View from the Mountain

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 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 the 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 that 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 the 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 became Sobotta Manor Bed & Breakfast for a few years.  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 not 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 and still is a slow ember in my soul.

We became full-time residents of North Carolina and lived on the Crystal Coast portion of the Southern Outer Banks for fifteen years.  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 chose to spend over decade in Carteret County. We lived 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.

 

Quiet Waters of the White Oak River

For fifteen years I got to live a dream of being on the water where I could slide a kayak in the water and go fishing. We also had a skiff on a lift, but piloting a skiff is work compared to paddling a kayak. There is little that compares to being on the water when the water is near perfect. Every stroke is magical.  When winds, tides, and river current cooperate, you are in a zone that few people get to sample much enjoy many times.

Once you have tasted a perfect morning or afternoon on the river, you keep going back trying to grab another piece of perfection. The experience hooks you. It is the river seducing you.

For me it was just the pure relaxation that comes  from floating around between the oyster rocks on a blue sky day when the wind and tide conspires to make life easy on the river.  Though I often used the word paradise to describe the Crystal Coast, no one should be lulled into thinking that all days are like the one in the picture. There were a lot of days when you get back to the dock almost sore from fighting the river and tides.

Sometimes those perfect days are pretty hard to find even for those of us living here. I was one of the lucky few who could take an hour or two to go kayaking if things are not too busy at work. Making up some work later in the evening might have been required, but that was a small price to pay if you hit one of those wonderful days on the White Oak River. Some days I would even catch a flounder, drum or trout and bring it home for lunch.

My kayak was rarely more than ten feet from the water and I just launched from our backyard.  Depending on the wind and tide, I could paddle to the middle of the river in ten to fifteen minutes so there wasno putting my kayak on a car and driving thirty minutes to get to water.  We kayaked nine to ten months out of the year depending on the water temperature.

The biggest enemy of kayaking on the coast in a big coastal river is wind. The more experience you have kayaking, the more wind you can handle assuming you have a kayak that can also handle it.  In my fifteen years there, I kayaked exclusively in a small area of the White Oak River.  I rarely went very much north of our inlet, Raymond's Gut, and I never kayaked south of Jones Island, the island at the bottom of the map.  I knew my part of the river very well, but even I could get beat up the wind and tide.

A Wednesday in July 2014 , I had a few hours off and there was hardly any wind in our inlet.  I learned early that the lack of wind back at our house in the marsh meant nothing when it came to wind on the river.  I also figured out the best way to understand what was happening on the river was to paddle out there and check it out.  

I had a couple of close fishing spots that I could usually wet a line even in windy conditions. I headed out that day and I figured out before I very far into the river that it was a lot windier than it appeared from home.  Even with all the wind and waves, I was determined to fish a little. Three or four casts were all that I needed to decide that I needed to change location and work my way back into Raymond's Gut, fishing the marsh edges as I went.

I did that and fished for twenty to thirty minutes with no fish and headed back to my dock less than five minutes away. The next day during my morning walk around our boardwalk in the neighborhood, I took a couple of telephoto shots and the river appeared a bit quieter on Thursday morning.

That evening my kayak went  in the water and I headed out on another journey. From the attached map you can see my trip after I got in the river and turned on my GPS recorder. While it was by no means an easy paddle, it was beautiful out on the water and I was determined to get to my rocks and fish. I got there made one cast and the skies opened up.  I was one wet person by the time that I got back to the dock.  Once I got inside, I stopped to take a picture.  Instantly I realized that I had answered a question no one wants to answer, "How do you give a kayak a bath."  The answer of course is “go fishing in the rain.”

I used a cloth to wring out a couple of inches of water inside the kayak.  It is good that I had a short memory.  I was back on the river chasing fish that next weekend.  Often it took two or three times to hit one of those perfect days on the White Oak. It was worth it because the river is truly magical when you find that perfect combination of water, calm winds, blue skies and a slack tide.

That happened to be the only time I got wet  while kayaking during our fifteen years on the coast.  If I look back, it is was also the first time I have ever been wet from rain while kayaking in over twenty-three years.  I wish I had been as lucky with wind as rain. I also caught enough fish over the years to declare that I had just enough luck in fishing to keep me happy.

Everything is Better Fried - NC Fish Camps

Seafood has long been a part of life in North Carolina at least according to my telling of the story. I am pretty sure I started eating seafood at the beach as soon as I could chew solid food. By the time I moved to Mount Airy in 1963, wherever I was home we would go to the small seafood restaurant run by a German fellow whose name escapes me. It was on the outskirts of town and was only open Thursdays through Saturday. While it was not a real fish camp, it operated similarly. Aside from a hamburger, the only thing on the menu was fish, shrimp, oysters, or the strange little stuffed crab shells.
I loved the fried flounder and the fried oysters but they would also sell you a Captain’s plate with three choices of food so it
was easy to get some Calabash shrimp if you really want to have a feast. You could get baked or fried potatoes with slaw and hush puppies. The tables in the restaurant were all long, designed to accommodate families with some friends. We were often joined by friends or other relatives.
Restaurants like this one would arrange to have fresh seafood brought up from the coast on Wednesdays. Some of the owners went to get the seafood themselves. They knew the fish houses that could be counted on to provide the freshest fish. All the restaurants had similar menus. They were not many places in Piedmont North Carolina without one of these restaurants an hour or so away.
The original fish camps were close to water and run by fisherman looking for a better way to sell their catch. The fried seafood was so popular that seafood restaurants with the same menu became very popular. My first real memory of a fried seafood emporium was in the summer of 1969. My uncle and I had gone down to Morehead City to do some surf fishing. The only bridge to Bogue Banks was there. Once we crossed, the roads ran out quickly and we drove my Bronco eighteen miles down the beach to the Point at Emerald Isle. It was midsummer so it was not real surprise that we caught almost nothing.
After reversing our trip on the beach and crossing the bridge from Atlantic Beach to Morehead City, we stopped at Captain Bill’s on the Morehead waterfront. We had a feast that I still remember well even the traditional lemon pie that follower. Later that summer I was camping on Ocracoke Island. Instead of going home by catching the short ferry and driving north to Nag Head, I took the long Cedar Island Ferry and eventually ended up in Morehead City where I filled my coolers with flounder and shrimp.
That was the summer that I learned how to cook flounder. My mother also shared the family hush puppy recipe. I learned that the biggest challenge of making small batch hush puppies is cooking them fast enough to stay ahead of the ones being eaten.
In our years down on the coast we tended to favor flounder that I caught and cooked or flounder that I bought from our local fish house, Clyde Phillips Seafood.
When friends visited we would sometimes visit one of the local fried fish houses. The most iconic would be T&Ws Oyster House which opened in 1971. The flounder is unlikely to be local and it might be a little heavier on the breading that what I would cook, but you can be sure that you will gotten a taste of the what fish houses are all about in North Carolina.
Just to get you in the mood for some fried flounder, here is our family's hush puppy recipe.
Most of the Hush Puppies that we get in restaurants are heavy and not anywhere close to the light fluffy ones that mom taught me to make.
The recipe is pretty simple.
One cup of self rising cornmeal,
One half cup of self rising flour,
One teaspoon of sugar,
One finely chopped small onion,
One cup of milk
Mix all the ingredients together.
Heat in a small heavy sauce pan three inches of Wesson oil until it is hot

Fill a coffee mug with cold water

Take a soup spoon, wet it in your coffee mug of cold water, dip it in your mixture so you have about enough mixture to cover about one third of the spoon lengthwise.
Carefully let it slide into hot oil.  If your oil is the correct temperature, there will be lots of bubbles around the hush puppy. If you take a long handled metal slotted spoon and touch the just dropped hush puppy which will sink to  bottom of the pan, it should rise to the surface easily.

If the oil isn't hot enough, just keep trying.  When the oil is the proper temperature, the dropped mixture will bob to the top of oil with very little encouragement.  Turn the hush puppies until they are golden brown and place them on a platter with paper towels.
It takes a little practice, but it isn't that difficult.  They are best done in small batches.  You're working with very hot oil so be very careful and keep kids away from the cooking.  Don't be surprised if for the first few minutes, the hush puppies keep disappearing.  The recipe makes enough for a huge crowd, probably four dozen or more hush puppies.  It does make something of a mess, but the good hush puppies are worth it.

 

Grounded in Life

Our Roanoke, Virginia, Home

Heading out on your own involves a little mystery until you find you place in the world. People used to join a company and the company had a lot to with their life and where they lived it.  That doesn’t happen so much anymore.

Our life wasn’t a structured one.  I got out of college, felt lucky to not be fighting a war in a jungle and equally lucky to have missed the law boards.  I went back to the land in Nova Scotia.  Life was remodeling a two-hundred year old post and beam house, gardening, and taking care of a few cows until I figured out what to do with my life.

Our First Nova Scotia Home

That house and others that followed provided safe haven from not just the weather but from a lot of life’s challenges.  We built our lives around our houses.  The people we met were nearby and because of the nature of the jobs that I held, I always had an office in the house.

In seventies and early eighties when we lived on the farm, local neighbors, also tied to the land, would drop by to build relationships and strengthen that web of friendship that keeps farming communities running.

After we moved off the farm to Halifax, Nova Scotia, then Columbia, Maryland and eventually to Roanoke, Virginia, visitors were often those with children of the same age.  Only for a few short months did we live where we could attend a company holiday party.

Life revolved a round our homes, church, and schools.Our Roanoke home at the top of post was high on the side of the foothills of a mountain. It was safe have from the winds that often buffeted  the mountainside and reminded us of our Nova Scotia years. It was big enough to get lost in and to collect far too many family treasures as our parents passed away,  The office I had there was larger than the one I commuted to as Apple director.  As the kids moved away the house became too big for the two of us.

Our Coastal NC Home

We moved to a smaller house on the North Carolina coast. It anchored us once again. We found friends and a church with more friends. Once again I had an office in the home. Our coastal home kept us safe from a number of hurricanes and plenty of high water.

After fifteen years there, we decided to move on again.  Each move after Roanoke took us to a

Our NC Piedmont Home

smaller home but every time the home anchored us in life. This last move to the Piedmont which by my counting is our sixth and might truly be our last. This has turned out to be a good home, one where we are comfortable in our surroundings and well-anchored in life.

At a time of rising seas, it is good to perched on a ridge at 785 feet instead of just six feet above sea level in marsh.  Even though I loved every moment of living in the marsh, I have found plenty to love here in the Piedmont.

Last Mowing Revisited

Eighteen years ago, I wrote a post, the Last Mowing.  We had been living in Roanoke, up on the mountain for fifteen years.  It was hard to get used to mowing the yard in December after years in New Brunswick where the snow could come in November and cover the ground until mid-May. 

Except for the green grass in December, there  were parts of living on the mountain that reminded us of our years in Canada.  The sometimes snowy weather was one thing and the friendly people were the other.

When you come over our hill after dark, it is almost like an approach to the airport. The city is spread out before you, street lights blinking, and buildings glowing. There are not many views in the world that can compete with it.

Being on top of the world at the end of the road seems to make us closer. Perhaps we have been drawn closer by the few times that the county has forgotten to plow the snow off the road in the winter.

Flatlanders, that is anyone who does not live on the hill, often ask how we get up the hill in the winter. Actually getting up the hill has rarely been the problem. All of us at the top have at least one four wheel drive. It takes less than one winter to realize that going down the hill is far more exciting than going up. I have been fortunate to have a job that allows me to work at home when necessary. That means that snowy morning’s entertainment usually is watching the folks who have to go to work try to get down the hill safely.

Our  first year on the mountain, we got an early coat of ice.  Everyone on the hill banded together and we cut a single tire track all the way to the bottom of the hill.  It was the first of many weather adventures on the hill.  We saw snow storms that were worthy of Canada.

It was a good place to live  and while we lived there, those of us at the top of the hill were a tight-knit group.  and I remember more parties than disagreements.  After we moved from the hill,  most friends drifted away but we remain close to one family that grew up with our children.

A lot of water has passed under me in skiff and kayak in the fifteen years after we moved from Roanoke and lived on North Carolina’s Crystal Coast.  My crocs also covered many miles of sandy beach. Yet I still fondly remember the years when we partied on our decks whenever given the slightest chance. There was no close neighborhood group in our coastal subdivision. I will blame it on the lack of any steep hills.

After fifteen years in the marsh, we moved from the coast during the pandemic.  Selling, buying, and moving during a pandemic are not the easiest things to do, but with lots of help, we managed to find a nice neighborhood less than half an hour from where I grew up in North Carolina’s Piedmont. We even found a home with a real backyard instead of a marsh or a ravine.

While my family has deep roots here, many who have been close to us are much older even than us.  The younger generation has their own busy lives and there is little to connect us with the neighborhood. Last year none of our immediate neighbors even attended the annual neighborhood HOA picnic with free (well it is covered by your dues) barbecue.

When we lived at the coast, we had a wonderful church family but we lost that when we moved.  Because of the pandemic, we remain video-church goers.  If the pandemic recedes further, perhaps we will find another church family.

Age, changes due to the way people live, some driven by the pandemic and even political divisions make it harder to connect.

Much like it was in early December eighteen years ago in Roanoke, we just had our last mowing of the yard here in North Carolina’s Piedmont hill country. Our fescue yard is still green like our bluegrass one in Roanoke so there is a chance it will be mowed again.

Our yards might be much the same green in December but somehow it feels like our world has changed.   In is unlikely we will have as close a group of friends as we did in Roanoke both on the hill and in the flatlands. Having children in school makes it easy to have common ground.  The Roanoke friends will have to share a spot in our fond memories of the friends we made during our years on the farm and in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

I have always believed that  there are good people everywhere, you just have to work harder in some places to find them than others.  I have seen nothing to change my mind in our latest move. We are finding our new ones, one at a time.

The Quietest New Year

We lived in Carteret County, North Carolina, for over sixteen years.

My Northern Virginia son believed that we lived somewhere beyond the edge of civilization. It is true that our former home is surrounded on the north and east sides by the 160,000 acres of long leaf pines and swamps contained in the Croatan National Forest.  

On the southern side there is the Atlantic Ocean with 76 miles of shoreline but only 20 miles of it developed in low density housing which precludes huge year round crowds. Then there was the two-miles wide White Oak River flanking us to the west with the 156,000 acres of Camp Lejeune and the Marines holding down that flank.  

You drive on two lane roads through a lot of farmland and forest to get to our former house. Often the first question out of a first time visitor's mouth was, "Just how did you find this place?"  The answer of course is that Carteret County is organized around waterways not roads. You find a place by exploring the waterways not following roads.

While it was not like living in a noisy metro area with continual blaring sirens and the near constant hum of traffic, it certainly was not a quiet rural place to live like our home in a small subdivision in yet-to-be-developed Davie County, North Carolina.

First off the Camp Lejeune Marines are not quiet neighbors. I have no disagreement that the jets, helicopters, mortars, and even bunker busters add up to the sound of freedom, but individually and collectively they are still very noisy and often made our windows rattle.

Then there is the minor thing about living in a vacation destination. Apparently going on vacation means you can ignore all rules including noise regulations.  The problem is compounded by a fair number of people who come for  beach vacations and either never leave or come back to put down roots.  They become permanent residents without ever losing their vacation attitude of being beyond the noise rules.

This the-rules-don't-mean-me attitude often means that even during dry times, fireworks can happen at any time just like mortars or bombing practice which is announced irregularly with just enough warning to confuse everyone.  Where we lived there was even a guy who thought firing off a small but exceedingly noisy canon was a good thing to do randomly just before bedtime for the neighborhood kids.

Even the White Oak River which was almost deserted when we first moved to the area in 2006 eventually got its share of boats and jet skis. The only safe place on a holiday in the summer was sitting on the barely covered oyster rocks in the middle of the river.

However none of the means that Carteret County was anything but a true natural paradise with added noise. Residents, including those with feathers and fur adjusted to the noise whether from bombing runs, impromptu fireworks, noisy jet skis or random homemade canons.

Still our move in 2021 has proved that there are quieter places than the edge of the earth natural paradise of Carteret County. 

Downtown Mocksville was quieter than quiet on New Year's Day. In our subdivision instead of fireworks starting two or three days before New Year's and peaking on New Year's Eve with a gradual leveling off the first week of January, we have heard none.  We have not even heard a single Christmas drone much less a Marine fighter jet or Osprey. There hasn't even been a single late night, low-flying helicopter.

Aside from one noisy jacked-up white truck that drives up and down a nearby local road, we have settled into a very peaceful spot.  It is no surprise that I don't miss the noisy canon or its owner at all.

After a year like 2021, quiet is good and would be even better if about half a dozen crazy politicians would lose their voices.