Daffodils from another time

This mild winter has given us a host of luxuries, from cold, dry days made for long walks in the woods, to mild afternoons that gave us time to finish the painful clearing of brush and brier from the face of the pond dam, and a good start on reclaiming some of the fields that have started to go over.

 I've read that you can lose a farm field in as little as two years if you don't mow every year; what we've found is that nature starts reclaiming the edges first. Every time there's an ice storm the tree branches sag a little lower, making it harder for tractors to mow to the old edges of the field, and before long you realize you can't even see the original fence line.

  So it is with the field bordering our leaky pond.  In the 1990s  I brought a canoe up from Raleigh and kept it on some old saw horses by the rusty barbed wire fence -- bobwar, we called it when I was a kid, not knowing there was more to it.  We sold the canoe long ago to friends, but left the sawhorses by the fence.  Not long ago, as we were cutting back the saplings and hawthorn and locust and greenbrier, I found the remains of one of those sawhorses, and realized that nature had taken back more than 20 feet of the field in some places.  We were just getting there in time.

We've watched, too, as the daffodils down by the old house began putting out green shoots, then faintly yellow buds, and in the past few days bright yellow blossoms.  They're short-stemmed daffodils, perhaps 5 or 6 inches at most, a hardy variety to stand up to the harsh winds that blow up the narrow notch from where the creeks converge half a mile down the way.  We've been watching those daffodils reappear each spring for decades now, and often I wonder who planted them and what life was like on this old farm. The old house hasn't been occupied for at least half a century, but years ago met some folks who had lived in the house in their youth. It was a good place for a kid to grow up, Buford Wood told me a few years before his death -- hard times, but a good place to learn how to shoot, how to hunt and how to live on a little.

  We think the house was built early in the 20th century, perhaps about the time the springhouse was built, but well before a little root cellar in the hillside.  The house has a central chimney of dry-laid stone, and inside the fireplaces on either side of the central wall were converted to what looks like an oil circulator.  Electric lights were put in, too -- a single bulb for the rooms downstairs. The second-floor stairs are too decrepit to give much confidence in prowling up above. Besides, the last time I looked a critter had adopted the space, and left his mark in little piles.

  But outside the daffodils by the rock foundation bring a fresh look to the old place each year. I imagine a farmer or perhaps his wife put them in the ground, perhaps as late as the 1950s, possibly even earlier.  If so, that would make these old bulbs at least 60 years old and still growing strong.  I can't quite fathom what those farmers' lives were like in these hills and hollows, but it surely would have been a struggle some years to scratch a living from the land, especially after the chestnuts died off.  But I'm grateful to them for the apples that still provide bright red fruit every few years, and the daffodils that come up each spring, heralding the end of a long winter -- and sometimes a short one.

Still a mystery: The Brown Mountain Lights

When I was growing up down in the flatlands, the mysteries of the natural world thrilled me:
--The Maco Light down in Eastern North Carolina, supposedly the ghostlight of a railroad brakeman who had been decapitated and was still looking for his head.
--The Devil's Tramping Ground, near the center of the state, a circular path in the woods where nothing would grow.
--Lovely Lydia, a ghost said to be waiting once a year by the railroad underpass near Jamestown, still looking for a way home after an auto accident that took her life. I later found that many communities across this nation have a similar story, and a popular country song popularized the girl who never came home.
--And the Brown Mountain Lights of Burke County, still unexplained after all these years.  That's the one I most wanted to see, after hearing the legend of a trusted old slave still looking for his master in the hills of Western North Carolina.

The other day a group of scientists and the curious gathered in Morganton for a symposium on the lights. These lights can be seen from the Blue Ridge Parkway and from the Brown Mountain Overlook on Highway 181.  See Julie Fann's story in the Morganton Herald here.
  You may have heard the song popularized by The Kingston Trio in the 1960s by John Stewart, Nick Reynolds and Bob Shane. You can hear the song here.  The lyrics tell the story:


The Legend of the Brown Mountain light

In the days of the old covered wagons,
where they camped on the flats for the night;
With the moon shining dim on the old highboard rim,
they watched for that Brown Mountain light

Chorus:
High, high on the mountain, and deep in the canyon below
It shines like the crown of an angel, and fades as the mists comes and go.
Way over yonder, night after night until dawn,
A lonely old slave comes back from the grave,
Searching, searching, searching, for his master who's long gone on.

Many years ago a southern planter
Came hunting in this wild world alone
It was then so they say that the planter lost his way
And never returned to his home.

His trusting old slave brought a lantern
And searched day and night but in vain
Now the old slave is gone but his spirit lingers on,
And the lantern still casts its light

Chorus

Then the other day I discovered that the song originally had been written by Scotty Wiseman, whose Uncle Fate Wiseman (for whom Wiseman's View is named), a pre-Civil War cattle drover,  had told him about the lights. Scotty Wiseman, of the famed country music duo of Lulu Belle and Scotty, had written the song with a first verse I had never heard:

Way out on the old Linville Mountain,
Where the bear and the catamount reign;
There’s a strange ghostly light, can be seen every night,
Which no scientist nor hunter can explain.
Chorus: 

Not too long after that song came out, my friends Woody Allen, Fred Birdsong and I formed what would now be called a tribute band, singing folk songs and some blues but mostly focused on The Kingston Trio. In time Jimmy "Squirrel" Garrison and Dave Safford also played with us.  When we did Brown Mountain Lights, it was Fred who would hitch up his britches and sing that high lonesome note on "searchinnnnngggg" for the old master. We lost Fred to an auto accident years ago and Jimmy to cancer a couple of years back, and it hasn't been the same since.

Woody, who keeps up with Kingston Trio original Bob Shane, sent him a link to the story on the Brown Mountain Lights the other day, and Bob replied via email, "Woody: Very interesting….there should be a song about it! :-)

Aloha, Bob Shane"

Also interesting is the fact that, more than half a century after Scotty Wiseman wrote that song and predicted as much, it's still a mystery. Maybe it ought to remain that way.

A footnote: Lulu Belle's real name was Myrtle Cooper, and she and Scotty had a number of hits, including "Have I told you lately that I love you" and the comic "Does your chewing gum lose its flavor on the bedpost overnight?"  In 1977 she was serving her second term in the N.C. General Assembly as a Democrat in the state House of Representatives, where I was covering politics for the Greensboro Daily News.

  During debate on the restoration of the death penalty that year, supporters of the bill were trying to write it in a way that would comply with a U.S. Supreme Court decision that had struck down capital punishment in a number of states for being overly broad. Those driving the bill wanted to keep out troublesome provisions, such as the death penalty for arson or rape, that would likely bring about another rejection on constitutional grounds.  Rep. Wiseman silenced the House when she rose to describe how, years before while on tour, she had been raped.  She left the House chamber immediately after that stunning revelation, but the legislature, aware of the difficulty of getting judicial approval of a new death statute that covered more than murder, made the bill apply only to first degree murder.   

A Kodak moment, no more

I still remember the first time my Dad let me borrow his old black metal Kodak Brownie camera for a third-grade class trip down to Chapel Hill. It was the first visit I can recall to that wonderful place, and it was the first picture I recall having taken.  The power of the knowledge that I could capture a moment in time, in a little black box, and keep it forever was overwhelming.  You'd think I might have picked a more memorable subject -- the Old Well, maybe, or Old East, the dorm where my father had lived one year in the 1920s, but the memorable picture I took at the Forest Theater was one of my friend Charlie McNairy taking a picture right back at me on his Dad's Brownie. We thought this was clever beyond imagination.

It would be years more before I had my own camera -- a little Kodak Instamatic -- and many more years before I had the object of my dreams: a 35mm single lens reflex camera with the swing-up mirror that allowed capturing exactly the image you saw in the viewfinder.  And after getting my first job, I finally got the holiest of the photo grails, a used Nikon with a 35 mm wide angle lens and a 135mm telephoto.  Hot stuff.

I wanted most to make my living with a camera, and for a time collected cameras -- many of them the early Kodaks -- of every variety. I had a Crown Graphic 4x5, a Yashica twin lens, an early Sears view camera with red leatherette bellows, a large 5x7 mahogany view camera that was sold to me by a portrait printer in the Army Photographic Agency lab at the Pentagon, where I was stationed. My favorite was a Kodak 1A Autographic Jr. that had a little flip-up slot on the back that allowed picture takers to inscribe a name or date or place where a photo was taken. That information would show up, in the photographer's handwriting, at the bottom of the print. You could sign your own picture, thus carrying your autograph in the picture taken on your Autographic.

I found an image of the camera online after a short search following disquieting news that arrived Thursday: Eastman Kodak, the company that was to photography as Ford Motor company was to the automobile world, would no longer make cameras. Here's  a graf or three from the AP story:


Eastman Kodak Co. said Thursday that it will stop making digital cameras, pocket video cameras and digital picture frames, marking the end of an era for the company that brought photography to the masses more than a century ago.
Founded by George Eastman in 1880, Kodak was once known all over the world for its Brownie and Instamatic cameras and its yellow-and-red film boxes. But the company was battered by Japanese competition in the 1980s, and was then unable to keep pace with the shift from film to digital technology.
The Rochester, N.Y.-based company, which filed for bankruptcy protection last month, said it will phase out the product lines in the first half of this year. It will look for other companies to license its brand for those products. 

Here's a link to the full story at the News and Observer.


That failure, or inability, of Kodak to foresee and take advantage of the sweeping changes of the digital age is hardly novel. A surprising number of major industries, including the newspaper business where I worked for decades, were unable to fully anticipate the changes that the electronic revolution would bring about even though Kodak virtually invented the digital camera and even though newspapers, for example, were often on the cutting edge of creating the best Internet Web sites in the early days of the digital boom. That was before information consumers, who used to be called readers, got used to getting most if not all of their news and other information for free, just for the taking.

There was a time when I spent much of my day with Kodak products -- using Kodak Plus-X and Tri-X film, processing prints in Dektol on Kodak photo paper, shooting KodaChrome film and marveling at the vivid color of slides.

More lately I have contributed to Kodak's bankruptcy.  It has been years since I worked in the darkroom, years since I bought Kodak (or anyone else's) 35mm film, though I have bought Kodak digital printing paper to run through my HP photo printers.  Last fall I acquired, for the first time, a new Nikon digital camera with a couple of lenses and more tricks than I can even tell you about. The thing will figure out exposures, set them, focus the image and do everything but grab you a beer so you can watch a big screen slide show full of the images you took 30 seconds ago. When I was a kid it was sometimes 30 days before we got back blurry black and white photos, so I'm not complaining. Today is a marvelous age, and electronic gizmos are scary smart, fast as whips and will do things George Eastman could not have imagined a century ago when he was building Kodak into an industrial giant of the 20th Century -- for what turned out to be just a Kodak moment.  Say cheese.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/02/10/1843368/kodak-ends-an-era-of-cameras.html#storylink=cpy

In the bright midwinter, some green

We've seen a little of everything up here in the hills this winter -- an ice storm in October, long before winter set in, in fact, and a couple of dustings of snow, and one 3- or 4-in snow, gone in just a few days, and a frozen fog a week ago. But the main thing we have seen this winter -- in the bleak mid-winter, as the poem and song put it -- is a lot of sun. Say hallelujah.

Today, like so many days this strange but welcome season, has been gorgeous.  Cool, for sure. We got up around 41 before the temp started sinking back into its hole, but the skies have been clear and many nights we've seen the brightest winter star shows ever. Well, of course, part of this is because this is the first time we've lived this close to the stars. Back in Raleigh where we lived since the mid-1970s, we saw only a bit of the night sky as we walked the dogs up toward Millbrook Road -- and much of that was dimmed by the bright lights of the 10,000 or so shopping centers of the Cap City and their incessant incandescents. Or sodium vapors. Or mercury vapors.

Two years ago the ground here was buried under snow and ice for months on end. Last year we had a few sizable snows and a cold spell that made my knees seize.  This year our severest weather has been rain -- blessed, welcome, rain. Sometimes coming down so hard the house seemed to shake. We had a howling screecher of a rain Thursday that put me in mind of Hurricane Fran in 1996 and Hazel when it blew through my hometown of Greensboro in 1954.  We were almost grateful for Hazel because the worst drought in decades had hit the Piedmont that year. Hazel wrought destruction and took lives up and down the East Coast, but it also ended the drought.

The winter rainstorms up here have also ended our mountaintop drought, at least temporarily. Our leaky pond has as much water in it as I have seen since early 2010. The springhouse, so nearly dry in early fall, is now full of water. As I walk along the brier-choked creek that feeds the pond, the sound of rushing water is a reminder that soon enough spring will work its way into our consciousness again, and in time there will be sandwich-grade tomatoes again.

Spring has already sent out its first skirmishers. Down by the old house in the bottom, scores of daffodils have sent up green shoots.  I know, in my mind, that this happens everywhere as winter moves along -- a few warm days, and bulbs put out harbingers of one thing or another. But it still knocks me out every winter when I see the first hazy, dim signs that one season will end and another begin, all in due time. I'm a sucker for this, and freely admit it. I also get excited when I see a deer, or a flock of turkeys.  It never gets old with me.

We know better than to get overly excited. A few years ago we had a remarkably warm spell in March, -- some days in the 80s, and buds were popping out all over. Then came a bitterly cold spell that ruined an entire season for blueberries, apples and raspberries, and even slowed the normally generous asparagus patch.  This is the price you pay for living in a paradise, willingly paid even when you don't know how the tab will run.

So we'll take this winter as it come, grateful for these lovely, crisp days and spectacular nights. By the fireside we pore over the seed catalogs and the spring training schedule for the Grapefruit League -- the Orioles surely will need me this season -- and study the offerings for chartering sailcraft on the Chesapeake, when the waters warm and the southwesterlies promise a beam reach all the way up to Baltimore.

Iced mountain laurel, just before evening

When the fog freezes...

When the freezing fog wafts in on a gentle breeze, it coats the 10-gauge hog wire around our deck with a half-inch wide horizontal knife's edge of ice.

There's just one hitch...

When it snowed a couple of inches the other night, it reminded me of a chore I'd been putting off for months: hooking up the big scrape blade to the back of the tractor.The tractor was still attached to an old Haban sickle bar mower -- too short to get at all the vile-tempered briars growing along the banks of our creek but better than any of the bush-hog brutes we've got to help keep the foliage down and the fields open. So I had put off what needed to be done.

I'm the hired hand on this old farm and I've been fighting tractor hitches just long enough to have an appreciation for the mule. Nope, never plowed with a mule, but the notion of an uncooperative, stubborn, recalcitrant, mind-of-its-own beast adequately describes my view of the three-point hitch. Shoot, just getting an implement unhooked from the tractor hitch can consume more time, effort and strength than you might have for the remainder of the day.

Or used to, anyway, until I traded in two old, leaky, shackley underpowered tractors that would barely pull some of the steep hills we have up here at 3,100 feet elevation. A fellow clued me in to part of the problem -- the two lift arms on each of the old tractors weren't adjustable,  and thus all manner of levering, banging around with a nine-pound hammer and cussing in the style of a stevedore on steroids was part of any change from, say, a finish mower to a box blade. It will wear you out.

A word about three-point hitches: They're far safer than the hitches many farmers used in the early days of tractors. I've written about this before: The three-point hitch was developed by Irishman Harry Ferguson in 1926 after the British government asked him to develop a system to prevent tractor accidents caused by plows catching on rocks.

"The plow would halt but the tractor would attempt to keep going – and with the large rear wheels’ axle serving as a fulcrum, the tractor would rear up and flip over backward, killing or maiming the driver. 
Ferguson came up with the three-point hitch, a sort of A-frame shaped connection whose two lower bars would provide stability and whose top bar would apply forward pressure, keeping a tractor from flipping back when a plow hung up on a rock. He also developed the hydraulic lifters that allowed the driver to pick up the plow or bush hog it was towing. That made turning or getting to and from the fields a lot easier."  Ferguson years later became the Ferguson in Massey Ferguson Tractors.

Yesterday the wind was screaming and the mercury around 30 when I finally fetched up the grit to go out and unhook the sickle bar mower and put on the scrape blade.  We're having a relatively mild winter, but I keep remembering two years ago when there was snow and ice on the ground from early December to the first week of April, and there was no way to move that stuff around once it froze.

This time it was almost pleasant. The picture at left, pulled from a website called TractorByNet, shows part of the solution.  After I finally learned how to extend the lift arms by pulling a clip and a clevis pin on each side, the old mower miraculously slid right off the now-loosened lift arms and settled onto a couple of six-inch beam cutoffs that keep the thing out of the dirt.  It's a lot easier to slide off the power take off (PTO) link, the devilish device that transfers engine power to the farm implement you're trying to attach, than it is to put it on. Detaching the top link is a simple matter of backing off on a threaded sleeve.  And hooking up the heavy-duty scrape blade was just about as easy, especially with no PTO to reattach.  I was done in about 10 minutes, a new world record for an aging, arthritic farmhand with too much newsroom experience and not enough farmland savvy.

I wrote about three-point hitches nearly five years ago for a newspaper blog I was putting out at the time. Shortly after it appeared, I got a nice note from a Raleigh lobbyist for agricultural interests. In part it read:

"Once you master the PTO, you can move up to the manure spreader!"

Several ways to take that, of course, but I decided it was a compliment. At my age you got to take them any way you can get 'em. Let it snow.