View from the Mountain

Getting Back To The Dock

Getting home is a wonderful feeling, and the older you get the more you enjoy being at home.

 Coming home in a boat if possible is even better.  I am a water person.  I love being out on the water, but no matter how much fun I am having on the water, it is always a sweet moment  when I throttle back the boat and turn at the Red Sixteen buoy for the short trip back to the dock.

When I cross the narrow gap between the river and our inlet, I know that I'm home.  Sometimes the feeling is tangible.  You can be slightly chilled or just plain cold from a high speed trip up the river, and the air in the inlet is like a warm blanket that wraps you in its embrace. 

The wind can be blowing up a gale on the river and as soon as you get in our inlet there is no wind.  You feel like God looked down and said they have had enough wind, you can stop now.

Then there is summer when the temperature is perfect out on the river.  As the boat glides into the inlet, you are absolutely sure someone has stolen the inlet and replaced it with a sauna.

I have written before about the peace in our inlet and how living by the inlet provides such a quiet and natural place to live.  Still I am amazed how wonderful the feeling is each and every time I return to the inlet in my boat.

The short ride from the river to our dock is the same area that I walk around each day in my hike through the marsh.  The perspective is different when you are gliding along in a boat.  Standing up in a center console boat provides a far better view than I get down close to the water from my kayak.  Some of the birds who immediately fly away when I am on foot, completely ignore the boat.

Once I have gotten down to our dock, executed the needed u-turn, positioned the boat on the lift, and lifted the boat out of the water, I always have a look around and try to be thankful for the opportunity of living in such a wonderful place. 

The only time of the day that rivals coming home in the boat is crawling into bed at night and easing my head back on my pillow.  Leaning back on your own pillow is a pretty good way to end the day. If you have enjoyed a nice boat ride to add a little zest to your day, you can easily slip off into the land of sleep with visions of blue water and puffy white clouds in your mind's eye.

Now you know why I sleep so well.  When my head hits the pillow, it is almost like those days when we lived on the farm.

 

Paradise by the Water

Living along North Carolina’s Southern Outer Banks comes with a few great advantages.  First and foremost, water is everywhere here.  When people say they want to live near the water, the first question out of our mouths is, “What kind of water?”

We have kayak water, skiff water, deep water, ocean water, river water, marsh water, and water which provides nothing more than a view.  One of my requirements when we first looked for a home in Carteret County  almost seven years ago was to be on some of the water which makes up 49% of the county

As you can see from the picture, we succeeded.  Our dock is 25 feet from our garage. Raymond’s Gut which runs behind our home is a naturalist’s paradise.  This winter I watched and filmed otters and loons from our dock. My last filming session with a loon ended when a pileated woodpecker landed not 30 feet from me.  The great weather we have makes being outside a treat.

From our dock it takes only ten to fifteen minutes to ride out to the White Oak River and then take the channel down to Swansboro where the White Oak meets Bogue Sound and the Intracoastal Waterway.  Our neighborhood is exactly what I wanted as a place to enjoy the coast, recover from corporate America, and practice my new passions of writing and photography.

It is no accident that I can also catch fish within sight of our house.  A boat ride out to the ocean only takes about twenty-five minutes. I slide my kayak into the waer right from our backyard.  I can paddle to the middle of the river in ten minutes. I can also be walking on the beaches of Emerald Isle in ten to fifteen minutes.  This area is a great place to enjoy a life without walls.  It is also easy to get caught up in the scenic beauty of the area.  Sometimes in the summer I even head out in my boat and visit the marshes before breakfast.

My wife and I spent the early years of our marriage in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.  The scenic beauty of those areas is unquestioned, but even today there are some trade-offs if you live there.  I have heard of places in the Canadian Maritimes where you still have to use a modem to connect to the Internet.  That is an advance from the party phone lines that were the norm when we lived there but it would make modern life a challenge.

Our part of coastal North Carolina, also know as the Crystal Coast, is well supplied with most modern services.  We have a good dose of 4G networks in the area including some strange places like Bear Island.  Most people have good access to cable modem class Internet speeds.  We even have two Best Buys and a couple of Staples within twenty to thirty minutes.  Amazon can find you in a couple of days if you are a Prime member.  All in all, this is a great place to live.

Most importantly our world provides few distractions other than natural beauty.  As a writer, I can go for a nice long walk in the morning and refresh my mind with natural beauty before tackling the day’s challenges.

We do get a few folks who think we are more than a little bit country because we live with 158,000 acres of National Forest on one side, the 56 miles of undeveloped beaches of Cape Lookout to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the south and Camp Lejeune to the west.

There are things that we don’t have like lots of traffic and smog.   There are a few fancy stores absent but mostly what we don’t have are things people can live without.  We do live in a close knit community where living close to nature binds us all to the land and the sea. It turns out there is nothing wrong with that. It brings you closer to God and makes those trips to church even more meaningful.

I am proud to be a resident of Carteret County. I hope that I can contribute with my photos and articles just a little to helping more people appreciate this unique piece of the world where we live.  I also hope we can preserve it for future generations.  If we lose places like Carteret County, its marshes, woods, waters, and beaches, the world will be a poorer place.

Roanoke in the Rearview Mirror

With the traumatizing experience of moving out of our home of twenty-three years in three weeks behind us but not forgotten, my thoughts have turned to what I will miss from our Roanoke years.  Those thoughts also bring to mind a few things that I won't complain about leaving behind.

In my recent post, We bid adieu to Roanoke, I've already mentioned the wonderful people in Roanoke and a few favorite spots.  Our exit from the valley reinforced my belief that the friends you make are far more important than the place where you make the friends.  I don't know how we would have made it through the last couple of days of moving without our closest Roanoke friends.  I do know that we will continue to stay in touch with them no matter where we live.

Since we didn't cook a lot the last few days in Roanoke, we got to sample some of our favorite places to eat.  I wasn't surprised as we often turned to one of Roanoke's best kept secrets, the Pancake House.  Not only is the Pancake House one of the few places that knows how to properly cook an egg, they also make a wonderful Chef's Salad.  While their evening specials have climbed thirty-four cents in price and been trimmed a little in size since I wrote the linked article in 2005, it is still the most economical place to eat in Roanoke.  I am especially fond of their country ham special which they offer on Thursday mornings.

Unfortunately there is no place to match the Pancake House on the Crystal Coast.  Mike's in Emerald Isle comes very close except they aren't open in the evenings for dinner.

Two other eating spots also deserve a recommendation for great food in our last days in Roanoke.  One was Annie Moore's Pub on Route 419.  I will long remember my Reuben sandwich and the Track 1 Roanoke Rail beer that I enjoyed after we finished our move.  I'll have to see if I can get Harrika's Brew Haus to order some Track 1.

The other spot was the Great 611 Steakhouse.  I'm convinced their sirloin steak meals are far better than what you can get from Outback. Interestingly we found out about them from a butcher at Fresh Market which is another place in Roanoke that I will miss.

I'm also going to miss the Salem Rotary Park by the Roanoke River.  It was a great place to stop and visit the river for a few minutes. It does not take long to figure out that parks are few and far between in the area where we lived in Roanoke.

My wife and I will also miss the wonderful ladies at the Discovery Shop not far from Tanglewood Mall.  They were always so grateful for donations that we brought them. It was a true pleasure giving items to them.

Then there is Cutaway and Jeri, our long time barber.  We might have to drive back to Roanoke once in a while just for the feeling of comfort that comes from getting your hair cut at the same place for decades.

Of course I doubt that we will ever have a connection with a service station as strong as we have enjoyed with Bratcher's Oak Grove Shell.  They always treated us right, and I would recommend using them to anyone in the Roanoke area.  I had to smile when they wouldn't accept anything for checking a low tire for me before one of my last trips to the coast from Roanoke.

One of our favorite neighborhood spots, Jamison's Produce, will always be on our list when we return to town.  Their hard candy, peaches, apples, squash, and corn are hard to beat.

I will also miss our Realtor®, Ed Smith.  In a world that sometimes seems to be dominated by people who have little connection with their clients, Ed stands out as a true gentleman who listens and responds.  He also works very hard for his clients. The great job that he did for us during our difficult situation will long be remembered.

We were fortunate to know a host of tradesmen who served us well in Roanoke from Martin Pruitt and his crew at Cornerstone Builders to a whole series of folks who have no web presence but take great pride in their craft.

While some of the places that made Roanoke special to us like Wood's Ace Hardware and Printer's Ink have disappeared over the years, we will still have fond memories of our connections with them.

Of course we will miss our many friends in Fairway Forest, our ministers Bob & Dusty along with all the wonderful things that we came to love at Covenant Presbyterian Church.  I will also miss the Roanoke Times.  In a world where newspapers are fading quickly, they've remained relevant and even more important to me their comics are in color all the time.

There are few things that I won't miss about the Roanoke Valley. Number one among those things is Interstate 81.  We got an exceptional reminder of how bad Interstate 81 can be when we left town on August 23.  We barely made it to Ironto before traffic slowed to stop and go.  It was even worse than my recent trip to Blacksburg that prompted me to write a post about SW Virginia's traffic challenge.  Our trip to Blacksburg took over an hour and one half.

I also won't miss Highway 220. With all the business potential that would come with improved connections with NC, it is a little hard to understand why Highway 220 has been ignored for so long.

Of course, the traffic mess over at Valley View Mall is something I  have avoided for many years during the holidays. My holiday shopping has been done almost anywhere besides Valley View Mall.

I also won't miss the political divisions between Roanoke, Roanoke County, and Salem.  I think they have held the Valley back from its true potential, but I doubt things are going to change.

Certainly Comcast is one local business that I'm happy to leave behind.  Their latest revenue gimmick of a little box for each television brought back memories of the first cable guy who visited our house and cut all the cables to our rooms except for the three we paid to have activated.  Their antiquated menu of cable services is a testament to how bad things can get without real competition.

Then there is VDOT and their need to be reminded that our sometimes snowy street up the mountain needs to be plowed.  While we were never forgotten, it seemed we waited far too often for the snow plow.

I also won't miss the annoying power outages that seem to have become relatively common in Roanoke. For nearly twenty years our underground lines seemed to serve us very well with the power never even flickering. During the last two or three years, it was common for us to have to reset our clocks from power blips.

While I will miss Roanoke's exceptionally reasonable insurance rates, I certainly am happy to say goodbye to the very high Roanoke County property taxes. As nice as the new library is, I doubt that it is something that I would use to its full potential.

Last but not least, I'm not going to miss all those 25 MPH speed limits which seem to be favored in the Roanoke Valley.  The more common 35 MPH neighborhood speeds in NC are far easier to obey.

The Roanoke Valley is a great place to raise a family, but no place, even the Crystal Coast where we now live, is perfect.

 

 

 

 

A Proper Sense of Community

People get their sense of community a lot of different ways. 

Sometimes you get it from being a part of a church like Cape Carteret Presbyterian Church where we are members.

When we lived and farmed in Tay Creek, a small rural community in central New Brunswick, Canada, we were bound together several ways.  Many of us were farmers or had been farmers so shared experiences brought us close much like military families are drawn together.  We also lived over twenty miles from town and its services so people often had to pull together especially when blizzards came to visit.

While religion had once dictated that the Protestants and Catholics live on different sides of the Tay, by the time we were living there, those animosities were gone.  Being a small community far from town, when someone died, the men of the community were responsible for digging the grave.

It didn't matter what your religion was, you pitched in as much as you could.  Considering that our village was on a pile of rocks and ground freezes instantly at minus twenty Fahrenheit, a grave was a community effort.  If someone had pressing chores and could only be there a few minutes, there was no complaining about someone working harder than the others.

In fact a lot of people out of habit did whatever they could to help others in that community.  I pulled many vehicles out of snowbanks over the years and cleared a lot of driveways, but I never took a dime for any of that.  Mostly I was helping my close neighbors and knew that they would do the same for me in an instant.

Our farming experiences ended in 1982 when I went to work for a computer company.  That career change and eventually going to work for Apple brought a lot of moves.  First to Halifax, Nova Scotia, then to Columbia, MD, and finally to Roanoke, VA.

Each neighborhood was different.   Columbia was a planned community organized around neighborhood schools.  Unfortunately only a few of us sent our children to those schools.  There were few churches like we were used to attending, and we never felt a great deal of community spirit there.  We only stayed in Columbia two years.

In Roanoke, we lived on the side of a mountain.  It was a new subdivision and for many years we had neighborhood parties and even went carolling together.  We also faced isolation together in a few snow storms.  I had an AWD vehicle which would take chains on all four wheels so I would often ferry people up and down the hill.  Our children for the most part went to school together and even swam on the same swim team at a local country club.  The community spirit of that neighborhood was a good experience and a reason that we stayed in Roanoke for many years.

Last year we faced Hurricane Irene together here on the Crystal Coast, there were a lot of shared sacrifices.  People helped each other without question.  Communities often come together in disaster, and Irene was a good example of that.

Our recent experience with a tornado spawned by Tropical Storm Beryl also showed that people are willing to step up to the plate and do more than their fair share of work.  Some of our neighbors worked tirelessly to clean up the broken glass at the community pool.  I took it upon myself to clean up our cul de sac.  It wasn't much but it took me a while to haul the stuff off and blow it clean.  It seemed like having a clean cul de sac made all the devastation on the street above it not quite so bad.

Community spirit requires working together. There is always a fine line between inconclusive and exclusive.  To build a community, you need to work really hard to be inconclusive even if it makes things more difficult.  Getting things done together is often a huge challenge.

I've often fallen victim to the path of it is easier to do it myself than ask someone else to do it or help.  However, I found as a leader that it is far better to make sure everyone is included even if the task ends up being more difficult.  You don't build community spirit without involving as many people as possible.

Still for the most part, the tornado in our neighborhood brought out the best in people. I certainly appreciate all the hard work that people have put in cleaning up the neighborhood.  

Of course there is always someone who has to poke a stick in my balloon of high expectations.  We had one neighbor who apparently didn't think others were getting things cleaned up quickly enough.  He complained to a neighbor but acted like he was relaying the complaints of others instead of voicing his own concerns. 

By twisting things around so that he put his own words in the mouths of other neighbors, he has violated that sense of community that people work so hard to create.  It was a cowardly thing to do, but unfortunately it is just the thing you might expect from someone who spends more time minding the business of others than staying focused on his own world.

If you want to be a good neighbor, walk in your neighbor's shoes before you start complaining.  Trust me, I have a hard time with this myself, especially considering I have one neighbor who started using a tile saw outside our bedroom window at 7 AM on Easter Sunday 2011 when we had company in the house.  The same neighbor spent hours trying to level his backyard with a riding lawn mower.  I finally had to restrain myself and decide that unless my family was in danger from his activities, they were none of my business.

At the same time, you become a good neighbor by helping when needed.  We live in a world where family is often miles away so helping your neighbor with minor things like watering plants or picking up their mail is a good way to start a relationship.

Most of all caring about the well being of your neighbor will lead you to do the right thing.  We had people in our neighborhood who were in great danger during the tornado that slid by our neighborhood.

That no one was injured is the greatest blessing that we could have.  Neighbors across the street with young children had a large tree fall in their backyard.  Fortunately it fell away from the house.  The window that exploded in our house was only ten feet from three windows in my office where I happened to be during the storm.  Had the limb hit one of my office windows, I might have ended up in the hospital.

I have no doubt that it wasn't chance that no one was injured.  It also wasn't chance that the first call that we got after the storm was a fellow elder in our church.  She was checking to see if we were okay.  Not long after that I got an email from our new pastor.  Our good friends from farther up in the neighborhood walked down to check on us within minutes of the storm.  We got a number of calls and notes from people from as far away as Canada.  It is reassuring that that even years later, the sense of community which once held us like a security blanket still binds us to many whose lives have intersected ours.

While a lottery win might trick you into thinking you have lots of new friends, a brush with disaster can quickly show the people who really care about you and your family.  As much as I might enjoy figuring how to spend money from a lottery, I know in my heart that I can count on the people who took the time to check on us after the tornado spawned by Beryl.  The quick touch from those friends more than balances the damage that we received.

 

 

Everyone needs a spot to perch

When you are really young, home is all you know, but as you grow into your youth, you spend most of your time trying to be away from home.

There comes a time, and it is probably different for everyone, when you need a comfortable spot to perch and watch the world as events unfold. 

The first time I remember wanting a place at home beyond my room was when I came home from college in the summer back in the sixties and seventies.

I used to sit on the side porch of our home at 347 West Pine in Mount Airy, NC.  From there I could look either at my mother's beautiful gardens or watch thunderstorms roll across the North Carolina hills.  I could also see people walking up Pine Street towards Main Street.

My wife and I moved to Canada and used to sit on the side stoop of our old farm house in St. Croix Cove, Nova Scotia.  From there we could look down the main road and see another three homes in the settlement. 

When we moved to Tay Creek, New Brunswick, we had a front porch that we loved. it the wintertime it was often looked out over mountains of snow, but in the summer it had a wonderful view of the farming community all the way to the ridge where we had a second farm.

In our Roanoke, Virginia home my spot was the screened porch on the corner of the deck. Not only can I remember going there to think things over, but I also took some wonderful naps while mountain breezes kept me cool.

One of the things the Roanoke porch did was to give me a refuge from all the civilization that I endured on my weekly commutes to Northern Virginia and especially from those all too frequent trips to California when I was working for Apple.  It was a place that I could decompress and forget about some of the unusual bosses that I had over time.

Now I need a different kind of refuge.  Living on the Crystal Coast of North Carolina is about as far from the pressures of civilization as you can get. The Southern Outer Banks of North Carolina gives me plenty of opportunies to be close to nature.  I am often alone in my boat out in the river or even if I am fishing with someone, the conversation is usually minimalist guy chit chat.  Then there are those long beach walks where the only conversation comes from the surf and your memories.

When my wife rearranged the furniture on our front porch at our home on the water near Cape Carteret, I happily claimed the white rocking chair from where I can watch the community boat ramp and the regular walkers that enjoy the quiet streets in Bluewater Cove.  It is also a good place to receive visitors.  We're far enough from the street that people don't wander in unless they see someone. I am looking forward to some nice chats with friends.

This summer with all the tomato plants that I have, I might have to put up a stand to get rid of the surplus.  That rocking chair might be a good place to handle those duties and to do a little thinking.

The funny thing is that the white rocking chair is also a good place to watch those summer storms which brings me back to those college years when I first started sitting on my mom's side porch.

I guess that completes the circle.  Front porches never died in the South. I'm glad to see them making a return.