View from the Mountain

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 house.

After I was born, we lived with my Aunt Mollie and Uncle Austin at their Yadkin County home until I was about three. Then we moved into a new house mother had built in Lewisville. The house had a beauty shop attached and a breezeway. The breezeway eventually got turned into my bedroom. There were no ghostly things in our house unless you count the scary smell of the permanents mother administered to ladies in the beauty shop adjacent to my bedroom.

A little mystery also helps with ghosts and there was plenty of mystery in my life in the fifties. I really did not know my dad or even that he was my dad until we moved back to Mount Airy and my last name got changed.  That fall was pretty challenging I had given up all my friends and Boy Scouts which I had grown to love and spent the fall living in a dorm six hours from home. When I came home, I got picked up at the airport by my mom and a couple of people that I had never met. That's a lot for a fourteen year old but I eventually rolled with the  challenges.

Not the least of those was living in the Pine Street house. It was well known to my older cousins who had regularly visited my mother there while they were growing up.  Though it took my mother a while to get it back in shape,  it was a much fancier home than ours in Lewisville. It was built on the same foundation as the original one which had been damaged in a fire sometime in the twenties. We ate at a table in the kitchen in the Lewisville house. The new house had a great room complete with a portrait of my father over the fireplace, formal dining room, a breakfast room and a table in the kitchen for the "help." It was a beautiful home and certainly worthy of all the parties which had taken place years before I got there. The gorgeous dark woodwork in the Mount Airy house was done by workers from the National Furniture Factory. My father was a part owner and vice president there. Most of the woodwork was solid walnut as were many of the interior doors.  The house had copper gutters and a slate roof. My understanding is that it had the first electrical service with circuit breakers in Surry County. All of these things were rare back when the house was built during the depression.

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 fully explained to me before everyone who could explain died. Some the questions that I wanted answered never got addressed because no one 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.

Looking at the back of the imposing Pine Street house which coincidentally was a five minute walk from a funeral home, my bedroom was the old master bedroom on the third floor. The old master encompassed the whole back side of the third floor including the strange bricked in windows, one with a tiny window and one with just bricks in a space obviously designed for a window. I would learn it had an amazing spring view. I had a fantastic for the age of the house tile shower with enough water pressure to take paint off of a board.  Behind the strange bricked in windows was a very fancy closet. There were three bedrooms on the floor and unlike many homes, each bedroom had its own bathroom.

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 about was powerful.  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 her 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.

After we moved back to the states in 1987 with our children, when visiting grandma, they would refuse to sleep anywhere except in the same bedroom with us. The stories of my dad's first wife, Clara, somehow had convinced them that a spirit was wandering the house. They even took to planting tombstones with Clara's name on them every Halloween in our flower beds in Roanoke, Virginia.

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.  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 come up with no explanation that made any sense. It was probably my imagination, but the upstairs hallway felt particularly cold that day.

Perhaps 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.

 

 

Beam Me Up Scotty, I am ready

Back in January 2007, I wrote an article,What Jobs told me on the iPhone, for the Guardian Newspaper. It was three years before the iPhone was introduced. It was also back when you could get a decent check for writing a good article. Certainly, that long ago none of us even Steve Jobs had any idea of the seismic change that smartphones were about to bring to all our lives.

The iPhone was introduced in January 2010.  I finally got a Droid (Android smartphone) in March of that same year. I went with Android for three reasons, I know how Apple works (they are a money machine), I needed better phone reception (Verizon had better reception, AT&T had the iPhone, and I was interested in maps, GIS, and mapping.  I judged the Android-Google-Map connection better than that of the iPhone.

So I joined the Google-Android world and have never really regretted it. I even ditched Verizon over four years ago and signed up with Google FI.  My wife had been on a flip phone. Our service her flip phone and my smartphone with Verizon was regularly over $120. With two smartphone on Google FI our charges for the two phones were around $53 a month.  Perhaps my wife getting a smartphone a few years ago was fortuitous. She was a proficient computer user but had done little texting. In the last four years, texting has become the choice for informal communications. I have to say it was only the tip of the iceberg.

Here we are in September 2022.  After today's experience at a nearby DMV office, I am not sure how citizens of North Carolina without smartphones and the smarts to use them are going to survive. Over a month ago, I made an appointment to get my NC Real ID Driver's License. I wanted to get it done before my passport expired.  The passport expires this month and I suspect it might take a while to get it renewed. It turned out that what most impressed them was an original notarized copy of my birth certificate. What shocked me was how deep technology had penetrated the world of the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) which impacts almost all of us.

We pulled into the DMV parking lot in one of the most rural of North Carolina areas. We got the last parking spot. I smiled at my wife knowing that she might regret coming if the wait ended up very long.  As I walked inside I was greeted by a large sign with a QR code.  The sign asked me like the one you see in the post to scan the QR Code to check in. I was getting some first-hand experience with Q-Anywhere, the North Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles app to make it easier to get services. It is a great idea but I watched as a number of baffled people waiting patiently to see if they could get around the system. When one of the two employees finally had time, they were told politely that the QR code or the less prominently displayed texting options were the only way to show up for appointments.

I heard at least one person say, but I don't have a smart phone. Even for someone like me (drenched in technology), the experience wasn't seamless. I scanned the QR code using the camera app on my Google Pixel 6 phone, touched the URL which showed up and quickly got to the right website to send a text, but the cell service was going in and out (too far from the 5G towers?) so I had to step outside to send the text response.

That worked fine and I got this message.

NCDMV: You have checked in successfully. Your ticket number is A123. Please proceed to the lobby, you will be called shortly. Msg/Data rates may apply. -Reply STOP to opt-out

 

NCDMV: Please proceed to Station 01 in XXXXXville. Thank you for waiting from a safe distance -Msg&Data rates may apply. -Reply STOP to opt-out

I took a seat by the only empty seat in the room.  The empty seat was quickly filled by a cute long-haired teenage girl. About a minute later, one of the two employees came out. He asked if everyone had checked in. Two people standing at the counter said they had not.  He told them to go home and make an appointment on their computer.  One of them said "I don't have a computer." He gave him a printed flyer and said call this number.  He then turned his QR code sign around and said they were no longer taking new check-ins until after 2PM (It was 11:10 AM)

 

A couple of minutes later the late arriving teenager was called back. In a couple of more minutes I was summoned by text. My appointment took less than ten minutes. The DMV employee made sure I was registered to vote, checked my organ donor status, took my picture, thanked me for being well prepared with lots of documentation and said I would receive my new license within two weeks. He said to keep my temporary license with my old one until the new one arrived. I paid my $14 by credit card and left. Unfortunately, they have yet to allow you to pay by smartphone but they have moved up from requiring cash.

 

As I left, I could not help but think of the story my mother often told. She was fond of saying that when she moved to Mt. Airy in the 1920s, the population sign on the outskirts of town read 150. I have not been able to verify that or her story about getting her first driver's license.  She claimed that the Justice of Peace said, "Blanche can you drive?" She responded, "Yes." He said "Here's your license, give me a quarter." That was likely about about 1935 when she was twenty-five.

 

Just to hammer home the grip of technology. We had lunch on Highway 601 just north of Mocksville.  When our check came, it had a QR code on it that allowed me to pay without handing over my credit card or signing anything.

 

Beam me up Scotty, I am ready.

 

 

 

 

Once There Was Only One Cat Beneath The Tree

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I remember when things were very different.

If Silver Could Talk

Silver is not very popular these days. Some silver things can hardly be given away. My generation has one foot in the world where silver items were well used and certainly respected and today's world where silver pieces cannot find a home where they even see the light of day and a little polish.

At least this straddling of worlds provides a little perspective. I know my mother who was definitely not born with a silver spoon in her mouth learned to love silver when she became the grand lady of the house at 347 West Pine St. My dad who I hardly knew loved to have dinner parties. In those days, the first half of the last century, a good party apparently required silver. I did not grow up with silver because my mother and dad were not living together during my early years.

It was only in the sixties when I came back from my first year at military school that my mother had moved back to Pine St. to take care of my dad who had a stroke. There were no parties in those years but there were extended family dinners when mother got to show off all the silver trays, punch bowl, and silver spoons.  I never thought much about them until after my father died and mother starting trying to give us silver every time that we walked through the house.

Giving us silver that she no longer used and was tired of polishing only had a limited impact but it did not matter. In July of 2004 when her boarder and long-time friend, RJ Berrier, died, she announced that she was moving in us.  She packed her suitcase and walked out of the house and left us to deal with it and everything in it.

It was then when we started figuring out what to do with everything mother had left behind that I started wishing that the silver could talk. I am sure there were plenty of Mount Airy people in the Pine Street house during the twentieth century. I suspect there was enough drink to keep the stories and conversations flowing into the early morning hours.

I know so little about the real person who was my father that I would gladly welcome a talking silver tray. Today we get snippets of who people are in video clips and social media. Certainly there is no shortage of casual photographs. Ninety years ago there was little to record the parties of the day but the memories of those you attended. If letters were written, I have not been fortunate enough to find them. 

Given a little magic, I would expect the silver to recount strong opinions which likely were freely expressed.  While people certainly disagreed about things in those days, certainly they all believed in a better life for their children through education and science. It is safe to say that they shared a vision of country ready to be built by people willing to work and pay their fair share of taxes.

One of the few things I remember my dad telling me and I sure the silver will back me up was that he was proud to be able to pay his taxes. Today that thought is about as popular as silver trays are. I know that my dad who came to this country at the age of five, got his education in night school and worked with his hands until his business skills could take over was sincere in saying that.

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 Adventure Begins

My wife, Glenda, and I have enjoyed an adventurous life and it all started back in 1973.  On August 5, 1973, this article written by Jerry Bledsoe was published in the Mount Airy Times where our good friend, RJ Berrier, was editor.  It is interesting to look back on the article after over 43 years have passed. Many of the actual details of our adventures can be filled in by our books, especially A Taste for the Wild - Canada's Maritimes.  There you can find out the story of why we did not end up living in Newfoundland.  Some pictures of our time in Nova Scotia are available in this album and additional pictures of our over ten years on the farm in New Brunswick are in this album. More memories from our time in Canada can be found at this website, The Canada I Miss.  Here is Mr. Bledsoe's article with some of the errors from the original article corrected.

 

They'll Start Their New Life By Pioneering In A New Land

Glenda Haymore smiled.

"I've really led a very sheltered life," she said.

Glenda Haymore is 24, bright and attractive.  She studied child development at UNC-G, and since she graduated two years ago, she has been working in the university's demonstration nursery and living in a modern new apartment at Guilford College.  If you'd told her a couple of months ago that she would suddenly give this up to tend cows in 40-below Canadian winters, she might well have laughed at you.

But, of course, she hadn't reckoned with David Sobotta then.

Like Glenda, David Sobotta is 24 and very bright.  They are both from Mount Airy, although they had not met each other until June 9.  But when they did meet...

"Well, it was just one of those magical things," a friend of Glenda has said.

That, however, is getting a bit ahead of the story.

David Sobotta went away to study history at Harvard.  A lot of people, especially his parents, assumed that he would go on to law school and become a Harvard lawyer.  "Everyone had sort of intended for me to be a lawyer," he said. "I never did think about it."

He had been thinking about something far removed from that, in fact. Instead of wrestling with law books and lawyers, David Sobotta was thinking of a more basic challenge. Man again nature.  That sort of thing.

Finally Decided on Nova Scotia

In his last two years of college, he had started looking for some land.  He wanted to make sure that it was well away from the centers of civilization, and he began his search in the Northwest, then went on up into Alaska.  But the place he finally decided on was Nova Scotia. It was a beautiful place, and he had found 340 acres with a 200-year-old shingled house on the Bay of Fundy that he could get cheap.  He bought it as soon he graduated from college and stunned his family by telling that he was going to be a Canadian farmer instead of a Harvard lawyer.

Three friends from college went with him to work the place at first.  Two did not last long.  The third married the village school teacher, settled down across the road from his farm and still helps him with it.

The plan was to raise cattle (he has 150 acres of pasture), but after he bought the farm equipment that he had to have, he only had enough money for seven cattle. There are now several more and he has made enough money to pay some taxes. "Fortunately it doesn't take a lot of money to live in Nova Scotia," he says.

He has learned a lot in the last two years.  With help from his friends he ripped out the insides of the old house and started to restore it.  He has put up hay for his cattle, grown vegetables and put them up for his larder, raised pigs, butchered them and cured the meat, butchered a steer and even netted herring to salt away for winter. Until he went to Nova Scotia, he'd never had any experience with anything like that.

"We pretty much learned as we went along from the neighbors," he says.  "They're friendly people."

There aren't a lot of neighbors of course. David figures maybe 12 or 15 within three miles of his place.  But then his farm in St. Croix Cove, is only about 10 miles from Bridgetown which has about 1,500 people.

"We aren't isolated from the world," David was saying.

"Just about," said Glenda, barely audible.

"I was just teasing," she said quickly.

"After all," he said the nearest grocery store is only 10 miles away."

If you are thinking that Glenda may have a vested interest in this place, you are right.  In early June, David went to Massachusetts for a friend's wedding and decided to come home to visit for a week.  His mother told him that she knew this nice girl, Glenda Haymore, she wanted him to meet, and he said, well sure.

They had lobsters for dinner, and they got to talking about David's place, and later he showed her slides, and they both knew right away. It took them only four days to make the decision.  They were going to get married.

Just-To-Make-Sure Trip

In early July, Glenda went to Nova Scotia to look over the place, a sort of just-to-make-sure trip.  After all, as she said, she'd led a sheltered life.  Nothing in her experience had prepared her to do battle with the elements.  But the place was beautiful and captivating and she was convinced.

Their wedding was at 2 p.m. Saturday at Holly Springs Baptist Church in Mount Airy.  They planned to leave immediately after the ceremony for Nova Scotia.

The Friday night before the wedding they sat in Glenda's old apartment awaiting the arrival at the airport of David's friend from across the road in Nova Scotia, and talking about their plans for the future.  Those plans may include moving on from their place in Nova Scotia, although they have no current plans for selling it. David has worked too hard on it, especially on the house, to get rid of it quickly, and besides, the value of the land has already doubled since he bought it and maybe even tripled.

But David has it in his mind that he would like to pioneer a little and anyway, it's getting a little crowded for him in Nova Scotia.  He'd like to go up to Newfoundland and homestead in virgin territory, build a house and clear the land and make it produce. Why"

"Oh, just sort of a challenge." He paused. "Even fewer people." And he looked at Glenda and smiled.  "We haven't really made that decision yet."

"All I had to promise," she said, "was that I'd go and look at Newfoundland at least twice. Give it a chance."