nature – Our technological infirmity

Barely Clinging To The Grid

Our formerly pink house after a year of intense work

The dearth of good programming this holiday season has sent me to YouTube where I have enjoyed watching this generation’s homesteaders who would have been part of my generation’s back to the land movement in the late sixties and early seventies.
I was on the fringes of that movement back in 1971 when I bought an old farm including 140 acres, a two-hundred-fifty year old farmhouse (pictured above after a year’s hard work), with a barn and out buildings. I had just graduated from Harvard but had chosen Nova Scotia over law school. Four, also disillusioned, college friends went with me to Canada, but I was the only one to make the commitment to become a landed immigrant. My Dodge Powerwagon and Landrover came with me to Nova Scotia. They carried all that I owned including a TV and lots of spare kitchen utensils from my mother in Mt. Airy, North Carolina.
The pink house in the middle of a sheep pasture was in rough shape when I took possession. We set about tearing it down to the hand hewn beams, insulating it and attempting to bring some modern conveniences to the house. That was probably what set me apart from most in the back to land movement who leaned towards off grid domes, hauling their water, and hand tools for gardening and no modern conveniences,
Maybe it was a childhood in rural North Carolina which was still close to the land filled with small farms that made me different. My mother had been born on a millpond in 1910. I had listened to plenty of her stories of ice being stored in saw-dust insulated holes in the ground and cooking over a wood stove. When I was growing up in the fifties some of relatives still had outhouses on their farms. I also probably had camped in the woods more than most. For whatever reason, I was fine with the conveniences that electricity brought including hot water and a dishwasher. I was also happy to use a diesel tractor on our farm.
I became the electrician and plumber for the modernization of the old house. By Thanksgiving of 1971 we were ready to host some college friends who were sure that we were crazy. It was the first Thanksgiving on our own for all of us. It was pretty rough with everyone sleeping on the floor, a blanket for a bathroom door, chicken crates for kitchen cabiinets, and mayonaise jars for glasses. Still we had an electric stove and a dishwasher. Still it was a great celebration of our independence.
The next year the house was more livable but we poured our energies into gardening and farming. My dad gave me $11,000 to buy a tractor, three furrow plow, disk harrows, front end loader, manure spreader and a bush hog. I took $1,500 and bought our first herd of six or seven cows. We also started refurbishing the old baler that had come with the farm. We converted it to a PTO driven model instead of one powered by a mounted gasoline engine.
We had unlimited compost from chicken manure that had rotted for years behind some old chicken houses. I had little experience gardening besides helping my mother grow tomato plants in North Carolina. What I did have was inspiration from Helen and Scott Nearing and Malabar Farm. Gardening in Nova Scotia on the foggy North Mountain by the Bay of Fundy required a lot more expertise than in North Carolina. Still the abundance from the garden was overwhelming until my mother and her sister, both experienced canners, showed up to help us through that first harvest. We filled the freezer and the cupboards. That winter we butchered a steer we had fattened from our herd. We hung it age in our cellar before carving it up. The next summer we raised pigs, one for us and three more for neighbors. We butchered them with the help of neighbors in the fall, topped up the freezer and made crocks of salt pork. It was an amazing amount of work that made me appreciate all the fresh pork in the fall that our relatives had always given my mother and me.

That winter of 1972 was something of a lonely one. One member of the college crew married the local school teacher and moved into another old house across the dirt road. The last one of my college friends left for a warmer climate. That left me wintering on the Bay of Fundy with our two Labs, Tok and Fundy, and a handful of cats. I made friends with some back to the land folks who lived far in the woods in a dome. I ordered some supplies with them including a giant tub of honey that was still with me when we moved. Mostly what we didn’t grow came from Beaver Fruit Cooperative in Lawrencetown down in the Annapolis Valley or from itenerant peddlers who sold salt fish and winter vegetables. I say we because that was my last winter alone.
I got married in the summer of 1973 and brought my new North Carolina bride home that September just in time for an early season snow storm that took the power out for a week. We stayed warm with the fireplace and cooked over the same. It was not unusual for the powe to go out on our dirt shore road but a week long outage was rare. That next summer my wife and I continued to garden, work on the house, and farm a little. Farming was a little because I had sold the cattle and part of my land to disolve an uneasy partnership with the friend who had married the village school teacher. Well before garden season my wife and I had made the decision to move to a better farming area with more and friendlier people.
We found the perfect place for us in Tay Creek, New Brunswick. We moved there in the fall of 1974 and started the process of building a real farm with the help of some great neighbors. We built our first barn in 1975 and converted to round bales in the summer of 1975.

Annually, we put up 200 large round bales for our herd which eventually grew to 200 head of purehred Angus.

We were actually even closer to the land than we were in Nova Scotia. On our New Brunswick farm we had spring-fed water for our house. We continued to garden, added chickens, and a milk cow. However, we found a local butcher to do our annual steer. We were still on the edge of the grid. Our first winter we got twenty-three feet of snow. We saw weather as cold as minus forty with sixty mile per hour winds. We went back to mostly heating with wood, burning three to four cords per year in our much newer home which was only one hundred years old. It was cold enough that we unplugged our freezers in the shed which was attached to house so you could get wood without going outside. The first winter there I fed hay that had been put up with horses. One thing we did not do is fight snow with tiny all terrain vehicles. A couple of miles of road to keep clear required real snow removal equipment.

Our 85 HP International 786 tractor with 8 ft wide blower, Tok and me with lots of layers

When I look back on it all, I am amazed that we did it without someone getting really injured. There was no Internet or YouTube for advice. Advice either came from a book or your neighbors. I learned to be pretty self-sufficient often repairing broken equipment with my torch and welder. I added chain saw carpentry to my resume as we built the barns. We ran our cattle in the woods in the winter and managed to get through our farming years without ever having a vet come out for a sick animal. We might still be farming if interest rates hadn’t surged to 20% and drove me to working in the city with computers and eventually to a career of nearly twenty years at Apple Computer.

We were never off grid but if your farm doesn’t have any cattle fences in the back because there is no place for the cattle to go, you can justifiably say you were barely clinging to the grid.

The Evolution of a Fisherman

**Puppy Drum, a Red Drum small enough that most fisherman throw them back**

The society of fishermen (and women who fish) is far more open minded thanyour average members of the population.

In politics, the mobility between conservative and liberal groups is almost non-existent. It would be fair to say that without some extraordinary circumstance once you are born a conservative, the chances of becoming a liberal are very slim unless you get whacked on the head with a police billy club. Likewise most liberals would only become conservatives if they won the lottery and caught a bad case of greed.

Fisherman really do not care about your history unless it is fishing history, they care about what you are catching today and how you are doing it. Everything beyond that is pretty much irrelevant unless you are trapped inside a house in a blizzard and have no entertainment beyond the stories you can spin.

Actually you can be a worm dunker one day, and a dry fly fisherman the next day. No one will care except the worms. Fortunately, I was born into a Presbyterian family which if you have seen the movie, A River Runs Through It, means I should be a dry fly fisherman. For many years, that was most of fishing.

Actually, I fished with a fly rod before I was even a teenager, but I have avoided the purity of only one type of angling. I came from a long line of worm dunkers on my mother’s side. No only did they dunk worms, they also dunked shrimp and fished along the North Carolina coast for whatever was biting. They caught a lot of fish every fall that they took home to fill their freezers.

When it comes to fishing, I have tried almost any method though I now lean away from the dark side of using live bait . There is a certain point in your fishing life when catching fish is not nearly as important as catching certain fish by a particular means. While most sports seek out ways to be more productive, fishermen often seek out ways which are more difficult and which result in fewer fish being caught. Often it doesn’t even matter if you catch something or not. It is the time on or by the water and the comradeship of your fishing buddy.

I was blessed to live for sixteen years on the NC coast in what was close to fishing heaven at the time. I did catch fish to be proud of just a couple of minutes from the dock behind our home. One quest was to catch a bluefish from the surf on a light spinning rod using an artificial lure. It is not an impossible task, I had actually done it before butnfar more often from a boat than from the surf. If you get a shiny lure in front of feeding bluefish, you will usually catch something. So catching one is not a huge challenge. However, if you give yourself a short time window and a long beach to read, then the challenge becomes a little more fun.

One evenng we left our home on the banks of the White Oak for a 15-20 minute drive to one of my favorite beaches. I like it because there are rarely people there for much of the year, and I have caught fish there before. That evening we got there a little after seven PM and stayed for around thirty minutes. That was all the time I had allotted myself to catch a bluefish.

It was a great evening to be on the beach. In fact when we headed home around eight PM, the temperature was still 80F. Anyway, I started my fishing with a Gotcha plug. I probably fished with it for the first fifteen minutes with no luck. Then I switched to a gold spoon. The sun was starting to drop quickly, and I had been watching a number of jumping fish just out of the range of my casts.

I was hoping the light from the dropping sun might make my lure more attractive.It was the third cast with the gold spoon when I got a solid hit. My next cast there was nothing, but on the following cast I hooked a bluefish but it quickly threw the hook. One more throw, and I had another hit and was solidly onto a nice bluefish. It did not take long to bring him to shore. He was about sixteen inches long. I quickly heaved him back into the surf and told my wife that I was done. She could not believe that I did not want to fish more, but I had accomplished what I wanted to do and the feeling was good. I was actually using a very light, long spinning rod which was purchased more with the soft mouths of trout in mind than bluefish. Of course that added a little to the challenge.

There are always more challenges for a fisherman. One of the most exciting is catching North Carolina’s state fish, the Red Drum, on an artificial lure.

On Saturday, November 5, 2016, I only had a few minutes late in the day to fish some close-in oyster bars on the White Oak River but it was spectacularly beautiful out on the water. I managed to catch and release a sixteen inch drum and bring home a sixteen inch trout for dinner.

On Tuesday, November 8, I had almost two hours to fish the oyster rocks near our home in my kayak. I caught four red drum and one black drum. I brought home one nineteen inch drum. In ten days, I landed with artificial lures, ten red drum, the best around twenty inches and another at nineteen inches. I only kept one red drum but I kept two trout, one sixteen inches and another eighteen inches and also one black drum at fifteen inches. We have feasted on fish these last few days. Baked browned-butter, panko-encrusted drum is one of my favorites.

That is only a sample of my fishing tales. Fishing during fall of 2016 will stick in my memory. I caught some memorable fish.

Goose Speaks Launches

Goose, the biggest of our tabby cats from the marshes

Goose has enjoyed some popularity on social media sites, including Facebook but also on Bluesky where one of his pictures got over 5,000 likes. Goose’s no nonsense attitude kept him from being quiet during the summer. His most famous quote has driven some of his popularity.

I have little tolerance for fools.

Goose follows a rigorous schedule that includes breakfast, bird watching, patrolling for squirrels, naps, dinner, and more naps. Then he gets his before bed treats. Goose isn’t so full of himself that having some fun dialogues is out of the question. He can get very passionate to the point of being hilarious when discussing the amount cat food in his bowl.

The following is an excerpt from Goose’s Newsletter this Sunday, November 24, 2024. Goose is talking about his first memories as a kitten.

Goose, “I remember how dark, cold and wet it was under the shed where we were born. What I remember best was how I would play with my sisters, Merlin, Jester, and Maverick in the sunlight at the back of the shed. Our mother, Elsie, told us to be careful and not to get far from the safety of the shed. She told us that there were all sorts of things that would eat us from hawks to alligators. Still when the sun was bright, we had lots of fun. We never saw any alligators but the marsh grass was so tall that even I couldn’t see over it.

We were sort of in a routine, nursing mom, playing, and then piling up together for naps. We were growing and it seemed that we were always hungry. After we were a few weeks old, mom carried us one by one up up over the bulkhead to the back of another building. It was a garage. There were bowls near it and they were full of what we were to learn is cat food. It was tough crunching for a while, but we learned it was a good way to not feel hungry. Sometimes we would hide until the people filled the bowls.

Then came the night mother left us in the garage. What happened next changed our lives.

The rest of the story is behind a paywall.

Have a look at the subscription options by clicking on the image below or clicking on this link for direct access to pricing without additional content.

Subscription Options for Goose Speaks

There is a subscribe button on the top right when you get to the site. If scroll to the bottom of the post, there is a free trial button.

There is a free subscription that will get you the occasional post, the paid subscriptions will get you everything. A $5 monthly subscription is only 16 cents a day. An annual $50 subscription is just 14 cents a day. If you subscribe you will be supporting not only an independent journalist but also helping to feed four growing tabby cats that have lots of love to spread around. Goose often share’s David’s recipes and cooking tips. Today provided directions for cooking perfect bacon. It you do a paid subscription, you will get some regular emails from Goose. He has his own website and his own email address.

Memories to hold close

I wrote this back in the fall of 2016. It was one of the nicest falls that we enjoyed in our fifteen years on the North Carolina coast. I wrote more than one post arguing that fall was even nicer on the coast than in the mountains.

Here is a brief description of the memorable month of November 2016, as seen from the water and the beaches of Carteret County.

The good fishing and nearly perfect weather, continues but I can already feel the best of fall sliding away.

On Saturday, November 5, I only had a few minutes late in the day to fish some close-in oyster bars on the White Oak River but it was spectacularly beautiful as you can see from the marsh grass picture. I also managed to catch and release another sixteen inch drum and bring home a sixteen inch trout for dinner.

On Tuesday, November 8, I had almost two hours to fish the oyster rocks in my kayak and I caught four red drum and one black drum. I brought home one nineteen inch drum. In the last ten days, I have landed ten red drum, the best around twenty inches and another at nineteen inches. I have only kept one red drum but I have kept two trout, one sixteen inches and another eighteen inches and also one black drum at fifteen inches. We have feasted on fish these last few days. Baked browned-butter, panko-encrusted drum is one of my favorites.

Last year, 2015, we did not have a fishing season like this one. I blamed it all on the early October rain we got. It is hard to miss a fishing season when fall fishing on the coast is such a tradition. This year we have been lucky. Since Mathew dropped three inches of rain on us October 8, we have only had two-tenths of an inch on October 22, and another two-tenths of an inch on November 4.

Fishing during fall of 2016 will stick in my memory.

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.