North Carolina – Page 2 – Our technological infirmity

The Trails of Our Lives

By the time I found the first trail that really meant something to my life, I had graduated from college and was living in an old farm house on the shore of the Bay of Fundy. Behind the house was a large field which sloped upwards to a spruce forest. At the top of the field there was a trail that wound through the woods. As much as I loved the rocky shore that was part of the property, the trail at the head of the field seemed to be more personal.

My two Labrador Retrievers, Tok and Fundy, often accompanied me on my hikes. There was nothing spectacular about much of the trail but it finally opened into a clearing that actually was on my neighbor Joe’s property. The view from the clearing was spectacular. I was living in the Village of St. Croix Cove and you could see the actual St. Croix Cove. I loved the view so much that I eventually traded some land for it.

There were times that I thought that Nova Scotia was the greenest place that I had ever seen. We sometimes were able to find baskets of chanterelle mushrooms just off the trail. No mushrooms since then have ever tasted like those.

With the trail being inNova Scotia, it sometimes took on a winter look and often stayed that way for a month or two. While it was hard to walk up the hill, getting up to the trail on cross country skis was even more challenging.

With each move, we managed to find new trails, some of them memorable.

I eventually got some snow shoes but the snow and and my schedule never managed to really coordinate before we moved off to New Brunswick which was the land of real snow as opposed to rain, snow, rain, and more snow like Nova Scotia.

Still the Nova Scotia trail was beautiful when it did snow. It was a little challenge skiing through the trees without getting covered with snow but that was just part of the charm. That and freezing your tail off were just part of cross country skiing in Nova Scotia in its normal thirty mile per hour breeze.

When we finally moved to New Brunswick, it snowed a lot and we eventually got a tractor-mounted snow blower which coincidentally allowed me to groom a very nice cross country ski trail. Obviously, my wife breaking trail on snowshoes like she did the first winter was not a sustainable solution especially once we had three children.

That first winter on snowshoes helped me to find my next favorite trail which was about a mile and a half and took me to a ridge at the back of our home farm. At the top of the ridge you seemed to surrounded by endless woods. It felt like true wilderness.

The next ten years were spent farming and there was scant time for pleasure hiking. Every trip to the top of the ridge was precious. I did spend lots of time leading cows through the woods from summer to fall pasture and making the long walk to the barn during calving season.

If we fast forward about twenty years, we have moved from New Brunswick to Halifax and back to the states, first finding some temporary roots in Columbia, Maryland. While Columbia, a planned community, was full of trails, none of them were wild enough for me. Barely two years after getting to Maryland, we moved south to Virginia and found a wonderful place on the side of the foothills of Twelve O’Clock Knob Mountain. Up on the mountain behind our home there was nothing for miles. It was a good place for the next trail that provided a respite from the pressures of civilization.

In the early nineties while still living on the mountain, we went to look at a Labrador puppy. It was no surprise that we came home with Chester. Chester, a wonderful pal, like all Labradors grew quickly and needed lots of exercise.

One winter Chester and I were doing our normal two to three mile hike around our subdivision and we saw an old woods road. We walked up it and managed to find our way home through the woods. It was not too long afterwards that I ran into the owner and got his permission to work on the trail.

It was a beginning of a decade of walking that trail, but it took a lot of work to make the trail usable during the summer. The old logging road had filled up with poison ivy. It took me months of work and spraying to kill the poison ivy so Chester and I could enjoy the trail together. Then we often spent Saturdays doing trail maintenance. Chester sleeping in a shady spot while I worked.

The trail rose high above all the houses and looked down on the city of Roanoke. Once on the trail, you felt like civilization was far away. Eventually I discovered an old homestead and the grave of a confederate soldier. It was easy to imagine living on the ridge and trying to scratch out a life from the small fields on the mountainside. A couple of times I made it to parts of the mountain where I found an old road that was knee deep in pine needles. It appeared the road had been unused for decades. At the very top of the ridge even the type trees started to change from hardwoods to firs. It was not unusual to hike the trail in the morning and the evening. We all loved it. We kept a kiddie pool so Chester could cool off after his hikes. Only when Chester began to get old did the trail fall into disuse.

It was always Chester’s Trail to us even as we moved from Roanoke in 2006 two years after he passed away. It was perhaps time to go because the old road that I cleared had been graded and paved. Someone from the valley had bought the land along the ridge and was building a home near the old homestead.

After moving from the mountains, we spent almost sixteen years at the beach. I found a favorite trail on the beach to the end of the Point at Emerald Isle. It was a wonderful hike and once again it was easy to feel like civilization had slipped away. Still it was not the same since I had to share it with lots of others in the summer and people could even get to the end of the trail by boat. I did fall in love with the salt marshes where you could lose the pretense of civilization a lot easier than on the beaches.

Now we are back in the hardwood hills not far where I grew up playing in the deep woods. I think that I might have found another trail that looks like it will be a big part of my life. It runs through what can only be called a cathedral of leaves. The beauty of their colors have left me speechless at times. I am happy to have found it early enough in life to still be able to enjoy walking it.

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 Shade Trees Are Still There, We Aren’t

I remember well the Sunday afternoons under the shade trees enjoying watermelon or homemade peach ice cream. As children, we played like there was no tomorrow. It was a simpler time when people could actually talk politics without getting angry. There was nothing like an old fashioned chicken stew to bring families together in North Carolina’s rolling hills.

There were no chicken stews that I got to attend during my college years. Those were the especially turbulent late sixties and early seventies and I was far away from North Carolina in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As I finished my degree in the summer of 1971, I needed to get away from those strange-hued city-night skies where it was impossible to see the stars.

Just as people used to gather under shade trees in North Carolina, friends used to just drop by on Sunday afternoons at our farm for visit. It was a great excuse to stop working and spend some time catching up on the neighborhood news. It was the way people built relationships, established trust and found common ground. I cannot ever remember discussing politics.

Beyond the impromptu visits, there were community picnics, shared meals, church services (even burials) and work done for the good of the community. All these things made for richer shared lives. When we were on the farm, I never doubted that the community and friends helped us be successful. The support of their communities was essential to success of farming when we had our farm.

That was back in the seventies. The fifty years since then have not been kind to under the shade tree gatherings or any of the other ways that we connected and established relationships.

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The Ghost I Knew

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

When I was about three in 1952, mother and I moved into a new house mother had built in Lewisville on Styers Street next door to my great grandmother, Millie Ann Crews Styers. She was ninety-nine the spring of 1952 when we moved into our new house. While she was still alive a the year and one half after we moved, one of my chores was to run over to her little house to see if she was still sitting upright in her rocking chair by her wood-stove and reading the newspaper.

Our new house had a beauty shop attached and a breezeway. The breezeway eventually got turned into my bedroom. There were no ghostly things in our Lewisville house unless you count the scary smell of the permanent solutions mother administered to ladies in the beauty shop adjacent to my bedroom. It was her high margin item so she was happy to do as many as possible in spite of the toxic fumes.

Then the fall of 1963, my mother moved back to 347 West Pine Street (pictured above) in Mount Airy, North Carolina. My first Thanksgiving trip home from boarding school was to that house by way of a Piedmont Airlines puddle-jumper. I was attending McCallie, a Presbyterian military school in Chattanooga, Tennessee. On that first flight home, I still remember they didn’t turn the airplane engines off when did a touch and go in Asheville. They just lowered the steps that came from the tail. Passengers exited, and we continued our flight. It was my first and only flight to the Winston-Salem airport. After that they all started and ended in Greensboro.

Since I left for boarding school, mybedroom had moved from our non-spooky house in Lewisville about thirty-eight miles away to the huge to me Pine Street house which certainly had the potential for spookiness. My dad had been in a house at that location since around the turn of the century. My mom lived there from the mid-twenties until just before I was born in 1949 in Charlotte, North Carolina. For many years, she ran a beauty shop on Main St. in Mount Airy, near Snappy Lunch, just walking distance from the Pine Street house.

The house also had a lot of history, some of it gruesome including a fire that destroyed most of the original house. Lots of history is certainly helpfully when looking for ghosts. Many of stories that the house’s four walls could tell never got explained to me before everyone who could shed light on the mysteries died.

Some the questions that I wanted answered never got addressed because no one ever wanted to talk about them. There were things that I did not even know to ask when I was growing up.

The house at 347 West Pine Street is an imposing home with bedrooms on three floors and noisy old hot boiler that made lots of strange sounds in the night. There was so much water pressure in the showers, that I thought it might take my skin off. It was something of a dark, magic house likely with secret passages. It was a good place to let your imagination run wild especially if you are a country boy more comfortable in the woods than in a big fancy house. By the time, I got old enough to care about the secrets of the house, I was on a mission to get away from the house and Mount Airy. That mission took me to Canada by the time I was twenty-two.

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 locked steamer trunks, this attic was it. The house even had a laundry chute which went all the way to the basement where there was a bedroom and bathroom for a maid. The kitchen, dining room, and great room were on the second floor along with the bedroom my father was reduced to using because of a stroke. I ended with the master bedroom and Mertha, the maid, took to calling me Mister David.

It did not take me long to figure out that the history I did not know about was powerful in the minds of others. My Aunt Molly when she visited would not stay in the guest bedroom. She always slept in one of the twin beds in my mother’s bedroom. Eventually I heard the story about my father’s first wife’s attempted suicide. My mother, who at the time was nursing my grandmother Sobotta, found my father’s first wife hanging from the walnut railing around the top of the stairs. She saved her but the one traumatic story that I heard about was born. I know there were others but I never heard them.

I was never afraid of the house but there were some strange things that made you wonder like how cool the hallway always felt between my bedroom and the stairs to the attic. Of course there were strange noises but it was an old house. Then in 1974 after my dad had died, my wife and I were staying in my bedroom after coming back from our place in Canada. It was our first night in the house as a married couple.

We were going to bed and all of sudden the two electrical panels started popping. It was like someone was running between the two floors using the steep back stairs flipping the ancient circuit breakers off and on except the lights didn’t go off and on. The circuit breakers, the first ever for Surry County, were not easy to move from one position to the other. They also made a loud noise. My mother was sound asleep in her bedroom. She always slept with a baseball bat by her bed but said the ghost had never bothered her. I thought someone had broken into the house. I took my Remington semi-automatic shotgun from my gun cabinet and checked the whole house. All doors were locked and no windows had been breached. Things quieted down as soon as I left my bedroom. To this day, I have never solved the riddle of the noise that night. I came to believe the ghost was welcoming my wife to the old house.

My mother deeded the house to my wife and me in 2000 when she moved in with us after her friend, RJ Berrier, a local newsman, died. He had taken over my bedroom for the last fifteen years so mother could still live there. If possible the house got even spookier with no live souls in it. Mother died in the spring of 2004. I often said that if there was a ghost in the house, it would have to deal with the life force of my mother when she entered the realm of spirits. My money was always on my mother winning any battle, even one of the spirits.

After her death, we were faced with cleaning out one hundred years of stuff that had accumulated in the Pine Street house. It took us a few years and we often spent weekends working on the house. One weekend my wife was working in a hall closet on the main floor. She looked towards the foyer and saw something translucent and triangular shaped floating from the stairs to the dining room. We are pretty grounded people but we could never come up with an explanation that made any sense. It was probably my imagination, but the upstairs hallway felt particularly cold that day.

This might prove I am crazy but not long after that I decided that the blinds in the attic had to go. I ripped them down and threw open the windows. It was not long after that when I noticed how warm the upstairs hallway felt. I smiled and thought to myself that my mother’s spirit had prevailed and the restless ghost had been driven out once I opened the windows and made sure the attic got plenty of sunshine.

Even after that I was the only one willing to spend the night in the house alone. By that time the guns were long gone but so was the evil ghost.

After we sold the house there were rumors guests in the house, now a bed and breakfast, seeing an ephemeral lady in a blue dress leaning over the bed in the bedrooms and of a jar of honey that moved from one shelf in the kitchen to the counter without human help. I probably can guess the name of the new ghost living there now.

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.

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)

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)

Finally a Backyard

Our Backyard in the North Carolina Foothills

It seems since my childhood that I have spent much of my life searching for a backyard. I have had hayfields and marshes as backyard but until this last move none were close to the one where I played ball with friends when I was in elementary school. I could plow up part of it for a huge garden but I have been there and enjoyed that when I was a lot younger. Read more.