View from the Mountain

Once There Was Only One Cat Beneath The Tree

When I was around three years old, my single mother and I moved to Lewisville, North Carolina from just across the Yadkin River in Yadkin County. It was where my mother had been born on a mill pond.

Sometime before I was very old, a black and white stray cat found its way to the porch that connected mother's beauty shop with the rest of the house.  My bedroom, the former breezeway, also opened onto the same porch. Mother told me in no uncertain terms, that I could feed Whiskers but that I could not bring her into the house.

I slid open the screen on the aluminum screen door to my room. It did not take much convincing with food for Whiskers to jump into the house by herself. Technically, i was innocent. I don't think I got punished. Whiskers was with us until my freshman year in college. When my mother, Whiskers, and I moved to Mount Airy in 1963, my dad fell in love with her. He decreed that she should enjoy a canned salmon and canned milk diet. The picture at the top is Whiskers under the tree in our Mount Airy house probably ten years after she first sneaked through the screened door. There were a lot of changes in those ten years before I headed off to military school.

I was five years old before there was a television in our neighborhood. I was in grade school before we had a black and white set in our home in Lewisville just west of Winston-Salem. It was a very different time.  Unlike the children of today, we were free-range children, showing up at mealtimes and just in time to fall exhausted into bed on summer evenings

Our doctor made house calls.  We walked to school or rode our bikes. After school, we played pick-up football or baseball. We built forts in the woods and dammed whatever creeks we could find. Getting to go fishing in a farm pond was a huge treat.

There was a bus service from Winston-Salem but mother always drove us past the Lewisville feed mill to the big city. We got rid of our trash by burning it in a barrel. Sodas were a nickel until they moved them from water cooled boxes to machines outside of gas stations. Then they went to a dime. Nabs came in a square four pack. My first memories of going to the local general store are of going to a counter and handing them a list which they filled. It wasn't long before they opened the aisles and everything went to self-service except the cold cuts and meat counter. The gas stations had teenagers or men who came out, pumped your gas, cleaned your windows, and checked your oil.

Before the television, we got our news from a morning and evening newspaper that was delivered each day. Even when I was very young, I started the day by reading the newspaper.

We lived on a red dirt road but we had a gravel driveway and were proud to have it.  Our car did not have air conditioning but did have a standard transmission which was three on the tree. Our grill was a little round one and cooking on it was pretty special because I got to be in charge of it. I .was a teenager before we got the one room air conditioner for our living room. On hot summer nights I would sneak in there and sleep on the sofa

Churches had revival services in packed tents and when people died the bodies were placed in homes for visitation.  There were softball games at night during the summer at the school. It cost twenty-five cents to get in the bleachers. It was the entertainment for summer nights except for chasing fireflies and capture the flag. The highlight of summer other than the two weeks mother took off were riding the old activity bus to Tanglewood Park were we swam and took swimming lessons in the morning, had a hot dog for lunch and played putt-putt until the bus took us home.

Sunday afternoons in the summer were spent at our relatives, often eating homemade ice cream or watermelon under the shade trees. In the winter we played tag or sometimes played cards.

They were only a few drive-in restaurants but they often had real carhops. If you went to a movie anywhere besides the city, you went to a drive-in theater. Once my teenage cousins got me in by having me ride in the trunk The first restaurant I remember was the Dinette in East Bend, NC. Going to town sometimes meant a grilled cheese at the Woolworths' lunch counter.

The big city of Winston-Salem had a magical Sears Roebuck store that had everything you could imagine needing. The city also had movie theaters and a K&W restaurant which my mother loved.  The first fast food restaurant on our side of Winston-Salem was a Burger King. It arrived about the same time that the first shopping center with a supermarket was built.  The Krispy Kreme might have gotten there first.

We had relatives who heated with coal and others who had an oil stove with mica window for their main heat. One relative only had an outhouse and no indoor plumbing.

Most roads were two lanes and when you went on a long trip to beach, you packed your meals to eat along the way. I learned early to navigate with paper maps and watch at night for lights shining on the power lines so mother would know to dim her lights.

Ten years after Whiskers first came and I returned from my first year from military school, the world had changed. Supermarkets were on their way to taking the grocery business but we still had a farmer come to the backdoor a couple of times a month selling homemade butter. For a while longer glass bottles of milk continued to show up on our steps.

I could walk up to Mount Airy's main street and find a couple of hardware stores, Robby's Army Surplus store, Flip Ree's Men's Clothing, Floyd's Barber Shop, the post office, the police department, two movie theaters, a couple of newspapers, Snappy Lunch, a furniture store, jewelry stores, a big department store. at least two banks and a few other restaurants.

When I went away to college in 1967, I got to visit the one room showroom of LL Beans. I came home with a catalog. Mail order was just beginning.

No one imagined that they would one day do most of their shopping by having cardboard boxes delivered to their houses.I never dreamed that a pandemic would lead us to having four cats and no Christmas tree, but that is another story.

I remember when things were very different.

Choices

Sunset from the Point at Emerald Isle.

It is wonderful to have enjoyed a life where I had some choices to make that actually made a huge difference in our lives. Many less fortunate than me have few choices open to them.

One of the most significant early choices that I made was to move to Canada after college. I did not make the choice because I disliked the United States. I made the choice because what was important to me at the time was to own some land where I could feel a connection to the natural world around me. While this was a long time ago in 1971, it was not far enough back for there to be cheap land in North Carolina or Virginia that could match the 140 acres, house and barn that I bought on the Nova Scotia shore for $6,000.

Three years later, having gained some experience farming and a wonderful wife as partner, we made the choice to move to New Brunswick. There we had found a wonderful, accepting community where we could farm with much better odds of success than on the foggy Nova Scotia shores.

Ten years of farming in New Brunswick brought us to the decision that our family would be better off if I could find a city job. That city job eventually led to a career of nearly twenty years with Apple and a return to the United States. We could have stayed in Canada but a move to Toronto had little appeal. We also missed our families and believed that our children would have better opportunities in the states.

Years later after my departure from Apple, I have few regrets about finding a life after Apple. That I ended up on the North Carolina coast near where I first learned to surf fish with my uncle in 1969 is something that I contemplate often. The place where I did that surf fishing is also the location of the picture in the post. It was taken on November 7, 2020, over fifty years after that summer surf fishing trip which involved a twelve mile drive down the beach because there were no roads on Bogue Banks and the town of Emerald Isle did not even exist.

It is probably not surprising that after fourteen years here on the coast that we have chosen to move back to North Carolina’s Piedmont. It is there that my mother’s family first showed up on the 1790 census. Some members of my wife’s family are still on a farm that I suspect has been in their family for even longer. Like many people our age, we are moving to be closer to our grandchildren and other family members.

Some of those family members are still living in the same homes that they occupied when I went off to a military school experience for my high school years. That was not one of my choices but I did choose to get in the car after graduation and go off to college up north at Harvard. It might well be that the packed humanity of Cambridge made the choice to go to Canada a little easier. One of things about most cities where I have lived, Columbia, Maryland, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and even Chattanooga, Tennessee, is that the lights of the city distort the natural light of the night sky. I think that dark night sky remains important to our lives. I hope at least places where you can enjoy it never disappear.

One of the great pleasures of living in New Brunswick was being able to see Northern Lights once in a while. Here on North Carolina’s Crystal Coast the night sky is dark with a deep undistorted black beauty. When we lived on a mountain in Roanoke, Virginia, when we got just over the peak of our hill before turning into our driveway it always looked like we were landing an airplane with the twinkling lights of the city spread out below us. The night sky of the coast surrounded by the darkness of the White Oak River and the Croatan National Forest is a special treat for light-weary eyes.

Our choice to leave the beautiful night skies of the coast is not one we make easily but I have been sustained by empty spaces for so much of my life that I am looking forward to finding the magical things around our next home even if I have to adjust to urban lights. I will also have a chance to hear some stories from the elders of our families before they are gone and to watch our grandchildren grow up. I think the trade is well worth it.

The Sweet Sixteenth Anniversary Post

November Sunset White Oak River

This November will bring up the sixteenth anniversary of my first post on Typepad. November is a time for memories for me. 

I wrote on the web for a few years before I found Typepad and then used other platforms including my own site but I never gave up on Typepad. Spread across a few blogs on the service, I have over two thousand posts.  I write because it helps me figure things out and because I can look back sometimes and see how right or wrong I have been. Sometimes what I write helps people with a decision but mostly I write to clarify things in my own mind.

Perhaps I have never shared any great words of wisdom, but I have managed to get this far in life with respect for our lives and how we have lived them. Writing has helped me do that. My wife, Glenda, and I have had a wonderful adventure. Some of it has been hard with sleepless nights but there have been plenty of enjoyable times also. I have made some mistakes along the way but I have also stood up for a lot of things that I believed. Sometimes doing that was not easy and certainly not rewarding monetarily, but having the courage to do the right thing is how I was raised. I am proud of it and I am unlikely to change.

There are a lot of things in today's world that you cannot understand no matter how much you write about it. This has been a tough year.  If you had any innocence left, like me, you probably lost that innocence in 2020. 

Recently I was driving home from Lowe's Home Improvement on a Sunday afternoon.  Highway 58 where I was driving is a two-lane road when delivers much of our beach traffic to the beaches.  It is often easy to recognize beach traffic.  A mini-van or sport utility packed to the ceiling with a luggage carrier on top is a pretty good tipoff. As I was headed north what looked like a beach-bound mini-van heading south swerved well over into my lane.  It was close enough that I had to swerve also and I also blew my horn. Had I been going faster than the posted 45 MPH or not paying attention, I might have ended up in an accident.  The mini-van was easily doing 60 MPH. We have learned over the years that the closer some people get to the beach, the faster they drive. Supermarket parking lots can be dangerous on check-in days.

I can only speculate why the mini-van came into my lane. My first guess and the odds are that it is a good guess is that the driver was distracted by his or her cell phone. It happens all the time.  The question is what is so important that you would risk your family's lives so close, literally just a few miles, from your vacation destination? It appears some have become so connected that it impossible to disconnect and focus on important things. That includes parents who go on walks with their children but never take their eyes off their cell phone.  Like my mother would say, "Who raised those folks?"

Some other things about the current state of our country baffle me. How can people who exclaim their extreme loyalty to our country think they are helping the country by intimidating others who are trying to vote or participate in the political process?  Since when is it okay to use pepper spray on a peaceful march that included children and was only headed to vote? Even more scary, what gives you the right to force a bus containing a political opponent, the former vice president of the United States, off the road. Intimidation and violence have no place in the world that I hope will welcome my grandchildren. Between political intimidation and people too stupid to wear masks during a pandemic, I am not sure what our world will be like when I write next year's post if I am lucky enough to be around. I hope the future looks a little brighter.

I will close with some observations from my last year's post. They have hardly changed.

1. First, there are many people in the world whose actions either intentionally or unintentionally are hostile to the rest of us. Often we are little but roadblocks in their schemes which often have more to do about their own insecurities than anything else.
2. If you are trying to do what is right for the majority of the people, you are going to run into people who will oppose you. There are people out there who care more about themselves than about anything. The concept of the greater good is foreign to them. I have seen these people, had to deal with them and felt the hurt long after they have disappeared.
3. I have also come to realize that there are people who really do not care for facts unless the "facts" happen to bolster their own opinion. It is hard to understand but they seem to love to cling to the worst stories about people. Even if the narrative has no factual basis, it lets them rationalize their dislike, distrust or divorce from reality.  They deal in lies and rumor.
4. Another fact of life is that many people have trouble admitting that they are wrong. They will try to shovel the blame over on you even when it requires unbelievable contortions.  It is never their fault mainly because they dress in Teflon and everything slides off of them.
5. A goal for us all in our thoughts, our writings, and our actions is to call out the people who are trying to destroy our world. If you are silent, you are complicit.
6. Finally, if you are struggling to demonstrate balance in your thoughts, maybe you need to see if your subject requires a stand instead of balance.

 

Unable to See the Forest for the Trees

Fixating on and focusing on a phrase or a few words is the province of those with very small minds. I recently got a full dose of this.

However, it wasn't as bad as the two and one half hour board meeting that we had a few years ago when a homeowner argued over one word in the minutes. The homeowner had not even been present in the meeting.

It is profoundly depressing to try to explain things to people who are so hung up on their own little view that they squeeze it to death. They do not want to hear or understand the big picture of what you are trying to say.  You could tell some of these folks that a tornado was about to hit and they would argue for hours over what the word "hit" means.

These are usually the same people who insist on having the last word in spite of almost all their words being laughable while completely missing the big picture. It is like they cannot see the water in the picture because of the rain. They rarely search for any context or take the time to read background materials.  They are the modern-day experts of everything. They refuse to learn from the past.  They apparently were born knowing everything and how to handle every situation. Their smug attitude is hard to take.

The reality is that most of them are pathetic little people who would have a hard time fighting their way out of a paper bag.  They thrive off being parasites on people trying to accomplish something worthwhile. Their accomplishments are only in their minds. They would rather email than talk in person. Unfortunately, these people are usually the same people who believe themselves to be above the rules. They subscribe to the end justifying the means.  It is a sure sign that they have yet to earn their battle scars or see enough end results to understand that you need to do things by the rules if you want what you have done to stand the test of time.

I care deeply about rules, whether they are Robert's Rules of Order, the US Constitution, or the compensation plan that I have had with my employers.  We have rules so that we can have an orderly society and things get done fairly and efficiently. McCallie, where I attended military high school, got that message on rules through to me even as a teenager. If you didn't follow the rules, you spent your free Saturday afternoons walking around the track.

Even worse, some people in power cannot stand it when they are shown to be violating the rules.  They want to do what they want to do. The rules are little more than a distraction to be avoided in their mind.  Bending or searching for a way around rules is the wrong way of approaching problem resolution.  Stick to the rules and it becomes easy to say, "We are doing this because the law requires us to do it this way".  When you have the law at your side, it is a great comfort. When you try to bend the law to meet your needs, you should expect it to snap back and whack you in the face.  I have seen it happen many times.

It also occurs to me that the true measure of any person only shows during times of adversity.  When you cannot tell a good faith attempt to help from an attack, you need to step back and reassess what you are doing and how you are doing it. You have likely gone off the rails and are most certainly missing the big picture of what is really important to you. During tough times, you should especially cling to the rules and whatever precedents that you can find for handling the situation. They are the road maps through minefields.

Rules are guideposts to follow, not things to shun. My recent experience with explaining the rules to people has reinforced my view that most people believe that ignoring the rules is okay especially if you get the result you want. People hate being called out on rules so much that they will attack you just for pointing out the rules. Attacking someone is something a good leader resists.

Attacking an individual when you are a person in power is just plain wrong.  It ranks among the most pathetic behaviors of those in power. Attacking someone who is trying to help is an even more grievous error. If you cannot tell help from an attack, is it any wonder why no one respects you?

Respect has to be earned. Yet, few people are willing to do the work required.

 

 

 

 

Covid-19 Has Brought Changes We Did Not Seek

Raymond's Gut, Crystal Coast, NC

We live in one of the most beautiful corners of the US, North Carolina's Crystal Coast and if you look at the numbers, so far we have done very well during this pandemic. Our county of almost sixty-nine thousand has counted thirty-five cases of the virus and three deaths according the North Carolina May 19, COVID-19 dashboard.

Still, the COVID-19 crisis has undermined my optimism, broken some of my connections with others, and altered my view of our country. All that has happened and the crisis is far from over. In spite of the advice to stay home, the last couple of weekends we have seen the first significant wave of beach people with license plates from New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Georgia, and even Florida. We also know that we have plenty of North Carolina visitors and likely most of them come from some of our state's own hot spots. Things could get much worse in our coastal paradise.

I feel like the pandemic is peeling away layers of my psyche like the layers of an onion. My family's life has been defined by seeing the possibilities of a better future and taking the calculated risks to get there. Optimism has been part of my being for as long as I can remember. That spirit is in danger. I no longer can make sense of the calculations needed to be safe much less to get to the next stage of our life which for us is to move closer to our grandchildren.

The seriousness of this event is reinforced by our family history. My mother lost her mother in the influenza pandemic of 1918. She started cooking for her six siblings at the age of nine. I heard my mother's stories, including how she met those challenges and went on to a better life. As a single mother she worked to give me the opportunity to be the first of her family to graduate from college. She died in 2004 at the age of ninety-three and six months. She never forgot how to overcome adversity and to trust in a better future. She went to her grave believing that hard work, education and determination are always rewarded. I am not so sure any more.

Living on the coast, the threat of disaster sometimes hangs over our heads for weeks at a time. COVID-19 is different. We have faced many storms and like always, even today in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, remain prepared for the next one. However, maps that help us understand, prepare, and sometimes even escape hurricanes do not work for COVID-19. They show us only that there is little chance of escape because the virus is virtually everywhere.

The inland metro areas that so often have welcomed us with open arms during a fierce storm are hotbeds of the pandemic. Areas even more rural than us like the mountains do not want anyone from the outside. Some rural areas with agricultural processing plants have seen explosive virus numbers.

Those of us who have lived on the coast through the likes of Irene, Sandy, and Florence know how to calculate the odds of whether we should stay or flee. Those skills are useless when trying to figure out when is it safe to go to the grocery or drug stores.

Beyond shaking my optimism, COVID-19 because of its highly infectious nature has broken our connection with others. While it is unlikely those who welcomed us when we evacuated for Florence would turn us away if we needed to run from the virus, I would not ask them to shoulder the risk of taking us into their homes. Some of them have more underlying conditions than we do.

This pandemic has also broken some of the strong bonds we have with neighbors. We are in our early seventies but one of our longstanding habits is to invite our widowed neighbor for dinner once or twice a week. He will turn eighty-nine this summer. The stories of his amazing life, his songs, his passion for life and his company are greatly missed during these times. We see him but it is different than spending three or four hours a week with him and a bottle of wine. Just as we miss him, we also miss our grandchildren. This is the first spring in eleven years that they have missed their spring beach trip. This epidemic has stolen precious memories that we could have made and which will likely never be replaced.

Finally and even more troubling than everything else, I miss my country which during much of my life has been a consistent leader for the world in time of crisis. Not only are we absent from the world's stage, our leadership is actively trying to disrupt a coordinated response by defunding the WHO and trying to blame others for our failures.

I struggle to understand how the country that was the leader of the free world has become the object of pity from much of the world. That such a significant portion of country has become accustomed to denying science and facts is heartbreaking. That the oval office, the place where the buck always stopped in past times of crisis, has become a farce and sideshow in an attempt to stay in power and destroy our republic with the knowing support of a significant portion of our population is an embarrassment.

Many people will survive COVID19, but I am not sure that our form of government will. Those that do not survive will more likely fall in easily defined categories that our government has abandoned. The poor or older people trapped in assisted living homes have little hope of rescue. Those working in minimum wage jobs, both white and people of color are really on their own. No one will be testing their co-workers every day like in the White House. Those workers on the front lines of this pandemic risk their lives so people with more money can stay safe in their cocoons.

It is a dark time and the only brightness for us and many of my social media followers are the adventures of four feral kittens that we rescued from the marsh a couple of weeks ago. Their progress in learning how to socialize with humans has been much more uplifting than watching armed protesters demand that we ignore scientific advice and put their lives and the lives of others at risk. It appears it is easier to teach two different species to live together than it is for those of us who believe in science to change the minds of those who want to ignore it and put all our lives at risk.