View from the Mountain

The Sweet Sixteenth Anniversary Post

November Sunset White Oak River

This November will bring up the sixteenth anniversary of my first post on Typepad. November is a time for memories for me. 

I wrote on the web for a few years before I found Typepad and then used other platforms including my own site but I never gave up on Typepad. Spread across a few blogs on the service, I have over two thousand posts.  I write because it helps me figure things out and because I can look back sometimes and see how right or wrong I have been. Sometimes what I write helps people with a decision but mostly I write to clarify things in my own mind.

Perhaps I have never shared any great words of wisdom, but I have managed to get this far in life with respect for our lives and how we have lived them. Writing has helped me do that. My wife, Glenda, and I have had a wonderful adventure. Some of it has been hard with sleepless nights but there have been plenty of enjoyable times also. I have made some mistakes along the way but I have also stood up for a lot of things that I believed. Sometimes doing that was not easy and certainly not rewarding monetarily, but having the courage to do the right thing is how I was raised. I am proud of it and I am unlikely to change.

There are a lot of things in today's world that you cannot understand no matter how much you write about it. This has been a tough year.  If you had any innocence left, like me, you probably lost that innocence in 2020. 

Recently I was driving home from Lowe's Home Improvement on a Sunday afternoon.  Highway 58 where I was driving is a two-lane road when delivers much of our beach traffic to the beaches.  It is often easy to recognize beach traffic.  A mini-van or sport utility packed to the ceiling with a luggage carrier on top is a pretty good tipoff. As I was headed north what looked like a beach-bound mini-van heading south swerved well over into my lane.  It was close enough that I had to swerve also and I also blew my horn. Had I been going faster than the posted 45 MPH or not paying attention, I might have ended up in an accident.  The mini-van was easily doing 60 MPH. We have learned over the years that the closer some people get to the beach, the faster they drive. Supermarket parking lots can be dangerous on check-in days.

I can only speculate why the mini-van came into my lane. My first guess and the odds are that it is a good guess is that the driver was distracted by his or her cell phone. It happens all the time.  The question is what is so important that you would risk your family's lives so close, literally just a few miles, from your vacation destination? It appears some have become so connected that it impossible to disconnect and focus on important things. That includes parents who go on walks with their children but never take their eyes off their cell phone.  Like my mother would say, "Who raised those folks?"

Some other things about the current state of our country baffle me. How can people who exclaim their extreme loyalty to our country think they are helping the country by intimidating others who are trying to vote or participate in the political process?  Since when is it okay to use pepper spray on a peaceful march that included children and was only headed to vote? Even more scary, what gives you the right to force a bus containing a political opponent, the former vice president of the United States, off the road. Intimidation and violence have no place in the world that I hope will welcome my grandchildren. Between political intimidation and people too stupid to wear masks during a pandemic, I am not sure what our world will be like when I write next year's post if I am lucky enough to be around. I hope the future looks a little brighter.

I will close with some observations from my last year's post. They have hardly changed.

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 own 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 divorce from reality.  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. A goal for us all in our thoughts, our writings, and our actions is to call out the people who are trying to destroy our world. If you are silent, you are complicit.
6. Finally, if you are struggling to demonstrate balance in your thoughts, maybe you need to see if your subject requires a stand instead of balance.

 

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.

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."

 

So Much to Learn, So Little Time

If you are really lucky when you finish your formal schooling, you will have enough skills to get that first job where you will likely figure out that the most important thing you picked up in school is how to learn.

I can still remember taking over the balancing of my mother's checkbook. It happened sometime in my elementary school days.  She was a single mom and worked long hours. I was good at math and it was one less thing she had to do as she worked to keep us afloat.  I got to feel like I was helping and it was the first practical application of my schooling and mother was all about applying what you learned.

There are lots of things you learn in a journey through life.  Certainly I came out of high school knowing how to study information.  College and the events taking place while I was there taught me how to look at information, evaluate it, form my own opinions and put it down on paper in a way that might explain it to others.

I took a somewhat different path after college and moved to an old farm in Nova Scotia. There I ended up learning lots of other things such as wiring a house, doing copper plumbing, painting, roofing, making cabinets and even cooking.  They were more survival skills than skills that would help me in my unusual set of careers.

Sometimes learning only amounts to figuring out that you really do not know as much as you thought you did.  I bought a few head of mixed breed beef cattle early in my days in Nova Scotia.  One of the first things that happened is that a neighbor's dairy cattle got into a pasture with them.  I look back and laugh that I had a hard time telling the difference between my mostly red and brown beef cattle and the neighbor's mostly black and white dairy cattle.  They all looked like cows.

Ten years later just from an all black cow's profile I could tell someone the origin of most the seventy cows that were on our farm in Tay Creek, New Brunswick. I could look at a calf and pretty well tell you the bull that was his father. 

When we sold all of our cattle, a gift of Apple II+ computer from my mother in the summer of 1982 presented another learning opportunity and ended up changing my family's life. Mastering VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet, DB Master, one of the first databases, and early word processing software propelled me into the world of technology.

Writing and working with numbers became easier because of the amazing power even of an early computer. Doing a printed newsletter for the Angus Association which had hired me as Maritime fieldman went from a week's worth of work to just a few hours.  Understanding the savings in time that came from computers made me a natural for the early days of computer sales and eventually led to a career of nearly twenty years at Apple.

You learn a lot in twenty years.  I learned to lead, motivate, and delegate. I also had to manage large budgets, to hire and fire people, to work with huge corporate egos and I figured out how to publish to the web. Along the way I learned even more about technology especially networking and also got to be on the leading edge of photography becoming digital and going to the web.

It has been eleven years since my exit from Apple. I am back in technology absorbing as much as possible, sometimes writing about it, but mostly using it to help others understand how to help create the infrastructure that will drive job creation in this century.

About a year ago in my second term as a board member for our homeowners association, I felt like I had been thrust into another situation where I had to take some skills learned along the way and apply them to a new and challenging problem.  Our association was spending about $60,000 a year and no one really knew where the money was going and how it was being accounted for on the books.  A lot of spreadsheets and checkbook balancing later, I can guarantee that I know where our money is going and who is paying their dues on time.

Almost sixty years ago I was balancing a checkbook with a pencil and paper. Today I have new tools to do it but the math is the same, the numbers are just bigger and the statements are online on the web.  Now we work with digital images of checks.  No one had a glimmer of the web back in the days of my mother's beauty shop. Today I make the appointment for my haircut with an app on my phone.  While technology has become all pervasive, I also have learned to read the water in our river and inlet almost like a book and I do it just with my eyes.

The world and its endless possibilities will never stop changing. To stop learning is to put the brakes on life.  The only solution is adapting to change through continual learning.  We especially need to learn as much as possible from those folks who have been here longer than us.  The only thing more amazing than the amount of knowledge most people accumulate during a lifetime is how much of it goes to the grave with them and how little of it is ever passed on to the next generation.