View from the Mountain

A Journey To My Country

 

White Oak River Near Swansboro, NC

Updated- July 4, 2020,- Writing is one of those things that operate on sparks of imagination.  Something starts to nag you and if it is truly important, eventually what is in the back of your mind ends up being a blog post or a book.

The fifth book published by my wife, Glenda and I is "The Road to My Country."  This is a paragraph that sets the stage for the book.

It's often late at night on a dark country road when people and places, both remembered and imagined, become the sparks that light the memory defining our lives.

 

As my wife and I glide through the black night on Union Cross Church Road, we cross a small creek, and it hits me. I see the long-gone millpond, the house with five fireplaces, and the mill itself. I see the shadows of three young girls, my mother and her two sisters, picking beans in their garden. Next, I remember the place as it was when I was young, an old, crumbling concrete dam with trees growing in the former millpond.

 

The memory fades as fast as it comes, and the dark road continues on into the night.

The story has been there for a long time and the first chapter of this book has been written for a while, but the rest of the pieces did not fall in place until recently. There seemed to be no urgency until North Carolina's state government decided to roll back years of moderate governance with the hope of turning our state into the Texas of the east coast.

However, my book is not about politics. It is about the North Carolina that I remember from my youth when I was growing up as the only child of a single mother in the Piedmont area west of Winston-Salem. It is also about our journey away from North Carolina, our return, and how our state has changed in that period of nearly forty years.  The crowd around the swimming pool looks a lot different than it did in the fifties.

Perhaps our short book is just me trying to figure out how I got to be the person that I am.  I grew up in rural North Carolina went away to military school, and then got my undergraduate degree at Harvard.  After Harvard, I moved to Canada to farm. 

My wife and I built a large cattle operation and lived for over ten years in the hardwood hills of New Brunswick. We had over two hundred head of cattle and grew almost all of our food. Then in a quick twist of fate, in a couple of years, I was working for Apple where I had a career of nearly twenty years including directly reporting to Tim Cook for a short time.

I have written a lot about my time at Apple including a book, the Pomme Company. I am one of the few people who worked at Apple and has written about the company without ending with any legal challenges from the company. However, when I published the book a few people still at the company were afraid to be in a picture that I used in the book even though it was taken ten years earlier.

This new book has very little about Apple in it and I think that is a function of how little Apple contributed to who I am and the mental distance that now separates me from the company. I have continued to use the company's products, but I remain convinced that Apple is all about the money.

I think my character was forged well before I got to Apple.  Perhaps certain things that had already burrowed deep into my subconscious before I got to the reality distortion zone of Cupertino kept me from staying even longer at the company.  That is not a subject of the book either, but you might be able to draw some conclusions.

I doubt that I would have survived and thrived as long as I did at Apple without the background that I brought to the company as a son of North Carolina with dirt on my hands.

Both North Carolina and I have changed a lot. I did not appreciate my home state until I stopped running from it and that was many years after I left it.  Why I was running might still be another story. 

My wife and I took title to my mother's homeplace in Mount Airy, North Carolina in 2002. Mother had come to live with us in Roanoke two hours to the north and could no longer take care of the large house and gardens that became Sobotta Manor Bed & Breakfast for a few years.  Going back to Mount Airy and also visiting our youngest daughter who had relocated to North Carolina at almost the same time helped us understand how much we missed being back in our home state.

We lived in Virginia for twenty years, but it was not North Carolina.  Living in Virginia did let us enjoy many summers, fall, and spring vacations to North Carolina's beaches.  It awakened a love for the Southern Outer Banks that never died and still is a slow ember in my soul.

We became full-time residents of North Carolina and lived on the Crystal Coast portion of the Southern Outer Banks for fifteen years.  North Carolina is a wonderfully diverse state.  The picture in the post is the large coastal river that I often enjoyed from my skiff or kayak.  The waters of the river behind our house and the uncrowded beaches of Emerald are a big part of why we chose to spend over decade in Carteret County. We lived in an area where the week of the Fourth of July can be a true delight at least when we are not having a pandemic.

Despite the headlines, I doubt our state will turn into the Texas east.  I have high hopes that the good people of North Carolina will stand up for the moderate policies that have made this such a great state where all sorts of people live in harmony.

I hope my book encourages others to look back and find those things which have made them who they are. A little "How did I get here and is this person the one I want to be," is good for the soul.

I think "The Road to My Country" is well worth its modest cost on the Kindle platform.  Even in paperback, it is only $6.99. 

If you are interested in more information about where we lived in Canada, try our book, A Taste For The Wild - Canada's Maritimes.  If you are interested in more about one of the top ten uncrowded east coast beaches, download our book, A Week At The Beach - The Emerald Isle Travel Guide.  It is a great way to take a trip to the beach without even leaving your easy chair. There are some good reasons in 2020 to make your visit to the beach virtual.  You will find some great family recipes in the book that help make that virtual vacation at home even better.

 

It takes more than Tweets

 

Raymond's Gut, A Source of Inspiration

As a member of the generation which was born just before the middle of the last century, I worry that a few things which I cherish might be disappearing

The ability to communicate with the written word is one of those things. Closely related to that is actually putting reasoned words down on paper.

Writing about life's challenges, triumphs, and disappointments has been a wonderful blessing to me.  I have often heard it said that bottling up your feelings can destroy you.

Somehow my fingers on the keyboard have kept that from happening to me. Often, I work out any of my issues with the words that I write.  Many times I have advised team members that the best way to handle an email crafted in anger is to let it breathe overnight and then see how it tastes in the morning. If it is palatble twelve hours later once the sun has risen, then it is okay to send it.

Writing things down often works even better than those wonderful debates that we used to have around the table after dinner during college.  Sometimes you would come away feeling a little whipped after one of those encounters.  Writing usually lets you resolve things in a way that makes accepting  a tough conclusion a private event until you choose for it to be otherwise.

Unfortunately we are now in a world where reasoned writing is becoming less and less common.  Those wonderful letters so full of information and feelings that we used to write to each other are  long gone.

Pages of thought have now been replaced by clicking on the "Like" button on Facebook or a few words of quick comment. Sometimes we even feel lucky when an abbreviated sentence is tweeted.

This turn of events worries me because I believe learning how to express your opinions on paper is perhaps what made our society what it is today.  As a student of the American Revolution, I can assure you that it would not have happened without the reasoned discourses which either started in print or found their way into print after substantial debate.

While you might create a revolution with Twitter, it is far from certain that Tweets are a good basis for a decent government.  To have a society that can create a lasting government, you need a body of thought that supports the ideas of the people.  It is more than just some random thoughts about freedom and certainly it needs to be put on paper and discussed.

If you are someone who reads a lot, it is easy to put a new book or set of ideas in context.  If you want to understand a person, the best way to do so is to read what they have written.  You might gather some ideas from what they have Tweeted or posted on Facebook, but it will be far less accurate than the understanding gathered from articles or books which they have written.  If you want to challenge someone, read what they have written and find some holes in their reasoning.  Attacking someone's character because you do not agree with them is a fool's errand.

In spite of the value of the written word, many people cannot seem to grasp that writing is more than just putting words on paper or a computer screen.  Writing involves reasoning and backing up your opinions with the opinions of others.

I have actually written articles and submitted them to an editor who as editors often do picks a title that will grab attention. After the article is published I have had people, who obviously have read no further than the title, attack not just the article but me personally.  The only thing they seem to know about me is that I have an article with a title that they do not like.  It would be lost on these folks that I did not even pick the title.

I have often wondered what people in the future might deduce from my Facebook postings or the things that I might have tweeted over the years.  I sometimes tweet opinions that I find interesting but which are ones that I do not personally embrace. It would be hard to really understand who I am by studing my tweets.

Many people today believe they are well educated.  Yet they refuse to read words with which they cannot agree.  I amazed that someone who believes they are a well versed person could possible hold as true ideas which they have not allowed to be challenged by the thoughts of others.  Truth is always born in the crucible of debate with other ideas and with other people hopefully even more knowledgeable than one's self.

I have written three books and thousands of other pages since I started writing in earnest a little over thirteen years ago.  One book, A Week at the Beach, An Emerald Isle Travel Guide, is about where I live and how much I enjoy living there.  Our second book, The Pomme Company, is about the twenty year journey that was my career at Apple.

Perhaps as one of my good friends said the most significant thing about my Apple book is "the control and measured perspective" that I brought to the book while preserving my passion for the subject.  To be able to step back from the situation you lived and provide perspective is what you strive for when you write a book.

Our third book, A Taste for the Wild, Canada's Maritimes, really describes much of how I got to be the person that I am.  Not all is in the book as there is another book a little earlier and maybe a few chapters on those ten years of farming.

That my three books are electronic books has also worried me so I have already formatted our book, "The Pomme Company," for print.  In celebration of being married 40 years this summer, I might spend the fifty dollars or so that is needed for that one print copy.  I am sure once I see it in print, the other two books will follow.

Those printed copies will join the many treasured papers and some other books that I believe are so necessary for a worthwhile life.

My good friend, RJ Berrier, who died after many years as a newspaper editor in 2000, used to say that most people only get their names in the newspaper a few times in their life and sometimes only twice, once when they are born and once when they die. RJ believed they deserved to have their names spelled correctly.

I would go much further today.

First if you want your obituary done correctly perhaps it is best to write it yourself but understand it will not be easy. 

Second if you really want your story to be told correctly, there is no other way than to either put pen to paper or fingers to your keyboard.

Trust me it is worth the effort.

 

 

 

Trying to tie it all together

As I look back on my life, there are many moments that bring a smile to my face and more than my share that cause me to grimace.  There are even a few that make my eyes a little moist.

Time has made it easier to picture the past by smoothing over many of the rough edges.  As much as I would like the opportunity to rewrite history, that's not going to happen.

I have accepted my past, warts and all.  I'm actually proud of it. It's no more perfect than I am.  Yet along the way, I think that I've learned a lot and ended up a lot better person than I was at the beginning of the journey.  Perhaps that's what it's all about, crossing paths with others who help us to become someone better than our previous self and at the same time leaving everything a little nicer for our having been there.

There's no question we make lots of mistakes along the way.  If we try really hard, sometimes we can keep our errors to a minimum.  Though more often than not the problems we create are mostly unintentional.  Yet the truth is that most of the time we muddle onward even with the errors.  Sometimes we have some grand victories, and they are often balanced by some equally grand disappointments.

Perhaps what keeps us going is that tomorrow is another day that needs to be experienced.  Maybe in that  one day we will do something special than reminds of us of our own humanity.  Touching that humanity reminds us that we can rise about ourselves, and perhaps the long journey was worthwhile in spite of the challenges and disappointments.

The clouds have cleared here, and there is hope that tomorrow morning I might get to see yet another glorious sunrise over the Roanoke Valley.  If luck is with me sometime after the sunrise tomorrow, I might have a few minutes to reflect on the past.  Just maybe the memories will run clear for a few pages.

I'm not kidding myself that those memories will be of great value to the world.  They may be of passing interest to those who have known me or been part of the journey.  Yet perhaps someone might glean a few words to help them along the way.  In the end that just might help to make it worthwhile.