View from the Mountain

Real Freedom

Our home in Saint Croix Cove, Nova Scotia -1971

Many of today’s protesters assume that liberty or freedom means the right to do whatever you chose. That is far from what the framers of the US Constitution had in mind. The idea of a social contract was part of their deliberations. Like all contracts, even a social contract has two sides to it.

“Liberty implies the absence of arbitrary restraint, not immunity from reasonable regulations and prohibitions imposed in the interest of the community.”

Congress long ago determined those reasonable regulations are the foundation of today’s social contract between the governed and the government. It might behoove those protesting against the “tyranny of wearing masks” or their employers requiring them to be vaccinated to read a little more before they trivialize the words “lost freedom” by equating it with the requirement to wear a mask to keep from infecting another citizen.

One of the ideas behind our freedoms is the freedom to contract which has its roots in the belief that if you do not like the rules one state is imposing on you, that you have the absolute right to uproot yourself and your family and move to another state where the rules are more to your liking. It is an idea that in theory makes our federalism stronger and more resilient. Different states have different rules within the bounds of the US Constitution. If you do not want anyone to force you to wear a mask, consider a move to Florida.

The reality is far different than the theory. Many people do not have the freedom to choose to live in a different state or even county. Everything from the lack of transportation to no money in the bank for a move prevents the theory from being a reality. Moving is not easy. While the number of people who have never moved is certainly less than it was fifty years ago, there are still people who live and die within a few miles of where they were born.

If we asked people to go to war to defend the right not to wear masks, I seriously doubt that we would get enough volunteers to continue to fill the ranks of our volunteer-only military. What has happened today is that because of the unwillingness of a number of citizens to take their responsibilities to other citizens seriously, we have already seen the lost of substantial freedoms.

Fifty years ago this August, I exercised one of the most precious freedoms of all, the freedom to move from one country to another without arbitrary rules making it impossible. In early August of 1971, I got on a ferry in Bar Harbor, Maine, and rode it to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. At the ferry terminal, I was granted the status of Landed Immigrant. I had on a prior trip earlier that summer purchased 140 acres, a house, and barn for the princely sum of the $6,000 US.

For the next sixteen years, I lived in Canada, brought a new bride up from the United States and worked through the process for her to also become a landed immigrant. We had a farm with 200 head of Angus cattle and in 1984, I went to work for Apple in Canada. Our three children were born in Canada. In 1987 our family moved back to the United States. Still a part of me will always be Canadian because of how we became part of the communities where we lived and the great respect I developed for the Canadian people that were part of my life.

I chose to move to Canada because of cheap land, the same thing that brought many settlers to the United States. We came back home because we missed our families and the chance for corporate advancement appeared better in the United States than it did in Toronto.

Today, what I did in the seventies would be impossible. Currently, though that might change soon, there is no travel between Canada and the United States. Fewer people today have the advantages that I did, no college debt and family support to chase a dream of farming. Moving from country to country is not so easy and hasn’t been for a long time. Even Canada is much harder and paces like New Zealand have made it very difficult if not impossible.

I like to think that I have known real freedom and it has nothing to do with mask or vaccination requirements. If these requirements are so important, I suggest you look for a state where you will feel more comfortable.  That is the way it is supposed to work. 

Our Pandemic Move - Life Lessons - Part 1

Our Neighborhood east of Mocksville, NC

We just finished a move just one month shy of the first anniversary of the COVID19 pandemic. We had to sell our old home, move, and settle in to a new community at a time when people are even avoiding their own families. It was our hardest move including the time when we moved from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Columbia, Maryland, and had to deal with a border crossing. We were still in our thirties when we did that move. We are now in our early seventies.

Certainly being older had an impact on this move but when we moved in 1987, there was no Internet. We did not have cell phones. The only way to see a house was to get into a car and visit it or wait for snail mail pictures. We carried prepaid long-distance phone cards to communicate when traveling. You could not find things out by going to a website. In the eighties, there were no websites. You either had to write a letter or pick up the telephone.

One of the underlying reasons that we were able to make this move is that a massive amount of new technology now underlies most of the business processes involved in a move. Sure there is still a lot of manual labor involved but during a pandemic, I seriously doubt you could buy a house without all of today’s remarkable technology.

We learned a lot with this move and I am not going to try to cram it all into one blog post. I suspect it will take at least two or three posts. For this first post, I am going to cover deciding where to live and buying our new home. I will probably do a post on selling our home and another on the actual move.

First just a little background, this is our seventh move as a couple. We did one corporate move and the rest we have done ourselves. My wife and I had 200 head of Black and Red Angus cattle on our farm in central New Brunswick in Canada. After dispersing our herd of cattle, I eventually went to work for Apple Computer after a two-year stint at an early computer reseller.

We moved from the farm in December 1984 and I worked for Apple in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and then Columbia, Maryland. Finally, we lived in Roanoke, Virginia, while I worked out of the Reston, Virginia office where I became Apple’s director of federal sales. I worked for Apple for almost twenty years until July 2004. I did some consulting and spent some time at a couple of other companies before trying real estate for a few years. I went back to my technology roots in 2011 and continue to work as a Vice President for that same company that builds community fiber networks.

I have been faced with figuring out where to live in unfamiliar areas several times. The one element which can make or break finding the right place to live is establishing a relationship with a realtor who knows the area where you have decided to live. In each move where we found a good home, there was a realtor who helped us make the right decisions. We have been fortunate to work with some great realtors.

Purely by chance when we started looking at places to live, we lucked into signing a buyer’s agreement with a great Realtor, Carrie Gibson of Mays-Gibson Real Estate.

I am a big believer in test-driving cars and real estate agents. In the early stages of moving, we saw a house listed that interested us. We emailed Shelia Mays, the listing agent, asking some questions in early January 2019. Before she had a chance to answer, a personal emergency happened and we ended up working with Carrie Gibson. It was a very fortuitous accident that made all the difference in finding a house in the right place that came as close as possible to meeting our needs.

Carrie was everything we could ask for in a buyer’s agent, knowledgeable, personable, caring, persistent, a good listener, patient, and a great communicator. I am convinced that our move would have been far more stressful and less successful without Carrie’s expertise.  Moving at any time is difficult especially when you are in your seventies. Moving during a pandemic is a huge hurdle and Carrie Gibson made our move possible. We bought our home twenty-five months after we first talked to Carrie.  Carrie is the best buyers' agent that has ever helped us and we have worked with a couple of stars.

While we ended up buying a place less than twenty miles from where I grew up in the fifties, the growth in the area makes it almost unrecognizable. My memory has to stretch to accommodate all the changes.

We made a trip to the area in the spring of 2019 to decide on areas where we might want to live. Carrie showed us around the area and gave us a good feel for where we might want to live. We actually tried to pick our area out before we put our home on the market for the first time. Because we were selling a waterfront home after Hurricane Florence paid a devastating visit to NC’s Crystal Coast, it took longer than expected. In fact, as the pandemic started to rage, we took our home off the market in the summer of 2020. We put our back on the market in the fall of 2021, that time it sold in thirty-seven days.  Carrie never stopped communicating with us or treated us like we were taking too long to buy.

When our home sold in early November, we had to buy a home and we needed to buy it before Thanksgiving. Carrie had been in the loop of the selling of our home and was prepared for us but it was still hard to absorb how fast homes were selling at the time. In the middle of the summer, we had sixty homes on our potential list. By early November, the number was down to a dozen. By the time we got in the car to make the four-hour drive to go look at homes, there were only eight homes left on the list. When we got up the next morning, we were down to six homes.

Carrie lined up the homes on a Thursday and after taking a second look at two homes, we made an offer Friday afternoon on a home about the same age, fourteen years, as our current home. The owner countered with a full-price offer. We upped our offer another $5K and when we got no response, we withdrew our second offer. We decided to buy one of the other two homes.

Saturday we had a close look at both homes. We rejected one because of poor cell phone reception, lousy Internet connectivity, and its location where we would have endured several homes being built nearby.

We ended up buying a beautiful spec home that we had initially rejected because of vaulting in the living room. It has Fiber to the Home for Internet connectivity, is on public sewer and water, plus the lot gives us the feeling of spaciousness. We feel like we live in the country but new construction is done on our street. Our home has 2,400 square feet home compared to our recent coastal home's 3600 square ft so we have down-sized like we wanted to do.

There were significant negotiations with the builder and Carrie’s expertise helped those go smoothly. She did a great job writing up the final contract. We also had a challenging closing because we didn’t receive the money from our closing until Monday before our 9:30 AM closing the next day. Once again Carrie smoothed out things on that end while our real estate agent at the coast, Don Whiteside, went above and beyond the call of duty to get us a check that would work for our next day's closing. I will talk more about Don when I write the article about selling our home.

Carrie also played a big role in helping us get settled but that too deserves its own article. When I did the walkthrough with Carrie and my son the week before closing, Carrie was on top of everything just as she was when we negotiated the finishing of the house.

We are living in what I consider to the perfect location in a very well-constructed home. We live in a quiet countryside area less than ten minutes from Mocksville’s quaint small-town charm and impressive services. We are fifteen minutes from just about any service that you could imagine in Clemmons and only twenty to twenty-five from everything else including Trader Joe’s and Costco which were an hour and a half from our coastal location.

The story of our new phones illustrates how much closer we are to civilization. Somehow during the move, some pieces of our previous Panasonic phone system went missing. I looked online and it was two days for an Amazon delivery. I checked Costco thinking I might drive in and pick up a system. They had a four-handset system for $79. While looking, I noticed they would deliver. So I started shopping and while doing that figured out I could add groceries. I placed my order which included a famous Costco rotisserie chicken, some of my favorite Canadian bacon, some beef sausages, the largest bag of Cape Cod chips that I have ever seen, and 40 lbs of cat litter. An hour and nine minutes after hitting submit, I am watching the Costco shopper/delivery person back out of our driveway. The chicken was still warm and required tasting.

We are very happy with our new home, its location, and our experience of buying and selling homes. We acquired a great home at a fair price which is something we cannot say about every one of our other moves. While lots of new technology helped us buy our new home. I cannot emphasize how important a role our agent, Carrie Gibson, played in the success of this whole operation.

A Safe Warm Spot for a Challenging Fall

Ed, a good friend of mine who died a few years ago, used to say that if you were willing to look a little, most of the time you could find a place on the water in Carteret County where the wind wasn’t blowing. Ed grew up here and knew the area’s waters better than anyone I have ever known.

We have spent fourteen years here along Raymond’s Gut just off the White Oak River north of Swansboro. I managed to learn enough about the White Oak River from my kayaking and boating to know Ed was right. Many times, I fished a cove just off the river when the main River had whitecaps on it. Then there were times you could be in the middle of the river with hardly a ripple. Sometimes it is blowing on the river but quiet on the backside of Bear Island.

It turns out Ed’s wisdom also applies to our house. If you look a little, you can almost always find a cozy spot out of the wind. It is one of the reasons we love our home. The side of our house with the most windows faces the South. That and the protection provided by pines just across the water from us makes our home a delightful place as the air turns cooler in the fall. It also creates a great microclimate for gardening. Living on Raymond's  Gut just off the White Oak River turned out to be a lucky decision for us.

On October 18, 2020, we awoke to a temperature of forty-nine degrees Fahrenheit. That is a very cool fall morning here on the coast. I actually wore a long-sleeved tee shirt when I went to retrieve the Sunday paper. It is only the second or third time that I have done that since early spring. However, I will have to change out the shirt by noon. I still have not given up my shorts and Crocs which often remain my uniform until well into November and sometimes even December.

When I headed up to my office, I stopped by our little porch which is off of our great room. I wanted to snap a picture of the view which turns out to be the picture that I chose for the post. As I walked onto the porch, I embraced by the warmth of the sun. The temperature on the porch was likely twenty-five degrees warmer than it was on the ground level out in the breeze. I was very tempted just to sit down and soak up the warmth and enjoy the wild world that is so much a part of our home. The number of Great Egret and Great Blue Heron pictures that I have taken from the little porch would stun most people.  I took this Great Egret picture and this Great Blue Heron picture the previous Friday just before I walked inside and took this shot of a Kingfisher.

Soaking up warmth is not something we do a lot of here in the summer when the heat has found us. Fortunately, Carteret County has a lot of water and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean, because of all the water, it takes longer for summer’s heat to reach us than it does many of North Carolina’s interior counties. In early summer it is not uncommon to find areas twenty miles inland recording temperatures ten to twenty degrees warmer than us.

We do go through ten to twelve weeks of really warm weather, but most people just use that as an excuse to either jump in the surf or be out on the water in a boat or kayak. We are lucky to have a house where there is almost always a continuous breeze in the summer. When fall comes all the warm water tempers the incoming rush of cool air. Many years we have even picked tomatoes in December and once we even harvested them in January. All that warm water makes a huge difference in the cold months.

With the Covid crisis that we all face, I feel extremely blessed to live in an area where there is room to safely walk and enjoy the natural surroundings that have so enriched our lives over the years.

While we might not have gotten our green beans planted early enough this year, we still have the hope of some November or December tomatoes. While the headlines in the newspapers cause a lot of stress, where I live and the house I live in generally help to counter that stress by letting me soak up some warmth or some of nature’s beauty.

Two of the linked drone pictures, the little porch and the wild area behind the house, were taken by Justin Whitt of Light House Visuals as he was taking pictures for the listing of our home. I highly recommend Justin but you can judge for yourself by looking at our listing.

On The Edge of the Continent

COVID-19 (Coronavirus) is already in Onslow County, just across the river from our home in Carteret County and in Craven County, another adjoining county so we know it is coming.  For just a while longer life here still revolves around the waters, fields, and forests that cover most of the county. Spring is definitely here and we might be doing some social distancing on the water soon.

I work at home like I have for most of my professional career. Social distancing is not going to change that work routine. Our company builds community fiber networks. While this virus will likely be good for our long-term business, no one wants their business to grow this way. Still, the coronavirus may be the shove needed for our country to get serious about fiber to the home which enables or improves a variety of services including telemedicine. We all might desperately need better connectivity in the next few weeks.

While I am worried about our local community which has not completely recovered from Florence, I remain optimistic because this is not your average place.

We moved to Carteret County, North Carolina fourteen years ago. The county is 62% water. The Croatan National Forest and its 158,000 acres are a buffer from most civilization. The almost untouched 56 miles of Cape Lookout National Seashore lies to the east. The 240 square miles Cape Lejeune covers our west flank and the Atlantic Ocean is our border to the south. We did not come to the county to get away from people, but people like the water in our big sounds and rivers are spread mighty thin.

My forty-year-old son declared while visiting us a few years ago that we were living on the edge of civilization. He lives in Northern Virginia, a land of epic traffic jams on multi-lane roads. Highway 58, the main access to the area, is just two lanes as it slices through miles of pine forest, pocosins and fields. It remains two lanes as it crosses the two-mile-long Cameron Langston Bridge to the beaches. It is not my son's favorite road.

As uncrowded as our area is, we are no strangers to challenges. Being on the Crystal Coast portion of the Southern Outer Banks, we have survived our fair share of hurricanes. Our schools were closed for two weeks for Florence which just happens to be the time Governor Cooper closed them for the coronavirus on March 14.

Saturday, March 14, was also scheduled to be the kick-off of our annual outdoor festival season with the Saint Patrick's Day Festival on Emerald Isle. It brings over 30,000 people to our little beach town which has a year-round population of under 3,700 people. It's cancellation this year is a big blow to the local economy. Emerald Isle, the largest of the area beach towns grows to 50,000 people briefly in the summer.  On March 19, Carteret County asked visitors not to come to the beaches. The same day Emerald Isle closed its public access beach parking.

That we are always prepared for the summer surge of people might make us hopefully a little better positioned to do well in the early stages of this crisis. If some areas are food deserts, we are a food oasis. We have six large modern grocery stores within five miles. They're virtually deserted from October until early May. Wednesday night I visited the Emerald Isle Publix, my car was the only one in the customer parking lot. While we have seen some shortages, it appears they are so far minor. One store might have eggs and/or bread, another hamburger, and another chicken.

Carteret County is also a farming area that grows a tremendous amount of produce. Rumor has it that a few farmers are already picking this year's first strawberries.  We know from the past, strawberries will be ripe and widely available in a couple of weeks. There are still people here like us with home gardens. We will enjoy our first lettuce from the garden this week. Many of our other services are designed to handle a short summer surge of business and hardly any of our storefronts shut down for the winter. All of that is good for today.

The long term outlook is unlikely to be so rosy. A coronavirus shock to tourism on top of a slow recovery from Florence will be tough on many small businesses that struggle to survive the winter so they can thrive for a few summertime weeks. A big hit to the early rental season makes our coastal area even more vulnerable to late-season Hurricane scares that also drive tourists away. We have already lost a number of restaurants and the ones that have gone to the expense of rebuilding definitely are going to be hurt by the recent closures.

Watching coronavirus is a little like watching a hurricane as it slowly makes its way towards your area. However, the analogy breaks down quickly since the drill most of us have internalized for hurricanes helps us little against a virus that we cannot see.

With coronavirus, we are following the government directives as we do for hurricanes. We trust that will make us safe.  Carteret County has good information available.  We remain hopeful even better instructions and wide-spread testing will follow. While our location is somewhat isolated, perhaps we are well enough connected to the rest of the world to learn from others' mistakes.

When we put our house on the market last year, we were excited to be moving closer to our grandchildren in the Charlotte metro area. Maybe the slow real estate season has turned out to be a blessing. Carteret County might be a good place to ride out the coronavirus storm. I cannot get very interested in looking for a new home right now.