I'm not complaining


Corn on the cob in a few more days

After several brutal summers, the summer of 2012 is going pretty well at the abbey. While 60 percent of the country is in drought, the abbey lies in a narrow no-drought area of western North Carolina. There was a period in early July when the temperature went over 100 degrees for four days in a row, but after that hot spell let up, friendlier weather followed. It’s been almost a month since I had to irrigate the garden. Rainfall has been doing the job.

Some things are looking a little shabby — whether from heat, the work of insects, or other pests I’m not sure. But for the most part, everything is doing what everything ought to do in summer — growing like crazy. I’m particularly happy to see my young trees growing. Previous years have been very hard on newly planted trees. I could never carry enough water. But the rainfall has been sufficient this year to keep all the young trees growing nicely.

In short, I’m not complaining. The long-range forecast doesn’t look too bad. For those of you who are in parts of the country that are being hit hard by heat and drought, I am very sorry. I know what that’s like.


Muscadine grapes


As the trees grow, increasingly the abbey can hide behind them and look shy.


Some of the tomato leaves are looking bad. The tomatoes will be OK, though.


Four rows of late corn and beans


Green pepper, soon to go into chutney with green tomatoes


I put up seven quarts of dill pickles today. Big ugly cucumbers make big ugly pickles, but they’ll be fine. When I’m canning, I think how nice it will be for Ken to get to eat some of what he planted. He’s in Alaska at the moment.


A shabby rose


Arbor vitae trees, growing strong


Chrysanthemums


The abelias bloomed for the first time this year.


Misty after 1.2 inches of rain fell this afternoon


The first tree I planted here, an arbor vitae. It was four feet tall then; it’s about 12 feet tall now.

Tuggle's Gap: a nice idea, but …

One of the many reasons I don’t eat out much is that there aren’t many places to go. One comes across places that you really want to like — like Tuggle’s Gap restaurant near Floyd, Virginia, near the Blue Ridge Parkway — but almost always you’re disappointed.

As late as the 1970s, there were still good roadside restaurants. They had honest foods cooked from scratch. Some of them are still in business. They’re nothing like they used to be. I’m not sure why this is. One possibility is that the food service industry has pushed a lot of labor-saving institutional food off on them, and now every place is the same. The individuality and adventure is lost. Another reason, I think, is that in these parts restaurants compete on price, not quality. When I was in San Francisco, friends visiting from back east were often shocked at the cost of eating out. But there is a big difference. In a good food city like San Francisco, restaurants compete on quality, not price. Price doesn’t matter. In these parts, that’s too small a niche. Take pizza, for example. I had a visitor in San Francisco who, upon taking the first bite of home-delivered North Beach pizza, raved about how good it was and said she’d never had such good pizza in her life. Yep. That pizza probably cost 22 bucks. Around here, pizza is worse than pathetic, because the price point is closer to 10 bucks that 20.

Southern eateries rarely — very rarely — produce edible homestyle Southern cooking anymore. Again, I think this is partly because of the intrusion of the food service industry, partly the fact that they have to keep prices low, and partly because there just aren’t as many good cooks as there used to be. One exception is Hillbilly Hideaway near Walnut Cove, which has done a pretty good job of keeping its standard up. I’ll review Hillbilly Hideaway sometime.

But back to Tuggle’s Gap. Tuggle’s Gap ought to do better, because its closeness to the tourist traffic on the Blue Ridge Parkway allows it to get away with charging higher prices. But I had an enchilada plate there yesterday that was pathetic. The enchiladas were hard and bland. The plate was decorated with sorry-looking iceberg lettuce and sorrier tomatoes. The rice wasn’t seasoned, it was just red. Have I mentioned that Southerners are terrified of spices other than pepper and cinnamon? And you’d think that they’d at least be able to do pinto beans right, but the beans were undercooked. Doesn’t every Southern cook know the blow test? If you blow on a spoonful of beans while they’re cooking, if any of the skin curls, the beans are NOT DONE. The skins must be completely softened, and there will be a soupy broth that is starting to thicken. How thick you make the broth is a matter of personal preference, but it absolutely must not be watery.

I should have known better than to order Mexican, but I was deceived into thinking that because Tuggle’s Gap aims at a fancier standard, they’d know what they were doing. Wrong. It is a common syndrome in these parts. You can get Chinese food that obviously was cooked by someone who has never eaten Chinese food. And you can get Mexican food cooked by someone who obviously has never eaten Mexican food, someone who has never eaten more than 20 miles from home. So what you get is a kind of white trash concept of what those foods would be like. At $9 a plate, there is no excuse.

By the way, when I use the term “white trash,” I speak proudly of my own ethnicity. I’m also thinking fondly of the White Trash cookbook, which I fondly recall was part of the countertop reading at the Lighthouse Restaurant in Sausalito, California. The lighthouse usually had cooks trained at the Culinary Institute of America (or, CIA cooks, as they call them). If you know your stuff, you probably also know stuff about white trash cooking.

Anyway, if you go to Tuggle’s Gap, order a burger with fries or onion rings. They can understand that. They weren’t trained by the CIA. They don’t understand anything else.

Democracy perverted, again


Rep. Becky Carney, D-Mecklenburg, who cast the “mistaken” deciding vote to legalize fracking in North Carolina

For months, tens of thousands of grassroots voters in North Carolina have been working to convince the legislature and the governor that fracking is a bad idea. We apparently succeeded. And yet we woke up this morning to find that fracking is now legal in North Carolina. How did this happen?

Well, they say that Rep. Becky Carney, D-Mecklenburg, hit the wrong button when she voted. They wouldn’t let her change her vote (though you can be sure they’d have let her change her vote if the “accident” had happened the other way around). Carney says she feels just terrible about it. Sure she does.

All over the country, state legislatures have been passing laws to prevent election fraud, even though election fraud by ordinary voters is very rare. Now we have a vote by those who make the laws that stinks to high heaven. If you believe this was an unfortunate mistake, then I’ve got a government in Raleigh I want to sell you. They will get away with this. They’ll say, too bad. Get over it. Move on.

Well, we won’t get over it, and we won’t move on.

I have been active in the county and state campaigns opposed to fracking in North Carolina. I have learned a lot. As a progressive, I’ve also seen how the people of this conservative county (65 percent Republican) have learned a lot. They’ve learned what progressives have been saying for years: that our politicians, our Congress, and our state legislatures have been taken over by corporate money and power — Democrats and Republicans alike. The word “oligarchy” is not just a rhetorical grenade. It’s a word that accurately describes American government at the national level and, increasingly, at the state level. More and more, the United States looks like Russia and corrupt countries in South America.

As a progressive, I’ve also learned how sensible conservatives can be, as long as they’re not just repeating what they’ve heard on the TV.

The conservative people of Stokes County have learned other things, too, that are not so bleak. They’ve learned that local government can still work, because the distance between politicians and the people is much shorter. We can actually pick up the phone and call our county commissioners, or our representative in the state legislature. This local process worked. Our state representative, Bryan Holloway, changed his mind and opposed fracking after he heard from the people. And our all-Republican board of commissioners unanimously passed a resolution opposing fracking after it heard from the people. Holloway’s vote alone would have kept fracking illegal in North Carolina, had there not been a “mistake” in our state House of Representatives. Had the “mistake” not happened in Raleigh, it could have been said that we in Stokes County, by raising our voices in good faith and changing the mind of our elected state House representative, turned the tide on fracking in North Carolina. That is the way the process is supposed to work. We followed the rules, expecting our elected representatives to also follow the rules.

But a law is now on the the books in North Carolina that the people clearly opposed and which our governor and legislature claim to oppose. WTF??

Sometimes it seems the only sensible response is despair and futile anger. How in the world can those of us who care, those of us who bother to be informed, stand up to the hordes who don’t care, to the lazy ignorati whose views are based on mass-media blather? How can we stand up to corrupt politicians, or to politicians like Becky Carney from the ugly, money-grubbing city of Charlotte who is either stupid enough to hit the wrong button or stupid enough to think we’ll believe it was a mistake.

In short, how can honest people who believe in the American system of government take back their own government?

One of my moments of greatest despair came when representatives of the Stokes County “Tea Party” joined the Facebook group set up by county people opposed to fracking. This Tea Party person posted a message in the No Fracking group inviting people to a meeting to talk about fracking at the same public library where the No Fracking people met. The “Tea Party” people, of course, believe the propaganda from the oil and gas industry. They think fracking is marvelous and squeaky clean. We raised no objection to their posting an invitation in the No Fracking group. We believe in free speech, and we believe — or do our best to believe — in the democratic process.

A couple of No Fracking people went to the Tea Party meeting. As expected, the Tea Party people knew nothing and simply recited gas-industry talking points. When the No Fracking people spoke up to challenge this misinformation, they were told that the meeting was a closed, private meeting. The Tea Partiers were so wrongheaded about the way American government works that they don’t understand that you can’t have closed, private meetings at the public library. They think government is their own private stick to use to beat down the people and views that they don’t like.

The people who think you can have closed, private meetings at the public library also got the fracking law they wanted — even though they had only a small following and they changed no minds.

And there you have it. There are people in this country who think that our supposedly democratic institutions are their private club. To disagree with them is tyranny. If the democratic process doesn’t give them what they want, they will simply take what they want. And why not? They always get away with it.

I don’t know what the hell we are going to do about it. But here’s a suggestion for getting started: Go to your local election board right now, whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, and change your registration to no party. Let’s ignore the party machines that have betrayed the people and sold out — Democrats and Republicans equally — to big money. Let’s turn off our televisions, talk with our neighbors, think for ourselves, and remind them what democracy is all about.

After this post was written, we learned that Rep. Susi Hamilton, a Democrat from New Hanover County, sold her vote on fracking for a budget amendment that gives $60 million worth of tax breaks to her pet industry, the film industry in Wilmington. As always, corporations get the profits, taxpayers get the bills. In this case taxpayers even paid for a $60 million bribe.

The Little Sisters of the Poor and Peckish


Sister Patience, Mother Superior

Here’s an update on the sisters of the convent adjoining Acorn Abbey. Though Sister Patience continues to hold office as Mother Superior, she is widely expected to announce her retirement when Sister Evangeline gets just a little bigger.


Sister Evangeline: Her motto: Modius primoris, precor laxus (Peck first, pray later


Sister Helen: Alis grave nil (Nothing is heavy to those who have wings)


Sister Fanny: De oppresso liber (Free from having been oppressed)


Sister Fiona: Fac fortia et patere (Do brave deeds and endure)


Sister Josephine: Per ardua ad astra (Through adversity to the stars)

Fried squash

Last summer, I somehow resisted the temptation to make fried squash, partly because it makes a mess in the kitchen. But tonight, after coming home peckish from a county commissioners’ meeting and needing a snack, I opened the refrigerator, saw one of those beautiful yellow squash, and decided to fry it.

Fried squash is a Southern classic. Some people fry it in batter; some people roll it in a beaten egg and then in seasoned flour. Some people add their secret mix of spices; some people use just salt and pepper.

The mess in the kitchen wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Yes, I fried it. And I’ll probably do it again.

As for the county commissioners’ meeting, there’s a whole nother issue we’re now fighting here in Stokes. Someone in the western end of the county wants a permit to start a “bioremediation” facility for toxic waste. Why would we allow that, in a beautiful county like Stokes in which tourism is an important part of the economy? People are drawn to the county’s mountains, state park, and rural beauty. Toxic waste doesn’t fit in with that plan.

If you set out to fight evil in this world, there’s plenty to keep you busy. Fried squash is as good a compensation as any.

Sauerkraut day

Of all the old-fashioned farm and kitchen chores I do, making sauerkraut is probably my least favorite.

Yesterday I pulled all the cabbages. There was a wheelbarrow load. Six hours later I had two full crocks — about 30 pounds — of sauerkraut starting to ferment, plus a few heads of cabbage to eat fresh. It’s hard, messy work. I washed each cabbage up in the garden area, with the hose. And then after bringing them down to the house, I washed each one again in the kitchen sink. The cleaning and washing alone is work enough, but shredding cabbage is even more miserable. It takes forever to shred that much cabbage, and it gets all over the kitchen. In any case, it’s a nice feeling of accomplishment when the work is done.

Early in the season, the cabbage was damaged pretty badly by cabbage worms. It took me too long to wise up and spray Bt, but that killed the worms, and the cabbages recovered far better than I ever would have expected. I saw only one cabbage worm while cleaning the cabbage. Next year I’ll know better. I’ll spray early and pre-empt the worms with Bt spray. The same is true of peaches, by the way. Peaches are highly susceptible to some kind of insect that lays eggs that hatch into larvae that tunnel into the peach. Next year, I’ll try to stay ahead of the enemies of the peach tree, probably with neem oil or a pyrethrin spray. By the time you first see them, they’ve already done a lot of damage.


Ready to shred — and shred, and shred, and shred

Magic always moves on …


Above: From an Armistead Maupin status update on Facebook

So Armistead Maupin is leaving San Francisco. For those of you who have read his books (Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, Further Tales of the City, etc.), this is a big deal. That aura of myth and magic around San Francisco was partly created by two very important writers, both of whom published in the San Francisco Chronicle (from which I retired in 2008).

The other writer, of course, was columnist Herb Caen, who died in 1997. Both Maupin and Caen loved San Francisco passionately. Both wove webs of magic around San Francisco’s places and people. Armistead Maupin’s magic was a more personal magic, contained in the lives and loves and heartbreaks of the characters he created. Caen’s magic was more extraverted. It was largely to be found in places — bars, eateries, hangouts — often lurking in the fog. Caen once said, “One day if I do go to heaven, I’ll look around and say, ‘It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.'” Caen’s magic was easier to find. Even visitors could find it, just making the rounds, living well, soaking up the atmosphere. Maupin’s magic was much more elusive. For Maupin’s magic, you had to have a life, even if that life wasn’t what you always thought it would be. And you had to have people in your life who understood how to help each other create magic out of everyday materials.

The center of the universe

I have thought a great deal about a magical power that writers have. They can cause the center of the universe to move. Pick a setting, any setting. It might be San Francisco. It might be a shack in Mississippi. It might be a beat-up old car rolling down a highway in Tennessee. It could be a hospital room. It could be a back yard in suburbia. It could be an imaginary place, out among the stars. But wherever that place is, if a writer can tell a true and beautiful story in that place, then that place becomes the center of the universe.

There is a wonderful line in George Lucas’ Star Wars. Luke Skywalker is a bored, dreamy teen-ager, living with his step parents, doing chores on the desert planet of Tattooine. One day two droids show up — R2D2 and C3PO. While Luke is repairing the droids, C3PO says, “As a matter of fact, I’m not even sure what planet I’m on.” Luke Skywalker replies, “Well, if there’s a bright center of the universe, you’re on the planet that it’s farthest from.”

To feel ourselves far from the center of the universe contains more existential pain than we ever admit.

But what Luke Skywalker doesn’t suspect is that, at that very moment, he is at the bright center of the universe. That is because a true and beautiful story is being told — Luke’s story, partly — but Luke doesn’t know it. It’s a secret for only the storyteller and the reader to know. But a good storyteller also knows some things about the reader that the reader doesn’t know.

It has been my good fortune to have known lots of good writers. One writer I knew back in the 1980s, at the time he published Ender’s Game, is Orson Scott Card. He used to say that the key to the best stories, to the truest stories, is that the storyteller is telling the reader’s own story. But the reader, who is unable to tell the story himself, doesn’t know it.

That was certainly true of Armistead Maupin’s stories. Maupin showed people a whole new way to live — simple, sweet, kind. He taught people how to not be too hard on themselves, or on each other. In his stories, the most ordinary events could contain a world of meaning and bring us to tears. His stories changed people’s lives.

When we are the center of the universe, we feel happy. We feel that life has meaning. Orson Scott Card would say that this is why people are so hungry for stories. Stories — good stories, at least — help us find our place in the universe. When we can’t do that, we become depressed, miserable. It’s hard to find meaning in our lives.

A friend from my San Francisco days now lives in Sacramento. He has to deal with a recurring sadness: He is having a great deal of difficulty creating magic in Sacramento. He pines for San Francisco. As any writer knows, settings do make a difference. Some kinds of stories just can’t be told in some kinds of places. A shack in Mississippi is the natural setting for only certain stories. The same is true of San Francisco. Stories certainly could be told in the suburbs of Sacramento, but to find that story may require a very difficult existential struggle. When we feel ourselves beaten down by that struggle, we instinctively turn to storytellers for help.

Most psychologists would say that living too much in the imagination is not healthy, that human beings function best when they are well-adapted to their actual environment, that excessive mythologizing can even be kind of dangerous. Maybe. But I don’t think so. I have long understood that I was happiest when I felt surrounded by magic, even when sustaining that magic required a certain level of delusion. That was one of the reasons I moved to San Francisco, more than 20 years ago. I could no longer sustain a sense of magic where I was. I needed a change of setting if there was to be any hope of finding magic.

To leave San Francisco is frightening, in a way. One has fears and dreads about what kind of magic — if any — exists outside of San Francisco. I remember telling my sister, when Acorn Abbey existed only in my imagination, that I wanted a place that felt as though magic was possible there. Settings matter. One feels one’s setting in one’s everyday life. Other people might feel it too. It’s possible to create magic alone. Magic also can be a co-creation. Even groups can create magic, though group magic is likely to be unstable, because people change, and people come and go. San Franciscans have created a powerful magic, as a group. But in 1997, when Herb Caen died, a powerful source of that group magic was lost. As my friend Rob Morse wrote in the San Francisco Examiner the day after Caen died, “We’re on our own now.”

And now San Francisco must make its magic without Armistead Maupin.

Just don’t forget: The center of the universe can be absolutely anywhere. It’s all in the story you tell.

Postscript: Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game is being made into a movie starring Asa Butterfield and Harrison Ford. It will be released in 2013.

Normal weather at last??


My whole-house fan, as seen from the attic

I am starting to feel optimistic that the frighteningly hot, dry, droughty weather of the past few years was abnormal, in spite of climate change. I am hoping that we are returning to more normal temperatures and levels of rainfall. When I say this, I am ignoring the clear global trend of extreme weather events. I am thinking selfishly only of this little part of the world, and of my ability to grow things here and to endure being outside in the summer without being baked to a crisp.

I suspect that La Niña was the culprit. La Niña, of course, is one extreme of a normal oscillation of water temperatures across the tropical Pacific. This oscillation still is not well understood, but it has been observed for hundreds of years. This oscillation causes a redistribution of rainfall on both sides of the Pacific. If India and Indonesia are getting more rain than normal, then here in the American southeast we are getting less. And the reverse is true.

Typically this oscillation occurs every three to seven years. Often La Niñas are 10 years apart. But since 2008, the pattern has been unusual. The La Niña of 2008 was quickly followed by another that lasted from 2010 until 2011. This La Niña ended in this past few months, and it was one of the strongest ever recorded. It was the cause of a devastating drought in Australia and probably last year’s drought in Texas as well.

Those years since 2008, unfortunately for me, were the years I’ve been working so hard to build Acorn Abbey and to get a garden, orchard, and landscape going. No wonder I have been so discouraged and exasperated at times, watching young trees die and gardens baked to a crisp.

The amount of rainfall varies greatly from spot to spot of course, especially the rainfall from thunderstorms. Thunderstorms are the source of most of the rainfall in this area during the hot part of the year. One spot can be flooded, and another spot 10 miles away can be high and dry. So I realized that I needed my own accurate rainfall record, and I started collected data on Sept. 1 of last year. Since Sept. 1, 39 inches of rain have fallen on Acorn Abbey, well on the way to equaling or exceeding the official average of 44 to 45 inches for this area. That is most encouraging.

I also am finding that, with normal weather, I need far less air conditioning at the abbey. So far this season, I have not turned the air conditioning on at all. The highest temperature we’ve had so far was about 92. The temperature in the house reaches 86 or so on a day like that, but after the sun goes down and the outdoor temperature drops, I turn on the attic fan and the indoor temperature comes back down to the upper 70s. I can live with that. But when the temperature gets above 95, I probably won’t be able to take it.

I’ve often mentioned in this blog how odd it seems that a fanciful house such as a Gothic revival cottage can be so practical. Here’s another way it’s practical: It’s livable when it’s hot outside. Actually, that was one reason I liked the design. There are lots of big windows, as with older houses. The high ceilings and large attic help. If I had large, grand shade trees — as I hope to have in 10 or 15 years — this house would be as livable in hot weather as any Southern country house of the 19th century.

A lot of the readers here are building houses, including Gothic revival cottages like mine. So I can add a few points to lessons learned after living in this house for almost three years. Large, south-facing windows are pure gold. They will warm you in the winter, and yet in the summer when the sun is overhead, they admit no direct sun at all. West-facing windows, however, are a different story. Heavy sunlight pours in on summer afternoons. You’ll want deciduous shade trees outside your west-facing windows. Lacking that, awnings would be good, though window shades are better than no protection at all.

I cringe when I look at some modern houses. The windows are tiny. Some people probably never even open them and instead rely on their heating and cooling system year-round. That would make me crazy. I like hearing the birds. And if a chicken squawks to alert me to some emergency, I can hear her.

The delocalization of religion


Watch this first, to better understand where I’m coming from

Once upon a time, the gods were in your own back yard. To get an idea of how that might have felt — the wonder and magic of it — watch the video above. Or think of the world of fairy tales. Fairy tales, of course, are some of the very few remnants of that old world. In the West, it was Rome, and the Catholic Church, that stamped out that world. I don’t claim to know a great deal about this period of history, but one area of this history in which I have done some reading is in the history of my ancestors, the Celts. The Celts, of course, held some of the finest real estate that the Roman armies took — much of Spain, all of France, the British Isles, and Ireland.

After the Roman conquest of the Celtic lands, it literally took centuries for the church’s priests to exorcise the old gods from the woods and fields and rocks and streams. There were special rituals for it, and there were severe punishments for any peasant who was caught in the woods communing with the old gods. Even in Joan of Arc’s time, in the 15th century, there were still fairies in the woods. At Joan of Arc’s trial before the Inquisition, much was made of charges that she, like the other children, had danced around the fairy tree in some magical woods near her childhood home. In the remote highlands of Scotland, the old ways actually persisted into the 19th century. The localization of religion had come to an end.

The work of keeping religion centralized, where it can be controlled by its priesthood and milked for power and income, is never done. Why, if there were gods in the rocks and trees and stars, then anyone could commune with them for free, and no one would be able to skim a profit from that, or claim to speak for such local gods. And it isn’t just the Catholic church. In the U.S. today, there are a host of protestant preachers who fly around in corporate jets, live taxfree in multiple multimillion dollar homes, and suck in millions of dollars from people who see god in the greasy, unctious preacher on their television screen rather than in their own back yard.

As I go about my daily business of sifting for information about the state of the world (I’m trying to stop calling it “news,” because “news” is a centralized corporate product), it’s alway enormously fun to come across pictures and quotes from the old fools in dresses who run the Catholic church. Just this weekend, for example, we learn that some American nuns, who have gotten in trouble with the Inquisition for acting like Jesus and actually caring about the poor, have been called to Rome to be scolded by Cardinal William Levada, who currently heads the Inquisition (formally called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — very centralized, you know). And let’s not forget that the current pope was the head of the Inquisition before he became pope and the title went to Levada.


Cardinal Levada, with the nuns he’s about to scold

A couple of days ago, driving back from a trip to town, I passed five or six acres of woods, newly bulldozed. It’s now a gash of red dirt and gullies. The church next to it, which has the words “Living Waters” in its name, apparently has outgrown its prefab building and is building something bigger. To them, the woods mean nothing. There are no gods in the woods anymore. And besides, what could gods be worth anyway, if they’re free? No, those folks need a building, and a praise band, and lots of taxfree contributions, and someone paid to shout at them about their centralized god.

Who is crazy? Them or me?

Probably me. I do know, though, that I would go crazy if I didn’t have a tiny refuge from a world raped and globalized and delocalized to the breaking point, a world in which ridiculous old men in Rome, wearing dresses, are outraged that not everyone — even nuns! — will do as they say.

But really there is no escape. Ken reports, after a four-day hike in the Smoky Mountains, that visibility from those mountaintops is ruined by smog and haze, and that the park service has posted signs explaining that the smog and haze is pollution from Midwestern and Southern cities. As for my tiny refuge, the corporate puppets in Raleigh, thanks to money from the oil and gas companies, are about to make it legal for corporations — not the government, mind you, but corporations — to take my land if they say they need it, to drill underneath it, and to inject poisons by the millions of gallons into the underground aquifer that feeds my well and upon which all the life around me depends.

Sometimes I’m afraid that this is hopeless. They have won. There is no local anymore. There isn’t anything they can’t take. They even claim the gods. We let them do it. And every step of the way, they said it was for our own good, and we believed it. They threatened us with hell. It’s odd that they can so vividly imagine such a place, but can’t imagine themselves in it. I can.

The Winston-Salem Journal steps up

One of the frustrations we’ve dealt with in fighting fracking in Stokes County — and in North Carolina — has been getting the attention of the Winston-Salem Journal. The potential fracking areas in Stokes and Rockingham counties are right in the Journal’s circulation area. We’d been trying for weeks to get the Journal to tell its readers that there are potential fracking areas right in their back yards. But other than a lukewarm editorial that did not even mention Stokes County, the Journal has ignored us — until today. They wrote quite a decent story today, and the were sensible enough to put it on A-1.

This venture into community organizing has been very interesting. Fracking — once people understand some basic facts — is a nonpartisan issue. Everyone is against it. People are grateful that you’ve let them know what’s going on, because the popular media have done such a terrible job.

The local politicians are really starting to feel the heat.