View from the Mountain

The Backyards of Our Lives

Does how you keep your backyard matter?  Can you draw conclusions about someone from how their backyard looks and what they do there? If you live in a neighborhood like ours where backyards are open and generally visible, you do not have to be a snoop to see a lot of your neighbor's backyard.

Since front yards are mostly visible as you drive through a neighborhood, people tend to keep them in good shape since all their neighbors see them.  Front yards are generally similar to others in the neighborhood. Backyards are less visible to the neighborhood as a whole so they are often different and perhaps those differences have a story to tell.

What you do with your backyard is often more private than what you might do in front of your home. I have heard it said that the true measure of your character is revealed when you know that no one is watching. If that is the case, are our backyards a window into our collective souls?

We have had some interesting backyards. The one that is pictured at the top was actually part of a twenty-plus acre hay field in Nova Scotia.  We lived on a farm, we made a garden in our backyard and parked farm equipment there. The only thing peering into our backyard was our neighbor's flock of sheep.  Our second backyard was also on a farm which stretched back over a mile into the woods but our real backyard there was a small grassy area that we kept mowed so that our children and the neighbors' children could easily move between the two houses.

After we left the farms and moved back to the states, our home in Columbia, Maryland, had a backyard of mostly dead pine trees. It definitely was not inviting. We eventually got permission to have them cut down and grass planted in their place. It made for a much more pleasant backyard but we did not stay there long enough to figure out if a nice backyard made a difference.

Our next home in Roanoke, Virginia, had a steep bank behind the house. It kept me busy for years cutting trees and keeping brush subdued. My efforts kept trees from growing up and blocking our amazing view. The deck with that unbelievable view became a favorite gathering place for the neighborhood. Our backyard in Roanoke was an open invitation to a party on our deck.

The land behind our home on the North Carolina coast was pretty rough where our land touched the water of Raymond's Gut, but I managed to subdue it within a few years. It is now a park-like place of privacy where my wife and I garden. It is also where I launch my kayak and our skiff. While it is manicured, it also has a very healthy buffer of marsh grass to protect the waters of the White Oak River which is where Raymond's Gut ends up. It is my place to launch trips into waters of the Crystal Coast but I also have a fish cleaning station that is available to any of my neighbors. I have had some great conversations sitting on the dock while a neighbor cleaned his fish.   Our coastal backyard is a place where we connect with nature and nature connects with us.  It is also a place where I make compost that I share with gardening friends.

We have never really been confined by a backyard fence unless you count the page wire fence that kept the cattle out of our New Brunswick yard. Even when I was growing up, we did not have a fence. The backyard of my youth in Lewisville, North Carolina, was a road to adventure. One corner of our yard backed up on abandoned fields which adjoined woodlands that seem to swallow us at the slightest provocation and only spit us out as daylight was disappearing.

Our backyard has never been a place to throw trash or hide junk. It has been a window into our lives as we maintain our connection with the soil and the rest of the natural world. One of the first things my new wife did in Nova Scotia was to buy a lawnmower so that I could do a better job mowing our St. Croix Cove yard.

Our backyards have been a way to touch others in a world that seems to be withdrawing from human connections.

We have enjoyed a lot of backyard conversations over the years. I have noticed as I have aged and my neighbors have gotten younger over the years that some people care little for their backyards. They spend most of their time inside and about the only time you see them outside is when they are chasing an uncooperative pet.

Having spent a good chunk of my life cutting brush and fighting weeds in our backyards, I have struggled to understand those that seem to lack my enthusiasm for cleaning up a backyard. I once had a Kudzu crusade in Mount Airy where I asked a neighbor if it was okay to also kill the Kudzu on his lot. It seemed the only way to subdue the weed. He was happy for me to go after it. My backyard in Roanoke, Virginia included a trail of two miles that I kept clean and free of poison ivy after the owner gave me permission. The trail became a wonderful place to take our Lab and a place to see everything from turkeys to spring wildflowers and other hikers.

Just maybe those who remain happy with a jungle of a backyard are not really interested in interacting with the rest of us. Perhaps the uninviting backyard is meant to discourage interaction. A fence even puts an exclamation point on it.  Over the years I have even seen people taking advantage of overgrown bushes and grasses as a place to throw dog poop. Certainly, those that would do this here on the coast are close to giving their neighbors the finger since we all depend on the waters they are intentionally polluting.

As we are looking for our next home, I am going to look closely at backyards.  A messy backyard might mean a neighbor that I would rather not have.  A neat backyard with gardens and a well-tended yard with no fences could mean someone who is open to interactions with their new neighbor. 

Maybe the front of the house is just a fancy slipcover over the soul of a house. It could be the backyard is the window that provides the truth. If I pay attention to the backyard, I just might get some insight that could help narrow our decision.

 

I Love Living in the South

There are lots of reasons to like living in the South.  Today's lunch is a perfect example.  Where else but the South is mac and cheese considered a vegetable?  Then there is my barbecue sandwich.  Last night we went out to dinner.  It was a little over twenty dollars for my wife and myself, but the meal, mine was barbecue and fried chicken, was such a bargain (Fat Fellas, Newport, NC) that we brought home enough barbecue that we had plenty for sandwiches today.

Food is just the icing on the cake for those of us living far from the snow belt country. One of the neatest things about the people here is that it takes almost nothing to get people talking.  You can strike up a conversation almost anywhere and most times people enjoy sharing their lives, the best of their area and tips on what to do and where to go.   If you go to most big cities people stare at the ground or at their smartphones.  Now we have plenty of smartphone users here but if you get out of the urban areas, you will often find that people use them more for sharing pictures of their families than they do texting or calling.

Then there is the climate.  As I have heard many times before, no one moves north to retire.  That is undoubtedly true but brings some problems since there are a few folks from the North who have a hard time adjusting to the South.  I like to blame the gate in our subdivision on folks from far away who have no idea how insane it is to have a gate on subdivision with pine forests and cornfields as neighbors and a river bordering another side.  Still most of the folks from away get with the program and learn some of the Southern graces.

With the climate comes the opportunity to grow lots of things.  We manage to grow something almost year round in our garden.  We planted Swiss chard last fall, we are still eating off of it and will likely continue to do so through the summer until we plant some more next fall.  We picked our last ripe large tomato on December 27 this past year.  We finally picked the last of our ripe and green cherry tomatoes on January 17. It was just before the first really hard frost.  We have finally finished six weeks of marathon lettuce eating and sharing. Our two four packs of Romaine and Buttercrunch lettuce yielded thirty-one heads.  We ate lettuce two meals a day for weeks.  When our lettuce finally ran out, we had given away close to half of it and were excited that another neighbor brought us some red leaf lettuce. We had ripe strawberries the first week in April. Just how quickly do ripe strawberries remove any thoughts of what passes for winter down here?  If we get some warm weather soon, we will be swamped with homegrown tomatoes by early June.  Eventually we will need to find homes for the tasty, deep red tomatoes that count as a complete meal here if you just add Duke's mayonnaise, salt, pepper and bread.

Sharing is another part of life in the South.  I have to add that in any farming area, New England, Maritime Canada, and the rest of the US and Canada, sharing is built into farming communities. However, because the South is still close to its rural roots, you find many people who go out of their way to share.  The shared bounty could be an extra pumpkin for a pie, some bulbs to plant for spring color, a mess of collards, a fresh spring cabbage, spare tomato plants, a bucket of pecans or whatever people have to give.  Folks on our home turf do not want things to go to waste.  If they have something that you can use, generally they are happy for you to use it.

Then there is advice.  There is a Southern way of giving advice and it is perhaps a kinder, gentler way of offering suggestions.  People are willing to show you how they have done something whether it is planting, building, making crafts, baking or cooking.  People here in the South are generous with their knowledge and often go out of their way to share what they have learned.

Next there is neighborliness. Again that is something you will find in almost any rural community but it is still widely present in the real South.  People want to be good neighbors and will put up with a lot just to remain on good terms.  Unless you are living next door to a transplant that did not take when planted in Southern soil, you will not have any trouble getting someone to watch your house like it is their own when you travel or help you out in any emergency.

A special part of life are the church families in the South that reach out with open arms to everyone.  There is little danger of not being able to find a compatible church home in the much of the South.  We have churches for every taste and imagination. Often there is food involved, sometimes even northern Lobsters.  When my wife broke her ankle checking on a neighbor's cat in Roanoke, Virginia, I finally had to tell her to have the ladies of the church back off because we had run out of refrigerator room.

Finally there is reverence and respect.  You will still find Southern people who try to pull off to the side of the road to let a funeral procession pass.  I will never forget the funeral of RJ Berrier, my longtime friend, and former newsman from Mount Airy, North Carolina.  As we rode through the streets of Mount Airy, we found a police car at every intersection. In front of each car stood a policeman with his hat over his heart. RJ had been a part of many lives.  He wrote for many people their birth announcements, the notice when they had graduated from high school, and their obituary when they died.

I know North Carolina is going through a tough time being the national spotlight for the wrong reasons.  It pains me to see some of our out-of -touch politicians and governor going to great lengths to make life miserable for a few people who have had a tough time living in their own skins.  In my humble opinion, I would rather share a bathroom with a transgender person than someone who voted for HB2.

Life in the South is not perfect, but it is a little like what I have heard about democracy.  It beats all the alternatives.

 

 

 

Fall Belongs To The Southern Coast

I have done some serious thinking about this since I suspect that even I at one time believed that fall was the season of New England, Canada's Maritimes or perhaps the Appalachian Mountains.  Certainly having written long ago that spring belongs to the South and even suggesting that Canadians visit North Carolina or Virginia in the spring, it might seem logical to give fall to the North.

Like lots of things, there is plenty of room for debate on this subject.  Fall is a great season in the North mostly because it is very showy with gorgeous leaves, pumpkins, and lots of apple cider.  But as many northerners will admit fall is nice mostly because it is a whole lot better than what follows.  Winter is not much fun in the North if you are in charge of snow removal on your homestead.  If the out of doors is your favorite spot, you can only love winter if you are addicted to cross-country skiing and snowshoes. Folks who love winter are few and far between.

Fall also brings the end of most gardening up North.  Fall was actually a very hectic time where we lived north of Fredericton, New Brunswick.  You are in a race to get everything done before snow covers the ground and whatever you have forgotten to pick up during the summer.  You actually end up working so hard that when the first snow comes that it often brings a sense of relief because you have done all that you can to prepare for winter.  I can remember snow coming at our Tay Creek farm at the end of October and not leaving until the beginning of May.  There were far more things that needed to get done in the fall than were possible. 

While my perspective might be colored by living on the farm, we did have a couple years in Maryland and a couple of decades on a mountain in Southwestern Virginia.  There is no arguing how beautiful the leaves are in the mountains.  It is a wonderful sight for three or four weeks. If you are lucky you can follow the fall as it unfolds and as the leaves change.  I can also remember the wonderful apples, apple cider, and late fall vegetables from Jamison's Orchard and Produce near our former Roanoke, Virginia home.

Still, I believe fall was not a relaxing time even in the Roanoke Valley. It is back to school and back to work time.  The shadows of the mountains accelerate the shortness of the daylight hours while at the same time, you still have to deal with the pesky but gorgeous bluegrass and fescue yards of the area.  Sometimes I was still mowing our Roanoke yard the second week in December. Halloween was sometimes so cold that it was not very much fun.

Contrast the above with the coast of North Carolina.  As fall comes, things quiet down here on the coast.  We know that our weather is going to get better.  In fact, our great weather often extends all the way through December when it is not unusual to have shorts weather.  While most areas are getting busier during the fall as people go back to work, we are actually winding down and getting more peaceful.

On top of that, we are beginning our wonderful fall gardening season as we finish harvesting things from the summer.  I remember one year when one of the local produce vendors had ripe watermelons and pumpkins in adjoining fields.  We already have our early winter garden of lettuce, peas, beans, tomatoes, and rutabaga in the ground. Now we are just watching it grow.  Our centipede yards will need at most two more mowings before they go dormant until next April.

Then there is the fishing and the beach.  Fishing is usually at its peak in the fall and there is no better time to walk on the area beaches.  The air has less humidity, the temperatures are nearly perfect, and the water is still warm.  While we will not have the gorgeous leaves of the mountains, plenty of their apples will get shipped in and we will have sunsets that take your breath away.

There are fall festivals galore from Swansboro's Mullet Festival and New Bern's Mum Fest to the North Carolina Muscadine Festival in Kenansville.  We even get church lobster dinners in the fall.

While our fall weather might seem like summer in October, it offers us an opportunity to relax and really enjoy our area during the fall.  I absolutely love walking in the area as the air starts to cool down.  Just as you might think you will need a jacket, the wind will blow across the water and wrap you in warmth.

So that is my case that fall is actually the season for the South instead of the North.  I have enjoyed both, but I know in my heart that fall is a much more leisurely season here on the Crystal Coast.  While we will have our ups and down with the weather, we will not be worried about frost for a long time and our sunsets will take care of that longing for fall colors.  After all, if we need to see some leaves, it does not take but a few hours to ride up to the mountains.

If you decide to visit the beach in the fall, you can start with my free online travel guide to the area.

 

Classic Southern Heat

It's another fine Southern day as long as you haven't had to go outside after 8 AM in the morning.

When it gets warm like this, I can still see in my mind's eye my mother working in her gardens on Pine Street early in the morning before the sun's rays ever reached her. 

I also remember the days after we took over the Pine Street gardens. We would exhaust ourselves by doing a day's worth of labor before 9 AM. 

Having grown up in North Carolina, heat in the summer plays almost no part in memories of my youth even though we did not have air conditioning in our home until I was a teenager.

Working around heat is part of the rhythm of the South. Life outside in the summer happens before the heat of the day and when the sun loses its power in the afternoon. At least it does for those of us who still venture beyond the air conditioning.

At the peak of the summer sometimes even those strategies of working early or late fail us.  When the heat penetrates the ground and warms the water around us, there is little hope of relief unless a powerful weather system somewhere in the world pushes some cooling air down from Canada.

And so for the first time this year of 2014, as we begin the second week of July, the heat here on the Southern Outer Banks has us on the run. On July 8, the temperature in the evening seems stuck near 80F. From 8 PM until 8 AM, the temperature will only fall to 78F before bouncing right back to 80F not long after the sun comes up.

There is no real surprise in this. It is a pattern we always see for a few weeks during the summer.  I went out in our skiff early Sunday morning, July 7. During the trip I measured the water temperature at 78.1 F. Later in the day, I made another trip out and found the water temperature to be over 82F. With water that warm, any hope of us cooling soon is pretty remote.

With little or no cooling, mowing the yard gives you membership in the fraternity of true Southerners.  Still we are fortunate.  Unlike some places we have lived, we do usually have a breeze here on the coast.  In Columbia, Maryland, it was hot and the breezes could not penetrate the thick canopy of trees.

On July 8, 2014, we were pretty close to 90 Fahrenheit along the White Oak River near the beaches of Emerald Isle. It was hot but we got a reamkable breeze with winds gusting almost to 30 MPH. Still I thought my feet were going to cook when I slipped on my crocs that had been drying in the driveway.  You have to be careful what you leave in the sun during the peak of summer. One of the first things we do every morning is open the windows on my car which does not have a place in the garage.

People thinking about moving here sometimes believe the humidity will kill them.  The ones that worry the most often run as qucikly as possible from one air conditioned environment to another.  Living in a cold air conditioned home makes it hard to survive outside.  We set our downstairs heat pump to 82F and keep the upstairs one at 78F.  Otherwise coming inside feels like a visit to a meat locker.  You actually do get used to the heat and gives us the ability to have some remarkable luck growing things.

When we were kids in the fifies, heat would drive us from our homes to the pool in the morning and we would stay until we were thrown out. In a certain respect heat was a social thing. The heat pushed us away from unairconditioned homes.  We met in groups by shade trees, along the edge of public pools, or high in the mountains along the edge of the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Time and the heat pump have changed things in the South.  Rarely do people gather under shade trees or by the edge of the pool as you can see from the picture at the top of the post.

Still we have some cards up our sleeve in the challenge of surviving summer's hottest weather. Since we live near the ocean, we can always count on getting away from the humidity and heat by taking a dip in the ocean.  Sometimes a fast boat ride can also cool you down.

The heat and humidity are not all bad. Since so many people live in their bunkers, it is easy to pick a warm night to enjoy a dip in the pool.  There is nothing better than hearing palms rattling in the wind and feeling the warm embrace of the warm waters of the neighborhood pool as the moon shines down on you and the pool lights flicker in the waves.

Heat might scare potential residents of the South, but it just makes most of us who live here appreciate fall even more.

Done with Toro mowers forever

Toro just joined the list of companies whose products I will avoid like a plague.  Coming to this conclusion really pains me, but I just have to face the facts.  Toro no longer makes good mowers.  They don't last very long and their dealer network at least in our local area makes matters worse.

I am sixty-three years old, and I have never purchased a walk behind mower other than a Toro.  In 1973 just after getting married, my wonderful wife, Glenda, convinced me that mowing our yard in St. Croix Cove, Nova Scotia with a seven foot bush hog that I towed behind our tractor was not a good idea.

My wife and mother sneaked off to the Annapolis Valley one day and came back with a small walk behind Toro. We soon had a wonderfully manicured small yard, and I was hooked on Toro mowers.

That mower was to follow us to our farm in New Brunswick and back to Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1984.  We even took it back to the United States with us when we moved to Columbia, MD.  It came with us to Roanoke, Virginia in 1989.  While we did a lot of our mowing with a Cub Cadet when we were on the farm, the Toro got plenty of use.

After two or three years in Roanoke, I had to replace the brackets on the front wheels.  They had cracked from almost twenty years of use.  Finally sometime after thirty years of hard use, our first Toro mower died.  There was no question in my mind about what mower to buy next, I bought another Toro.  I ended up having to get a self-propelled one since straight push mowers had almost gone out of style.

That Toro still resides at our home in Virginia.  For years it was often the first mower to come to life as the suburban yard wars heated up each spring.  In 2006 we got a home on North Carolina's Crystal Coast.  By August of 2007, we needed a mower on the coast.  Without any hesitation, I bought another Toro.  After using it a few times, I declared it the best walk-behind mower in the land.

I happily used my Toro for almost four years, and then it uncharacteristically died.  While I was shocked, I didn't think too hard about it so I went off and bought another new Toro. I felt lucky that a dealer not far from our home in the Cape Carteret area had picked up the Toro line, so I bought from him in spite of his prices being higher than the more distant Home Depot. 

I only used the new mower for a couple of months when a small piece of plastic broke on the mower.  I ended up having a terrible repair experience with my local Toro dealer.  It was bad enough that I planned to never set foot in his establishment again.  That same summer when I bought a generator in preparation for Hurricane Irene, I deliberately bought from another dealer.

That was in the summer of 2011.  On March 26, I started up my coastal Toro for the first time in 2012.  I got half way through mowing my yard and the cable to the drive system broke.  I managed to jury rig something that let me finish mowing my yard with a great deal of difficulty.

On Wednesday of the same week I decided to see if I could call Toro and perhaps convince them to ship me a new cable.  I still had hopes that Toro cared about its customers.  After a long discussion on the telephone with a service person and a supervisor, I was told that the only solution was to load my mower and drive it to a dealer who would confirm that yes indeed there was a broken cable on my mower.  The dealer would then order the cable and then I would have to come back and have him install it.

I even sent the Toro service people a picture of my broken cable and a link to my story declaring my Toro the best walk-behind mower ever. They did not care.  The only other choice open to me was to buy the cable on-line and have it shipped to my house.

I had a look at the cable on-line and determined just as the customer service rep had suggested, it was actually a little hard to tell which cable I needed from Toro's poorly drawn diagrams.  I did finally decide it was called the "Traction Control Cable" and with shipping it would cost me $24.00.

The other possibility was to load the mower in our SUV and visit one of the Toro dealers. Then I would have to wait for a cable and after it arrived, go back and pick it up.  I figured the closest dealer which I wanted to avoid anyway would cost me about $10 in gas and lots of aggravation. I did call them on the phone and after some nearly unintelligible conversation ruled them out as an option.  The next closest dealer would end up costing me over $25 in gas plus a couple of hours of driving.

None of the options were very palatable, but then my ten years experience running a large commercial farm kicked in, and I decided to fix the mower myself.  I determined what I needed and headed off to the closest hardware.  The parts ended up costing $2.82.  I spent less than $4 in gas.  It took me about thirty minutes to do the repair and test that it worked as I hoped.

I installed a much heavier stainless steel cable than the original one which broke.  My Toro mower is now functional, but I have had it with the company.  I will never buy another Toro.

I have gone from a Toro that lasted thirty years to one which died after less than four years to this most recent one which required two repairs in less than ten months of its first year.  If I were the CEO of Toro, Michael Hoffman, I would be concerned.

However, if I made over $800,000 per year like Mr. Hoffman, I likely would not be too concerned about mowing my own yard or repairing my own lawn mower.

I have seen other companies go this direction.  Maytag was one of them.  Circuit City was another.  Quality in service and in products is a much bigger problem in the United States than most people realize. 

Still there are companies which will fix the problem when they figure out how bad they have screwed up.  While I had a terrible problem with Adobe customer service, to their credit they stepped up to the plate and fixed the problem.  I actually got a Sunday evening call and apology from their worldwide director of operations.

We all have different experiences. No products or services are perfect.  I have had very good luck with Dell and HP computer products. My luck with Apple laptops has been no so good, but I have had good luck with their desktops.  I have had great luck with our Toyotas, Acuras, Subarus, and Nissans, but not so good luck with our most recent Volvo. 

It used to be that a really good dealer could smooth out problems, but as we have found with Maytag, Volvo, and Toro, poor dealers can not only create problems, but they can also make them much worse. 

If I were Mr. Hoffman at Toro, I would figure out how to boldly embrace the world of the Internet. If a good customer has a small part break, ship it to the customer. It might be an easy, inexpensive way to keep good customers and decrease the importance of what I have found to be a very creaky dealer network.

I would also use the Internet to start listening to my customers and find out what is happening to my brand.  When you start losing customers who have never owned another product other than yours, it should be a clear sign that your brand is in big trouble.

When we sell out Roanoke, VA home, I will bring my other Toro to the coast so I will have a spare mower. Between the two machines, I might be able to finish my mowing career.  However, if I end up having to buy another mower, it most certainly will not be a Toro.

Update-  Toro finally called me and sent me a new cable which I received the week of April 11.  I told the Toro lady that it was a nice gesture on the company's part, and I do appreciate it.  However, I did mow my yard with the cable that I created.  I'll keep using it until it breaks.  We'll see if it lasts longer than the original Toro cable.