View from the Mountain

Two Lessons from the Land

After college, I went “back to the land.”  The reasons are diverse but after growing up in rural North Carolina, I spent four years in a military school, and then another four at Harvard in Cambridge during the Vietnam war.

As I have often said, the city was never for me so rural Nova Scotia and eventually the hardwood hills north of Fredericton, New Brunswick seemed to be to be a good place to figure out life. The urge to work the land was strong.

I started with a two hundred year old farm house on 140 acres on the Nova Scotia shore. We grew lots of vegetables, butchered our own animals, and learned the basics of farming. That bit of knowledge convinced me that there were better places to make hay than the foggy shores of the Bay of Fundy.

We ended in the small settlement of Tay Creek where we built barns and a big herd of Angus cattle that became known for high quality bulls and breeding stock. We brought our foundation stock from western Canada and our big red Angus bull from Montana.

We raised cattle for ten years, but we dispersed our cattle herd of 200 head in the fall of 1982.   When I went to work in town at the age of thirty-four, I was far better equipped for success after ten years on the land than I was when I graduated from college.

The two lessons I learned on the land are really simple but the trick is figuring out which applies to your current situation. The first lesson is that there are times when you are truly on your own.  There is no one else who can help you but yourself. There will be no one coming to rescue you. The bucket with tines that you use to lift the round bales that the cattle eat has broken. It is snowing on a Saturday and you are twently miles from town. If you are going to get out of the situation, the only way to do it is through your own efforts. It you don't know how to use an acetlyene torch and a welder, you have a serious problem.  Your ability to solve the problem is based soley on the skill, the strength, the determination and intelligence that you can muster with the tools and materials at hand. In this moment you are the master of your own fate.  If you are not  skilled enough to meet the challenge, you will have consequences that could be worse.  Two hundred head of hungry cattle bring a lot of focus to your efforts especially when the rest of the world is cut off by a snowstorm.

The second lesson is that sometimes it is impossible to succeed without the help of all your neighbors and perhaps the whole community around you. Sometimes you have to ask for help and other times it will miraculously show up.

We saw it when we dispersed our cattle herd in the fall of 1982.  Our herd dispersal was less than a month away.  Wet, cold weather set in, everything turned to mud and it was impossible for my workers and I to get things done with my tractors. I will never forget the Monday morning when many neighbors just showed up to help. I still get emotional when I remember it.  How they knew we never found out but there we suspected one person organized it. Other farmers made time to help even where there was no time in their day. One friend with a job in town took time off to help. They worked for days in conditions that only the closest friends or family would endure.  One even got sick but wouldn't stop working. All they would take is a "thank you" and whatever hot food my wife could get on the table. It is impossible to forget that the people of Tay Creek and nearby spots rescued us from a dire situation which we could not get out of by ourselves. We would have never been successful dispersing our cattle and moving onto the next stage in our lives without their selfless help. 

Our community showing us to rescue us is one of the most memorable experiences in my life.  It shows how deeply our the village of Tay Creek and surrounding communities were woven into our life on the farm. Farming teaches you independence but it also builds a spirit of community. It doesn’t matter how big your equipment is. At some point, you will need your neighbors.  It is just as likely that they will also need you.

Being on the land teaches you lots of other things but the need to be independent while being part of a strong community (interdependent) is the essence of what I learned.  That knowledge has served me well during nearly twenty years at Apple and the decades since then.  The idea of interdependence is lost on today’s talking heads and overly-rich executives. To them success is just an individual thing and has nothing to do with the hard working people who support the dreams or the network of others (including the government) who enable success. It is unlikely those talking heads have ever had their hands in real dirt or faced situations that farmers regularly resolve without any headlines. 

The land schooled me well for the tough years at Apple.  In my book about Apple I provide this accurate description.  "The sales people not its executives were the ones who kept Apple's lights on until the iPod and then the iPhone showed up to rescue the company."  They learned early in their careers that no one from Cupterino was coming to help them and that if they were going to succeed it would be with their own intelligence and the help of people on their local team.

My Theory of Soil

As I wrote in November 2021, there has been dirt on my hands for many years. I started serious gardening in the summer of 1972 on our farm in St. Croix, Nova Scotia.  It was grass pasture that we turned into a garden. It was plowed with my John Deere tractor and its three furrow plow. It was then harrowed, covered with old chicken manure. The next spring we tried beating it into submission with a tiller with front-mounted tines. It was a bone jarring experience.

We were young and strong so it still became a great garden. We grew so much broccoli that I am still traumatized if I eat broccoli more than once a week. We moved to New Brunswick where we raised cattle for ten years. Not only did we garden, I also planted twenty acres in oats most years. We did not harvest the oats as grain but green chopped them in the fall to extend the pasture season. The oats were a cover crop for reseeding an old field in grass and clover.

The garden spot that we inherited on the old farm in Brunswick had been used for quite a while so it was at the opposite end of the spectrum from our garden spot in Nova Scotia. It was also rocky, well-drained soil while the Nova Scotia soil was heavy clay once you got down over a foot.

If you a trying to grow new grass where mostly weeds and brush grew, you work the land hard. If you are trying to build up a worn out soil, you hardly work it.  What did do was apply as much rotted manure to the old garden as we could. We never plowed. We would use a disc harrow to work the composted manure into the soil.  Then I would till it in the spring before planting with my tiller that now had rear-mounted tines.  Towards the end of our time on the farm in 1984, the garden really did not need tilling.  The soil structure had been restored.  You could easily stir it with a three-tined digger. Unfortunately, there was nothing we could do about the rocks. As the old-timers were fond of saying, the most reliable crop in the area was rocks.

Since the farm we have lived and gardened on a mountain overlooking Roanoke, Virginia. Next we did the same along the marshes at the North Carolina coast and finally here on ridge in the North Carolina Piedmont.

The recipe for good soil has always been the same, plenty of compost, mix it with the soil so the air, soil, compost, and moisture can do their thing.  This year our soil needed stirring, I used a broadfork to lift and break the soil a little. It was not turned over like with a plow. I figure three or four years of this and I will be able to stir it with my three-pronged digger. As for no till gardening, it can work if your soil is in good shape. As for no-till farming, I am all for the no-till not so much for all the chemicals.

The New Art of Eating Well At Home

It has been years since I spent significant time in the big cities so I cannot vouch for the state of restaurants outside my rural world of North Carolina’s Piedmont.  We have some good restaurants here, but with few exceptions (and we just ate in one for our fiftieth annivesary) most can be faulted on something, service, price, or even the quality of the food.

Like many since the pandemic we have cut back our in-restaurant eating drastically. We have been disappointed so many times that we often choose to not go back.

Our home-cooked meals have for the last few decades been exceptional. We have been fortunate enough to eat wonderful fish like red drum and flounder fresh from the waters of the White Oak River where we lived from 2006-2021.  The fish I caught was often supplemented with vegetables from our own garden.

We know what good food is. We understand what it looks like and how it tastes. For a decade we had a cattle farm and raised most of our own food. Our kids grew up on unpasteurized Guernsey milk that I got from our cow every morning.  Our freezer was full of beef. We had our own chickens which provided us with eggs even when they had only snow for their water. 

We had wild red raspberries that grew along the rock piles by our fields. There were still a few wild strawberries around in those days. We harvested Chantelle mushrooms from our woods and fiddlehead greens from our marshes.

Times have changed. We are a lot older but we still love good food.  We still garden but it is only supplemental to what we buy from farmers, farmers’ markets and grocery stores. We also have relatives that garden.  This year I have grown enough tomatoes to sell a few pounds and still have plenty to enjoy and share with friends.

We have all the tools we need to cook well from a sous vide stick to a gas grill and a wood pellet smoker. The challenge is that the older you get, the less time you want to spend cooking and cleaning up.

We use our cooking energy sparingly, often working to cook something  that will last a few days. If I smoke a trip-tip roast, we might eat off it for four or five days or until it ends up in the soup pot. A pot of beans or crowder peas will last at least as long.  When I bake bread, it is usually three or four pounds of bread.  We always freeze most of what I bake.

Even so there comes a time when the spirit to cook needs a rest.  We have learned very little take out food travels well. Pizza needs to come from a place as close as possible, certainly not more than ten minutes away and it is still just pizza.

Burgers, Chinese and Mexican food just don’t travel well. Even rotisserie chicken is a gamble and often too salty. The one food we have found that travels well is barbecue or smoked meat. We are lucky to live in the South where it is plentiful.

The meal pictured above has crowder peas that were given to us by relatives and cooked by my wife. The brisket and smoked-pulled chicken, and collards came from Honky Tonk Smokehouse in Winston-Salem, NC. Honky Tonk is one of the hidden gems in the Triad area. The baguette was from Camino Bakery in Winston-Salem. It was a delicious takeout meal supplemented by some of our cooking and bread from a good local bakery. It is the way we have learned to give ourselves a cooking break post pandemic - find something that travels well and build a meal around it.

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.

Mowing Your Way Through Life

I am not sure not how people managed in the first half of the twentieth century before there were yards to connect them to the soil around their homes. I suspect that they were working in their gardens and fields. By the time I was growing up in the fifties in Lewisville, North Carolina, yards had become important. The condition of our grassy yard often stood between me and a trip to my uncle Henry's fishing ponds. My mother who claimed the only yard she had as a child was packed dirt swept with broom straw wanted our yard neatly clipped. In driving by our old home, I am little disappointed the town did not put in sidewalks in front of our house during my youth. It would have eliminated the slope on the front yard. It was by far the hardest part of the yard to mow as a youngster.

Going away to military school (high school) and then college got me out of mowing yards for almost a decade. My first home after graduation was a two-hundred year old farm house located in a sheep pasture on the Fundy coast of Nova Scotia. No sheep came with the old farm house but long grass did not bother me as a young farmstead owner. When I first moved there in the summer of 1971, the yard was the least of my worries. Getting hot water plumbed in and running so we could stop taking showers at the local campground was close to the top of the list. The second summer I had a tractor with a nine-foot-wide bush hog which I used to mow around the house a couple of times a summer. That was all it needed in my days of being single. After all, I mowed plenty of mature grass or hay, starting with the twenty acre field behind the house which served as one of the few backyards in my life away from home.

Then came the summer of 1973, and I married Glenda, the love of my life from the world of well-manicure yards in North Carolina. Her mother often mowed their yard twice, the second time against the grain, just to catch any grass that might pop up after the first mowing. Sometime during the summer of 1974, Glenda and my neat-lawn-loving mother who was visiting us formed a conspiracy. They drove down the mountain to Bridgetown ten miles away and came home with a Toro push mower. I spent much of the next forty-forty years sharing the task of mowing whatever yard happened to be attached to our personal home.

For the ten years or so when we lived on our farm in Tay Creek, we had a nice riding lawn mower which was adequate for much of the yard. Even Glenda did some mowing. When we lived in Halifax, our yard was postage-stamp sized. By the time we arrived on the mountain in Roanoke, Virginia, I had come to somewhat enjoy mowing. There are those times in your life when something as simple as mowing a yard can be very satisfying because you can actually see what you have done.

One of the immutable laws of mowing is that the farther south you live, the more miserable the task of mowing can be. Sometimes, even the most careful home yard person can end mowing in the oppressive heat of the day like I did more times than I want to admit after we moved to the North Carolina coast. As I wrote then, there is a true brotherhood of Southerners (both men, women, and teenagers) who have mowed yards when they never should have.

Mowing is one of those circular things in life. In your early years, you are too young to push a mower, so it seems fitting that in the later years of life, it is also okay to be too old to push a mower. You come to a point when you are faced with either hiring someone to mow the yard or buying a riding mower. Since I spent many years straddling a John Deere farm tractor, we chose not to revisit those days after a back problem slowed me somewhat. For a couple of years, I shared the task with our mower of choice, choosing the spots that required a push mower for myself. However, it was an easy transition to giving it all up. When we made our 2021 move from the land of coastal centipede grass back to the fescue grasses of the Piedmont, we left our third Toro mower with the father and son team that was doing our mowing. I even gave them my gas-powered trimmer.

When our current mowing team shows up, I know the noise will be over with in a few minutes as opposed to the hours that it would have taken me with a push mower. I still enjoy our green space especially the backyard which is the nicest we have had since that twenty-acre field that came with our first home. 

 

 

The Trails of Our Lives

By the time I found the first trail that really meant something to my life, I had graduated from college and was living in an old farm house on the shore of the Bay of Fundy. Behind the house was a large field which sloped upwards to a spruce forest. At the top of the field there was a trail that wound through the woods. As much as I loved the rocky shore that was part of the property, the trail at the head of the field seemed to be more personal.

My two Labrador Retrievers, Tok and Fundy, often accompanied me on my hikes. There was nothing spectacular about much of the trail but it finally opened into a clearing that actually was on my neighbor Joe's property. The view from the clearing was spectacular. I was living in the Village of St. Croix Cove and you could see the actual St. Croix Cove. I loved the view so much that I eventually traded some land for it.

There were times that I thought that Nova Scotia was the greenest place that I had ever seen. We sometimes were able to find baskets of chanterelle mushrooms just off the trail. No mushrooms since then have ever tasted like those.

It being Nova Scotia, the trail had a winter look and often stayed that way for a month or two. While it was hard to walk up the hill, getting up it on cross country skis was even more challenging. I eventually got some snow shoes but the snow and and my schedule never managed to really coordinate before we moved off to New Brunswick which was the land of real snow as opposed to rain, snow, rain, and more snow like Nova Scotia.

Still the Nova Scotia trail was beautiful when it did snow.  It was a little challenge skiing through the trees without getting covered with snow but that was just part of the charm.  That and freezing your tail off were just part of cross country skiing in Nova Scotia in its normal thirty mile per hour breeze.

When we finally moved to New Brunswick, it snowed a lot and we eventually got a tractor-mounted snow blower which coincidentally allowed me to groom a very nice cross country ski trail. Obviously, my wife breaking trail on snowshoes like she did the first winter was not a sustainable solution especially once we had three children.

That first winter on snowshoes helped me to find my next favorite trail which was about a mile and a half and took me to a ridge at the back of our home farm. At the top of the ridge you seemed to surrounded by endless woods. It felt like true wilderness.

The next ten years were spent farming and there was scant time for pleasure hiking. Ever trip to the top of the ridge was precious. I did spend lots of time leading cows through the woods from summer to fall pasture and making the long walk to the barn during calving season.

If we fast forward about twenty years, we have moved from New Brunswick to Halifax and back to the states, first finding some temporary roots in Columbia, Maryland. While Columbia, a planned community, was full of trails, none of them were wild enough for me. Barely two years after getting to Maryland, we moved south to Virginia and found a wonderful place on the side of the foothills of Twelve O'Clock Knob Mountain. Up on the mountain behind our home there was nothing for miles. It was a good place for the next trail that provided a respite from the pressures of civilization.

In the early nineties while still living on the mountain, we went to look at a Labrador puppy.  It was no surprise that we came home with Chester.  Chester, a wonderful pal, like all Labradors grew quickly and needed lots of exercise.

One winter Chester and I were doing our normal two to three mile hike around our subdivision and we saw an old woods road. We walked up it and managed to find our way home through the woods. It was not too long afterwards that I ran into the owner and got his permission to work on the trail.

It was a beginning of a decade of walking that trail, but it took a lot of work to make the trail usable during the summer.  The old logging road had filled up with poison ivy. It took me months of work and spraying to kill the poison ivy so Chester and I could enjoy the trail together.  Then we often spent Saturdays doing trail maintenance. Chester sleeping in a shady spot while I worked.

The trail rose high above all the houses and looked down on the city of Roanoke. Once on the trail, you felt like civilization was far away. Eventually I discovered an old homestead and the grave of a confederate soldier. It was easy to imagine living on the ridge and trying to scratch out a life from the small fields on the mountainside. A couple of times I made it to parts of the mountain where I found an old road that was knee deep in pine needles. It appeared the road had been unused for decades.  At the very top of the ridge even the type trees started to change from hardwoods to firs. It was not unusual to hike the trail in the morning and the evening. We all loved it. We kept a kiddie pool so Chester could cool off after his hikes. Only when Chester began to get old did the trail fall into disuse.

It was always Chester's Trail to us even as we moved from Roanoke in 2006 two years after he passed away. It was perhaps time to go because the old road that I cleared had been graded and paved.  Someone from the valley had bought the land along the ridge and was building a home near the old homestead.

After moving from the mountains, we spent almost sixteen years at the beach. I found a favorite trail on the beach to the end of the Point at Emerald Isle. It was a wonderful hike and once again it was easy to feel like civilization had slipped away. Still it was not the same since I had to share it with lots of others in the summer and people could even get to the end of the trail by boat.

Now we are back in the hardwood hills not far where I grew up playing in the deep woods. I think that I might have found another trail that looks like it will be a big part of my life. It runs through what can only be called a cathedral of leaves.  The beauty of their colors have left me speechless at times. I am happy to have found it early enough in life to still be able to enjoy walking it.