View from the Mountain

Memorial Day At The Beach

Raymond's Gut near Emerald Isle, NC

While the view from our neighborhood is an inlet leading to the White Oak River, we are only a few miles from the beaches of Emerald Isle, North Carolina.

The proximity to the beaches is one of the reasons we ended up living in western Carteret County.  I love to walk the area's beaches and I spend lots of time doing it.

For many visitors Memorial Day is the beginning of the beach season.  For those of us who live here, it is the beginning of the few weeks of the year when we share our almost empty beaches with others.

The truth is that our beaches never get very crowded.  With low density housing along our ocean shores and our slightly off the beaten path location, real crowds on the beaches are not one of things that summer brings to Emerald Isle.

Bogue Banks, our piece of the Southern Outer Banks, is over twenty miles long.  If we run out of room on Bogue Banks, there are other places less accessible to casual beach visitors.

Map of the Crystal Coast

Even during the peak of the summer, you can escape our "crowds" by hiking a couple of miles.  I will often head to the Point which is the far western end of Bogue Banks. 

If that doesn't work the next barrier island down the shore is Bear Island home of Hammocks Beach.  It is only accessible by boat.  The North Carolina Park Service runs a pontoon boat ferry from the mainland to Bear Island several times a day. Then there is always the option of the 56 miles of the Cape Lookout National Seashore if you really want to avoid people.

One of my favorite pictures is the image at the beginning of the post, Life without Walls.  It was taken on Bear Island which despite the name has no bears.  You can find more photos of the beautiful beaches of Hammocks Beach at this Google+ album. Most people treat beaches like parking places, they fight over the close ones and ignore the ones which require some effort.

If crowds on the beach are not part of the season, what does summer bring to our area.  Things  can get more than a little cozy in the area grocery stores on the weekend.  Our largest grocery stores go from being some of the quietest stores in North Carolina to being the busiest.  Those of us who are locals tend to avoid the grocery stores from Friday afternoon until Monday morning during the summer.

Our two lane bridge from the mainland to the beach area clogs a little with traffic during peak check in hours on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. However, those of us used to traveling in the Washington, DC area or through Fredericksburg, Virginia, generally scoff at a ten to twenty minute delay in getting across the bridge. Once in a while it is worse, but it is never like a bad day on the Washington beltway.

We also have a little spurt of traffic on Friday evenings as the weekend folks who own places on the island arrive.   Usually during most of the year it takes me four or five minutes to drive this stretch of highway which goes from the tourist bureau on the mainland to the heart of the town of Emerald Isle which I define as the stoplight by Jordan's Restaurant. It is where you turn for Bogue Inlet Pier.

On the Friday evening before Memorial Day 2013 weekend the drive took eleven minutes with there being just enough stop and go on the bridge for me to snap some nice pictures of Bogue Sound.

The return trip took just under six minutes and by then the bridge had already started to clear.

Summer also brings more boats to our waterways, but they are mostly a weekend thing so for a few weeks during the summer, I boat mostly during the weekdays.  Even then with the exception of July 4 itself, perhaps Memorial Day if it is warm, and Labor Day, we can always hide in the White Oak River when the Intracoastal Waterway gets busy.  There are days when the wind and weather make the White Oak a better choice anyway.  Being stuck in a beautiful coastal river is not exactly punishment.

Most of the people I know are happy to see our summer visitors.  Tourism drives our economy and helps many of us live in a place that others live to visit.  It is not a bad deal.  The influx of visitors also provides us with a number of services that would likely not be here without the boost they get from summer visitors.

If you have read our A Taste for the Wild, Canada's Maritimes, our $2.99 Kindle book about New Brunswick, you know that I am not a stranger to off the beaten path locales.  Given my choice of living in one which has visitors and one which does not, I will choose the one with visitors.

It never hurts to have some new people come to town.  Sometimes a few of the best ones figure out our secret and become residents.

 

The Canon SX50 HS - A Great All Around Camera

 

Canon Powershot SX50 HS

My experience with exceptional cameras goes back to the Nikon F1 that I started using in 1969 when a college roommate and I headed off to Alaska.

Cameras have come a long way since then and some would argue that smartphone cameras are quickly on the way to replacing cameras.

Then there are those of us who believe the camera in your hand does matter if you are seeking to capture a memorable image.  You can bombard me with all the advertisements that you want but you will not convince me that the photographs that we will remember twenty years from now will all come from smartphones.  There will be some but there are times when having a real camera matters.

About sixteen months ago, I wrote an article, The Nikon Coolpix P500, My Favorite Beach Camera.  In March of 2013, after fourteen months of stellar service, my Nikon Coolpix P500 moved into the status of backup camera.

I made the decision to switch cameras because I was missing a lot of shots.  The Nikon Coolpix could not focus fast enough to catch many of the birds that I chase during the winter months. I tried switching to my Nikon D3100 but I could not afford a telephoto lens to match the 36X zoom power of the Coolpix. Even if I could have come up with the money, it would have weighted far too much for the type of hiking that I do.

I came very close to ordering a Nikon Coolpix P520 but after reading several reviews, I chose to go with a Canon SX50 HS.  There were a couple of factors but the two most important ones were the speed of focusing and the ability to take raw images.  The battery life is also much better with the Canon. On hikes of four to five miles, I often ran out of juice on my Coolpix

While I am still learning some of the features of the Canon, it has been a fairly easy transition.  About the only time that I really feel the need for my DSLR is when I want to take ocean wave pictures.

The 50X zoom on the Canon is amazing and I find that the image stabilization is very good.  The camera is light weight, turns on quickly, and has enough custom settings to please me.  I have not tried the video extensively but I have a video camera which I am more likely to use for video anyway.  One feature that I love on the Canon is the silent mode for the camera.  While many of the large egrets that I photograph seemed to hear the sound of the shutter in my Nikon Coolpix, the Canon in silent mode goes unnoticed.

The Canon lacks the GPS capability of the Nikon P520 but I have found a very satisfactory substitute through using MyTracks on my Android phone. I am able to import to the GPX file into Lightroom and sync the GPS data with my photos.  It is a simple and elegant solution which avoids waiting for a camera to acquire a GPS signal.  The GIS data in this album of a hike at the Point on Emerald Isle came from MyTracks on my LG Spectrum photo.  The photos are from my Canon Powershot SX50 HS.

Unless I have made a mistake and one of the images from another of my cameras slipped in, I believe all the pictures in this album were taken my Canon SX50 HS.  The Canon also does an exceptional job on landscape pictures.  I offer up this image of the Edenton, NC waterfront.

If you need a versatile camera that is light weight, quickly focuses, takes great pictures, and has an unbelievable zoom ability, take a close look at the Canon SX50 HS. 

I have been a Nikon user for over forty years and this camera is one of the best that I have ever used.  I paid only $389 for the camera. It is a fantastic camera for the money.

The camera was well worth the money and I think the shots that I got from it were welcome additions to our book, A Week at the Beach- The Emerald Isle Travel Guide. In our latest Kindle addition I sized the photos for optimal viewing on the latest tablets.  The rich colors of the Canon and quick focusing are hard to beat in a camera in this price range.

Mothers' Helpers

There is no busier person than a mother with a child.  They often burn the candle at both ends and in the middle. 

Sometimes they work so hard that they collapse from pure exhaustion. 

I often wondered if my own mother ever slept.  When I was young she was awake when I went to bed and had been up for hours by the time I got in the morning.

When our children were growing up on the farm, I often marveled at how my wife, Glenda, managed to take care of three children, two dogs, and a husband, and still find time to drive a pickup truck home with a load of feed and bake dozens of loaves of bread.  That our children get raised and learn how to take care of themselves is a tribute to unbelievable patience of the mothers of the world.

Just as amazing to me is how the mothers of the world build networks of support where none are apparent to most of us.  That they can somehow find others to willingly help is a tribute to the importance of their jobs and their resourcefulness.

For sixteen years before my mother became a mother she was an aunt to a large extended family of children.  She might have had more influence as an aunt than she did as a mother. She certainly touched more people.  She taught a few of her nieces how to drive. Making sure that her nieces and nephews had a good Christmas morning was no different than what she would have wanted for them if they were her own children.  She even dragged one of her nephews off to another school to make sure he got a better education.

Not everyone is blessed with the opportunity of having children but that does not stop the best among us from helping to mother the children of the world.  I know there are times when a friend or aunt like my mother might come and rescue an overworked mother for a few hours.  I suspect those moments are precious.  Sometimes it might be delivering a carload of toys, clothes, shoes, and food for children whose parents' money just will not stretch far enough.  Maybe it is just taking a child for a walk when a mother needs just a few moments to herself or perhaps even a shower without company.

While I know God created grandparents just to help raise the next generation, somehow we all seem to live too far apart to help as much as we would like.  Maybe that is why on mother's day, I want to remember my mother as much if not more for the mothering that she provided to others.

I can still remember a trip to Roanoke last year when this young lady ran up and hugged my wife.  She was wearing the medical clothing of a profession.  It turns out she was a teenager who spent a few weeks with us when she and her parents could not tolerate each other.   She thanked us for the help we provided when she needed it the most. She has turned out well and as a mother can now appreciate the challenges that she created as a teenager.

There are a lot of aunts, cousins, grandmothers, and just good friends who help with the mothering of the next generation.  As we think about our mothers on Mother's Day, I hope we do not forget those whose timely help to the mothers of our children can sometimes make all the difference in the world. We live in a complex century and the children who will thrive in it need all the nuturing and support that they can get.

 

 

Community

Most of us would have a hard time relating to some of the early settlers of our country. 

That they carved homes and farms out of forests is pretty amazing.

Many did not do it alone.  They settled in small communities where people often leaned on each other to get things done.

I feel privileged to have grown up in a small town and to have lived in a community or two where people still valued helping each other.

Finding people that are willing to reach out to others and help them is getting to be harder and harder in this world where "me and mine" and the stuff we accumulate has come to define the ultimate happiness.

I guess that I have been around so long that I can pretty well tell in a few minutes if someone is genuinely interested in cooperating in a way that might help themselves and perhaps enhance something that I am doing.

There is a whole world of businesses out there who believe that helping someone else be successful somehow threatens their own business. It is actually far from the truth.  Businesses who cooperate and help each other often end up more successful because of it.

As I was publishing our new Emerald Isle Travel Guide, I reached out to several individuals and businesses. Some responded positivedly and a few just ignored me.  It is hard to generalize but often businesses that go it alone are so focused on their success that they really do not care what they have to sacrifice to get there including customer satisfaction.

Far too many of those businesses measure success in how much money they make instead of how much general good that they can do.  I was reminded of this by a recent article in NY Times about how corporations like Apple move profits outside the country so that they have to pay no taxes. Companies used to be proud of the good they and their employees could accomplish in a community.  Now the bigger the horde of cash that a company can accumulate the better.

I actually witnessed Apple stomp on the rights of a small business. I am happy they prospered in spite of Apple's above the law attitude.  I am pleased to relate that if you take your cash to the grave with you, there are still no reports of it being of any use.

When cleaning out my mother's house, I came across a letter from a railroad company. It was written to an uncle of mine in the fifties.  He had become sick and because he had been such a good employee for so many years, the company wrote that they were going to continue to pay him for a year while he tried to get well.  Times have changed and I suspect finding a business willing to do that would be nearly impossible.

Certainly Apple is not that company, a recent article about the company had the title, "Bad Apple? The company may just show us everything wrong with American business."

Now I do not like to pay taxes any more than any other person, but I do like to have good roads, schools, fire and emergency personnel and a few other things.  There are a lot of tax dodges in this country but that is not the point of this post nor are tax dodging companies. 

What matters to me is what we can do working together as opposed to striving alone as individuals.

We often come together as communities because as a group we can do more than we can do by ourselves.  The sea wall in the picture is in Edenton, North Carolina.  I am pretty certain that one individual did not pay for it.  Likely the government or a group of individuals worked to get it built.

We happen to live in a small community with a Home Owners Association and we pay dues for that privilege.  The dues let me enjoy some things that I could not afford to have on my own.  We have a community swimming pool and a nice dredged channel out to the White Oak River.  Of course it is impossible to please everyone in a community, so there are always challenges but I am willing to take the tradeoffs.

Because so many of us live far from family and the nature of most communities and companies has changed, we often seek out other ways to be part of a group that can provide support when we need it.

Church is a wonderful example.  As I was making some calls recently as an elder of Cape Carteret Presbyterian Church, I got to hear from individuals who were very appreciative of the care and help from other church members.  I also listened to someone who was happily working at another church member's home while that person is recovering from surgery.  Fifty years ago most people lived close to an extended family and a family member would have probably been doing those chores.  Today that is often impossible.

Yet there is a whole world of people out there who believe that they can afford to pay for everything that they need.  They have been very successful in business and perhaps they do not feel that they need help from anyone.  I am not going to applaud every success because I know that for the handful of businesses which have built their success on cooperation there are plenty who got to the top on the backs of others. I have never see anyone who was responsible for all of his or her own success.

Usually success has a whole crew of unnamed heroes who have often worked tirelessly and ended up with little fame or fortune. Only a few good companies take care of their employees beyond an inner circle.

Beyond those whose personal riches allow them to believe that they can go it alone are those of us who not only know we cannot make it on our own but who also derive a sense of accomplishment from helping others succeed along the way.

I have been in situations where I have had to lean on members of my community and even my family.  I have taken great pleasure in returning the favor to others.

Reaching out and helping someone who needs a hand is part of what helped this country of ours become great.  Perhaps not everyone who gets help will make it, but that is certainly no reason to give on the idea and make sure than no one gets any help.

If you reach the end point of the logic of a society built completely on I have mine and you have yours, it is not very pretty.