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.

 

Mowing Your Way Through Life

I am not sure not how people managed in the first half of the twentieth century before there were yards to connect them to the soil around their homes. I suspect that they were working in their gardens and fields. By the time I was growing up in the fifties in Lewisville, North Carolina, yards had become important. The condition of our grassy yard often stood between me and a trip to my uncle Henry's fishing ponds. My mother who claimed the only yard she had as a child was packed dirt swept with broom straw wanted our yard neatly clipped. In driving by our old home, I am little disappointed the town did not put in sidewalks in front of our house during my youth. It would have eliminated the slope on the front yard. It was by far the hardest part of the yard to mow as a youngster.

Going away to military school (high school) and then college got me out of mowing yards for almost a decade. My first home after graduation was a two-hundred year old farm house located in a sheep pasture on the Fundy coast of Nova Scotia. No sheep came with the old farm house but long grass did not bother me as a young farmstead owner. When I first moved there in the summer of 1971, the yard was the least of my worries. Getting hot water plumbed in and running so we could stop taking showers at the local campground was close to the top of the list. The second summer I had a tractor with a nine-foot-wide bush hog which I used to mow around the house a couple of times a summer. That was all it needed in my days of being single. After all, I mowed plenty of mature grass or hay, starting with the twenty acre field behind the house which served as one of the few backyards in my life away from home.

Then came the summer of 1973, and I married Glenda, the love of my life from the world of well-manicure yards in North Carolina. Her mother often mowed their yard twice, the second time against the grain, just to catch any grass that might pop up after the first mowing. Sometime during the summer of 1974, Glenda and my neat-lawn-loving mother who was visiting us formed a conspiracy. They drove down the mountain to Bridgetown ten miles away and came home with a Toro push mower. I spent much of the next forty-forty years sharing the task of mowing whatever yard happened to be attached to our personal home.

For the ten years or so when we lived on our farm in Tay Creek, we had a nice riding lawn mower which was adequate for much of the yard. Even Glenda did some mowing. When we lived in Halifax, our yard was postage-stamp sized. By the time we arrived on the mountain in Roanoke, Virginia, I had come to somewhat enjoy mowing. There are those times in your life when something as simple as mowing a yard can be very satisfying because you can actually see what you have done.

One of the immutable laws of mowing is that the farther south you live, the more miserable the task of mowing can be. Sometimes, even the most careful home yard person can end mowing in the oppressive heat of the day like I did more times than I want to admit after we moved to the North Carolina coast. As I wrote then, there is a true brotherhood of Southerners (both men, women, and teenagers) who have mowed yards when they never should have.

Mowing is one of those circular things in life. In your early years, you are too young to push a mower, so it seems fitting that in the later years of life, it is also okay to be too old to push a mower. You come to a point when you are faced with either hiring someone to mow the yard or buying a riding mower. Since I spent many years straddling a John Deere farm tractor, we chose not to revisit those days after a back problem slowed me somewhat. For a couple of years, I shared the task with our mower of choice, choosing the spots that required a push mower for myself. However, it was an easy transition to giving it all up. When we made our 2021 move from the land of coastal centipede grass back to the fescue grasses of the Piedmont, we left our third Toro mower with the father and son team that was doing our mowing. I even gave them my gas-powered trimmer.

When our current mowing team shows up, I know the noise will be over with in a few minutes as opposed to the hours that it would have taken me with a push mower. I still enjoy our green space especially the backyard which is the nicest we have had since that twenty-acre field that came with our first home. 

 

 

The Shade Trees Are Still There, We Aren't

I remember well the Sunday afternoons under the shade trees enjoying watermelon or homemade peach ice cream. As children, we played like there was no tomorrow.  It was a simpler time when people could actually talk politics without getting angry.  There was nothing like an old fashioned chicken stew to bring families together in North Carolina's rolling hills. 

There were no chicken stews that I got to attend during my college years. Those were the especially turbulent late sixties and early seventies and I was far away from North Carolina in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  As I finished my degree in the summer of 1971, I needed to get away from those strange-hued city-night skies where it was impossible to see the stars.

Perhaps with a different childhood I could have gone back to North Carolina which still was clinging to elements of rural life. Instead I ended up going to Canada because I had fallen in love with rural Nova Scotia and the endless waters and forest that I saw there. Just maybe Nova Scotia reminded me of North Carolina in the fifties. It was certainly about as far away from Cambridge, Massachusetts as you could get.

Like many on the same path, I came across the book, Living The Good Life, by Helen and Scott Nearing. The Nearing's book along with the Whole Earth Catalogue by Steward Brand and Malabar Farm by Louis Bromfield were very influential in my sixteen years in Canada that included thirteen years of farming and growing our own food. The books were as much about community and interest in the common good as farming and growing food.

It did turn out that life in Nova Scotia and also New Brunswick was much like my youth growing up in the Piedmont of North Carolina in the fifties and sixties.  Since I did not have many of those North Carolina rural skills, it was lucky for me the influence and knowledge of my mother followed me to Canada. Her story and that of her generation whose roots ran deep into the fertile soils of rural North Carolina has always had great meaning to me. Even though I put great distance between myself and North Carolina, the ideas, the traditions, and memories stayed with me as guides to living a life away from the city lights.

Just as people used to gather under shade trees in North Carolina, friends used to just drop by on Sunday afternoons at our farm for visit. It was a great excuse to stop working and spend some time catching up on the neighborhood news. It was the way people built relationships, established trust and found common ground.  I cannot ever remember discussing politics.

Beyond the impromptu visits, there were community picnics, shared meals, church services (even burials) and work done for the good of the community. All these things made for richer shared lives. When we were on the farm, I never doubted that the community and friends helped us be successful. The support of their communities was essential to success of farming when we had our farm.

That was back in the seventies. The fifty years since then have not been kind to under the shade tree gatherings or any of the other ways that we connected and established relationships.  Even workplaces have fundamentally changed. Modern companies with their distributed workplaces have made it highly unlikely that employees feel much connection to their local communities through their ever more soulless companies. There are exceptions but most of us work for companies with little local identity. With the pandemic many more people are now working from home today than even a couple of years ago.

As for the common good, most people have lost sight of that. Those who have achieved great riches rarely credit the communities that have helped them so much.

Months of pandemic pressure have made it even harder to make local connections or even talk about the common good. Technology has given us some supposed solutions. The trouble is that they never work nearly as well as true human connections. Many times technology makes things worse so it is often counterproductive and alienates us from the people we need.  We are not likely to get back to shade tree gatherings or really knowing our neighbors anytime soon, but we can hope that out of all this isolation from each other, a solution might some day arise.

Partners in Cooking and Life

When I was chasing cows around our farm in Canada, I would have laughed if someone told me that I would replace my wife as the bread baker. I still remember the days that she would bake four or five loaves of oatmeal bread and the kitchen smelled heavenly every time I entered during the day.

I know that cooking together with my wife has become a great joy. We have found a few regional recipes to carry with us as we have wandered from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to Virginia, the North Carolina coast and back to the rolling hills of the Piedmont.

The meals that we have cooked are almost always based on simple ingredients. We are blessed to have grown up in families that were close to the land. Fresh vegetables and food direct from the farm or sea often have delighted us and made our meals special.

We were blessed to have grown much of our own food for over a decade. We have never lost those skills or the appreciation of truly fresh food grown in soil that has had enriched with compost that we have made. While we have not got our composting started after our recent move, for years on the coast we made compost from our food waste and grew our vegetables in it. The gardening space we had was limited but what we grew was impressive.

For much of our life, we were too busy to do much more than get food on table. That is probably normal for a family that raised three children while running a farm with two hundred Angus cattle. After we left the farm, I spent nearly twenty years traveling and selling computers for Apple. It was only as my career at Apple was winding down that I got the time to start cooking seriously. My wife, Glenda, kept us all fed during my many years of hard work on the farm and traveling for Apple. Fortunately, she still loves to cook and has created countless wonderful meals in the kitchen with her many skills. We are writing a cookbook, Recipes for Our Lives. It is an effort to share some of Glenda's and my cooking skills which I maintain are a direct line from her mother and my mother, both excellent Southern cooks. I offer up our attempt at recreating my mother's fried chicken as proof of our cooking heritage.

I love baking bread, rolls, and biscuits. I can grill salmon or spatchcocked chicken to perfection and whip up a delicious beef Stroganoff without looking at a recipe. When the family comes, I am always in charge of breakfast. Whether it bacon and eggs or sausage and eggs, I often manage to serve the meal with fresh biscuits hot out of the oven. I do not even measure the ingredients for my biscuits any longer. For special occasions I can even dip into the country ham supply for those who appreciate it.

However, none of that compares to the clam chowder that my wife makes. My affair with clams began before I got married. When I made that fateful first drive up to Boston in the fall of 1967,  I had no idea where I was going, but I had a map, a car, and enough money for a few nights on the road. I believe I stopped the first night someplace in Conneticutt after driving right through New York on I95 at rush hour. Those were the days, my blue GTO convertible could take me anywhere.

The second night, I stopped just south of Boston and on a lark I tried some fried clams. I was hooked. There were a couple of places in Harvard Square that had great fried clams, but soon I discovered clam chowder. When real whole fried clams were nowhere to be found, there was always a bowl of chowder to sample. Even today,  I judge a restaurant by the quality of its clam chowder. It is easy to make thick chowder with no taste or one so rich that you can't taste the clams. Making a great bowl of clam chowder with just the right taste of clams is the sign of a great cook.

Maybe looking for that great bowl of chowder was one of the good reasons to go live in the Maritimes for sixteen years. It is a little ironic that the best clam chowder that I have ever eaten comes from someone who never met a clam until she was over twenty one and got whisked away to Nova Scotia as a new bride.

I don't remember when my North Carolina bride made her first pot of clam chowder. Perhaps she was searching for a meal that would bury forever the boiled salt cod fish, potatoes, salt pork and beer that was a maritime favorite. Sometime in the first year in St. Croix Cove, Nova Scotia, Glenda remembers making her first pot of clam chowder. We even tried it with fresh steamed clams but we figured out they were better dipped in butter and that the ones in a can did just fine for chowder. Over the years she has refined "the recipe."

Not many cold days go by in the fall before I start feeling like I need some clam chowder. It usually takes hinting for a week or so before we finally hit the grocery store and buy the ingredients.

Now six bowls and a couple of days into the latest batch, I can say it is the best yet. Here is the recipe. It is one of those "cook until done" recipes with lots of room for experimentation.  While we have other versions of this recipe, this is Glenda´s original

There are not many exact measurements but with the spirit of adventure you can make this chowder your own.

Cook until perfect five slices of bacon. Drain bacon on paper towel and save for later.

Leave the bacon drippings in the frying pan.

Take one large onion diced, one rib of celery diced and add to frying pan.
Cook until translucent in the bacon drippings.

Peel and cut into 1/2 inch cubes three large potatoes - yellow potatoes work best
Add potatoes, cooked onions and celery to a large pot.
Add water until it is two inches over the vegetables.

Cover, bring to a boil and simmer covered until potatoes are tender.
Add three tablespoons of Minor's Clam Base or Chicken Base

Add undrained three large cans (8 oz) of minced clams.
Bring back to a good simmer and let simmer for a few minutes.

Thicken chowder with flour and milk mixed together (approximately 1/2 cup flour mixed with 1 1/2 cups of milk- we use skim milk) Gradually add, while stirring constantly.

Cook until thickened, you might need to add more flour and milk, just experiment until you find how you like it.

Add one pint of half and half, simmer until hot, DO NOT BOIL after you add the half and half.

Salt and pepper to taste.

Serve with bacon crumbles and an optional 1/2 teaspoon of butter in each bowl. We have gotten bread bowls from Panera but usually we just serve with a piece of my fresh baked sourdough bread.

May the great clam be with you. Stay tuned for our cookbook.

On The Edge of the Continent

COVID-19 (Coronavirus) is already in Onslow County, just across the river from our home in Carteret County and in Craven County, another adjoining county so we know it is coming.  For just a while longer life here still revolves around the waters, fields, and forests that cover most of the county. Spring is definitely here and we might be doing some social distancing on the water soon.

I work at home like I have for most of my professional career. Social distancing is not going to change that work routine. Our company builds community fiber networks. While this virus will likely be good for our long-term business, no one wants their business to grow this way. Still, the coronavirus may be the shove needed for our country to get serious about fiber to the home which enables or improves a variety of services including telemedicine. We all might desperately need better connectivity in the next few weeks.

While I am worried about our local community which has not completely recovered from Florence, I remain optimistic because this is not your average place.

We moved to Carteret County, North Carolina fourteen years ago. The county is 62% water. The Croatan National Forest and its 158,000 acres are a buffer from most civilization. The almost untouched 56 miles of Cape Lookout National Seashore lies to the east. The 240 square miles Cape Lejeune covers our west flank and the Atlantic Ocean is our border to the south. We did not come to the county to get away from people, but people like the water in our big sounds and rivers are spread mighty thin.

My forty-year-old son declared while visiting us a few years ago that we were living on the edge of civilization. He lives in Northern Virginia, a land of epic traffic jams on multi-lane roads. Highway 58, the main access to the area, is just two lanes as it slices through miles of pine forest, pocosins and fields. It remains two lanes as it crosses the two-mile-long Cameron Langston Bridge to the beaches. It is not my son's favorite road.

As uncrowded as our area is, we are no strangers to challenges. Being on the Crystal Coast portion of the Southern Outer Banks, we have survived our fair share of hurricanes. Our schools were closed for two weeks for Florence which just happens to be the time Governor Cooper closed them for the coronavirus on March 14.

Saturday, March 14, was also scheduled to be the kick-off of our annual outdoor festival season with the Saint Patrick's Day Festival on Emerald Isle. It brings over 30,000 people to our little beach town which has a year-round population of under 3,700 people. It's cancellation this year is a big blow to the local economy. Emerald Isle, the largest of the area beach towns grows to 50,000 people briefly in the summer.  On March 19, Carteret County asked visitors not to come to the beaches. The same day Emerald Isle closed its public access beach parking.

That we are always prepared for the summer surge of people might make us hopefully a little better positioned to do well in the early stages of this crisis. If some areas are food deserts, we are a food oasis. We have six large modern grocery stores within five miles. They're virtually deserted from October until early May. Wednesday night I visited the Emerald Isle Publix, my car was the only one in the customer parking lot. While we have seen some shortages, it appears they are so far minor. One store might have eggs and/or bread, another hamburger, and another chicken.

Carteret County is also a farming area that grows a tremendous amount of produce. Rumor has it that a few farmers are already picking this year's first strawberries.  We know from the past, strawberries will be ripe and widely available in a couple of weeks. There are still people here like us with home gardens. We will enjoy our first lettuce from the garden this week. Many of our other services are designed to handle a short summer surge of business and hardly any of our storefronts shut down for the winter. All of that is good for today.

The long term outlook is unlikely to be so rosy. A coronavirus shock to tourism on top of a slow recovery from Florence will be tough on many small businesses that struggle to survive the winter so they can thrive for a few summertime weeks. A big hit to the early rental season makes our coastal area even more vulnerable to late-season Hurricane scares that also drive tourists away. We have already lost a number of restaurants and the ones that have gone to the expense of rebuilding definitely are going to be hurt by the recent closures.

Watching coronavirus is a little like watching a hurricane as it slowly makes its way towards your area. However, the analogy breaks down quickly since the drill most of us have internalized for hurricanes helps us little against a virus that we cannot see.

With coronavirus, we are following the government directives as we do for hurricanes. We trust that will make us safe.  Carteret County has good information available.  We remain hopeful even better instructions and wide-spread testing will follow. While our location is somewhat isolated, perhaps we are well enough connected to the rest of the world to learn from others' mistakes.

When we put our house on the market last year, we were excited to be moving closer to our grandchildren in the Charlotte metro area. Maybe the slow real estate season has turned out to be a blessing. Carteret County might be a good place to ride out the coronavirus storm. I cannot get very interested in looking for a new home right now.

Fifteen Years of My Own Words

The Point, Emerald Isle, NC

The Point, located on the far western end of Bogue Banks in the town of Emerald Isle, has great significance to me. For over a decade it has been the local place where I feel the closest to nature. I have written about it many times and even specifically about going to the ends of the sand which is not far from where this picture was taken.  The Point is also where my love affair with the Crystal Coast began in 1969 when my uncle Austin and I had to drive down the beach in my old Bronco to reach the Point.

I do not have to look back nearly as far as 1969 to remember that I wrote my first post on Typepad in November 2004.  This is post number 1,445 on View from the Mountain.  It has been seven years since we left the Mountain, but the blog continues to be one of my favorite soapboxes.  It is something of a minor tradition that I write an anniversary post. I hold up the tenth-anniversary post and the fourteenth-anniversary post as examples.

Much like the moment of clarity that I wrote about in this post, I have come to a few conclusions about our world.

1. First, there are many people in the world whose actions either intentionally or unintentionally are hostile to the rest of us. Often we are little but roadblocks in their schemes which often have more to do about their insecurities than anything else.
2. If you are trying to do what is right for the majority of the people, you are going to run into people who will oppose you. There are people out there who care more about themselves than about anything. The concept of the greater good is foreign to them. I have seen these people, had to deal with them and felt the hurt long after they have disappeared.
3. I have also come to realize that there are people who really do not care for facts unless the "facts" happen to bolster their own opinion. It is hard to understand but they seem to love to cling to the worst stories about people. Even if the narrative has no factual basis, it lets them rationalize their dislike, distrust or divorced from reality thoughts.  They deal in lies and rumor.
4. Another fact of life is that many people have trouble admitting that they are wrong. They will try to shovel the blame over on you even when it requires unbelievable contortions.  It is never their fault mainly because they dress in Teflon and everything slides off of them.
5. It is incumbent on us in our thoughts, our writings and our actions to call out the people who are trying to destroy our world. If you are silent, you are complicit.
6. If it requires a struggle to demonstrate balance in your subject matter, maybe you need to see if you are having to manufacture the balance.  To equate the influence of evangelical right on our politics with that of the religious left is a stretch that I am not willing to make.

That is it for the fifteenth-anniversary post.  As another fall comes to a close on the Crystal Coast, we are settling into our winter routine here along Raymond's Gut and the White Oak River as we finish this adventure and look forward to the next one.