Is that a 1953 Buick grille on our deck?

The weather forecast was for maybe a tenth of an inch of ice, at worst.  Then it was two tenths. Then a quarter inch.  What we got, as indicated by this photo of a '53 Buick Roadmaster grill I found on our deck this morning, was 3/4 inch of ice, accompanied by downed trees, billions of ice cubes and frozen grass locked inside translucent cylinders of ice. Herewith:

 Oh, wait, maybe that was a '52 Nash Rambler.  Or a '47 Willys Overland with the flathead four-cylinder?

For sure, the place looks like a picnic area where about 10,000 dedicated beer drinkers emptied their coolers of ice cubes. And ice cylinders and ice chunks.  Crushed ice. Bergy-bits. We've got old sailing friends coming this weekend and I'm going to scoop up some of the ice to show them how we keep the brew cold up here in the hills.  Down in some of the warm spots where we used to sail, a good-sized bag of ice could last up to,k oh, 15 or 20 minutes, on cooler days.

Look like it will be cool around here for a while.  The pictures don't do Nature justice, but you get the idea.

A cold seat

Buford's Woods

Twisted laurel

We didn't exactly expect this result.  Kein Myatt, the weather guru at the Roanoke Times, was explaining in print just the other day how the terrain up here complicates weather forecasting, and why we sometimes get long-lasting ice when others not far from us get a good breeze and a melted malt:

" If you’ve lived in Southwest Virginia for several years, you know by now that the high terrain of Floyd and Carroll counties, often extending into the Bent Mountain area of extreme southern Roanoke County, is very often the bullseye for ice storms. As recently as Dec. 26, much of this area was suffering power outages and was iced in for days when most of the rest of Southwest Virginia experienced what was mainly just a nuisance mixed precipitation event. The Blue Ridge widens into more of a plateau in that region, rather than a sharp ridgeline, so it can be harder to sweep cold air away as it clings to the rolling and raised terrain, somewhat protected from southerly winds by even higher mountains to the south and southwest. It’s also susceptible to the easterly upslope winds lifting additional moisture, providing cooling with the lift even when the winds are blowing out of a “warm” southeast angle, and trapping cold air against the east side of the Blue Ridge even when it begins to be scoured out around it. It’s also just south enough to experience thicker moisture earlier in most events than locations farther north, which may have more time to warm above freezing before the bulk of the precipitation arrives. For these reasons, Floyd and Carroll counties have been placed under a winter storm warning for heavy ice, though even at that, it appears to be a low-end warning with a quarter-inch of ice accretion – the bottom boundary for an ice-inspired winter storm warning – expected in some spots."

We're in Patrick County, but in the Blue Ridge part, where our climate is closer to Floyd and Carroll than to the Piedmont climate of Woolwine and Stuart.   We look at four different weather forecasts -- NOAA, Accuweather, Weather Channel and WeatherUnderground, and I'm unhappy to say that none of them has figured out how to get our neighborhood -- about 1,500 feet from the edge of the Blue Ridge Escarpment -- reasonably correct.  Our best sources of information, as always, have been the window and the thermometer.

Thank goodness for Generac and the Stihl Chain Saw Co. 

Tyranny of The Winter Project

Some years ago I fell victim to the theory that months as awful as January and February might be redeemed in small measure by tackling and completing what became known around our house as The Winter Project.  It got us through some miserable winters down in the flatlands when there was little to do but watch basketball, shovel ice and wait for the Daytona while dreaming of warm breezes, soft sandy beaches and beam reaches.

One year it was painting the dining room, front hall and living room before the paper hangers came to put on wallpaper.  (We had learned years early not to hang wallpaper together.  Some projects are not worth doing, together or otherwise.)  Another year it was pulling up old carpet and old carpet pads and yanking up about nine gazillion rusty staples that held the carpet pads down on an otherwise perfectly serviceable oak floor.  Last year it was building two sets of built-in bookshelves in the new house.

This year it was building a large spice rack to hold 45 or so of the most frequently used spices, so as to clear out a kitchen cabinet, and to stack the stacking washer and dryer, revise some shelves built to hold cleaning products and expand by 60 percent the size of the kitchen pantry shelving.

Here's how I prepared for the job: 1. Smashed my left hand in a bizarre accident when the tongue on an overbalanced 4x8 trailer half full of firewood let go from the hitch ball on the RTV and banged the hand against the underside of the dump bed on the RTV.  From this I learned the dangers of the runaway lever and a stationary object; 2. Shot a 1 1/4" finishing nail into the tip of my little finger while miscalculating where to hold a 3/4" square support for one of the pantry shelves.  From this I learned the dangers of 100 pounds of pressure behind a small nail that doesn't want to penetrate a knot; and 3. Bruised a shinbone and raised a baseball-sized lump when, seeking a change from hand-smashing and finger-shooting, I took a hike downstream and took a tumble on a steep hillside overlooking the upper reaches of the Smith River while trying to find a long-overgrown trail that led by a spooky old house I once found while looking for something else. From this I learned that hand-bashing and pinky-puncturing were not so bad.

It would all have gone a lot faster had I been able to find the handy-dandy 8-inch sharp-as-a-new-chisel Bostitch prybar that is essential to removing shoe molding, baseboards, nails driven into fingers and other misplaced objects.  Tore up the workshop looking for it; failed to find it; substituted a much larger and not half as effective Wonderbar, a magnificent tool in its own right, but much too bulky for close finish work.   After filling half the remaining trashed shop with sawdust while rebuilding the shelves and fitting new trim, I spent a couple of Sunday hours cleaning up the mess.  Restacked lumber.Found some things I was looking for weeks and weeks ago. Put away hand tools.  Found the right boxes for some power tools.  Rearranged odd pieces of trim, tucked away some cutoffs too good to burn for kindling, stored some old speakers too good to burn for kindling, and kept an eye out for that little prybar. It drove me crazy looking for it. Opened every box, every bag, every drawer, every cabinet, every tool box dating back to the 1956 model my Dad made for me out of an old shipping crate.  No prybar.  But that shop looked better than it has in, oh, three years or so.

So: The Winter Project is done.  The shop is clean.  The bruises are healing.  Oh -- and at 3 a.m. this morning I awoke to receive an internal e-mail .jpg from the quirky cerebral harddrive hidden somewhere inside my aging skull.  The .jpg was a mental picture of a little wooden toolbox that I keep in the back of the RTV, about 30" from the site of the ambush on my left hand.  Nestled neatly in that little toolbox was the black-and-yellow prybar that would have made The Winter Project oh, so much easier. From this I learned to take the advice of a good and wise friend: Next time I have the urge to undertake an ambitious project, I'm going to go lie down until the urge passes.

The wayward prybar

Why is Warren Buffett buying up Southern newspapers?

Dang if I know why Warren Buffett is buying up Southern newspapers, but I suspect it's for the same reason he buys other stuff: he thinks he can make money.  Despite cackling and heckling from newspaper detractors for at least the last decade, newspapers have not vanished from the face of the earth.  Circulation has certainly declined precipitously and newspaper advertising revenue has plummeted and employment had dropped, yet newspapers are still publishing, still paying the help, still making money, though hardly as much as they made in the heyday of the industry.

So it really didn't come as a surprise when he bought up the newspaper I worked for from the time I was a kid on a bike throwing an afternoon route, a high school sports stringer, a college dorm route carrier, and later a copy editor, reporter, Washington correspondent, Raleigh Bureau Chief and editorial writer and columnist over nearly three decades.  Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway (BH Media) bought The News & Record of Greensboro yesterday. It once was a fine newspaper that you could find in just about any sizable town in the state.  Now it's a small almost tabloid-sized paper, but the people who work there still aim to do the kinds of things it did when it featured such luminaries as Jonathan Yardley and Ed Yoder and Jim Jenkins and Larry Keech and Wilt Browning and Sherry Johnson and Greta Tilley and Jerry Bledsoe and Ned Cline: break stories, provide good writing, publish compelling commentary and tell people what they need to know.

Buffett's company has been buying up newspapers in this region for at least the past year. It owns larger papers such as the Richmond Times-Dispatch, medium-size papers such as the Winston-Salem Journal, smaller N.C. papers such as those in Hickory, Morganton, Statesville, Marion, and Florence, S.C., and he has bought up smaller community papers such as Floyd, Va, Bristol, Va. and Reidsville, N.C.  We are, it seems to me, becoming surrounded by the new media king of this region.

A longtime friend and former newspaper executive recalled the other day that this kind of thing once would have been against the law, back in the days when the U.S. Justice Department worried about such things as monopolies and trusts and one company dominating a single market.  Once upon a time, Landmark Communications, which owned the Greensboro newspapers as well as the local CBS affiliate, sold the TV station in Greensboro to avoid questions, or worse, about anti-trust issues.  You just don't hear those kinds of questions being raised much these days, perhaps because a lot of people think newspapers and even TV stations are dying and it won't be long before they're gone.

I don't think they're dying so much as they are changing in dramatic ways.  They'll look a lot different in years to come, as newspapers maneuver to attract more paying online readers and as they reshape general news products to attract subscribers still interested in print editions.  I'm also guessing that in small towns, print will remain a viable product for a long time -- as least in communities where newspapers still cover the news vigorously and give people reasons to buy it.  From what I've read, that's one reason Buffett is buying: He still thinks newspapers are important to their communities.

While I've never met Warren Buffett, I did spend a lot of time with his distant cousin Jimmy's music during our sailing days.  It occurs to me that I've spent considerable money over time with the Buffetts -- with CDs about pirates and shrimp and schooners and sloops, and with several of Buffett's current newspapers, currently including the weekly Floyd Press, where there's always some kind of a story that comes as a surprise about the colorful people and their aspirations for a small town with ambitious ideas.  Given that most TV stations and the bigger papers pretty much ignore the place except for the obligatory quarterly pieces about the arts, I expect the Press is going to do all right -- at least in comparison to its citified cousins down yonder in the flatlands.

The 322,500-mile checkup

Every time I see a red box wobbling down the road I wonder if it's the one I drove for about a decade. It was so ungainly and ungraceful that it looked like a sawed-off 4X4 on wheels from the rear and a bad imitation of a Jeep from the front.  That's the only time I think about that old heap these days -- until I got an e-mail note the other day from the folks who in Raleigh who long ago kept it rolling for me.

"Dear JACK,
Based on our records, your 1990 ISUZU TROOPER is due for its 322,500 mile manufacturer recommended service. Click here to schedule your appointment online 24 hours a day or call (919) 872-1999 within the next 30 days..."

It brightened my day. It hadn't really occurred to me that a 1990 Trooper 2 with more than 300,000 miles really could still be on the road -- despite spotting the occasional Trooper that looked mighty like mine.  Well, may one with 250,000 miles, but the way I drove mine -- hauling stuff all around creation, yanking stuck tractors out of the mud and pulling an old 17-foot McKee Craft down to the coast and back time and again -- made me think it would have worn out long ago and put to pasture in some parts yard along U.S. 70.  I traded it in nearly 13 years ago and was happy to be out of it.

There were times when that truck scared me to death.  If you've ever driven U.S. 70 east of Raleigh down to Morehead City, you know there are something like 10 billion stop lights -- okay, maybe only 85 or 90, but it seems like a lot more -- and those lights turn red fast. If you're moving along toting a boat and trailer that are a bit much for your engine, not to mention your braking system, you know what sheer terror is: just when you have coaxed the whole rig up to maybe 50 miles an hour in traffic and you're trying to beat that light south of Smithfield or coming up on Princeton, the light a quarter-mile down the road turns red and you have to stand on the brake pedal while shifting from third to second to first, holding your breath and closing your eyes and hoping you stop before that tanker truck comes flying through your passenger-side door.

That truck was kind of shackley, as some of my friends would say. When a pal and I were planning to drive down to the coast shortly after the devastating floods from Hurricane Floyd, he insisted on driving.  "Why?" I asked. "The Trooper will get us there." And he replied, "Yeah, but I don't know if it will get us back, too."

And it was uncomfortable for some. When Eva M. Clayton of Warrenton was running for Congress in a special election in 1992, I got an interview with her to write a column for The Charlotte Observer on her effort to become the first African American elected to Congress from North Carolina since George White in 1898, and the first African American woman from the state ever elected to the U.S. House. The interview ran late and she asked me to drop her off at a political event. But when I brought the Trooper around to pick her up, she looked stricken and said, "You expect me to get into that thing?" She had on high heels and a nicely tailored business suit, and I had no idea how she would get up into the thing from her perch down there by the side of the road. But somehow she did, and I delivered the soon-to-be-Congresswoman safely to her next appointment.

The Trooper had about 172,000 miles on it when I traded it in during the summer of 2000 on a pickup truck that still, with about 195,000 miles today, is the best driving vehicle I ever owned.    I think this one might well make it another 100,000 miles -- knock wood -- or maybe more, if I baby it along. It has pulled heavier vehicles out of ditches -- including a few weeks ago one big handsome black SUV that probably cost three times as much as the pickup.  But I don't expect it'll be pressed into duty for transporting members of Congress around their districts any time soon.  Out where we live, there aren't enough potential voters for a politician to ever set foot looking for a hand to shake, or a ride somewhere.  Seems like a fair deal to me. 

Big birds from the tundra

The first time I saw these huge birds that migrate from the high tundra to winter in North Carolina was about 15 years ago, when we were driving across the causeway that splits Lake Mattamuskeet on a frigid winter day. We weren't close enough to hear them, but what we could see was dramatic. It looked like nothing so much as hundreds, maybe thousands, of bales of bright white cotton bobbing on the water way over yonder.

Tundra swan on the edge of a drainage ditch in the Pocosins

In 2002, I heard them for the first time when Joe Albea, producer of Carolina Outdoor Journal and Tom Earnhardt, international fishing guide and with Joe the prime mover behind the PBS series Exploring North Carolina, had me squatting in the dark on the banks of Pungo Lake in the federal Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge.  We couldn't see them clearly but it sounded like a drunken cocktail party or a national political convention out there -- gabbling and hollering and arguing and hooting at one another.  It was a magnificient site when the sun was up enough to make out the many thousands of tundra swans bobbing out there on the dark waters of these ancient lakes in Eastern North Carolina.

Over the MLK holiday weekend we went back out east on an oyster-eating and bird-watching expedition, staying at Lucia Peel's Haughton Hall B&B in historic Williamston and driving out to Mattamuskeet, Phelps and Pungo lakes to see the swans and the snow geese. Haughton Hall is a great place to stay because of its fine breakfasts, good company with the proprietor and her dog, Brown Sugar, and its location near my favorite oyster joint of all time: The Sunnyside Oyster Bar.

But first we drove out to Lone Goose Lodge, an early 20th-century house owned by the Swindell family for, oh, about 100 years.  A.B. Swindell, a former state legislator (as was his father, the late Russell Swindell) loves to show off the historic photos from the days when such luminaries as Gov. W. Kerr Scott of Hawfields visited the lodge.  The day was fast ending but A.B. and Mike Mann -- whom I have known only for the past 40 years of so since our days on Capitol Hill in Washington, where he was a key staffer for Sen. Robert Morgan -- had a roaring fire in a great big barrel and where friends were boiling shrimp and steaming oysters just in from Kent Narrows, Md.  We watched the birds flying back to the lakes from the grain fields where they had fed all day, then gorged ourselves on oysters and various libations which seemed to appear with astonishing frequency.

Saturday we followed the same excellent program -- chasing birds all day and oysters in the evening at the Sunnyside, where old hands like Floyd and Jesse were entertaining customers and shucking the bivalves with the same degree of commotion. The oysters were from the Texas coast this time, but I'll have to say they were fine as well. We were too busy knocking back the sliders to take pictures, so these shots of swans feeding in the fields and looking for landing spots will have to do.

Feeding a field near Pungo Lake

Waiting for clearance from Traffic Control

A few redwing blackbirds were baksing in the early afternoon moonshine

If you go, take a shovel

Just the other day we were sitting out on our deck, looking over the hayfields at the trees on the yon ridge, watching a curious thing. From here, it sure looks like the faintest of pink buds have swollen on the western-facing slopes of this old 66-acre farm.  We usually don't see the first blush until February.

This is ridiculous, of course, here in the middle month of winter, and on a day when it's raining for the fifth straight day, about to undergo what the weather experts call "dynamic cooling," with a forecast of anywhere from three to seven inches of snow, maybe 10 inches in places.  Or not. Who knows?  We've already had one ice storm, and I've pulled a great big expensive SUV out of a jam after a tow truck blocked his way. Thus it is ever so here in the Andes of the Appalachians.  Well, perhaps I exaggerate, but if you've ever tried to go up or down our particular dirt road when it's frozen hard with an inch-thick glaze that may not melt until August, you understand.  Sometimes we just go sideways and hope for a nice soft ditch.

So when it comes to reading the weather, we have learned to wait just a few minutes.  An old sailing buddy, an Air Force meteorologist who gives mariners at sea a daily broadcast discussion of weather patterns, always used to advise looking out the window first to see what's happening.  If it's raining, he would say, it's probably going to rain.   And so on.

Except up where we live, where our southwestern horizon is no more than a quarter of a mile thanks to the high ridge to our west, we rarely see what's coming unless we look at the weather radar.  Even so, we know that at any given time, we're constantly about 5 minutes from a dramatic change in the weather, just based on what we can see.  It's part of the price you pay for living in paradise.

On the other hand, we're gathering empirical data, thanks to a handy-dandy weather station from another buddy. It's got a little anemometer to clock the windspeed and direction, a barometer, temperature and humidity sensors and a nifty self-bailing rain gauge that since Sunday tells us we've had 3.7 inches of rain.  Seems like 8 inches and about two weeks of bad weather, but who cares? Our leaky pond is starting to fill up again after its waters have receded to about the level of the milk you left in the bottom of your cereal bowl this morning.

With this area in a moderate drought, we're all for precipitation, and a good thing, too. We're fixing, as Southerners say, to get more of it, good and hard, this time of the snow variety. I'm throwing a snow shovel in the back of the car just for a run up the road and into town for some more snakebite medicine, just in case.  You can't be too careful.

The pipes, the pipes are calling

When I was a boy my cousin Sid became a neighborhood hero when he took a cold steel chisel and knocked a triangular hole in the muffler of his grandfather's Cadillac, which Sid borrowed to drive around town and go on dates.  You could hear him coming a block away, preceded by the throaty growl of that big engine as he came down Cornwallis Drive.  It was a disappointment to all of the younger set  on our block when his grandad took the car downtown to get a new muffler, but I never forgot how that car sounded to a 12-year-old kid who couldn't read enough about hot rods, dragsters and '49 Fords with flathead V-8s.

So it was one day last fall when I realized that the little Diesel engine on our banged-up 4x4 hauler sounded a lot like that Caddy, circa 1958 or so. Just firing it up made booming echoes that bounced off the hills and ridges that rose above our garden, and I wondered if a hole had magically appeared in the muffler to help announce our arrival to the bears, deer, turkeys, coyotes and other critters that traipse around in our rural neighborhood.

I liked the sound of it all -- but worried a little about the Diesel fumes that seemed to envelop the bench seat region.   Got nothing against Diesel odors, understand. We had a 37-foot sailboat with a three-cylinder Yanmar engine that always started and always got us where we were going when the wind died, but there was little drip into the bilge somewhere, and everything had that oily aroma of Diesel fuel. Even our saltines tasted of Diesel. Got so I didn't like 'em if they didn't taste a little fumey.

Just before Christmas I cleaned out the dumpbed of the hauler and raised it on its hydraulic cylinder so I could take a closer look. There was no tailpipe hole.  The tailpipe had separated entirely from the exhaust flange on the side of the engine, so the exhaust was not getting even close to the muffler -- but I was coming up right under the bench seat. I briefly considered buying a wire-feed welder outfit recommended by Popular Mechanics, but I needed to get it fixed fast.  I unbolted the rusty flange and the muffler from its mounting bracket and took them to a local auto shop the other day to be re-welded.  I thought I had marked the flange and pipe correctly, but somehow the welder got it wrong by 3/8 of an inch. There was no way to get the flange over the four bolts unless the whole flange-pipe-muffler-tailpipe rig was to stick up at an odd angle, preventing the dumpbed from closing flat.

I found an online outfit that made couplers that could join two pieces of 1.5" exhaust pipe. When it arrived I sawed the pipe in half a couple inches from the flange, banged on one end of the coupler, bolted the flange back on the engine manifold, then banged the sawn-off muffler pipe into the other end of the coupler and torqued it all down with two hefty muffler clamps so the pipes couldn't slip out of the coupler.

Never was a kid more disappointed than when I started up the engine. It purred relatively quietly, all trace of that menacing guttural roar channeled back into the mysteries of the muffler box.  Well, it's fixed now, and I can hear myself think, and I can get my ice-damaged trees cleaned up and limbs hauled off to the burn pile without having to risk total hearing loss. 

But it just isn't the same.   I was thinking of getting out one of my old cold-steel chisels and a ball-peen hammer and cutting just a bit of a hole in the muffler to make it sound a little better. Nothing over the top, mind you, just enough to let folks know I'm on my way.