Nova Scotia – Our technological infirmity

The Worthwhile Journey North

My wife, Glenda, at the head of our hayfield in St. Croix Cove, Nova Scotia. She is accompanied by Tok, one of our Labrador Retrievers

My seventy-seventh birthday is coming up in a few weeks. The thought of being that old has prompted a lot of introspection. Someimes we know why we do something but there are some forks in the road where our motivations might not be so clear. There are also things you remember which make you wonder how much influence they had on your decisions. I was in high school, a military one, when President Kennedy was assasinated. I remember the deaths of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. I also vividly remember the election of Richard Nixon, the Vietnam War demonstrations and the feeling of relief when I found out that I wasn’t going to get drafted to fight a war which I thought was wrong on more than one level. When I graduated college, I went back to the land on shores of the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia. Some dissatisfaction with the political direction in the United States helped direct me to the north in 1971.
I spent first weeks of 2026, entertaining myself with YouTube videos of the new generation of homesteaders. Many of them are young, and all that I have seen appear to be healthy enough to handle all the wood splitting required to live off grid. I often wonder how their lives might change a few years down the road when their families include two or three children who need educating while the unrelenting work taking care of farm animals demands much of their time. Some of these homesteaders seek purity and will not even consider using a chainsaw. Others seem to believe that doing everything with used equipment shows their dedication to a different kind of life with ingenuity and a dose of poverty. Some fully embrace ATVs, snowmobiles, tractors and even excavators. Most it not all of them embrace solar power. There is a propensity for them to have goats and chickens with few pigs and cattle sprinkled around. Some have subsistence permits and live off Alaska’s. bountiful salmon and wild game. No one seems to have the land to grow their own hay, but many are investing huge effort into growing vegetables in places were vegetables are very hard to grow. Some have very young children but very few have teenagers. I am sure there are many reasons why they are living off grid or in my world have gone back to the land. They will likely wrestle with their decisions as they get older. A few have figured out how absolutely brutal longterm homesteading is on the homesteaders. It will be interesting to see how many are still around five eyars from now.
Long before I graduated college in the summer of 1971, I wanted to move north There were all sorts of reasons but four years at military school along with four turbulent years at college set the stage. My freshman year (1967) at Harvard, I was one of three students out of 1,500 in our class from North Carolina. At the time North Carolina was a rural place, and I had grown up loving camping, fishing, and wandering the woods. No one from our family had ever been to college so there was no famial advice to lean on for a career. My single mother raised me by running a beauty shop in the back of our house. Her one piece of advice was whatever I chose to do, I should do it to the best of my ability. She had grown up on a mill pond with a father who was a miller. She had become the lady of the house for her five sisters and brother at the age of nine when her mother died in 1917 flu pandemic. She left home by her middle teenage years when her father remarried..
With those ties to the land and the family of one of mother’s sisters still farming, it was not a stretch for me to want to go back to the land and farm. A trip to Alaska and another to Nova Scotia fanned the flame. In the spring of 1971, I found an old farm on the Nova Scotia coast that was listed for $6,000. It included an old farm house and 140 acres with about thirty acres of that in a hayfield.
Restoring the old house, buying some farm equipment and a few cows are all part of my history. When we decided to get serious about farming we moved to New Brunswick where we built a farm where we eventually had sixty-five cows calving every year.
There were lots of other easier paths to take to adulthood. I needed a path that let me learn everything the hard way. I learned how to wire a house and do copper plumbing by reading Sears How-to-do-it pamplets. I learned to farm by reading books and listening to my neighbors in most cases. I built barns with just common sense, skill saws, and a chainsaw. We only left the farm when interest rates got to over 20%. We also made the decision three years after leaving the farm that we wanted our children to know their North Carolina based grandparents and hopefully find lives not far from us.
It was a huge effort to move from the farm to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where I went to work for Apple. It took even more effort to move back to the states.
Now as I sit in my comfortable house eating food from local farms and exotic places like Trader Joe’s, I struggle to remember the day to day challenges we faced on the farm. I can remember all the wood splitting, the hauling it into the woodshed, the years of milking our Guernsey, Rosie. I also remember all those trips, often three times a night, to check for new born calves in the depths of winter. All the work that went into haying and gardening is clearly burned into my mind. The freezers were always filled with beef which is a luxury today. We had more garden produce than we could dream of eating but it was a lot of hard work especially when the black flies were around. We saw weather as cold as minus forty with sixty mile per hour winds and heat over one hundred degrees. We lived on the edge of civilization but most days we had power. We also had the equipment to move snow and take care of 200 head of cattle without hiring another person. There was a ten year stretch with no vacation. When we finally did get a vacation to Prince Edward Island, we did not know how to act on vacation. Farm life was brutally hard at times, often money was very short, but we all slept well at night.
Even with all the hard work, I would sign up for it again but with fewer cattle if somehow I miraculously got a body forty years younger. Whatever the reasons behind this generation going back to the land, it might well burn brightest in their memories like it does in mine.

Doing it the hard way

In the sixties or early seventies, the back to land movement was well known. The 1968 Whole Earth Catalog was the instruction manual dedicated to it. Helen and Scott Nearing were its inspirational grandparents. Many in my generation’s back to the land movement were vegetarians like the Nearings. Some were vegetarian by choice and others because of necessity. Because of my proclivity to cattle and farming, I studied Louis Bromfield’s book, Malabar Farm. Today there there is a new generation of people going back to the land.
In this century they are known by the label “off grid.” Few of those folks are openly vegetarians. This new generation proudly hunts and fishes for protein to supplement what they grow. Though their animals are more likely goats than cows, there are some with cows and even horses.
Many of today’s off grid folks are often in places deliberately difficult to reach. Most back to the landers in the seventies went where they could find cheap land whether it was alongside a road like my house and barn or back in the boonies where my friends in the dome lived.
During the seventies, the rural Annapolis Valley where we shopped did not have supermarkets. It had small grocery stores and cooperatives where you could get your food, your baler twine, and some beef fattener for your steer all in one shopping trip. Beaver Fruit Cooperative got most of our business. I also did some bulk orders with the folks in the dome. We had a local hardware and a Sears catalogue store which is where we ordered our appliances.
There were times in the early seventies when I thought about getting farther from the roads that connected us to the rest of the world. Reality always intruded. I thought about homesteading in Newfoundland, but my wife took one look and said I would be homesteading alone. I even found a great spot high on a hill on my land in Nova Scotia.
It is pictured at the top of the post. It was over a mile off the road which does not sound very far until you factor in the heavy clay soil and the astronomical expense of building a mile-long gravel road where gravel is in short supply. Then there would be the likely impossible task of getting power to the homestead. In those days there were no solar panels and battery systems to give you electricity off grid. Drilling water wells on our North Mountain was also problematic.
By the time we moved to New Brunswick we were well on the track for serious farming. We still gardened on a large scale, had chickens, and a milk cow. We did move to having someone butcher our annual steer for us instead of doing it ourselves. In creating our farm, we built well over a mile and a half of roads with New Brunswick’s ready supply of gravel over our rocky soils. I also convinced New Brunswick power to bring power a quarter of a mile back to the new barns that we built. We drilled a well back by the barns. It provided so much water that it was hard to measure.
So by 1976, all the elements were in place for us to move farther from the village of Tay Creek near our new barns but with no close neighbors. It wasn’t in the cards. While we had not had a great experience with the people of St. Croix Cove, the people of Tay Creek had been so welcoming that neither my wife or I would consider having the village become less accessible. It was also a great convenience to be by the road where the school bus picked up our children. It turned out we liked being part of our small farming village. We valued the connections of people dropping by to chat. I did not even mind cleaning the driveways of some residents who became close friends. When we needed them, our farming neighbors were there to help as much as they could.
In the end it seems the biggest difference between the back to the land movement of the sixties and seventies and today’s off grid homesteader is that the homesteader of today is often working to isolate themselves from others. In the sixties and seventies back to landers were still interested in community. I loved the small country stores, but today’s off grid folks are much more likely to seek out the anonymity of COSTCO. The money that some make from YouTube makes it even easier to not have ties with nearby communities. We were part of communities because we needed connections and income. Even today you will find exceptions and some off grid folks are much more community oriented than others. However, when I hear the term off grid what comes to mind are people living in places that are only accessible by four wheel drive, snow mobile or ice road for at least part of the year.

Life Sneaks Up On You

The Royal Road, Tay Creek, New Brunswick, Canada

Just after I graduated college in the summer of 1971, instead of going to Law School, I headed off to Nova Scotia. I was part of the generation that felt strongly about getting back to the land and understanding a lot of things that modern society was hiding from us.

A decision like that is possible when you are young, I believe that as age and life will sneak up on you, it gets much harder to go off on your own in a wild adventure as you age. How older people have done it, remains a mystery to me.

Eventually, I got married and my wife and I moved to what I considered a real farm or at least one that I believed that I could make into a modern farm. We never really gave up all modern conveniences like many back-to-the-landers. One of the first things that I installed in our Nova Scotia farmhouse was a dishwasher. I also put one in our home in New Brunswick. I plowed my garden with a John Deere tractor not a horse.

The road in the picture ran 20 miles back to Fredericton, the capital of New Brunswick. We were lucky to have schools, churches, a couple of general stores and medical services in our little community of Tay Creek. Forty years after we left, the churches and general stores are gone. If you want to buy gasoline or a nail, you have to go to Fredericton.

Taking on building a home for your family in an isolated spot which at the time was subject to amazing snow storms is something you only do when you are young and your body can take on almost any challenge. In my twenties and thirties, I never doubted that I could do everything for my family aside from medical care and schooling. Plumbing, electrical wiring, installing appliances, those were expected of the folks who lived beyond the city. There was no one to hire to mow a yard or even change faucet. While we had an oil furnace, most of our heat came from a wood stove. The furnace would come on during the early morning hours as the house cooled. Our water came from a spring. Our food came from our garden, our milk cow, chickens and cattle herd.

As nice as the life on your own in the hardwood hills of New Brunswick was, it was non-stop work. It was ten years before we went on a real vacation. After we left the farm, we mostly lived in suburbs. Seven years after leaving the farm we were in subdivision on the side of a mountain in SW Virginia. For many years I kept the steep slope behind the house clear of brush and small trees. It meant working with a chainsaw on a hill where I could barely stand. Fortunately, I never got injured. It was another activity reserved for youth.

By the time we got to our next house twenty-four years after leaving the farm, the strenuous work was down to mowing the yard, keeping our skiff running, and hurricane preparation. Good preparation for a hurricane often meant the cleanup afterwards was relatively easy. A storm like Hurricane Florence meant extra cleanup for everyone in the area no matter how much you prepared. The older you get, the harder all that is. Polywood outdoor furniture is nice until you have to haul it all into the garage.

When we moved from the coast in 2021, my wife and I were both over seventy. We were far from our children and family. Our house had too many steps and we were both tired of the hurricane routine in spite of never having any real damage to our house.

My wife had almost five acres of raw farmland which was a hayfield in Surry County. We briefly considered building a home there, but quickly decided that we were too old for all the work needed to build a home so we found a great subdivision with public sewer, water, and fiber Internet. Moving to North Carolina Piedmont close to where I grew up has turned out to be a wise decision.

We are glad that we moved when we did. We have friends our age that would like to move from the coast but have decided that they are too old to try. I can relate to their feelings. Getting our coastal home ready to sell and moving with our four kittens was not the easiest thing that I have ever done. I am pretty sure that three years later, I would be reluctant to move again unless I just had to move.

You don’t think about these things when you are young and can handle anything. Life can sneak up on you. It is good to plan a little for the time when you can no longer take on the world with one arm tied behind your back.

Someone Lives Here

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.

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

Mother’s azaleas just before she moved in 2004

All in on Cattle

Our red Angus bull, Yellowstone, with a small part of the herd- 1981

My first cattle were purchased in the summer of 1973, when we were living in the two-hundred year old post and beam house along the Bay of Fundy in the village of St. Croix Cove. I laugh when I tell the story that our cattle got mixed up with a dairy farmer’s herd and I barely knew enough to separate the two herds.

It did not take much farming on the North Mountain of the Annapolis Valley to figure out that there had to be better places to make hay than a slope that was often covered with fog during the haying season.

I was looking for a new place to farm when I met my wife, Glenda, on a blind date while visiting my mother back in North Carolina. I guess the theory was that a beautiful North Carolina girl would keep me in North Carolina. It did not work and the beautiful North Carolina lady headed off to Canada where we even explored Newfoundland as option for our next farm.

Finally, in the summer of 1974, one year after we got married, we found our farm. It was in the rolling hardwood hills north of New Brunswick’s provincial capital, Fredericton. It was a good place to make hay with much warmer summers than Nova Scotia. It also had winter weather that tended towards snow instead of rain, snow, rain, snow, and finally freezing rain which was typical of the Nova Scotia coast.

When we moved, we sold our first cattle and started fresh. We probably had a couple dozen in the herd that first winter. I was still learning and I got talked into tying the mature females in the barn that first winter. It was the first and last time that we would do that. After a trip to Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta to buy some better brood stock, I was convinced the cattle would be better in the woods than a damp barn. For the next eight years we ran our cattle outside in the winter. For the last few years, we calved an average of sixty cows per year.

The important statistic is that we never had a vet on the farm for a calving problem or a sick calf. We were heavily mechanized using a round baler to put up 300 t0 400 large round bales per year.

The large framed Angus and big bulls that we imported from the west turned out to be pretty popular. We had a good spring trade of selling performance tested yearly bulls. Our cull bulls were sold for beef at twelve months of age.

As we had got several daughters from our original feedstock, we started selling them for breeding stock and replacing them with their daughters. It was a lot of work and lots of promotional work. Yellowstone, our giant red Angus bull from Montana was a show stopper for most people.

In the fall of 1982, we dispersed our herd. Interest rates had risen to 20% and according to the Provincial farm board, we were too successful to qualify for a government-backed two percent loan. I always thought it was because I was a young American with too many new ideas for them to swallow.

In 1974, when I started farming in New Brunswick, I was one of a handful of farmers using round bales to put up their hay. The Provincial Agriculture people told me round would never work in New Brunswick’s climate.

Unfortunately the statistics were on my side. I fed two hundred head of cattle with them for over eight years. I was also told that running the cattle outside would never work. We built two large barns designed around the theory that a cow could have its calf outside in the snow and spend a night or two in a barn before the cow and calf went back outside. Yearlings had a large pole barn to run into during bad weather. We never lost a calf to a cow calving in the snow.

When I went back to New Brunswick forty years later, I found my two barns still standing, almost everyone using round balers, and very few cattle farmers. I guess that shows how effective agricultural experts can be in destroying cattle farming when they put their minds to it.

There have been lots of things that pushed farmers out of beef cattle but having clueless agricultural experts certainly didn’t help. I have often wondered if would still be farming if I had gotten the two precent provincially-backed loan.

My son and I walking through the herd during the summer of 1981

Haying Stays In Your Blood

**Hayfield Near Farmington, North Carolina, April 22, 2023**

Of the over fifty years that I have worked since I graduated college, only a little over a decade was spent farming. I did grow up in North Carolina in the fifties and sixties when everyone we knew had gardens, some had chickens, and even a few had a milk cow. It was not unusual to see hog killings in the fall and to receive some fresh country sausage as a gift.

The land was what gave life to us all, and where we go when life is gone. The land was at the center of all, and how could understand anything without first being on the land?
The Road to My Country

I felt that I had to go back to land. I was a little shellshocked after the sixties, four years in a military school and another four in the funny lights of Cambridge. I bought an old farm in Nova Scotia the summer that I graduated from Harvard. The skies in Nova Scotia were like the ones I remembered in my youth.
The urge to work the soil was strong even though I did not grow up on a farm. The immersion course we got in farming was intense but somehow we thrived for over a decade. We might have stayed on the farm if interest rates had not hit twenty percent in the early eighties and there were better local opportunities for our children. We dispersed our cattle in the fall of 1982 and sold the farm three years later after I spent a couple of years working in the city.

Farming has stayed with me all these years, even during my years in technology. It was only a year or two ago when I was driving from our home at the coast through the Virginia Mountains to headquarters when I saw a field of grass down. It was well on its way to being ready to be becoming hay. I had to stop, roll down the windows and enjoy the smells and remember all the good memories.
It was not unusual for our “team,” Harvey and I to put up sixty tons of hay in a good day. Harvey was in his sixties when I bought his farm which he had farmed with horses. We sometimes cut hay with two nine-foot mower conditioners. The big fields Harvey would rake with our twenty-one foot rake and the small fields with a ten-foot rake. I would bale with the big Vermeer baler and one of the 105 HP International tractors.
You could start cutting hay in the morning while the dew was still on it. Raking the hay before noon was okay, but I rarely started baling the hay until the afternoon. Large windrows that the tractor could barely straddle helped me churn out a nearly 2,000 pound bale every five to ten minutes depending on how much turning had to be done. When the hay was rolled up, we left it in the field until we had time to haul it back to the farm in the fall. Our hay farm was a couple of miles from where we kept the cows. We also cut hay all around the area wherever we could strike a deal with the owners. Before our children came, my wife even used to rake hay.

On a good day, making hay was something that gave you a feeling of accomplishment. A good crop of hay started with clearing the field of brush and rocks, applying lime, then working the ground, planting the grass seed in an oat cover crop, and sometimes fertilizing the fields in the spring. It doesn’t sound like much but it was lots of back-breaking work and sweat.

There were bad days making hay. Our mowers in those days had cutter bars with blades riveted on them. If you hit a rock and broke a blade, you had to stop and replace it. There are few things dirtier that replacing a blade on a mower conditioner cutter bar that has been collecting bugs, seeds, and dust for ten acres on its platform. If you didn’t itch from something that got on you, just remembering all the bugs would make you itch. The worst thing is when the equipment broke when you had hay ready to bale and wet weather was on the way. You try to forget those days. Getting hay that was ready to be baled dry after it was rained on is not a lot of fun.

There were some great memories from those haying seasons. Sometimes I would stop for lunch and my wife and the kids would show up with a real lunch. While my wife and I ate lunch, the kids would pick red raspberries on the rock piles. There were no snakes so it was as safe as it could be. Few of the raspberries they picked made it to us but they were so plentiful you could pick all that you wanted in a few minutes. The hay farm was high on a ridge and you could see for miles. There were no places any nicer on a summer day in the hardwood hills of New Brunswick.

It should be no surprise that I stopped recently to look at a field of grass (pictured above) that needed cutting. It is the last week of April here in North Carolina. There will be no thoughts other than my dreams of cutting hay in New Brunswick, Canada for another couple of months.
If I am lucky in the next two to three weeks, I will get to smell some curing hay in our rural area. I can hardly wait because it is still in my blood.

We Find Our Farm

An aerial photo which a super-imposed elevation of our old farm with picture of the house, a barn, and some cattle. — Tay Ridge Angus Aerial Photo

While we were still working on our old farm house the winter of 1973-74, we were also trying to find a place to move where we could have more success farming. When I look back on it, I am amazed that we found a place which was forgiving enough for us to take what little we knew about farming and have a run at being successful. Still I wanted to work the soil.
We looked in several places in Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island without much success. We took a trip to New Brunswick from St. Croix Cove to deliver Sophie, the goat, and to lend a hand moving to my college roommate and his wife. Mostly my job was to upgrade the electrical panel in the old house that they had purchased.
The trip there was quite an adventure, the Saint John River was flooding and as I have said many times, the only way we made it through the flooded roads was staying in the wake of a tractor trailer that was in front of us on the Trans Canada highway.
This was well before cellphones and the Internet so you might say that we were flying blind but we got there, delivered Sophie, and on the first weekend in May after surviving a night in my roommate’s newly purchased and almost flooded old house, we had a look at a nearby farm that would become Tay Ridge Angus.
It was a spur of the moment decision to look at farm near where my college roommate had found his old farm. It was the first weekend in May. There was still snow on the ground. A rational person would have said snow in May, no way.
My wife and I have talked about it a number of times, but we were hardly on the farm when it was clear that it was love at first sight. The farm had a lot of sheltered areas where cattle could be kept in the woods during the winter. There were plenty of streams and brooks for water, and the land matched the soils that I hoped to farm.
We finally came to an agreement with owner that carved off a couple of acres on the front of the farm so he could build a new house and have a garden spot.
It would take a few years, but Harvey, the previous owner, would become the main help on my farm which he had farmed mostly with horse-drawn equipment. He would transition from raking with a converted horse-drawn rake to a double one that was over twenty feet wide. It made the Vermeer round baler that I built the farm around very happy.
After one winter with a few cows housed in an old barn, I transitioned to cattle running in the woods and calves born on the snow. It turned out to be a wise decision. In the seven years that we farmed there, we never had the vet on the farm. Even Harvey came to believe that cattle were healthier outside and that in spite of what the Dept. of Agriculture said, round bale hay worked for them.
In hind sight, there are a lot of things I might have done differently, the first being to have kept our herd smaller. A lot of things and cows are one of them, you have to learn the hard way, having just a few cows is a hard lesson to learn. We eventually got to two hundred head. It was too much work and required too much equipment. However, that was the dynamics of farming then, get big or get out. The second is that I would have tried harder to get a government-backed 2% loan. We tried once and were turned down.
The twenty per cent interest rates on our operating loan killed us while our neighbors with 2% loans did just fine. We could have built a third bard to store our hay and save a lot of waste. However, with no government loans, we crunched the numbers, weighed the options and decided going to work in town was the better of the two. We had a very successful dispersal sale. We sold our cattle in the fall of 1981. I went to work helping people market their cattle but quickly moved to selling computers in the fall of 1982 and by the fall of 1984, I was working for Apple which turned out to be a career of nearly twenty years which came with a good dose of magic before my wings melted.
Still, I would love to relive those years on the farm with the knowledge and skills that I have gotten since then. However, I doubt the old body would hold up to all the work that a farm, even a modern one, requires.

Next Came The Old House And Barn

Our St. Croix Cove, Nova Scotia, House After Remodeling, Summer 1973

The glowing ember of that Nova Scotia trip did not die. Maybe it was fanned a little by another trip that my college roommate and I took to Alaska in the summer of 1970 in my PowerWagon. We were gone most of the summer. When we came back I was even more determined to find a spot 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 I really enjoyed. I was not alone.

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. Soon after with help from my mother, I ended up buying more property across the road. It actually went down to the shore.

That August after I finished my last class ( I had missed a semester from sickness), I followed in my Land Rover and the adventure really began for me. Two roommates and I had graduated from Harvard and now we were determined to get our hands dirty and let the land tell us what to do. A third adventurer had left Harvard as a sophomore and might have been even more lost than we three college roommates.

Just reworking the old house was a huge undertaking. It needed painting and complete reconstruction inside. By the time I got there, the plaster, old chimney and lathe had been ripped out. Much of the home was down to its hand-hewn beams. That was only the start of the work. We had to caulk the cracks on the inside of the walls. Then came wiring and insulation for the exterior walls. We had made the decision to go with electric baseboard heating because it was easy to install. We had one very good carpenter, another who loved to tear things apart and to do shingles. A third who was also good with hand tools. I became the electrician and plumber.

There were no beds, we slept in sleeping bags on the floors on four inch thick pieces of foam. Our few pieces of furniture had come from college dorm rooms. The decision to relocate the bathroom upstairs delayed having a functional shower for weeks, so we warmed water in a coffee pot for bathing. Sometimes we took advantage of the showers at a local campground. Eventually one of roommates’ new sweetheart came to stay with us, and she helped with some of the cooking. Cooking was pretty basic since there was no kitchen. We ate a lot of tuna fish sandwiches in the midst of our construction and more than a few fried clams at Alice’s Clam shack down in the village of Hampton a few miles away. We did learn how to cook smoked picnic hams and make baked beans. We also learned to make salt cod and potatoes. The salty dish was a particularly good excuse for some beer.

We celebrated an amazing first Thanksgiving in Canada with college friends who had decided they needed to see this place that had lured their friends north. There were lots of walks in the brisk Nova Scotia air and the housed now blessed by lots of college friends was soon ready for winter.

By the time winter rolled around, the roommates/helpers started to disappear.

Then there were only two of us left. In the next year, it became clear that I had moved to Canada and beyond working on the old house, I needed to figure out what to do with the rest of my life. I bought a few cows and decided to try my hand at cattle and gardening. One of my original helpers had married a local school teacher, he and I began a tenuous partnership with those few cows.

There was a lot to learn and the biggest lesson was that partnerships are hard to sustain. By the next fall, I decided that I needed to move on and find a better place to farm. Between that thought and the reality of accomplishing it there would be a lot that needed to happen. Some things also were hidden in the cards. The decisions were about to get a lot more complicated. Just to keep things interesting, I decided to get my pilot’s license. It would be just a footnote in 1973 which by the time it was done would set me on a course for the next ten years of life.

Sobotta, David. A Taste for the Wild, Canada’s Maritimes

It Started With Nova Scotia

The view from the top of the hay field at the back of my new home in St. Croix Cove, NS

Thanksgiving during my junior year in college, three college friends and I decided to take an extra long break and go camping on Cape Breton Island. This was long before the days of the Internet and Google maps. We had little idea of what was ahead of us when we choose to drive up Route 1 through Maine and then into New Brunswick and finally Nova Scotia where we could finally cross the Canso Causeway to Cape Breton Island. Even today with more bypasses, Google maps says the drive is thirteen hours. It probably took us sixteen hours.

We went in my old 1966 Bronco which had a can of stop leak as an item in emergency equipment. Fortunately, we were young and driving that far and crossing an international border was not nearly as hard as it would be today. By the time we got to Cape Breton, it was sleeting and snowing. All the provincial campgrounds had shut down months earlier. We managed to pitch a tent in an abandoned field one night. We almost froze. Everything was soaked. By the time we got back to Halifax, I pulled out my emergency credit card and we booked a single room for the four of us in a Holiday Inn. Hot showers never felt so good.

We drove back down Nova Scotia’s south shore stopping only to grill a steak over a fire and eat a barely thawed bag of Nova Scotia shrimp. Our trip back was on the Bluenose Ferry which in those days traveled from Yarmouth to Bar Harbor, Maine. The seas were rough but there were few people on the ferry besides us. We stretched out and slept on the long bench seats. I have vague memory of a weighted ash tray sliding by me in the rough seas.

The trip has no moments that suggest that Nova Scotia is a place to visit again but as my wife has always said, “If you can tolerate a place during miserable weather, you are likely to live it when the sunshines. Somehow what I saw of Nova Scotia planted a seed. I started watching the Sunday Boston Globe for Nova Scotia properties for sale.

The spring after the trip to Nova Scotia, the anti-war protests hit Cambridge. In a classic case of taking to the woods after all the debates and marches, a roommate and I decided to take a road trip to Alaska in the Dodge Powerwagon that I convinced my parents that would keep me out of trouble for a summer. It was a beast, a 3/4 ton 4X4 with a mechanically driven (PTO) 8,000 pound winch on the front. It had two gas tanks since it barely got ten miles to the gallon with its 383 cubic inch V8 and four speed transmission. The Powerwagon would come back to school senior year, haul me to Nova Scotia and even have a place on the farm in New Brunswick.

Sleeping in the back of a truck while traveling thousands of miles seemed like a good idea. I was in love with wilderness. There were great adventures on the trip including my roommate almost getting killed while climbing. It was to be an epic trip and one that would give me a life long love of wild places. It would make Nova Scotia the place that I wanted to live.

An Unconventional Journey – Life, Learning and Work

*My wife, Glenda, in Newfoundland, October 1973*

I recently started reading Disrupted, My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons. Dan and I have crossed paths a few times. The first time was when he was in full Fake Steve persona. He offered me sanctuary when it appeared Apple might be coming after my Applepeels blog.

In Dan’s book which starts with losing his job at Newsweek and finding a new job as an editor at ReadWrite. The description of his first new job made me smile.

“Suddenly I am the editor-in-chief of a struggling technology news website called RedWrite a tiny blog with three full-time employees and a half-dozen, woefully underpaid freelancers”
Disrupted, My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

I was one of those “woefully underpaid freelancers.” Dan was actually my first real editor. I had already written my first book, The Pomme Company, by then but the editor of that book had been my very patient but comma-obsessed wife with some help from two former colleagues.

I wrote for ReadWrite for a few months at end of the five years it took me to find my four or fifth career. After nearly twenty years at Apple that was a tall order. During the years after Apple, I worked at a couple of VP jobs in technology, including one at a startup which fortunately unlike Dan’s misadventure was actually generating revenue and went on to a successful acquisition. However, there were enough similarities in my experience to Dan’s to bring back some interesting memories.

Though writing is one of the things that I love to do, I have never thought of it as a possible career. I also love photography and fishing but I have never understood how to make a career out of any of my favorite things. I have supplemented our income through writing and photography. Perhaps having been “a woefully underpaid freelancer,” I learned how hard it is to make good money doing something you love. Good money is required to send three young adults off to college and help them get off on the right foot. I also figured out that what you do doesn’t matter nearly as much as doing it with someone you love at your side in a place that you both learn to love.

How you end up in your career is an interesting topic that Dan talks about in his book. My experience has some similarities but is very different. I hope to write about it through a number of blog posts here.

Only a couple people in my youth even mentioned a career to me. Things were very different in the fifties especially if you were the only child of a single mother and no one in your family had even gone to college.

Mother worked long hours as a beautician in the beauty shop that was attached to our house. We lived in the small community of Lewisville, just west of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. My elementary school and church were just a short walk from home. There were deep woods around our homes. As we were growing up, we thought more about building forts in the woods than we did about building careers. There is no question that I enjoyed my childhood in spite of its share of challenges.

A big turn in my life came in 1963 when I got sent off to a military school that was a six-hours drive from home. Being a boarding student in a dorm was not how I envisioned my teenage high school years. At some point after I got over the worst of being homesick, I decided to make the best of it. Getting good grades had never been a problem for me so I focused on that first. Next I figured out how to do well in the military, stick to the rules, shine your shoes, and do what you are told.

McCallie, where I went to military school did have an important impact on my future. It was assumed that every student would be headed to college. I was part of the pack there so college was clearly now part of my future as well.

While the years at McCallie rolled by, I did get to meet a number of adults with careers that were new to me. Whether they were at McCallie or in Mount Airy where I moved after my mom and dad decided to get back together, meeting new adults did give me an opportunity to think about my future. One of the most interesting people who came into my life was RJ Berrier, who was at the time was the editor of the Mount Airy Times, one of two small local newspapers. RJ was something of a local legend and he loved what he did which was getting the paper out the door onto people’s doorsteps in time for them to enjoy it with their morning coffee. The Times was still using lead type and bourbon to make deadlines. People looked forward to RJ’s Mount Airy After Midnight column as much as I look forward to the comics and the morning paper today.

Though I was already showing some talent for writing, RJ gave me no encouragement to go into the newspaper business. He often explained the pay was poor, the hours long, and job security non-existent. Getting a liberal arts degree at Harvard was not much of a push in that direction either especially since it was during the turmoil of the late sixties and early seventies. I did really hit my stride with writing at Harvard. I am not sure whether it was the expository writing class or all the long papers. However, something clicked and I could churn papers that got stellar marks even at Harvard. I also got paid to do some research work, but there were other things on my agenda that created a hard turn away from writing.

Perhaps, the best description of what was pulling at me was the necessity to get away from the cities that threatened to smother me. Like many others, getting my hands dirty seemed more important than a law degree.

In my case, Nova Scotia appeared to be the locus for a cure. My wife, Glenda, seen contemplating Newfoundland at the top of the post also became a big part of the equation. That we spent ten years building a herd of two hundred head of Angus before I went to Apple is just part of the magic that has touched our lives. I will get around to our lives in Atlantic Canada and how Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and New Brunswick became part of the magic.