View from the Mountain

Dining Along Side Roads, Captain V.P.'s, Swansboro, NC

Sound Water Cocktail

Update- unfortunately Captain VP's appears to have closed.  We stopped by on October 25, 2013 and found a notice saying the restaurant was closed.  There was no explanation.  We are sorry to see them go.

We have three new restaurants in the area as of the summer of 2014.  Santorini Grille has taken over the space once occupied by Captain V.P.'s.  Also new to the area and in the space where Fairway Restaurant operated successfully for years is Angie's Lighthouse Cafe. The newest restaurant in the area is the recently opened Swan's Burro.  In addition to these restaurants in permanent facilities, Lil Johnny's Crab Shack has provided some memorable shrimp and fish tacos this summer from a food truck at the Salty Air Open Market in Cedar Point.

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It has been seven years since I was inspired enough to write one of my Dining Along Side Roads columns. 

That is a long time and a lot of meals to find another restaurant that is deserving of a post on View from the Mountain. We have been reviewing lots of restaurants for our travel guide, but none merited a full article here.

I am thrilled to have found another restaurant where the food, the atmosphere, and the staff work together to create a memorable dining experience.  It is only by chance that we dropped in at Captain V.P.'s for lunch on Thursday, July 25, 2013.  We were headed for another place but fortunately we had some well-traveled and adventurous close friends with us.

We saw the open sign and stopped out of curiosity.  The Crystal Coast is not a large area and a new restaurant, especially one on the water, is big news. Ron and I went in to check out the menus while the ladies waited in the car.  We were on the hunt for fried oysters since Ron's wife, Jeanette, had told us that was what she wanted for lunch.  After quickly glancing at the lunch menus, we found no fried oysters and were actually walking out the door, when we were lured back in by the admission that they were having some menu challenges and the fried oysters just had not made it on the lunch menu.

The meal that we enjoyed on July 25, was perhaps the best restaurant meal that I have had in the last five years.  It could be longer but I cannot remember many meals beyond that length of time.  

The food at Captain V.P.'s was perfectly prepared.  The service was great, and the items that we tasted were unique.  We got to meet the owner, Sassy.  She was a gracious host, and we are excited to have her running a new restaurant in our area.  They will inevitably have a few startup challenges, but there is no doubt in my mind that Sassy will make sure things are running smoothly as quickly as possible. 

Glenda and I actually went back for a second meal on Saturday.  The hush puppies which were very good on Thursday were even better on Saturday.  I am perfectly happy to be patient as the food gets even better.  Right now if someone asks me where to go for great seafood and a wonderful dining experience, I will tell them to go to Captain V.P.'s during the mid-afternoon.  Without the crowds that might overwhelm them as they get up to speed, this place is hard to beat.  That first late lunch we had was such a great meal that we did not even try to eat another meal later in the day.

So far we have tried the seafood nachos appetizer which is based on hand-cooked tortilla chips. It is so tasty that I plan for it to be my next meal.  We also had fried green tomatoes and Down East style chowder before the fried seafood combination with flounder, clam strips, crab cake, and oysters that we split.

The flounder and clam strips were better than any that I have tasted in local restaurants recently.  The crab cake was filled with crab and the oysters were fresh and delicious. My wife who is not a fan of Down East chowder absolutely loved the Captain V.P.'s version.  I was exceptionally pleased with the overwhelming number of clams in the chowder. I think the fried green tomatoes were the best that I have ever eaten.  We also split a piece of wonderful pineapple cake four ways.  On the following Saturday, I tried an Oyster Po' Boy and my wife had a Reuben sandwich.  Both were excellent. We have friends who tried a steam pot and enjoyed it. 

It is actually very exciting to have a new restaurant to explore.  We have seen lots of restaurants open over the years but very few actually warrant a second visit much less the planning of our next visit.  I am looking forward to taking a friend who loves steam pots to Captain V.P.'s.  I love steamed clams, mussels, and crabs.

I have gotten copies and posted on the web the lunch menu, the dinner menu, and the steam pot menu.

Having a new restaurant to show off to friends is a great treat.  There are obviously other places where we will still eat, but Captain V.P.'s has won the top spot as far as I am concerned.  I will be wishing Sassy and her crew the best of luck at keeping their quality high and their prices reasonable.

While this is a really good review, my wife and I are actually demanding food critics since we want the readers of our travel guide for the Emerald Isle area to have the best possible experience when dining out.  We dropped six restaurants from last year and listed only eleven restaurants and three fried seafood places that we recommend in our 2013 edition among the many places to eat in the area. That number has gone up to twelve restaurants since I have added Captain V.P.'s to the list.

Drop by Captain V.P.'s (Google map for directions to the location) and tell them David sent you. You will find them in the light blue building on the waterfront between the Highway 24 bridges in Swansboro right next door to my favorite seafood market, Clyde Phillip's Seafood where I get the shrimp and flounder that we cook ourselves.  Keep in mind that any small restaurant can be overwhelmed during tourist season so follow my advice and have a very late lunch, you will not regret it.

The Pundits Can Be Very Wrong

Like the forecast for rainy weather that I saw before paddling out in the river when I snapped this picture, sometimes the experts get it very wrong.

I try not to let things that others write get under my skin these days, but unfortunately David's Brooks recent opinion piece, Men on the Threshold, is something that requires a response. 

The article has a lot of things that bother me, but perhaps the one that grates the most is the suggestion, "that men raised in fatherless homes, without as many immediate masculine role models, do worse in the labor force."  I come from a fatherless home and so that makes this article a little personal for me.

I have never been a fan of broad generalizations about people.  There are just too many exceptions to the rule when you talk about humankind. Brooks should also be careful about defining the road to success for others.  If he has done anything other than write, teach a couple of courses, or pontificate, I cannot find it, but if I am wrong on that score I would be glad to amend my post.

Matt Taibbi does a good job of taking apart the statistics from Brook's column in a Rolling Stone article, David Brooks Wonders Why Men Can't Find Jobs.  My comments are more of a personal nature. 

Perhaps Mr. Brooks should have taken a trip into the real North Carolina when he was teaching at Duke in 2006.  I was 57 years old and actually working at a startup then just across the border in Virginia.  The CEO was younger than my older daughter.  Brooks suggests the following.

A guy in his 50s doesn’t want to find work in a place where he’ll be told what to do by savvy young things.

I would disagree.  There are plenty of examples of people doing jobs which Brooks might find "humiliating," but most men will do whatever it takes to take care of their family.  While he might not want to take orders from someone under thirty, I did not mind being told what to do.  What was challenging was watching young team members reinvent the wheel because they were so certain that no one had ever faced the same problems that they were uncovering. Young companies can be a little like young adults, they often have to learn the hard way.  I find Brooks' between the lines suggestion that older workers cannot be savvy a classic case of ageism.  I try always to respect the knowledge of others, but I certainly think that I can hold my own in the world of technology.

Obviously David, whose pieces I sometimes enjoy, never got the chance the meet my mother, Blanche Styers Sobotta. She raised me back in the fifties and sixties before fatherless homes were as common as they are today.

I doubt that there could have been a better example of hard work, dedication to family, and the hope of a better life for the next generation.  Mother did not have an executive job, she worked as a beautician. The hours were long and every Saturday morning she set aside time to cut and fix the hair of close relatives for free.

Blanche did not just raise me, she had a hand in raising her many nieces and nephews.  In a sense her spirit and efforts gave them and other family members a taste of what life off the farm might bring.

She was the only one of the three Styers sisters who ever lived beyond the red clay of Yadkin County, North Carolina. They were all born there by their father Walter's millpond in the days of horses and buggies. She started cooking for her brothers and sisters at the age of eight when her mother died in the 1918 flu pandemic. She was also the only one of the sisters to ever drive a car on an Interstate highway or to fly to another country.

Mother managed to see that I went away to McCallie School in Chattanooga, Tennessee, for my high school years. McCallie was a military school in those days, but I knew how to study hard long before I got there. Mother would accept nothing less than the best even when I was in grade school.

From McCallie I went to Harvard and after graduating built a cattle operation in the hills just north of Fredericton, New Brunswick. After that I had a career that lasted almost twenty years at Apple. I have known a lot of CEOs over the years, and I have no doubt that my mother could have outworked any of them.  Anyone who knew her would agree.

Mother, who lived to the age of ninety-three and six months, resided in our family home at 347 West Pine, Mount Airy, North Carolina, until she was ninety.  She was able to stay there for so many years after she became a widow because R.J. Berrier, a family friend, lived upstairs until his death in 2000.  During his career of 50 years in the press, R.J. was an editor at both local papers, but I remember him most for his Mount Airy After Midnight columns.

R.J. would get in police cars and ride around with local patrolmen. Unlike television's Mayberry, which is modeled after Mount Airy, things did happen and R.J. was there to see them and report the events from a first hand perspective. It is a lesson that I have taken to heart in my writing.  Before I wrote about the beaches of Emerald Isle, I walked the more than twelve miles of beach in the town more than once.

There are plenty of others who have grown up in fatherless homes who have gone on to show they can work hard and achieve success just like those who grow up in homes with a father.  In New York you do not have to look very far for examples. My older daughter was at high school with Tiki and Rhonde Barber. I got to see Tiki score some touchdowns before he went on to the University of Virginia.  While Tiki has had some personal challenges no one can take away the success he and his brother have achieved. I am not surprised that they were raised by a strong woman without a male in the house.

You can read more about the influence of my mother in my recent book, The Road To My Country.

Memories, The Steps To The Past

Near The Emerald Isle Town Line

The human mind is an amazing computer. 

It does not matter what kind of processor you have in your laptop or desktop, your mind can still do things that we have not learned how to program into computers.  I doubt computers will ever be able to make the same connections that the human mind does.

If you happen on a scene like the one in this post in person, your mind will store some associations to the image and sometimes the images will retrieve other memories that might be tied to those associations. 

I recently published a new book, The Road To My Country.  The book is all about my memories.  I did not put any images in the book.  One of the reasons is that I wanted readers to create their own mental images when reading the book.  If there were images in the book, you might well associate a passage with one of my images instead of one that you pulled from your own past.

So far I have gotten some good feedback that the book encourages people to think about their memories.  I think it is healthy to relive positive memories that are part of the quilt of our lives.

In some ways, memories are like small towns along a highway. You're in the dark until all of sudden, you round a corner onto Main Street, where the memories are waiting for you like the inviting lights in a late-night diner.

Just because we enjoy our memories does not mean we are living in the past.  I often find that a recalled memory in the right situation creates new memories and associations that make things we do today even more special because they are grounded in the past.

The sea oats in the picture that I took on July 17, 2013, are a good example.  While sea oats always make me think about being at the beach, that is not the most positive association for me.  They also bring back the memory of the days when I first spent some time with my wife, Glenda.  She had a vase with sea oats in her apartment.

Food is often associated with pleasant memories.  Ripe red tomatoes and cold fried chicken bring back memories of my mother.  She was famous for her tomatoes.  The summer that I went to school at the Grayln Estate in Winston-Salem, I ate a lot of her cold fried chicken.

Weather can also bring back memories.  Since we spent many years in Canada before we came to the Crystal Coast, it is no surprise that snow is attached to so many memories.  One of my best snow memories is tied to the birth of our younger daughter.  We had one of the most impressive blizzards of our whole sixteen years in Canada the day our daughter was born.  Just before the blizzard came, the temperature reached minus forty.  I guess I was so worried about getting Glenda to the hospital during a blizzard that the drive home through the last part of it was still a positive experience because mother and daughter were fine.  Of course my own mother had fried chicken waiting for me when I got home so there were a lot of good things about that storm.

Even being cold and wet brings back good memories for me.  Other than during my ten plus years as a farmer, I was never colder and wetter than on a fall fishing trip in Beaufort.  I would have repressed the memory if the half day of fishing had not been one of the best in my life as you can see from this picture of the catch.  The picture does not have the dozens of puppy drum that I caught and released that same morning.

If you want to take a journey down my memory lane in the hope it will spark your own imagination, give our book, The Road To My Country, a try.  You might be surprised at what memories of your own that it brings back.  Some readers have asked if there are pictures of some of things mentioned in the book.  Our other recent book, A Taste For The Wild - Canada's Maritimes, has many images that are described in The Road To My Country.  As I told a friend my lime green Bronco is even there.  

Each of the books are just $2.99 which considering a Sunday Raleigh News & Observer costs $2.14 including tax is pretty reasonable.  You will likely remember our book a lot longer than anything you read in the Sunday paper.

 

 

 

 

Our new book, The Road To My Counry, is available

Our new book is done.  It is $2.99 on the Kindle Store.  I would love to hear what you think about it.  Click this link or the cover to read a sample.

A Journey To My Country

 

White Oak River Near Swansboro, NC

Updated- July 4, 2020,- Writing is one of those things that operate on sparks of imagination.  Something starts to nag you and if it is truly important, eventually what is in the back of your mind ends up being a blog post or a book.

The fifth book published by my wife, Glenda and I will is "The Road to My Country."  This is a paragraph that sets the stage for the book.

It's often late at night on a dark country road when people and places, both remembered and imagined, become the sparks that light the memory defining our lives.

 

As my wife and I glide through the black night on Union Cross Church Road, we cross a small creek, and it hits me. I see the long-gone millpond, the house with five fireplaces, and the mill itself. I see the shadows of three young girls, my mother and her two sisters, picking beans in their garden. Next, I remember the place as it was when I was young, an old, crumbling concrete dam with trees growing in the former millpond.

 

The memory fades as fast as it comes, and the dark road continues on into the night.

The story has been there for a long time and the first chapter of this book has been written for a while, but the rest of the pieces did not fall in place until recently. There seemed to be no urgency until North Carolina's state government decided to roll back years of moderate governance with the hope of turning our state into the Texas of the east coast.

However, my book is not about politics. It is about North Carolina that I remember from my youth when I was growing up as the only child of a single mother in the Piedmont area west of Winston-Salem. It is also about our journey away from North Carolina, our return, and how our state has changed in that period of nearly forty years.  The crowd around the swimming pool looks a lot different than it did in the fifties.

Perhaps our short book is just me trying to figure out how I got to be the person that I am.  I grew up in rural North Carolina went away to military school, and then got my undergraduate degree at Harvard.  After Harvard, I moved to Canada to farm. 

My wife and I built a large cattle operation and lived for over ten years in the hardwood hills of New Brunswick. We had over two hundred head of cattle and grew almost all of our food. Then in a quick twist of fate, in a couple of years, I was working for Apple where I had a career of nearly twenty years including directly reporting to Tim Cook for a short time.

I have written a lot about my time at Apple including a book, the Pomme Company. I am one of the few people who worked at Apple and has written about the company without ending with any legal challenges from the company. However, when I published the book a few people still at the company were afraid to be in a picture I used in the book even though it was taken ten years earlier.

This new book has very little about Apple in it and I think that is a function of how little Apple contributed to who I am and the mental distance that now separates me from the company. I have continued to use the company's products, but I remain convinced that Apple is all about money.

I think my character was forged well before I got to Apple.  Perhaps certain things that had already burrowed deep into my subconscious before I got to the reality distortion zone of Cupertino kept me from staying even longer at the company.  That is not a subject of the book either, but you might be able to draw some conclusions.

I doubt that I would have survived and thrived as long as I did at Apple without the background that I brought to the company as a son of North Carolina with dirt on my hands.

Both North Carolina and I have changed a lot. I did not appreciate my home state until I stopped running from it and that was many years after I left it.  Why I was running might still be another story. 

My wife and I took title to my mother's homeplace in Mount Airy, North Carolina in 2002. Mother had come to live with us in Roanoke two hours to the north and could no longer take care of the large house and gardens that were at one time Sobotta Manor Bed & Breakfast.  Going back to Mount Airy and also visiting our youngest daughter who had relocated to North Carolina at almost the same time helped us understand how much we missed being back in our home state.

We lived in Virginia for twenty years, but it was no North Carolina.  Living in Virginia did let us enjoy many summers, fall, and spring vacations to North Carolina's beaches.  It awakened a love for the Southern Outer Banks that never died.

Now we are full-time residents of North Carolina and live on the Crystal Coast portion of the Southern Outer Banks.  North Carolina is a wonderfully diverse state.  The picture in the post is the large coastal river that I often enjoyed from my skiff or kayak.  The waters of the river behind our house and the uncrowded beaches of Emerald are a big part of why we live here. We live in an area where the week of the Fourth of July can be a true delight at least when we are not having a pandemic.

Despite the headlines, I doubt our state will turn into the Texas east.  I have high hopes that the good people of North Carolina will stand up for the moderate policies that have made this such a great state where all sorts of people live in harmony.

I hope my book encourages others to look back and find those things which have made them who they are. A little "How did I get here and is this person the one I want to be," is good for the soul.

I think "The Road to My Country" is well worth its modest cost on the Kindle platform.  Even in paperback, it is only $6.99. 

If you are interested in more information about where we lived in Canada, try our book, A Taste For The Wild - Canada's Maritimes.  If you are interested in more about one of the top ten uncrowded east coast beaches, download our book, A Week At The Beach - The Emerald Isle Travel Guide.  It is a great way to take a trip to the beach without even leaving your easy chair. There are some good reasons in 2020 to make your visit to the beach virtual.  You will find some great family recipes in the book that help make that virtual vacation at home even better.