View from the Mountain

The Disappearing Narrative of Our Lives

Cathedral of Trees, Rich Park, Mocksville, NC

For years there has been a rush for our lives to become digital. Few people I know write letters requiring a stamp. The staffing at local newspapers continues a long-term decline. The bits and pieces of local life are more and more under-reported. Email with changing clients and no good way to preserve the important ones has always been a poor choice to preserve history. Now people seem to be abandoning email for SMS or even the less reliable Facebook messenger. Try finding something from fifteen years ago in your text messages.

I suspect we are losing the really interesting things that might help historians understand us and our times. What is film worthy today might not be as important years down the road as the letter you did not write to your cousin living in another state. As my wife and I have moved over the years and downsized our living spaces, we have been forced to jettison many of pieces of paper that at one time I hoped to preserve. I suspect we are not alone.

Even if you are among the few of us who still read paper newspapers and you do have a copy of that newspaper article that meant so much to you, can you actually put your hands on it? Part of my early life in Mount Airy, North Carolina, was defined by my knowing R.J. Berrier. R.J. as he was known to his friends spent fifty-two years writing for the Mount Airy Times and then the Mount Airy News. I wrote about him in a post, Love and Respect for Print. When I woke up today to read that one of R.J.’s friends, Eleanor Powell, had died at the age of ninety, I was immediately reminded of the article that she wrote around twenty years ago celebrating R.J.’s many years in the world of newspapers.

I tried a Google search and then a search on the Mount News Archive. The searches returned nothing which surprised me because I remember Eleanor getting an award from the Associated Press for her article on R.J. It seems a shame that so much of what makes life memorable is so hard to keep close. I likely have a copy of the article somewhere in the boxes that followed us to our new home. I might have been able to have put my fingers on it two houses ago, but not now.

Modern life throws enough challenges at us that it is hard enough keeping up with the needs of today without trying to organize the past. If nothing else I think this demonstrates why writing for yourself is so critically important. When I went to write this piece, I could not remember exactly how long R.J. had worked in newspapers. There is certainly no one alive that could tell me. I thought it was around fifty years. Fortunately, a little over fifteen years ago, I wrote that post about R.J. and the information was there. I am sorry that I did not scan Eleanor Powell’s article about R.J. at the time.

Perhaps the best narrative of history is the one you write yourself. I am pleased to chronicle my own times and how the world has looked to me. Writing to record your own view of the world might be the best remedy.

There are advantages. Just before we left the coast and moved inland, my new neighbor, Bill, told me that he wanted to debate me about something I said about the history of the White Oak River. He said he changed his mind when a Google search showed that I was the author of one of the top-ranked articles on the subject. There is nothing like being your own authority on the subject because no one else thought it was important enough to write about it.

The Ghost I Knew

You cannot have a ghost story without a spooky, somewhat mysterious house and where I grew up in rural Forsyth County was nothing like that but things change.

My mother moved back to 347 West Pine Street (pictured to the left) in Mount Airy the fall of 1963. I came home to that house for Thanksgiving that year, my first at McCallie, the military school I was attending in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

My bedroom had moved from our non-spooky house in Lewisville about thirty-eight miles away to Pine Street which certainly had the potential for spookiness. My dad had been in a house at that location since around the turn of the century.  My mom lived there from the mid-twenties until just before I was born in 1949. For many years, she ran a beauty shop on Main St. just walking distance from the Pine Street house.

The house also had a lot of history, some of it gruesome which is certainly helpfully when looking for ghosts. Many of stories that the house's four walls could tell never got explained to me before everyone who could shed light on the mysteries died.

Some the questions that I wanted answered never got addressed because no one ever wanted to talk about them. There were things that I did not even know to ask when I was growing up. 

The house at 347 West Pine Street is an imposing home. That was especially the case to a country boy who was more comfortable in the woods than in a big fancy house. By the time, I got old enough to care, I was on a mission to get away from the house and Mount Airy. That mission took me to Canada by the time I was twenty-two.

Upstairs above the floor with the bedrooms was a full stick-framed attic complete with walnut banisters. If ever there was an area that could house ghosts along with mysterious steamer trunks, this attic was it. The house even had a laundry chute which went all the way to the basement where there was a bedroom and bathroom for a maid.  The kitchen, dining room, and great room were on the second floor along with the bedroom my father was reduced to using because of a stroke.

It did not take me long to figure out that the history I did not know about was powerful in the minds of others.  My Aunt Molly when she visited would not stay in the guest bedroom. She always slept in one of the twin beds in my mother's bedroom. Eventually I heard the story about my father's first wife's attempted suicide. My mother, who at the time was nursing my grandmother, found my father's first wife hanging from the walnut railing around the top of the stairs. She saved her but the story was born.

I was never afraid of the house but there were some strange things like how cool the hallway always felt between my bedroom and the stairs to the attic. Of course there were strange noises but it was an old house. Then in 1974 after my dad had died, my wife and I were staying in my bedroom after coming back from our place in Canada. It was our first night in the house as a married couple.

We were going to bed and all of sudden the electrical panels started popping. It was like someone was running between the two floors flipping the circuit breakers off and on. The circuit breakers were not easy to move from one position to the other. They also made a loud noise. My mother was sound asleep in her bedroom. She always slept with a baseball bat by her bed but said the ghost had never bothered her.  I thought someone had broken into the house. I took a gun from my gun cabinet and checked the whole house. All doors were locked and no windows had been breached. Things quieted down as soon as I left my bedroom.  To this day, I have never solved the riddle of the noise that night.

My mother died in the spring of 2004.  I often said that if there was a ghost in the house, it would have to deal with the life force of my mother when she entered the realm of spirits.  My money was always on my mother winning any battle of the spirits.

After her death, we were faced with cleaning out the Pine Street house. It took us many years and we often spent weekends working on the house.  One weekend my wife was working in a hall closet on the main floor. She looked towards the foyer and saw something triangular floating from the stairs to the dining room. We are pretty grounded people but we could never come up with an explanation that made any sense. It was probably my imagination, but the upstairs hallway felt particularly cold that day.

This might prove I am crazy but not long after that I decided that the blinds in the attic had to go. I ripped them down and threw open the windows. It was not long after that when I noticed how warm the upstairs hallway felt. I smiled and thought to myself that my mother's spirit had prevailed and the restless ghost had been driven out once I opened the windows and made sure the attic got plenty of sunshine.

Even after that I was the only one willing to spend the night in the house alone. By that time the guns were long gone but so was the ghost.

So that is the story of the ghost that I once knew.

 

 

Snapshots of Our Lives

Pine Forest Along Raymond's Gut

I took a course in college my senior year. It was decades ago. The class focused on communications. Computers were not on the desktop, cameras were film based, and telephones were analog with rotary dials. There was no Internet much less text messaging or cell phones. People still wrote letters on paper by hand. The other choice was a typewriter.  It was not unusual to find people who did not know how to touch type.

The communications course was an unusual one for Harvard because it allowed lots of room for creativity. I decided to show people slides and see how much information they could gather without any verbal or written information. One of my roommates and I had just returned from a road trip to Alaska. The report for the course was not as easy to write as I hoped.

What was easy to predict was that someone who had visited a place or one similar to a photo gathered a lot more information from a photo than someone who had never been there. What surprised me is that my roommate and I had stored very different information about the same pictures. However, in general it is easy and not too surprising to say that people who have walked on beaches can draw more information from a beach picture than someone who has been landlocked all their life.

Hundreds of thousands of pictures later, I am still trying to take pictures which “capture the moment.” It is not an easy task. The lighting, the composition, the distance from the subject and the subject itself all have to be right to capture an image that stands on its own without commentary. A few years ago, I even went to the trouble of publishing a Kindle Book, 100 Pictures, 1000 Words, A Crystal Coast Year. The pictures that went into the book triggered memories for me. My wife, who helped edit the book, and I disagreed on some of the pictures which were chosen from over 100,000 images but usually I let myself win because I am the person with the closest connection to the pictures.

Even sixty years after a picture is taken, a picture has to be really good or have some written context to not be thrown away. Many good pictures today disappear today because they are only stored on a cell phone. They have no name, there is no back to write on, and the phone gets old and is thrown away. The lucky photos get put somewhere with a little more persistence than a cell phone that is going to be dead in three or four years.

Every time I go looking for a photo and find it in one of my many albums, I am thankful that I took the time to put it in an album. When I search by name and one of the photos that I have labeled comes up and turns out to be the right one, I am encouraged to keep labeling digital photos.

The closest that we can come to time travel is a photo that takes us back in time. As long as our memories remain strong, the narrative is not so important but at some point unless our narrative has been adopted by the next generation, the memories disappear and the photos can become meaningless especially as our landscapes are increasingly transformed by development.

The Pressure Cooker of Our Lives

Tulip Magnolia, Mocksville, NC

How wonderful is it to wake up and the most important news that you read this morning is that nearby Clemmons is getting an Aldi grocery store?

Not only did I wake up to that interesting news but I also read an article that mentioned an unheralded benefit of remote learning, no mass shootings or having children practice lockdowns. I think everyone agrees that children will benefit from more in-school time but there is nothing wrong with making a little lemonade out of some very sour lemons.

The pressure cooker that many have lived in is nothing new except that over the last four years our government by tweet has made it worse. I certainly was not surprised that my latest physical revealed a blood pressure that was the lowest it has been in years. My wife and I no longer wake to an immediate discussion of what crazy thing happened last night.

Certainly, the recent killings in Atlanta are heart-breaking, but I have the feeling that this will be a priority for our first Asian-American vice president and the administration around her. Yes, there are other issues like the border surge and a determined effort by one party to undermine voting rights.

As worrisome as all this is, I somehow feel like the adults are in charge of enough of the government to push towards a more appropriate responses instead of tweets. Even if they are complex solutions they will be better than the typical government by tweet that haunted us for the last four years. You will not find me complaining about complex policies that actually solve problems. Focusing on policy instead of grievances might have a better chance of creating solutions that work and actually make things better rather than worse.

Still government-by-tweet was certainly not the only factor in our pressure cooker lives. There is the pandemic made worse by government inaction and the resulting long period of lockdowns without seeing family and friends in person. This was all made worse by a subset of the population who refused the simple gesture of wearing a mask to protect others if not themselves. Now many of the same don’t-tramp-on-my-freedoms group is refusing to get vaccinated. Vaccinations and continuing to wear masks are clearly our best path back to normal life.

I think it is worth remembering that your freedom ends where it starts to endanger others. You might have earned the privilege to drive a car but if you drive it recklessly at eight-five miles per hour on a public highway, I am going to be rooting for the police to arrest you and throw the key away.

With freedom comes responsibility. If you cannot be responsible with your freedoms, someone will likely suffer. Think about how your actions will impact others. Will running that red-light to save two minutes end up steal someone’s life?

It is critical that we think about others when it comes to vaccinations. If enough people don’t get vaccinated, we might be wearing masks for a long time as COVID continues to rage. If everyone gets vaccinated, we might have a normal Fourth of July, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Are you willing to sacrifice a normal year, just to prove that you are a part of a group that most closely resembles the know nothings of the last century?

I Remember When

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, North Carolina, 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 in time to fall exhausted into bed on summer evenings.

Houses did not have central air conditioning. We had awnings on windows to keep our houses from getting so hot. In the summer we were hardly in the house, we were outside playing. We lived on a dirt road which the county sprayed with used oil in the summer to keep the dust down. They also sprayed for mosquitoes regularly. I am not sure what they used but it could have been DDT.

There were no supermarkets or even restaurants in our little town. There was a lunch counter, a couple of general stores, a couple of gas stations, a post office, a dry cleaner, a furniture store, a fire station, a hardware store, lots of churches, our school, a mill, a barber shop, and my mother's beauty shop.

We had a rotary phone but managed to be on a private line instead of a party line. Doctor Hampton 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 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. 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 teenage guys 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.

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.

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 inside the fence. It was the entertainment for summer nights except for chasing fireflies and playing capture the flag.

We spent Sunday summer afternoons 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 with real carhops. If you went to movie anywhere besides the city, you went to a drive-in theater. The first restaurant I remember was the Dinette in East Bend, NC.

The big city of Winston-Salem had a magical Sears Roebuck store. The city also had movie theaters and a K&W restaurant.  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 a 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.

I remember when things were very different.

Lumix Cameras That Capture My Life

Taking pictures is a big part of my life. I have been doing it for as long as I can remember. There is a picture of me as a college student over fifty years ago with a Nikon F1 camera in my hand.

I have written several camera articles starting back in 2006 when I wrote about a Sony Pocket camera. The death of that Sony camera gave me my first experience with Panasonic cameras when I bought a Panasonic Lumix DMC ZS-1 as a replacement. Ten years later that camera is still working.

I have also used and written about Nikon and Canon's point and shoot super zoom cameras. I bought my Nikon P500 in 2012 and moved to a quicker focusing Canon SX50 in 2013. The Canon was a great camera but had to go in for repair regularly.

In 2017 I got a Panasonic Lumix Z1000 as a large sensor replacement for my aging Nikon DSLR D3100. In 2018 after three refurbished replacements to the Canon now an SX60 followed by another hardware failure, I moved to a Panasonic Lumix FZ80 for my everyday bird and beach camera. I have been a happy user for over a year. Along the way in 2016, I added a Lumix LX100 which I sometimes use as a pocket camera. Most often it gets used for inside shots especially of people. These are not particularly expensive cameras. You could buy all three of them for what it costs to buy one of Nikon's new 70-200mm zoom lens.  The FZ80 is available on Amazon for under $300.

People regularly ask me which camera is my favorite? I often reply that my favorite camera is the one I have in my hand and sometimes that means my Google Pixel 2XL smartphone.

It is no surprise that cameras have a hard time surviving my environment. I take close to 100,000 pictures for some years. The cameras get exposed to a lot of sand, salt, and weather. I regularly wear out SD cards. I am happy to report that my two newest Lumix cameras have very reliable WiFi transfer modes.

More important than the cameras that I use is what I do with the photographs after I take them. On a typical morning, I will go for a walk and take anything from a dozen to fifty photos. When I return home, I will often do a WiFi transfer to my phone of four to ten pictures. Those pictures once they get to my phone, are automatically backed up to Google photos. I often use the online Google photo editing tools to resize and correct a few photos which I will post on Facebook.

When I go upstairs to my office, I will download all photos using Lightroom. From all of the photos I have downloaded for the day, I will pick the best ones, crop, and correct them in Lightroom. They are exported to a folder that is named with the day's date. That folder is on Microsoft's cloud service, One Drive. Sometimes, I will add to that folder from the ones I have stored on Google photos. Microsoft has very good tools that quickly allow you to resize photos that I download from Google. Once a month or so I will upload my favorite photos from the month to Flickr. I also create Google Photo albums when it makes sense.

I still believe that in most cases, you will get a better photo with a real camera especially if you are after birds. However, I have taken some remarkable photos with my Google Pixel 2XL but they would have a hard time competing with an image from the  Lumix Z1000 with its 21.1 Megapixels and 1 Inch High Sensitivity Sensor.

However, the best way to take good photos is to take lots of them and learn how to work with them. Photos straight out of the camera rarely match the image that you were trying to capture. At least learn how to change the white balance on your camera. Just setting the white balance on your camera to minus 2.5 will allow you to take a picture of a bright moon in the night sky. Having a good camera with image stabilization will allow for some great bird pictures. Most of all storing your photos in the cloud will let you easily enjoy your memories.

I was (07-03-20) a member of the Amazon affiliates program but I am no longer. You can click on one of my camera links to buy the cameras from Amazon where I purchased mine. No commissions will come to me.

I was (07-03-20) a member of the Amazon affiliates program but I am no longer. You can click on one of my camera links to buy the cameras from Amazon where I purchased mine. No commissions will come to me.

I was (07-03-20) a member of the Amazon affiliates program but I am no longer. You can click on one of my camera links to buy the cameras from Amazon where I purchased mine. No commissions will come to me.