The Canada I miss

A Few Cows

Angus Cattle-Tay Ridge Farm

Cows are interesting creatures. They can prosper off of land and food that few other animals can manage.  They are very hardy and survive all sorts of extremes of weather.  They are very focused animals. They like eating and spend most of their time doing that.  They do not like being on two sides of a fence.  They want to be together as a herd and they do operate under the principle that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.  While they might appear docile, they can be aggressive when protecting their young.  Watching two bulls fighting over a herd of cattle will change your opinion of cattle forever. I knew none of this years ago when I first got my feet muddy as a cattleman.

In the summer of 1972, a year after graduating from Harvard, I was living on a small farm along the shores of the Bay of Fundy.  I had taken $6,500 given to me by my mother and bought an old farm of 140 acres.  The first year was been spent getting the old house livable.  It was an interesting experience and more details can be found in our book, A Taste for the Wild, Canada's Maritimes.

 That same summer of 1972, I bought a few head of cattle.  We had lots of pasture and enough farm equipment to make hay cost a little over $10,000.  It seemed like a reasonable step at the time.  At least it was not law school.  Of course it did not take long to learn that cows are not very reasonable.  Our cows got mixed up with a neighbor's dairy cows when the dairy cattle broke through one of our fences.  We did not know enough to even tell the difference between our cows and his.  With the dairy farmer's help we got them sorted out.  I should have stopped while I was ahead but I was young and foolish.

About a year later I got married and by then I had decided that I wanted to try serious farming but I had figured out that the foggy shores Nova Scotia's North Mountain was not the place to be successful. I had learned a few things in the short time with the cattle. Number one was that putting up hay in square bales was a lot of work.

We ended up buying a farm twenty miles north of Fredericton, New Brunswick.  We sold our first set of cows before we left Nova Scotia .  Then we bought some Charolais-Angus cross heifers (young females), six purebred Angus cows, and a few head of mixed breed cattle that were already on the New Brunswick farm.  That would have likely been enough but I headed out to Manitoba and Saskatchewan that winter and brought back a tractor trailer load of cows and a bull. It was not long before we were having sixty calves a year.  It was an immersion course into being a cattleman.

All those cattle required lots of hay and some barns. We built the barns and became experts at making round bales of hay. Most years we put up six hundred big round bales weighing around a ton each. Our mature cattle wintered in the woods so we did not use the barns to house them in the winter.  We used the barns to take care of the yearlings and for calving later in the spring.

Cows have to be fed every day when they cannot get enough food from grazing. In the winter that meant snow removal was a big chore.  It was close to a mile back to the woods where the cattle spent the winter.  Usually one big round bale a day took care of the cows. Almost another bale was required for the young animals and the bulls. 

In February and March the cows were brought in close to the calving barn.  Most nights for those two months, I had to walk to the barn and check the woods around the barn to see if a cow was calving.  It was around three tenths of a mile from the house and I usually made a trip at 8PM, midnight, and 4AM.  If I found a new born calf,  I would "walk" it to the barn between my legs and the mother would follow.  They would be put into an inside pen for a couple of days until I was certain they were doing well. A calf born in a snow storm or cold rain required extra attention.  We lost only a couple of calves over our ten years of farming and never had to have a vet come to the farm. We lost one cow to problems in the ten years.

Still there was plenty of excitement. Cows require lots of attention to details like fences.  It is also a challenge to balance the amount of pasture you need for your cattle.  Some years when it rains less, there is less grass in the pasture.  As soon as the snow is out of the woods in April, it is time to start fencing. Fencing meant getting covered with old woodsman black fly repellent. Fencing was my least favorite part of farming since it was impossible to do it well enough to be cow or moose proof.

There are as many cow tales as there are cow tails.  The first time we weaned the calves, we made the mistake of going to dinner at a friends house.  We had not gotten a bite of the main course when the phone rang and we heard the dreaded news, "the cows are out."  Trust me there are lots of things more fun than chasing black cows through knee deep snow in the dark on a very cold night.  It was more fun that trying to find a group of heifers that had been chased off one of our farms by kids on motorcycles.  That took a month before I got them to follow me back to pen where we could put them on a truck and bring them home.

We had one cow that learned to jump a fence almost flat footed.  I did not believe until I saw it myself.  I sent her off to become hamburger.  Perhaps the funniest adventure was Rosie, our milk cow.  She was supposed to be my wife's milk cow, but she ended up mine.  I was told that she was halter broken so we led her off the truck with a rope and halter. She then proceeded to drag me around the dooryard until I could get a rope around the bumper of our big four-wheel drive truck.

After we sold our cattle in 1982, we kept a few cattle for some buyers who did not have room for them.  I was pleased that I did not get any calls that the "the cows were out" while they stayed with us.  I was happy to see them go.  Here are a few pictures of the farm and some others of our first farm in Nova Scotia.

Maybe cows are a little like a boat.  You are almost as happy to see the boat leave as you were to see it arrive.  When I hear about someone getting a few cows, I restrain myself from saying anything.  Some things you just have to learn about the hard way, and cows are one of those things.

A Misty Nova Scotia Day in North Carolina

Raymond's Gut on a Nova Scotia day

We have actually have been through a remarkable stretch of sunny but windy weather along the Crystal Coast, but Wednesday, May 18, 2016 reminded me a lot of a day in Nova Scotia. As my wife says it was one of those days that can happen in any maritime climate. We did not get much rain, but for much of the day the air was filled with mist.

When you live near the water, you can get caught in a damp pattern while areas just inland enjoy sunshine.  That very reason drove us to move from Nova Scotia the first time in the fall of 1974.  I tried farming along the shore of the Bay of Fundy and found that the weather made it very hard to make hay.  Often we would have a day of mist or fog while just inland from us, the temperatures would be in the eighties and people would be making hay.  We ended up moving north of Fredericton, New Brunswick.  While it was only fifty or sixty miles from the Bay of Fundy instead of just a mile, we could count on good haying weather most of the time.  We needed it since we often put up five hundred or more tons of hay to feed our herd of 200 red and black Angus at Tay Ridge Angus.

Still there was something peaceful about a misty day along the shore.  Usually in Nova Scotia those misty days were cool ones since the Bay of Fundy barely got into the lower fifties during the middle of summer and often was in the forties.  You get used to cool weather but you miss warm weather and things that come with it.  Perhaps the climate has warmed some but back in the early seventies, tomatoes were a late August crop and corn was a challenge.  However you could grow five gallon buckets of broccoli and more English peas than you would think possible.

While we were lucky to have soil dry enough to garden in the heavy clay of the North Mountain by the end of May, where we live along the North Carolina coast, our spinach, lettuce and broccoli are already done until fall by mid-May. Summer is almost on us and we are looking forward to it and the visitors that it brings. Our water temperatures are already around seventy degrees so we rarely cool below the sixties this time of year.  However this has been a cool spring so we have seen the forties at least once and a few fifties.

Living in any coastal area will bring you closer to mother nature.  The weather can turn on a dime and can turn on you without much warning.  I was recently kayaking and a heavy rainstorm sneaked up on me. Fortunately it was a warm rain but I still got very wet and was reminded that storms can take different paths without telegraphing their moves.  While Nova Scotia never got very warm in summer, it also never reached the depths of cold that we saw in New Brunswick where winter often brought temperatures in the minus twenty Fahrenheit range and sometimes even bottomed out at minus forty.

It you look at the picture at the top of the post and squint your eyes enough to make our long leaf pines become spruce trees and turn the air conditioning down to about 65F, you might get some idea of a misty cool day in Nova Scotia.  Of course it would more likely be 45F in Nova Scotia but temperature is all relative. Fifty degrees this time of year on the NC coast feels like winter to me.  As my wife says, you would not feel that cold if you would give up the shorts and t-shirts and put on some clothes.  Come to think of it, I think wearing shorts along the Bay of Fundy was pretty much a rarity.

You can see some pictures of our farmstead and two hundred year old house at this link.

Not A Typical Canadian Beach

The Point, Emerald Isle, NC

The last few years that we lived in Canada, we actually managed to take a few vacations to the beach. The decade or so before that we were running a cattle operation just north of Fredericton, New Brunswick.  As any farmer will tell you, vacations are very hard to do when you have lots of animals especially in an area like ours where fences were optional at the back of our farms. 

PEI and its beaches managed to capture us a couple of times after we moved off the farm and back to Nova Scotia.  As beautiful as the windswept and sandy north shore of PEI is, there is little warmth in those waters.  People kept telling us to try the Northumberland Strait on the south side of the island where we were assured the waters were very warm.

We were never successful in finding a nice beach on that side of the island and certainly the beaches we found near our home in Halifax, Nova Scotia were far too chilly for swimming.  Even the lakes would turn the children blue.  We were thankful for the wonderful indoor public swimming pool near our home in Clayton Park.  What we did find one year was our way back to the North Carolina beaches our youth.

That summer we headed home and stopped at my mother's house in Mount Airy, North Carolina. From there we made our way to Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina.  On the way we stopped at a fast food restaurant somewhere in North Carolina's toasty coastal plain.  It was so hot as we got out of the car that the asphalt pavement in the parking lot was soft.  However, the beach was worth the drive, our children played in the water without even during blue.  It was the beginning of their love affair with the Carolina coast.

We eventually moved back to the states and ended up in Roanoke, Virginia.  We lived there seventeen years just one year longer than our sojourn to Canada Maritimes lasted.  Our years in Roanoke often had a summer vacation on North Carolina's Northern Outer Banks.  We visited Corolla, Duck, Nags Head, South Nags and Buxton at the foot of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse.

Back in 2003 as I could see the handwriting on the wall that Apple no longer needed my services after almost twenty years. That same year we took a thirtieth anniversary trip to Beaufort, North Carolina.  It did not take me long to decide that I wanted to spend the next decade or so of my life with my toes in warm salt water.  In 2006 we bought a home on the water in Carteret County near Swansboro, North Carolina.  For a while we kept our home in Roanoke, but in 2012 we sold our home and quit commuting between the mountains and the coast.

I have spent almost all of the nine years since we bought our place exploring the waters and beaches of Carteret County's Crystal Coast.  There are a lot of reasons that I love living in Carteret County but one that I rarely articulate is that it reminds me a lot of Canada's Maritimes. The Crystal Coast especially the water is just a whole lot warmer.  One of things I loved so much about the Maritimes was the friendliness of the people and the closeness to nature.  I have found both here on the Crystal Coast.

Behind our home is Raymond's Gut which does not travel far from our dock before joining the nearly two miles wide White Oak River.  The White Oak flows into Bogue Sound which winds its way out to Bogue Inlet and the Atlantic Ocean. Bogue Inlet is right between two of my favorite spots, the Point at Emerald Isle and the ocean part of Hammocks Beach State Park, Bear Island.

I love this place so much that in 2012, I wrote a travel guide to help people enjoy and appreciate all the natural wonders of the area.  Our book is now in its third edition and has grown to over 180 pages with over 100 full color images, several maps, recipes and dozens of links to more information.  It is a little over $20 for the full color paperback version, but you can get the five star Kindle version for only $3.99 and it is updated each year.

Many of our Canadian friends have visited us and go away with an appreciation for this special spot.  We are not Myrtle Beach with lots of shows and shopping.  We are actually very rural and with 158,000 acres of Croatan National Forest on one side, 56 miles of Cape Lookout Seashore on another, and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, that is unlikely to change. There is no better place to take a walk on a beach with mostly stars for light.

I have walked all the miles of beach within the town of Emerald Isle and I think they are some of the best around. Some like the Point might even wrap itself around you. 

A good place to start for information is my free online travel guide.  We are about six or seven hours south of Washington, DC and Nags Head is a day trip for us.  Read about all my special spots in our Kindle travel guide, A Week at the Beach, The Emerald Isle Travel Guide.

Playing What If With Water

White Oak River just north of Swansboro, NC

I have vivid memories from living in the Martimes from 1971 through 1987.

At the time I thought the blues and greens of Nova Scotia were unlike any that I had ever seen. 

Some of the snows we lived through in New Brunswick were truly epic storms that we will always remember and that grow deeper with each telling of the story.

In certain ways living north of the border was like rolling back the clock.  Life in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in the seventies was much like growing up in North Carolina in the fifties.  Neighbors had a similar feeling of trust towards each other and children played outside with a freedom that is unheard of today.

Twenty-seven years later, I am living along North Carolina's Crystal Coast, another spot with amazing blues and greens.  I have changed a lot and so has the world arround me. My wife and I even wrote a book, A Taste for the Wild - Canada's Maritimes, about some of the changes that we noticed north of the border after a 2012 trip to our favorite part of Canada.

Hurricane Arthur recently brushed our area but went on to devastate parts of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Friends who have a farm just one mile from where we used to have our Tay Ridge Angus farm twenty miles north of Fredericton were without power for over a week and had tremendous damage to their woodlot.  Fredericton lost over 4,000 trees in the storm.

While our area on the coast of North Carolina is in general well prepared for hurricanes. New Brunswick is much better prepared for snow storms.  This started me wondering how my life would been different in Canada if I had lived on the North Carolina coast before I lived in the Maritimes.

One of the big differences in life here on the Southern Outer Banks is how much time we spend on the water.  In my case I am either kayaking, visiting the marshes, or out by the big water in our boat, a 20 ft. Sundance skiff.  The skiff was a new addition to our life after we moved here, but I have logged well over 225 hours in it and that does not count the countless hours bouncing at anchor someplace in Bogue Inlet.

When we lived in Nova Scota we were on the Bay of Fundy where tides are up to 28 feet. Here in Carteret county our tides are generally from 1.5 to 3 feet.  Much of the White Oak River and other water that we kayak on is less than three or four feet deep.  There are places where I float above the oyster rocks that the water is so shallow that the oyster rock is well above water at low tide.

When I think back to the waters that were part of my life in Canada, I am doubtful that having boated in the warm waters of Bogue Sound would be sufficient training for the harsh cold waters off of Canada's east coast or especially the huge tides and very cold waters of the Bay of Fundy.  The summer water temperatures of the Bay of Fundy are between 46F and 54F.  Our water temperature in the middle of July is 84F.  As a safety precaution I usually decline to kayak in water below 50F because while the water often looks very enticing in early spring, it can be deadly.  Sixty percent of the people who drown, drown in water that is below 50F.  I was pretty sure that the Bay of Fundy might not be a place that people would kayak, but I found a YouTube video of people doing just that.  Still I am not certain that I would.

I can still remember seeing fishing boats grounded in the mud at low tide in the Bay of Fundy.  Here on the shores of the White Oak River, we can have our skiff on a simple lift.  Obviously that is impossible on the Bay of Fundy, but certainly there are Nova Scotia lakes and spots in sheltered coves of the Atlantic where it would be possible. While I was able to find the YouTube video on kayaking easily, boating information seemed to be clogged up with boats for sale.  I did find that Nova Scotia has a tremendous number of boat launches so I am guessing there are lots of boats to go with them.

Likely the boating season in the Maritimes is much shorter than ours here on the North Carolina coast.  Our season actually stretches through all twelve months.  Usually our waters only get as cold as the Bay of Fundy for a few weeks during the winter and then warm quickly.  The heat captured by our waters helps us have a magnificent fall where we surf fish in warm waters and enjoy cool air temperatures.  Kayaking into December is something we count on here.  Often November is one of our best fishing months.

New Brunswick with large lakes and the Saint John River might be a better boating home than Nova Scotia, but then what about Prince Edward Island?  It did not take a lot of searching to figure out that Prince Edward Island is a premier boating and kayaking destination with summer water temperatures in the sixties.  While I might not do any swimming in 64F water, I would probably try kayaking and I certainly would feel comfortable in my skiff.

My guess is that if I had lived in coastal North Carolina before living in Canada, I might well have ended up in Prince Edward Island instead of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Now that would have been another interesting adventure.

 

Snow Storm Memories

Snowy barn in Tay Creek, New Brunswick

My wife has given up trying to understand or explain the changes that I have gone through. Today it is hard to convince me to leave the warmth of the Crystal Coast.

Forty years ago I loved the snow and was living in a very old farmhouse on the shores of the Bay of Fundy. Somehow I convinced the love of my life to leave family and friends and move to snowy Canada with me.

It did not take long for her to find out about snow.  We got married in the heat of August in North Carolina and just a little over a month later a surprise snowstorm of twelve inches hit our Nova Scotia farm that September. I wrote about that event in a post called, My Wife's First Nova Scotia Snow.

In those years snow was just another challenge to me. When we got married, I was actually in the midst of evaluating a move to Newfoundland. The western part where I was looking is a lot snowier than Nova Scotia but a trip up there with my new wife and a visit to the barrens by float plane put an end to that idea.

It is a great story and part of our book, A Taste for the Wild, Canada's Maritimes. The book talks about our early years in Canada and the changes we saw during a return trip we made to New Brunswick in the fall of 2012.

I have told a number of folks the story about the Newfoundland barrens and the drunken hunters at the moose camp there is worth every penny of the $2.99 price of the book.

Newfoundland got rejected not because it had too much snow but because it had too few trees and the long ferry ride made it too far away. We actually ended up in an even snowier place, Tay Creek, New Brunswick. The Google place marker actually is just to the left of our old farmhouse and the road that we had made out to the new barns we built for our cattle herd which eventually numbered over 200.

That first winter when we were in Tay Creek, I kept track of the snowfall. We had twenty three feet of snow that year. There were times when six feet of snow was on the ground in our fields.

Snow was part of life in Tay Creek. There was still some on the property when we first looked at it during an early weekend in May 1974. Snow was already on the ground when we moved there during November of 1974. We did not see bare ground again until months later in April of 1975.

That first winter we snowshoed a lot and learned about breaking trail in very deep snow.  I had a ball with my cross country skis on those beautiful trails. We only had a handful of cattle so there was time to enjoy the snow. We did buy a tractor mounted snowblower and it was to become an essential part of our lives.

Most mornings during the winter, I started the day by shoveling snow. It was not unusual for it to snow five or six inches during the night. The snowplows did not even bother with that tiny amount of snow. When it did not snow, there was usually snow sliding off the roof of the house. One way or the other you ended up shoveling for most of the winter. You learned that keeping up with the snow was a Canadian virtue that made life a lot easier in the snowy north.

You might guess that in a land as snowy as Tay Creek it would take some impressive storms to stand out in your memory. Getting a foot or so of snow really was no big deal in Tay Creek. However, getting two to three feet at one time sticks out in your memory even in place where the old timers swore that we had "eleven months of winter and one month of damn poor sledding."

One storm in April of 1975 delivered over three feet of heavy wet snow. Even with my heavy duty equipment it took me hours to clean the one quarter of mile of road to our first barn. Our cattle were wintered in the woods three quarters of a mile farther back. It was twenty four hours before I finally got back to feed them the next day.

The most impressive storm that hit us in the ten years we lived in Tay Creek came just on the heels of the coldest weather that we ever experienced. We complain here on North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks when the temperature does not make it out of the forties. Cold in Canada is completely different. You know you are headed for a bad spell when today's low is tomorrow's high. It is especially bad when you start at something like minus ten degrees Fahrenheit and the temperature drops five to ten degrees each day for a week.

It was January 16, 1982 and we had finally bottomed out at minus 40 degrees. It was a time of extreme life threatening cold. The seats in our vehicles were like concrete because the moisture in the foam had frozen. When I rode out to feed the cattle using our tractor without a cab, the only uncovered part of me was my eyes. The moisture in your breath would freeze immediately on anything it touched even your own face mask.

Often when it got very cold, we would joke that it was going to have to warm up to snow. Usually at very cold temperatures, we had little wind and almost no precipitation except that any residual moisture in the air would freeze and fall to the ground as a strange instant snow as the temperatures got colder. January of 1982, was different.  We had extreme cold, wind, and lots of snow. This picture taken looking off our porch at the peak of the storm. It gives you an idea of how bad it was during that memorable storm.

It was a storm that will always be fresh in my mind since our youngest daughter was born just as it got started. Fortunately I made it the twenty miles to town in our big four wheel drive truck with my pregnant wife. We were also extremely lucky that she had a relatively quick delivery because my truck would never have started if it had been turned off in the extreme cold for more than a couple of hours.

As soon as I was sure that everything was okay at the hospital, I headed back home. It was so cold at home that we had hung blankets over all the windows the day before. My mother who was seventy-two at the time was keeping our other two children. I barely made it home and I can still remember the wonderful meal she had prepared. After twenty miles of driving in a blizzard, my mother's fried chicken was a treat. It was also a relief to be safely at home.

Schools hardly ever closed in Tay Creek. That next day they closed the schools because of the extreme cold.  Also some snowbanks were so tall that they were worried about children playing on them running into power lines. One section of  the road in Tay Creek near the village's store was actually so blocked by huge drifts that they sent the airport snowblower from Fredericton out to clear it so the regular plows could keep it open.

There have been other storms in my life, but the one in January of 1972 probably tops the list. When you get over two feet of snow and the temperature has been minus 40 with wind speeds of fifty to sixty miles per hour, it is hard to top. It took a long time to get cleaned up after that storm, but we survived.

While Canada and New Brunswick in particular are certainly places that can be called the home of real snow, I do remember one very impressive storm in the mountains of Virginia. We got over twenty inches of snow mixed with sleet. These pictures will give you an idea of what the snow looked like. I got pretty upset with VDOT for taking so long to clear a path up the mountain. They finally did send a road grader to clean our road. In Canada I had equipment that could clear roads, that was not the case in Virginia.

Today in 2013, I would rather be kayaking in the fog on our river than isolated by a snow storm. The funny thing is my wife does not understand my love of kayaking on the river in the fog any better than she did my love of snow storms in the seventies. However, she has learned to put up with the unusual things I enjoy.

The picture at the top of the post was taken in Tay Creek, New Brunswick in December, 2013, by good friends who live about a mile from our old farm.  I think they got another big storm the weekend of December 21, but I have not gotten pictures of it yet.

The Long Walk To The Barn

One of our Tay Creek barns

Many years ago in the seventies my wife and I were running a cattle farm located about twenty miles north of Fredericton, New Brunswick.  We eventually had about two hundred head of cattle with around 65 calves being born each year.

The calves were typically born in February and March which as you might guess is a snowy time in the part of Canada where we lived.  For some reason, calves like to be born at night.  

Raising cattle is not the kind of thing you do with lots of help so during calving season I would make two to three trips a night to our calving area which was the woods around another barn a little farther away than the one in the picture.

The walk up the hill to the small field by the woods where the cattle were fenced was not a long one.  Even with the walk back to the house it was only about six tenths of a mile.  However, a good part of it went through the grove of tall spruce trees that separated our farm house from the barns.

Of course there were no street lights and you had to go no matter what the weather.  If I found a cow that had calved, I would walk the new calf to the barn between my legs and the new mother would follow.  I would put the calf and cow in a stall filled with nice clean straw.  Depending on the weather they would stay in the open front barn two to three days and then go back to join the herd.  The front part of the barn was arranged so that the calves could get under cover on dry straw during wet weather.  With the barn facing south it made a nice place for them on a sunny day.  Sometimes the straw looked like it was blanketed with calves.  I remember looking up there one time and my oldest daughter who had just started school was sitting there in the sunshine in the middle of a dozen sleeping Angus calves.

Walking through the dark woods in an almost wilderness area, never really bothered me.  I always figured that there was nothing in the woods that could harm me in the winter time.  All the bears and there were lots of them were hibernating.  The moose were deep in the swamps and the rest of the critters were more afraid of me than I was of them.

There is one thing almost certain about the northern woods.  When the temperature is down around minus twenty-eight Fahrenheit, there are no crazed muggers hiding in the three to four feet of snow in the spruce forest.  They would be frozen like a Popsicle pretty quick.

Walking in the dark in almost silence is a rather unique experience.  As someone who takes lots of pictures during daylight, it makes me use different senses. I have an opportunity to focus on my thoughts rather than where I am going to take my next picture.  There is no television, no computer, and no music.  While I usually have my smart-phone in my pocket, it never rings on my walks.  All it does is record the distance that I have walked.  I long ago took Facebook off my phone because all the status updates were too annoying.

If you have a safe place to walk at night, it is a great experience.  You have to let go of all your fears of the dark.   If you are not used to being alone in the dark outside, it is probably not a good idea to watch a bunch of crazy television vampire shows before you go on your walk unless television vampires have a hard time haunting you.

While things might wander through my mind, there are no vampires floating around in my head on my walks so that is not a problem of mine.  I hardly even watch the television news these days much less scary vampire stories.

I have been in places where even I decided to not walk in the dark.  I still remember one of my first nights in Washington, DC, during my career at Apple.  It was a nice June evening and I wanted to walk down to see the White House.  It was a short walk, but as I started out the door of the Hyatt Regency, the doorman stopped me.  He told me that I was the wrong color to be walking around in that DC neighborhood in the evening.  Being new to the DC area, I took his advice.  My neighbor in Columbia, Maryland, had just been carjacked in his Volvo the previous week.

We now live on North Carolina's Crystal Coast, a long way from our old farm in New Brunswick.  Coastal North Carolina and Carteret County where we live is a remarkable, almost wild place.  We have the Croatan National Forest of 158,000 acres cradling our back.  To the north and east of us is the 56 miles of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore.  To the south is the Atlantic Ocean and to the west on the other side of our two mile wide river, the White Oak, are the thousands of wild acres of Camp Lejeune.

While we live in a subdivision with just over forty homes, my walks at night are in a section that only has one occupied home in it.  The distance to the end of the road there is almost exactly the distance that I used to walk to the barn in Tay Creek.  Maybe that is why I feel so comfortable. In 2013, the biggest difference is that I have the benefit of a couple of street lights.  Also the road is paved and the temperature might get to twenty eight Fahrenheit only a couple of times a year. It never gets to minus twenty-eight.

As I was walking the other night, the fog was rolling in off the river and the moon kept sliding behind the clouds.  Someone had turned on almost all the lights in the one home along my path, but I could tell no one was home.  The home looked a little spooky with the fog swirling around the blazing lights which seemed to be trying to ward off the fog.  I could hear our local owl hooting in the distance.  When I made the turn to head back home, a great blue heron squawked at me for disturbing his nap.

The walks I take these days in the dark do not bother me any more that the ones I took over thirty years ago.  While I am a lot older and slower, our bears are over in the national forest.  I have only seen one alligator passing through out waters in seven years and I never seen or heard any big coyotes around so I feel pretty safe.

I would rather be walking in the dark streets through the pine forests along the White Oak River than almost any street in any town in the world.  It might look a little spooky in the fog, but even the fog is a pretty rare event.  The warmth of the marsh often comforts me and prepares me for a good night's rest.

I cannot think of any place I would rather be even in the dark.

 

My Wife's First Nova Scotia Snow

We were married in the heat of a North Carolina August day in 1973. 

I had been living in the old farmhouse overlooking the Bay of Fundy for nearly two years when we got married that summer. 

When I bought the farmhouse, barn, and 140 acres in the late spring of 1971, the house was pink. A lot of work had gone into making it sort of livable.

By the time we got back from North Carolina after a summer of getting ourselves and friends married, the huge garden was so weedy that I had to mow between the rows before I could till them.  Learning how to garden, preserve food, and make hay was all part of the experience of living in Nova Scotia that still makes me fondly remember those first few years right after college.

We lived in the little village of Saint Croix Cove between the small harbor towns of Hampton and Port Lorne.  It was a long ride into Bridgetown for any groceries or supplies.  Bridgetown did not even have a supermarket in those days. At the time the road along the shore was dirt.  My first two winters there I had been amazed at how we could get a storm that would start out as snow, change to rain, and back to snow.  The road would go from frozen solid with snow drifts to mud to frozen ruts dusted with snow all in twenty-four hours.

September is one of the special months in the Maritimes. People are cleaning up their gardens and getting ready for the winter. We were working away at the remnants of the garden while my new wife battled homesickness as all her friends were over 1,200 miles away.  Our old farmhouse with hand-hewn beams was a work in process and very different from the modern apartment in Greensboro, North Carolina, where she lived before I convinced her to come to Nova Scotia.

Fortunately, we had added a brick chimney and a stone fireplace the first winter because in September of 1973 a surprise snow storm hit us.  We got almost a foot of heavy wet snow.  Not only did it take the power out, but it also blocked our link with the town, the shore road.  Luckily, we had enough wood cut to keep warm. We also had some kerosene lamps for light.  We managed to cook what we needed over the fire in our fireplace.

Joe, one of our neighbors who had made his living herding sheep, figured out that he could take the bar off his chainsaw and use it run our belt driven pumps so we could have some water.   My wife remembers sitting by the fire and finishing an afghan that she had started at some time during college.

It was a tough introduction to Nova Scotia for my wife, but we are still married over forty years later.  I remember the power being out for several days.  What made us the happiest was the snow plow finally clearing the road.  For anyone who has never lived in an isolated settlement, it is hard to properly describe how excited you can get with the big road grader with a mounted V-plow comes roaring through the night with lights flashing and snow swirling around it. It looks like an alien spaceship, but it is certainly a welcome sight after a big storm.

There were several more snow storms the first winter for my wife.  She got see some of the more traditional Nova Scotia snow that often blows from one shore of the province to other as the wind changes.  Our old house was very hard to heat and she still complains about having to plan her showers for days when the wind was not blowing so she would not freeze.

I still remember nearly freezing my cheeks cross-country skiing down the big field behind our farmhouse.  Those Nova Scotia times still linger with us.  The beautiful blue waters of North Carolina's Crystal Coast and the rural nature of Carteret County with its surrounding Croatan National Forest, Bogue Sound, and Cape Lookout National Seashore are good reminders.

You can read more about how we got to Nova Scotia and a recent trip back in our book, A Taste for the Wild - Canada's Maritimes.  The cover picture is my wife with Tok, one our Labrador Retrievers, in the big hay field behind the house overlooking the Bay Fundy.

 

Memories Of Canadian Waters

Waters Just Outside Bogue Inlet, August 28, 2013

Something about the water that we found just outside of Bogue Inlet on August 28, 2013, reminded me of Canada. 

I do not remember ever seeing any waters in Canada that looked like these Crystal Coast waters,

The waters along the shores of Atlantic Canada often looked like the rough waters just outside of Bogue Inlet that we saw in late summer of 2013.  These waters beat us up enough that we stayed less than hour before looking for a calmer place to fish.

Of course waters often change from day to day, a couple of weeks prior to taking that shot I snapped this picture.  The photo that I took on August 19 shows even a more dramatic difference. With the water being very calm we were able to enjoy our time out there a lot more than the day when the whipped up waters attacked us from all sides. 

Perhaps my memory is not serving me well, but I remember very few times when the Bay of Fundy near our place in St. Croix Cove, Nova Scotia, was ever calm.  Low tide seemed to be the only time when the water was almost at peace with itself.

Of course having a tide of twenty-eight feet might have something to do with those stirred up waters.  There are other events that help me remember rough Canadian waters.  I made several trips on the Bluenose Ferry that used to travel the waters between Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, and Bar Harbor, Maine. 

As I recount in my book, A Taste For The Wild, Canada's Martimes, I can remember napping on one of  the Bluenose's long sofas and seeing some of the heavy weighted ash trays slide by as we rocked and rolled in the water.  Of course that was nothing like the trips by ferry to Newfoundland where they chained down each corner of your vehicle. 

My last crossing to Prince Edward Island before they built the causeway was during a fierce winter storm that had waves breaking over the bow of the icebreaker that was hauling us to the island.  The water was freezing as soon as it hit the steel hull.

The few years we lived high on a hill near Mount Saint Vincent University overlooking Halifax Harbor gave us a calmer view of the water.  Still as is often the case, you remember those stormy days long after you might remember a normal day.

All of us that live near the water know that it can change quickly.  Often a storm like Hurricane Irene can whip up even the waters of a calm little inlet like ours. We live just off the White Oak River not far from Swansboro, North Carolina, and we are pretty well protected.  Of course during a hurricane the waves over at the ocean are pretty wild, but we often have a hard time seeing them since the big bridge to the barrier island is closed during storms.  These pictures of some surfers during one of our storms are a good reminder of how stirred up our water can get.

Living by or near to the water is a great privilege, but it does come with some challenges as you can see from these Irene pictures.  Being close to the water seems to magnify weather, but on the other hand we can get some great sunset pictures on the water. I also would not be able to enjoy fishing ten months out of the year if I did not live on the water here on the Southern Outer Banks.

The rough waters outside Bogue Inlet on one day will not keep us from going back there.  I will enjoy the Canadian memories that they trigger and keep going back until we get to enjoy another one of those days when the water is bathtub calm.

There is one big difference in our waters from the Canadian waters that I remember and that happens to be temperature.  The day we saw the rough waters we also recorded a water temperature in the ocean of seventy-seven degrees Fahrenheit which is much higher than I ever remember seeing water in Canada.  You can read more about that in this post.

If you want to plan a trip to sample some of our warm waters, check out our Emerald Isle Travel Guide.  It is available either in Kindle format or paperback.  Our waters also have some nice fish and people have been known to catch drum fever from fishing here.

Beach Days In Canada

Beach Near Emerald Isle, North Carolina, Town Line

Nova Scotia must be reeling from all the heat.  During the first eighteen days of July 2013 Halifax has endured seven days with temperatures in the eighties and another two days when the temperatures reached ninety or better.  There were only two days with high temperatures in the sixties.

As any Haligonian will tell you that is actually pretty warm for Halifax which usually has a July average high temperature in the low seventies Fahrenheit or twenty-three Celsius.  We lived in Halifax for a couple of years in the eighties.  I can remember a down jacket feeling good at a few evening soccer games.  I can only remember one session of hot weather and it only lasted for two or three days.  That was a good thing since we had no air conditioning in our house or cars for that matter.

Even with all the hot weather, the current water temperature on July 19 in Halifax Harbor is a chilly 62F. We went to the beach a few times in the Halifax area, but mostly when we wanted some beach time we headed off to Prince Edward Island.  It used to be one of my favorite places on earth. I have not been there in twenty-seven years, but I doubt that it has lost its charm.  We hoped to make it there when we were on our trip in the fall of 2012.  That visit back to New Brunswick sparked my book, A Taste of the Wild, Canada's Maritimes. Unfortunately Hurricane Sandy had other plans and chased us back down the coast.

I spent a fair amount of time in Prince Edward Island during my time at Datamaster and when I was Apple representative in the Atlantic Provinces.  We also vacationed there.  I still remember our first vacation on the Island.  We were fresh from ten years of working on the farm.  We really did not even know how to vacation.

The first night that we walked on the beach it was so windy that it sandblasted our ankles.  Still the north shore of Prince Edward Island is a gorgeous place and we ended up having a great time.  We did take to heart the province's advertising that PEI has "the warmest beaches north of the Carolinas."  We went looking for some warmer water after our kids turned blue in the surf on the north shore of Prince Edward Island.  We were able to stick our toes in the water on the other side of the Island but water barely getting into the seventies is nothing to native North Carolinans.  We usually have water like that in May and sometimes even in late March.

I recently spent a wonderful morning fishing over at the area called The Point  in the town of Emerald Isle which is located on the piece of the Southern Outer Banks called Bogue Banks.  We are an extension of the same Outer Banks that is the home to Nags Head, Kitty Hawk, Duck, Corolla, and Hatteras.  This a map of the area for those unfamiliar with what is often called the Crystal Coast.  The water temperature here in the Point area was somewhere between 82F and 84F.That is consistent with the maps that I have found.  The water actually had cooled some from earlier in the week.

With those temperatures in mind I did some fact checking of sea surface temperatures.  It does not look good for Prince Edward Island's claim. I suspect the waters off of Prince Edward Island should not even be mentioned in the same sentence as the ocean waters of North Carolina when it comes to temperature.  Both places have great scenic beauty and wonderful people, but there is a lot of warmer water north of North Carolina. On July 20, 2013 our waters are in the low to mid-eighties.  Other than the statement on the province's tourism site,  I cannot find anything which shows that the waters of Prince Edward Island are much different than those in Halifax Harbour.

I offer up this sea surface temperature map of Atlantic Canada and this one of United States Northeast Coast and finally another one of the Southeast Coast as proof that there is lots of warmer water than that of Prince Edward Island north of North Carolina.

Prince Edward Island has enough wonderful things going for it without trying to lure people to its beaches with questionable advertising.  I am not a big fan of tourism sites which are often funded by businesses who want visitors to think everything is perfect in paradise.  Just Prince Edward Island lobsters are enough to get me to want to visit.

While I do think we live in a little piece of paradise here on the North Carolina coast, tourists if they listen only to tourist bureau hype sometimes get taken advantage of when they visit.  In spite of all the sunny photos, we do get some rain.  We also have some restaurants that charge exhorbitant prices for mediocre meals like this fried flounder and clam strip dinner that set me back $20 US.  We had not been to this particular restaurant for a few years and had come looking for whole fried clams which someone who worked there had told us was a regular item on the menu.  They did not have them when we got there and we made the unwise decision to not drive back to the restaurants where we know what we are going to get.

Actually it is better that a bad meal happen to us than to some tourists.  My wife and I write a travel guide for the Emerald Isle area.  In the book there is a link to a restaurant list that we keep updated year round.  You can be certain the restaurant where I ate the clam strips will not make it on our recommended list.

There is plenty of good food in our area and our $4.99 book offers plenty of recommendations which I should have taken to heart myself. I would love to see more Nova Scotians, Prince Edward Islanders, New Brunswickers come visit us.  We do have nice warm waters, but we are not the beach for everyone.

There is lots of space on the beach here much like on Prince Edward Island and Islanders would be comfortable with all our fields.  Our fields are corn, soybeans, wheat, and cotton instead of potatoes,  but we also have plenty of vegetables grown in the area.  Our strawberries are usually ripe by the middle of April and the tomatoes come in around the first week in June.  Our eating corn is usually ready before July 1 and our watermelons are ripe by the first week of July.

So the next time you want some really warm waters, some visit North Carolina's Secret To Share, Carteret County.  If we do not have enough warmth for you, there are even warmer beaches south of here, but I do think you will be very comfortable here on the Crystal Coast.

Nova Scotia Memories

Marsh along Raymond's Gut

I have not figured out why those first years after college seem to stick so well in one's memories, but I know that they do for me.

After graduating from college, I went off to Nova Scotia and lived in an old farm house on the shores of the Bay of Fundy along the North Mountain of the Annapolis Valley.  In some ways it was a rejection of life in the big cities of the east, but mostly I had this desire to do something close to the land.

Perhaps my family had not been off the farm long enough for the pull of the land to be broken for me.  Whatever the reason, the idea of living far from the big cities, growing my own food, and living close to the elements appealed to me. I certainly got a full dose of elements. The weather was far beyond what someone from North Carolina could imagine.

Somehow I came full circle.  I never would have dreamed back in 1971 that a large part of my career would be framed by the Washington Beltway.  I remember well getting on a plane after visiting a friend there in 1973 and wondering if I would ever spend time in the city again.  Little did I understand how many times that I would travel in on Interstate 66 in morning rush hour traffic. I never dreamed that I would have a ringside seat as Northern Virginia transformed itself.

It took many years of recovering in what could easily be called a natural paradise.  The world along the Crystal Coast is dominated by the Croatan National Forest, the Atlantic Ocean, Cape Lookout National Seashore.  It is easy to see on a map of the area how much green space and water is around or near you.

Then there is the White Oak River. While it looks small on my map, it is a large coastal river which is almost two miles wide near our former home.  A gut of the White Oak reaches into our subdivision and the river water is very close to the home where we lived for fifteen years. Much like those early years in Nova Scotia, the water, blue skies, and green grass dominated our life there.  Only the miles of sandy beach here are foreign to my early Nova Scotia experience.

There were times along Raymond's Gut when the light caught things just right and I was transported back to those Nova Scotia days.  I really enjoyed taking the time trip.  Especially if I happened to be out on the water in my kayak away from most hints of civilization, it would then when I could feel my cares slip away.

Not surprisingly those were the times to forget about the Internet and its overwhelming information and never-turned-off connected world.  Those moments that I slipped back in time let me focus on just what was around me. The green pine trees, ever present marsh grasses, warm blue waters, and mostly gently breezes took control.  It was a good feeling.  There were no deadlines.  No posts to check and no marketing campaigns to start.

Life in this century is full of pressure and it is good that sliding into the kayak can strip away some of those challenges and take me back to Nova Scotia and a time before life got so complicated and expensive.

The escape to another time, no matter how brief, is a welcome respite from the hyperactivity of our over-connected world.