View from the Mountain

Grounded in Life

Our Roanoke, Virginia, Home

Heading out on your own involves a little mystery until you find you place in the world. People used to join a company and the company had a lot to with their life and where they lived it.  That doesn’t happen so much anymore.

Our life wasn’t a structured one.  I got out of college, felt lucky to not be fighting a war in a jungle and equally lucky to have missed the law boards.  I went back to the land in Nova Scotia.  Life was remodeling a two-hundred year old post and beam house, gardening, and taking care of a few cows until I figured out what to do with my life.

Our First Nova Scotia Home

That house and others that followed provided safe haven from not just the weather but from a lot of life’s challenges.  We built our lives around our houses.  The people we met were nearby and because of the nature of the jobs that I held, I always had an office in the house.

In seventies and early eighties when we lived on the farm, local neighbors, also tied to the land, would drop by to build relationships and strengthen that web of friendship that keeps farming communities running.

After we moved off the farm to Halifax, Nova Scotia, then Columbia, Maryland and eventually to Roanoke, Virginia, visitors were often those with children of the same age.  Only for a few short months did we live where we could attend a company holiday party.

Life revolved a round our homes, church, and schools.Our Roanoke home at the top of post was high on the side of the foothills of a mountain. It was safe have from the winds that often buffeted  the mountainside and reminded us of our Nova Scotia years. It was big enough to get lost in and to collect far too many family treasures as our parents passed away,  The office I had there was larger than the one I commuted to as Apple director.  As the kids moved away the house became too big for the two of us.

Our Coastal NC Home

We moved to a smaller house on the North Carolina coast. It anchored us once again. We found friends and a church with more friends. Once again I had an office in the home. Our coastal home kept us safe from a number of hurricanes and plenty of high water.

After fifteen years there, we decided to move on again.  Each move after Roanoke took us to a

Our NC Piedmont Home

smaller home but every time the home anchored us in life. This last move to the Piedmont which by my counting is our sixth and might truly be our last. This has turned out to be a good home, one where we are comfortable in our surroundings and well-anchored in life.

At a time of rising seas, it is good to perched on a ridge at 785 feet instead of just six feet above sea level in marsh.  Even though I loved every moment of living in the marsh, I have found plenty to love here in the Piedmont.

Rules of engagement for heat

The first thing you learn about heat when you grow up is that for outside work, you have to work early or late and find something else to do from noon to four or five pm.
When we moved back from Nova Scotia to the states in the late eighties, we spent our first two years in Maryland. I didn’t work outside much but I wore a suit everyday. It was a dash from the air-conditioned car to a similarly air-conditioned building. I could hardly wait to get home and switch to shorts.
By the time we got to our mountainside in SW Virginia, I was used to heat and I went back to mowing our yard. Seventeen years in Virginia was not enough serious heat training for our move to coastal North Carolina.
We lived on a coastal river in Carteret County which is mostly water. Heat did not come early to Carteret County because it took a while for all the water to warm up. When the real heat arrived in late June or July, it was serious heat. I did a lot of boating, hiking, and kayaking and I learned never to be far from a bottle of water. Sometimes I would freeze a bottle and carry in my kayaking tackle pack. It was a lifesaver a number of times.
The biggest challenge was mowing a yard in the heat. The best planned days sometimes get offtrack, and you end up mowing when you should be cooling in the air conditioning. There are things I learned in coastal North Carolina that are of value anywhere you have to face heat.
Our garage which had a good cross breeze when the back door was open was what I called a transition zone. It is never a good idea to charge out from a chilled house directly into 85F heat and start pushing a lawn mower. I alway puttered around in the garage until my body started getting accustomed to the heat. Then I would put my straw hat on and start mowing. You are always better pacing yourself than racing with yourself. When I felt myself getting really hot - the kind of hot that sends the message - “Well you’ve done it, this is nearly as hot as your body can get without shutting down,” I would head back to our porch or garage and request some ice water. I would always drink my water outside in the shade or in the garage but not in the sunshine. Real heat means that you have sweated so much your clothes are damp if not wet. Going inside and getting chilled in air conditions just makes it harder to finish your job.
Once you’re done, you cool off outside in shade but still in the heat. When you’re not longer about to incinerate, head inside to the shower.
On the NC coast the water lines are so shallow that in the summer, cold water is pretty warm. I could tell it was the peak of summer when I could shower without any hot water.

Tomatoes and Me

I would not venture to guess when it was that I ate my first tomato.  Tomatoes likely appear on every page of my life story.  Shortly after we moved to the small town of Lewisville just west of Winston-Salem in 1952, my mother had tomato plants growing in front of our house.  When she moved from her Mount Airy house to our Roanoke house, there were still tomatoes growing near her back steps.   When she got to our house, there were tomatoes growing by the side of the house.

I remember loving tomato sandwiches, even to the point of ordering BLTs for breakfast when traveling.  Some time during my teenage years when on an overnight fishing trip with a friend, I learned about bologna, cheese, and tomato sandwiches. It was love at first bite.  This was well before all cured and processed meat was pronounced as bad for us.   However, we can cling to the knowledge than nothing is better than a plain tomato sandwich on the great bread of your choice with the perfect mayonnaise which in my case is Duke’s.

To eat really good tomatoes, you must face the challenge of growing tomatoes unless you live in an area with lots of farmers’ markets.  I planted my first tomatoes in Nova Scotia in 1972, on the shores of the Bay of Fundy.  We started the plants from seed and hardened them off in cold frame made from salvaged windows.  We barely managed to get tomatoes before the first frost. Since they were all we had and North Carolina was a long way off, they seemed delicious. However, there just wasn’t enough heat out on the shore for tomatoes to be a reliable crop.

For lots of reasons including better hay making weather for our cattle, we moved inland to the hardwood hills north of Fredericton, New Brunswick. It was much easier to grow tomatoes (and make hay) there.  By the time we got to the mountainside in Roanoke, in 1989, I had a lot of experience growing tomatoes in harsh conditions.  Even so, getting a ripe tomato by July 1 on our Virginia mountain was a challenge.

Then in 2006, we decided to make a move to North Carolina’s coast.  We ended up on a marsh on an inlet of the White Oak River near the beaches of Emerald Isle.  It was definitely a tomato friendly climate. The spring of 2007, we planted our first coastal tomatoes. Even though we got them in the ground late, we had ripe tomatoes before the end of June.  The next year we had ripe tomatoes before the end of May.

Eventually, in 2016, we managed to grow tomatoes for twelve months using wagons to move them in and out of the garage.  The ripe ones we got in January and February weren’t the best but by the time the heat came in March they were pretty tasty. 

Now we are back in North Carolina’s Piedmont where my mother grew her first and best tomatoes.  On March  8, I planted my tomato seeds for this year’s crop. I will get them into the ground in late April.  Hopefully, we can still manage to beat that July 1 date that I used to chase on the mountain.

Last Mowing Revisited

Eighteen years ago, I wrote a post, the Last Mowing.  We had been living in Roanoke, up on the mountain for fifteen years.  It was hard to get used to mowing the yard in December after years in New Brunswick where the snow could come in November and cover the ground until mid-May. 

Except for the green grass in December, there  were parts of living on the mountain that reminded us of our years in Canada.  The sometimes snowy weather was one thing and the friendly people were the other.

When you come over our hill after dark, it is almost like an approach to the airport. The city is spread out before you, street lights blinking, and buildings glowing. There are not many views in the world that can compete with it.

Being on top of the world at the end of the road seems to make us closer. Perhaps we have been drawn closer by the few times that the county has forgotten to plow the snow off the road in the winter.

Flatlanders, that is anyone who does not live on the hill, often ask how we get up the hill in the winter. Actually getting up the hill has rarely been the problem. All of us at the top have at least one four wheel drive. It takes less than one winter to realize that going down the hill is far more exciting than going up. I have been fortunate to have a job that allows me to work at home when necessary. That means that snowy morning’s entertainment usually is watching the folks who have to go to work try to get down the hill safely.

Our  first year on the mountain, we got an early coat of ice.  Everyone on the hill banded together and we cut a single tire track all the way to the bottom of the hill.  It was the first of many weather adventures on the hill.  We saw snow storms that were worthy of Canada.

It was a good place to live  and while we lived there, those of us at the top of the hill were a tight-knit group.  and I remember more parties than disagreements.  After we moved from the hill,  most friends drifted away but we remain close to one family that grew up with our children.

A lot of water has passed under me in skiff and kayak in the fifteen years after we moved from Roanoke and lived on North Carolina’s Crystal Coast.  My crocs also covered many miles of sandy beach. Yet I still fondly remember the years when we partied on our decks whenever given the slightest chance. There was no close neighborhood group in our coastal subdivision. I will blame it on the lack of any steep hills.

After fifteen years in the marsh, we moved from the coast during the pandemic.  Selling, buying, and moving during a pandemic are not the easiest things to do, but with lots of help, we managed to find a nice neighborhood less than half an hour from where I grew up in North Carolina’s Piedmont. We even found a home with a real backyard instead of a marsh or a ravine.

While my family has deep roots here, many who have been close to us are much older even than us.  The younger generation has their own busy lives and there is little to connect us with the neighborhood. Last year none of our immediate neighbors even attended the annual neighborhood HOA picnic with free (well it is covered by your dues) barbecue.

When we lived at the coast, we had a wonderful church family but we lost that when we moved.  Because of the pandemic, we remain video-church goers.  If the pandemic recedes further, perhaps we will find another church family.

Age, changes due to the way people live, some driven by the pandemic and even political divisions make it harder to connect.

Much like it was in early December eighteen years ago in Roanoke, we just had our last mowing of the yard here in North Carolina’s Piedmont hill country. Our fescue yard is still green like our bluegrass one in Roanoke so there is a chance it will be mowed again.

Our yards might be much the same green in December but somehow it feels like our world has changed.   In is unlikely we will have as close a group of friends as we did in Roanoke both on the hill and in the flatlands. Having children in school makes it easy to have common ground.  The Roanoke friends will have to share a spot in our fond memories of the friends we made during our years on the farm and in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

I have always believed that  there are good people everywhere, you just have to work harder in some places to find them than others.  I have seen nothing to change my mind in our latest move. We are finding our new ones, one at a time.

Drawn To Wilderness

I admit to being conflicted. I grew up in the North Carolina Piedmont, the mountains were never far away. The Blue Ridge Parkway was in my backyard. We spent the summer vacations that we didn’t go to the beach in the Smoky Mountains. The beach was always North Carolina’s Outer Banks.

Just after I turned sixteen, I drove across the country with a friend only a couple years older than me. My favorite part of the trip was Montana and a quick trip to Glacier National Park. The summer of 1969, a college roommate and I took a road trip to Alaska.  We wandered through Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, up through western Canada to the Alcan Highway which was still gravel at the time and finally to Alaska. I saw plenty mountains and loved most of them, especially the towering Tetons and the nameless ones in Alaska.

John Muir once said the following.

“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings, Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.”

I wish that I could have invited John Muir to join me in a walk along the salt marshes of North Carolina. I have seen my share of mountains from those in Alaska to the Canadian Rockies, the Tetons, the Southern Alps of New Zealand, and the Alps of Austria and Switzerland.

Though I have lived on side of a mountain, no mountain has ever brought me the peace that I feel walking or paddling the edges of the salt marshes, sounds, and beaches of North Carolina. I do not disagree that the redwoods and the tall mountains of the world are wonderful cathedrals to nature. However, I think marshes are even more important to our lives and what they give back to those who treasure them is priceless.  Maybe if I could have lived along a mountain stream, I would feel differently, because I loved the streams in the deep dark woods of my youth.

The wonderful thing about the salt marshes and the waters that touch them is that they are alive with creatures that touch our existence in so many ways.

It is easy to fall in love with the beautiful feathered friends that I find on my trips through the marshes. However, it goes far beyond that. The other day I saw a fox chasing something along a marsh pond. I have watched river otters play on the shores of the marsh. I have been lucky enough to have an osprey dive straight into the water just yards from my kayak. I have caught fish in the marsh. I have seen ospreys eat mullet in the trees along the marsh edges. I have watched in awe as fish and crabs fight over scraps we have fed them.

The marsh is a world in itself. Birds and fishes live and die in the marsh. Nothing is wasted in the marsh. Whatever falls there is always recycled. An area of marsh which has been either undisturbed or repaired is a powerful source of life, food, and healing for the soul.

Walking through the marsh, I see swirls of bait fish, ducks and other birds feeding in the marsh, hawks and ospreys hunting for food, and sometimes from the edge of the marsh I can even see bottle nosed dolphins feeding on fish that were born in the marsh.

Somehow I worry about the marshes more than the mountains. I know mountains get developed but marshes get destroyed.  Marshes seem so fragile. The Raymond’s Gut marsh where we lived for fifteen years is now under full assault. A neighboring tract of land of land has been completely cleared of trees. A fine, sandy silt now covers everything according to former neighbors. I have heard the Great Blue Herons, Great Egrets, and River Otters have disappeared from Raymond’s Gut. The cycle of life in the marsh is breaking down. 

Maybe the sometimes hostile mountains built on granite will be around when we are all gone and the marshes are filled in with silt.

All my life I have sought those places on the edge of civilization where the wilderness and humans touch each other.  One of the reasons is that those edges are the places where the interactions between our world and the wilderness are the easiest to see. 

Years of working far too inside the world of wall to wall humans has made me leery of living where all the trees are in a park and the rest of the land has been paved over into parking lots.