Rural issues – Into the Woods

ATV’s: a new reality of rural life

Yesterday we had the first snow of the winter. It wasn’t a particularly heavy or pretty snow, but the neighbors, who have not one but two ATV’s, invited me to ride with them on today’s equivalent of a sleigh ride: the ATV ride.

These neighbors have property on three sides of the abbey’s woodland, and fortunately we get along well. Most of the people in this area, actually, have some form of off-road conveyance. Given that something like half a million ATV’s are sold each year in the U.S. (and the market is growing), this is happening everywhere.

In the hands of the irresponsible, ATV’s can make a serious mess, causing erosion from the ruts they can create. Fortunately my neighbors are responsible. I gave them permission to build a bridge where one of the old rights-of-way crosses a stream on abbey land. Not only does the bridge look much better, a bridge avoids the mud and erosion that can happen where ATV’s ford streams.

These vehicles are not just an American phenomenon. They’re being sold in large numbers all over the world. On the Scottish islands of Mull and Gometra, which I visited in 2018, there are no real roads, so ATV’s are the new mule carts.

Sometimes neighbors ask me why I don’t have an ATV. The real reason is that they cost too much. But I show them my walking stick (which is always with me when I wander) and say that I already have one — an economy model that I picked up in Scotland.

An ATV bridge of all-local materials. Two streams come together here at the lower end of the abbey’s woodland.

Let’s hear it for the P.O.

Many things have vanished in rural America. Jobs and people (particularly young people) are at the top of the list. One institution that remains is the U.S. Postal Service, which has shown a remarkable ability to change with the times.

Though I lived in San Francisco for 17 years, much of my life has been spent in rural America, with a rural mailbox. I feel sorry for people who open their mailbox and mostly find bills. I get some of those, too. Still, after all these years, opening the mailbox each day and seeing what’s inside is like a tiny Christmas that comes every day.

When I was a boy, I eagerly awaited the little packages that brought fresh chemicals or glassware that I’d ordered for my chemistry set. I often ordered little doodads that were advertised in comic books. For years, I received regular catalogs from the U.S. Government Printing Office, and I ordered little books and pamphlets on all sorts of subjects. Everyone received a Sears catalog. As a teenage nerd, I got lots of electronics catalogs such as Allied Radio and Electronics. When I was older and had friends, and when those friends began to scatter, it was the post office that kept us in touch — letters typed on manual typewriters and mailed in legal-size envelopes, always with commemorative stamps for better presentation. Many of those old letters from friends still survive in trunks in the attic, which I refer to as the archives.

Everyone has email these days, so letters in the mailbox are, sadly, a thing of the past. But opening the mailbox is still a tiny Christmas. Amazon Prime, of course, is the new Sears catalog. All those boxes bother me (though of course I recycle them). But Amazon Prime does greatly reduce the amount of driving one has to do. Since the mail carrier drives through every day anyway, there are efficiencies there in maintaining rural supply lines.

What started me thinking about the reliability of the post office was the unreliability of UPS and Fedex in rural areas. Fedex can hardly ever find me. (The truth is that Fedex drivers don’t try very hard, because they obviously detest rural deliveries.) UPS does a better job here, but not much better. UPS and Fedex are just not efficient for rural delivery. Whereas the U.S. Postal Service knows its rural customers because they deliver every day.

Rural Free Delivery has been the rule in the U.S. since about 1900. Before that, people had to go to a post office to pick up their mail. Still — and this is just as true today — mail carriers don’t deliver mail to every rural door or driveway. Mailboxes are often clustered to make delivery easier. If your home is remote (as mine is), then your mailbox may be some distance away. My mailbox is half a mile away. I can stop and pick up the mail if I’m in the car, or I can walk a nice woodland trail to pick up the mail, just over a mile round trip.

The use of First Class mail continues to decline. But, since 2014, Postal Service revenue from online retailers has been steadily increasing and is making money for the Postal Service.

Not too long ago, I was saying to a friend that rural living today is a privilege. Obviously people need jobs, and they need reasonable commutes. Rural living is not very efficient for most working people. For retired people like me, rural living is efficient, if one stays off the roads as much as possible and especially if one grows at least some of one’s food, as many rural people used to do. It’s shocking to reflect on the fact that the world’s population is now twice what it was when I was born. That is just too many people, so it is a great gift — if you like peace and quiet and nature — to live in a place where the population actually is declining rather than growing. The U.S. Postal Service is as necessary to rural life today as it was in 1902.

Using the Apple watch in fringe areas

Sorry, non-nerds. This is a nerd post.

Technology companies these days assume that everyone, everywhere, has fast Internet and good cell phone coverage. In rural America, that is not the case. Millions of us have been left behind. In the 10 years that I have lived here in the woods, things have gotten better. But I still have sketchy cellular service (the nearest tower is about 2.75 miles away). For Internet, I now have HughesNet satellite service. It’s fast, but it’s expensive. I get only so many gigabytes a month. And a half-second delay is built into everything you do, just because of the speed of light and the round trip to the satellite (46,000 miles).

A week ago, when I bought an Apple Watch 4, I knew that I was taking a risk and that some of the features might not work well in a fringe area. For example, by default, if the watch’s owner is more than 65 years old (I am), then fall detection is turned on. If the watch’s internal sensors think that you have taken a fall, and if you don’t move and don’t respond to the watch for a minute, then the watch will call emergency services and send texts to your emergency contacts. I wanted that feature not only for fall detection, but also so that I always would have on my wrist a way to call 911.

I am happy to report that, when I did a walkaround today, the watch was able to make calls from anywhere on abbey property — the woods as well as the yard, garden, and orchard. However, to make that happen, I had to order a WIFI range extender and mount it in the abbey’s attic. It took a lot of fussing, experimenting, and reading to figure out why a WIFI range extender was necessary in my situation.

My watch is paired with a new iPhone XR. The phone actually is quite a good cell phone, much better than my now-retired iPhone 5, which was six years old. I’m on the Verizon network. The iPhone XR will make an LTE connection to Verizon if it can. That’s the fastest kind of connection, but LTE also requires better signal strength. If the nearest Verizon tower is too far away to support LTE, then the iPhone will fall back to 3G, or CDMA-EVDO, which is slower but totally useful. If the signal strength is too weak to support 3G, then the iPhone will fall back to CDMA-1x, which is very slow but good enough for phone calls and even slow, slow, data. The iPhone even has another option. If WIFI is available, then the iPhone can make phone calls using WIFI, routed through Verizon’s “VZW-Wifi” system. In short, the iPhone XR has options for how it connects to the nearest tower, it has decent antennas, and it has enough power to be a pretty good cell phone. The iPhone also has the option of routing calls over WIFI.

The Apple watch can function as a cell phone even when its paired iPhone is not nearby. The watch can connect directly to Verizon. But the watch is not a powerful cell phone. The watch has low power and tiny antennas. Even worse, the watch supports only LTE, so it cannot fall back to 3G or 1x when signals are weak. Apple watches love the city. But there is a limit to what they can do in rural areas with fringe cellular coverage. However, if the watch’s paired iPhone is nearby, then the watch will make its calls through the iPhone, using a Bluetooth connection to the iPhone. That provides some options for people like me who are in fringe areas — as long as the iPhone is within Bluetooth or WIFI range of the watch.

So, what if I’m out mowing the yard, the mower turns over on a steep bank, I’m thrown off and land hard, and I don’t respond when the Apple watch asks if I’m OK. As long as the iPhone is in my pocket, the Apple watch will connect to the iPhone, and the iPhone will make the call and send the texts. Depending on where I am on abbey property, the iPhone might make its emergency call using LTE, 3G, or WIFI. By walking around the entire property, including into the woods and up the ridge, I determined that the iPhone always has an option for making the call. LTE works up on the ridge, for example. But down by the stream, and in most of the yard, the iPhone chooses WIFI.

About the watch: I love it! I actually like wearing a watch. The Apple watch will always be accurate to a fraction of a second, because it gets the time from network time servers. I was somewhat skeptical about whether the fitness features of the watch (and of the iPhone XR) would be useful, but they are, not least because the watch gently encourages you to keep moving. I also learned that my old-fashioned rural lifestyle is more active than I realized. Even on a sedentary day, I cover two miles and 25 flights of stairs. Four miles a day is easy to achieve. Because the watch helps you calculate the number of calories you’ve burned each day, it provides decently accurate advice on how much you can eat without gaining weight. It’s also nice to know that my resting heart rate is in a very healthy range. The new Apple Watch 4 has new features that obviously are aimed at older people. The geniuses at Apple are geniuses at separating us from our money, even our retirement income.

To test the watch’s ability to make phone calls anywhere on abbey property, I used the number that anyone can call to hear BBC’s audio — (605) 781-9836.

Environmental justice: The people fight back

Al Gore

This is a rather long photo essay. I hope you’ll bear with me.

People sometimes ask me why I choose to live in a rural and seemingly backward place like Stokes County, North Carolina, after 18 years in an urbane place like San Francisco. Stokes is a poor county in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s mostly white, and it’s mostly Republican. But it’s also a beautiful, green, un-suburbanized place with mountains, a river, and forests that — as far as I can tell — reach all the way up the Appalachian chain to Quebec. It is an unspoiled — and also very livable — piece of rural America. I love rural America and refuse to cede rural America to Trump deplorables, because rural America can be better than that.

I also learned pretty quickly that I am needed here. The progressive people in this county are greatly outnumbered. But we are fierce, and we stand up for ourselves. We have become so effectively organized that we caught the attention a few years ago of progressive forces outside our little county. That’s why Al Gore and the Rev. William Barber were here today. For the Rev. Barber, it was his second time in Stokes County.

Many of the readers of this blog are in Europe, so you may need to be reminded that Al Gore was vice president of the United States from 1993 until 2001, with President Bill Clinton. Gore ran for president in 2000 and won the popular vote nationwide by half a million votes. But because of peculiarities in the American constitutional system and a disputed vote count in the state of Florida, the U.S. Supreme Court gave the presidency to George W. Bush. Gore, a true statesman, said in his concession speech, “[F]or the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession.” Since then, Gore has made environmental activism an important part of his life.

Readers in Europe, and some American readers as well, may need to be reminded that the Rev. William J. Barber II has been president of North Carolina’s NAACP since 2006. He is a theologian with degrees from Duke University and Drew University. I consider him the Martin Luther King Jr. of our day. With his “Moral Monday” resistance tactics in North Carolina, he has become a thorn in the flesh of the right-wing and utterly despicable North Carolina legislature. If rich people want it, the North Carolina legislature is for it. The rest of us don’t matter, except insofar as we can be made to pay for the things that rich people want, such as tax cuts.

The environmental justice issue here in Stokes County is a huge coal ash impoundment at a coal-fired electricity-generating plant operated by Duke Energy. The pollution of ground water, and the air, near this plant have sickened many people and caused many premature deaths. Most of those people are poor and black. They still are fighting for clean water. But they have gotten organized. (There is little need to worry about the residents of the abbey. Luckily we are some miles from this problem, and we are both upstream and upwind. But we care about our neighbors downstream and downwind.)

But this is a photo essay, not a political post.

Photojournalism is in my DNA. So I am very mindful of how photographs can be used to tell a story. I love taking photographs of people, so public events are a great excuse for pointing my camera at people’s faces and getting away with it. I shot 932 photos today, but I selected those that I thought told the story best, those that represent the main characters, and, hopefully, those that contain a bit of emotion.

This is my county. And I love it.

Karenna Gore (daughter of Al Gore) with one of our local activists

A local activist (and excellent fundraiser)

Al Gore

Rev. William J. Barber II

Local activists (and good friends)

A local activist and, I hope, a future candidate for political office

A local activist (and son of a local activist) and Al Gore

A local activist

Karenna Gore, daughter of Al Gore

A local activist

Stacks of the Belews Creek Steam Plant. The lake is primarily for cooling the steam plant’s water.

A local activist

Rev. William J. Barber II

Al Gore

A local activist

Hands during the breakfast invocation

Farm porn

Click here for high-resolution version

A high dynamic range photo of a farm on Flat Shoals Road, Quaker Gap, Stokes County, North Carolina. This is a digital photo and will become part of an experiment to compare results from a film camera with HDR digital photos.

Small solutions for light pollution

The new LED fixture, aimed in such a way as to limit its coverage to 180 degrees.

Acorn Abbey is near the end of an unpaved private road. The abbey feels remote and isolated, but there are other homes on the road. Luckily the other places are closer to the nearest paved road than I am, so there is no daily traffic past the abbey. The closest house is across the road, though that place is out of sight down a steep hill. But I have been bedeviled for as long as I’ve lived here by a so-called security light by the roadside across from me. Its light washed into the abbey’s bedroom windows, lit my house so starkly that the only real shadow was behind the house, ruined the night sky, and all too often tricked a mockingbird into singing in the dead of night.

It’s a vacation home over there; the owner lives in Florida. I’ve tried over the years to persuade her to get the light removed, but she wouldn’t do it. She believes that so-called security lights actually provide security, though some studies have found that increased lighting actually increases crime.

Not until a week ago did I learn that electric companies actually have reflector shields that can contain at least some of this light when neighbors complain. Also, electric companies are in the process of replacing the old mercury vapor lights with LED lights. The LED lights are much more directional. The direct light from them can be limited to 180 degrees.

As soon as I learned that reflectors existed, I called our electric company. The electric company here is Energy United, a small (and very friendly) co-op company. They sent an engineer to see what could be done. The engineer proposed an LED fixture mounted on a S-arm aimed across the road, away from my place.

What a huge difference that has made! Now no direct light falls on my side of the road. I can’t see the neighbor’s place anyway, because it’s down a steep hill. So all I see now is light falling on an oak tree across the road. The oak tree glows a little and shimmers like the ghost of an oak tree. But I don’t mind that, because I don’t get any direct light anymore. The sky is dark again. No light glows through the abbey’s front windows.

If more people complained about light pollution from those infernal “security” lights that can’t be turned off, then electric companies would be forced to come up with even better solutions to keep the light from trespassing.

Ken’s new book

In a recent comment here, Jo asked whether Ken Ilgunas was involved in the upkeep of the abbey’s orchard. Yes he has been, actually, very much so.

Though the first trees were planted before Ken first came to the abbey, he has slaved in the orchard for many hours — planting new trees and replacements for casualties, feeding the trees, pruning them, straightening them, weeding around them, and mourning for the fatalities that always seem to overtake the figs.

Ken’s second book, Trespassing Across America, will be released April 19, 2016. It’s available for sale (or for pre-order, if you’re reading this before April 19) at Amazon.

Ken’s first book, in 2013, was Walden on Wheels.

Watching the development of Ken’s literary career is like watching his generation finding its way. Ken, however, insisted on blazing his own trail. Student debt? Down with that. Cubicle job? No way. A career-oriented education? Nope — English and history.

I will never forget a critical moment in Ken’s career on the abbey’s side porch. The year was probably 2011. Ken was sitting in one of the rockers in his dirty work clothes, in a quandary, looking off into space, as he often does. He had been offered a desk job at a salary that anyone else his age would have had to jump at. Ken was teetering: What kind of career did he want to have? Should he take the desk job, or did he want to take the risks of making a go of it as a writer?

He asked me what I thought he should do. I evaded the question, because I was pretty sure I knew what he’d do. I believe my words were, “Whatever you decide, I totally trust your judgment.”

Having published two beautiful books by the age of 32, I’d say that Ken made a pretty good career choice.

Local milk!

While in the Winston-Salem Whole Foods on Monday, I was pleased to see milk from a local dairy in the dairy case. It’s grass-fed milk, and the dairy is Wholesome Country Creamery in Hamptonville. Hamptonville is in the Yadkin Valley not far from where I grew up.

Not since I was in San Francisco have I been able to buy milk from a local dairy. That milk came from the Strauss Family Creamery in Marin County.

The Winston-Salem Journal did a story last year on Wholesome Country Creamery, which I did not see at the time. It’s an Amish dairy, and the creamery grows all its own feed. The dairy also uses a lower-temperature pasteurization process.

I’m old enough, and my rural roots are deep enough, that I remember when relatives, including my grandmothers, used to keep cows. That’s important, because I remember what milk should taste like, and I will never forget. My grandmother no longer had a cow after the early 1950s, but a few of the neighbors kept cows up until the early 1960s, and we used to buy milk from them.

It’s pricey, but I could get used to local grass-fed milk.

An environmental victory

This is another of my photo essays on grassroots environmental activism.

For three and a half years, ever since a Tea Party takeover of the legislature has tried to fast-track fracking and off-shore oil drilling into North Carolina, a tenacious little organization called No Fracking in Stokes has fought to keep fracking out of Stokes County. To corporations and urban outsiders, Stokes County looks like a poor county with a backward population that would be just perfect for an environmental sacrifice zone — a good place for fracking, toxic waste dumps, and stuff that nobody else will put up with.

Those of us who actually live here beg to differ. To us, Stokes County is a place of unspoiled Vermont-like beauty in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. We have a river (the Dan River), our own mountain range (the Saura range), and the most popular state park in North Carolina (Hanging Rock State Park). Our economic roots are agriculture and tourism. The old cash crop of tobacco no longer brings in much money here. Manufacturing is long gone. We desperately need to revive our economy with forms of economic development that take advantage of, rather than ruin, our rural landscape and way of life.

Last night, the all-Republican board of county commissioners unanimously approved a three-year moratorium on fracking in Stokes County. This is the strongest action against fracking that the board can take under North Carolina law, because the pro-fracking legislature has done everything possible to tie the hands of, and to intimidate, local governments. This was a conservative county board telling its own party in the state capital to keep its money-grubbing hands off our county.

Though this issue has certainly caused turmoil in Stokes County these past three years, in the end the fracking issue has united this county as never before. You haven’t lived until you’ve witnessed a room full of people of all political stripes, including left-wing liberals like me, not to mention a large turnout from the African-American community, giving a standing ovation to a Republican board.

At the local level, the system still works.

What blowback looks like

After the little town of Walnut Cove agreed to let the state of North Carolina (at taxpayer expense) drill a geological core sample on town property to test for the presence of frackable gas, what followed was an uprising. These photos are from a press conference called by the state and national NAACP to announce an environmental justice investigation into where these polluting activities tend to be located — near black communities.