Since our trip, what remained of the three churches in our old town disappeared. The community store closed. Yet the provincial capital, Fredericton, is thriving as the small towns wither. It is a story repeated time and again in Canada and the United States.

I still worry that some of those wild places like the North Carolina coast will become too populated. I sometimes think that what we call the Northern Outer Banks from Corolla to Cape Hatteras will sink into the seas just from the weight of all those beach castles. I offer up my profound thanks for those who created the National Seashores. Beyond nourishing our souls places like coastal Carteret County and hilly Davie County where we now live grow a lot of food that North Carolina cities need.

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Empty Promises

No Paper in the Driveway and An Empty Newspaper Box

I don’t want to be the old guy complaining about other people trying to earn a living. I would like to provide some constructive criticism that might make all of our lives easier.

I spent nearly twenty years at Apple and anyone who knows me will quickly tell you that I am no Steve Jobs fan. I saw him do things that were nothing but mean and contributed nothing to the great products that came out of the company.

However, the one thing that I learned of value from time within the Steve Job’s orbit is that the hardest thing is to say no to things that you might like to do but aren’t in your sweet spot. I would add that if you cannot do something with passion and precision, find something else to do.

Obviously sometimes you really need money and I understand those pressures because I have had my back to the wall with a payment or bill due. I have been lucky that I have always found ways, one time I sold our bulldozer, to keep going until better times. Those better times have always taken me to opportunities where I was proud to work and more importantly eager to do my best.

So here is the problem today. People take jobs and commit to doing the work, then they don’t do the job. Some never master what it takes to do the job. Some pretend to do the job. Others do not even bother to show up. We have been amazed when trying to hire students to do data entry as part time jobs. It is not hard work, yet continually people commit to working x-number of hours but only work half that. Then there are those who promise but never show.

The problem is widespread. (Read More)

The Five Shirt Day

An overlooked challenge of the pandemic is that it has been very hard on clothing, specifically shirts. I have never been easy on clothing. I have a long history of getting dirty. When we lived on the farm, my wife, Glenda, was known to sometimes hose me down and make me take my dirty clothes off in the woodshed before I could come into the house. Back in my lawn mowing days on the North Carolina coast, not only did I come in encrusted in dirt from a yard that was more dust than grass at times but I also ended up fishing, walking on the beach, gardening and working at my desk. It all required a lot of different clothes, but I am not sure that I ever had a five shirt day.

The pandemic has made it more challenging to do almost everything except work from home. The statement that clothes make the man or woman has changed to shirts make the man or woman. With Zoom and Team conference calls, how you look on video is what matters these days and our video cameras only show us from us from the face down to our desks. So we pay attention to the shirts that we wear.

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The Ghost I Knew

You cannot have a ghost story without a spooky, somewhat mysterious house and where I grew up in rural Forsyth County was nothing like that but things change.

A little mystery also helps with ghosts and there was plenty of mystery in my life in the fifties. The house also had a lot of history, some of it gruesome which is certainly helpfully when looking for ghosts. Many of stories that the house’s four walls could tell never got fully explained to me before everyone who could explain died. Some the questions that I wanted answered never got addressed because no one wanted to talk about them.

Upstairs above the floor with the bedrooms was a full stick-framed attic complete with walnut banisters. If ever there was an area that could house ghosts along with mysterious steamer trunks, this attic was it.

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A Cathedral of Leaves

Trees at Rich Park in Mocksville, North Carolina

Apparently none of the storybook scary tales of danger in the forest ever stuck with me. In rural North Carolina in the fifties, no one worried about evil happening in the forests that surrounded us. We did not understand it at the time, but the cathedral of leaves where we played immensely enriched our lives. As a fifties explorer of the local woods, I could not make the connection because I had yet to experience any of the great cathedrals of the world. Now it seems pretty obvious.

In the summertime, we got up in the morning and headed to the coolness of the deep woods. The towering trees and the brooks that ran through them were our playgrounds. We built dams, seined for minnows, made forts, and played elaborate games in the woods. Sometimes we hardly bothered to leave the woods for meals. We barely escaped the trees as dark descended on the forest.

(Read more) This is post number nine in a series of twenty-two designed to get my blog to 1700 posts before Thanksgiving 2021.

We Were Barn Builders Once

The first barn we built on our farm in Tay Creek, New Brunswick, Canada

We moved to our farm in Tay Creek, New Brunswick in the fall of 1975. We bought a few cows and they were housed in the old style barn that came with the farm. That spring I went to Manitoba and Saskatchewan and bought a trailer truck load of cows. I had no intention of wintering that many cows in an old style barn. We got a couple of estimates to build a barn. We decided to build a couple of barns ourselves.
While I had learned a lot about working with my hands since I graduated from college, building a barn was not one of those skills. Living on a farm teaches you quickly do what needs to be done even if means learning how to do something new. I ordered all the materials that we needed from Ontario. They were shipped by rail to New Brunswick and then delivered by truck to our farm. The trusses for the barns were 36 ft. long and the others for the other barn were 36 ft. Even getting those trusses unloaded was not easy but it is amazing what you can do with a couple of farm tractors with front-end loaders.
It was harder getting a crew together but a couple of older neighbors agreed to help the two alternative life-style individuals that I hired. They had both come to Canada to get away from American life. I did not care about anything other than they were smart and hard workers. I started by digging a trench four-feet deep as straight as possible for 128 feet. We followed recommendations and made concrete pads to go under each of the four by six pressure treated poles. It was the last time we put pads under poles.
It turned out the instructions we were following were written for building barns in rock-free Ontario soils. New Brunswick soils were mostly rock. There was little danger of them sinking. After the first trench, I decided that we would dig holes with large hydraulic-powered auger mounted on a front-end loader. The advantage of having it on a front-end loader is that I could put down pressure on the auger with the loader so that it would dig more efficiently in the rocky soil. Once the poles were set, we used a tractor-mounted concrete mixer to pour concrete around the poles.
Once the posts were in the ground, it was just a lot of chain saw carpentry cutting the posts off to the same heights. Then we put plates on either sides of the poles. Then the trusses were put in place one at a time. The first truss was the hardest since there wasn’t a lot to brace it with when it was first lifted up. By the time I built the second barn, I had figured out how to improve the construction so that the first truss really was no longer a problem. If you look closely at this picture of the construction of our second barn you can see we put longer posts at the end of the building.
Beyond all the strapping that goes on a pole barn, the hardest thing is putting on the big sheets of galvanized roofing. Often you are way in the air and the only thing keeping you from slipping is the head of a nail. The second barn also got extensions on both sides. We ran out of pressure treated wood so we used cedar posts that came from trees cut off the farm.
The first barn was finished by Thanksgiving (American) 1975. I put the last steel on the barn door before I had any turkey. There a lot of other things that went into making the barns functional like getting electricity to them and of course water. We had to drill a well. I used the backhoe to build a small underground building around the well so I could keep it going in the brutal New Brunswick winters. I dug trenches to put frost free hydrants at both barns.
The finished barns had dimensions of 128 ft. by 36 ft. for the first barn and 69 ft. by 64 ft. for the second one. When I visited the farm back in 2012, both barns were still in good shape in spite of no real maintenance since 1984 when we moved from the farm. They were the only barns that I ever built.
It took at least of couple of years to get the interiors of the barns done so that they met the needs of our growing cattle herd. It was a lot of work but the new barns, a round baler and big farm tractors allowed me to run a cattle operation with 65 or so calving females before we decided to change careers. At our peak before our dispersal in 1982, we had 200 head of Angus, both red and black. The open style barns gave us a very healthy herd of cattle. In the nearly ten years we farmed, we never had a vet visit the farm. We probably had well over three hundred calves in that time.

Turkey Tussles

The first turkey that I remember being prepared in our house was cooked after we moved to the Mount Airy house with my dad. The first Thanksgiving at college, I did not come home but I got invited out by a college friend, Jack. We had a wonderful dinner and I got my one and only opportunity so far to sample stuffing with oysters.

The next memorable Thanksgiving happened after college. I had purchased an old farmhouse with a barn and 140 acres on the shores of the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia. Four of us had spent months remodeling the two-hundred year old house with hand-hewed beams. College friends came up to celebrate that first Thanksgiving on our own in the fall of 1971. We bought the biggest turkey we could find and the ladies in the group figured out how to cook it.

Little did I know I was already on the slippery slope to a smaller turkey and eventually just a turkey breast. I never take exception with the cook but I sure do miss those whole turkeys. (Read more)

Dirt On My Hands

Our first off-the-farm garden in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Spring 1986

I farmed for over ten years, but I did not grow up on a farm. I graduated from college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as those of us who went to Harvard in sixties and seventies are fond of saying. The closest I got to farming there was my focus on colonial American History. My family did have a rich history of being close to the land and my grandfather was a miller and then a dairy farmer. I never knew him.

I grew up with a mother who spent most of her free time digging in the dirt. She loved flowers and they responded to her love. Roses grew for her in places no one else could get them to grow. Tomatoes were the only vegetable that we had room for at my childhood home, but they did incredibly well.

Growing up, the only digging in the dirt that I did was to get worms so I could go fishing. I was completely uninterested in growing anything. That certainly continued through my college years. The change and how it came about are something of a mystery even to me. When it happened is easier. The change happened sometime between August 1971 and January 1972 when I started ordering seeds from a catalog. (Read More)

The Mill Pond

Mill Stone from Walter Styers Grist Mill

My mother spent her childhood up to her teenage years on a mill pond. In my mind’s eye I can see the mill pond, the mill and the house. I have certainly heard enough stories. My mother grew up there. As a very young child she got lost in the woods one night. She had tagged a long with her older brothers to play at the other end of the pond. Like older brothers will do, they got frustrated with their sister hanging around and told her to go home. She got lost on the way back. She was found by a black man who helped at the mill. She was found only after spending a long cold night in the woods with only one of the family’s dogs as company. Walter Styers, her father, was getting ready to drain the pond and start looking for her body just before she was found. (Read more)

If Silver Could Talk

Silver is not very popular these days. Some silver things can hardly be given away. My generation has one foot in the world where silver items were well used and certainly respected and today’s world where silver pieces cannot find a home where they even see the light of day and a little polish.

At least this straddling of worlds provides a little perspective. I know my mother who was definitely not born with a silver spoon in her mouth learned to love silver when she became the grand lady of the house at 347 West Pine St. My dad who I hardly knew loved to have dinner parties. In those days, the first half of the last century, a good party apparently required silver. I wasn’t around but the silver was and if only it could talk. (Read more)