Into the Woods – Page 181 – Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere

Solar activity picks up

Today’s two sunspots: spaceweather.com

Much has been written in the last couple of years about how quiet the sun has been. We are just starting to emerge from the low part of the 11-year sunspot cycle. For months, there were no sunspots at all. Today there are two active sunspots. In another five years, this cycle will peak, and it’s during that peak period when, because the sun’s surface is heavily riled, the earth is particularly subject to big geomagnetic storms of the type that disrupt communications and even affect the power grid.

Just how much solar variance affects the earth’s climate is hotly disputed, but we do know that the 11-year sunspot cycles dramatically affect the amount of ionizing radiation (that is, high frequency radiation such as X-rays) that hits the earth’s ionosphere. It’s this process that causes the Northern Lights. The process also causes radio waves of certain frequencies to travel much farther.

Since we had two good sunspots today, I thought it would be a good time to fire up a ham radio and see who can hear me. I made quick and easy contact with EA1ABT in Spain (at 14.19175 Mhz) and CU2CR in the Azores Islands (at 14.198 Mhz).

All it takes is a 100-watt transmitter and a modest wire antenna hidden in the attic.

Priddy's store was hopping today…

Ron Taylor in Priddy’s store with some of his products that Priddy’s sells

Coming home from the post office at Danbury, I stopped at Priddy’s General Store today to pick up a few things. There were a lot of customers, but in between ringing up customers Jane Priddy still found time to talk with me about local issues, as we often do when I’m in the store. We were discussing the local farmers and local products and ways to better connect customers like me with the people who have local produce and products to sell. Jane was telling me about a man in Eastern North Carolina whose business has expanded to help get local products on the market. For example, he produces and cans the sweet potato butter made from the Stokes Purple sweet potatoes.

By the strangest of coincidences, a man in the store who had overheard much of our conversation let us know that he was that very man. He was on a business trip to this part of the state, and he had stopped in to have a look at Priddy’s store, which he had never seen before.

People like Ron Taylor and Jane Priddy are the kind of people who have done much to help rural North Carolina find its way to a new kind of local, sustainable economy. Ron is the president of Taylor Manufacturing, which has made equipment for tobacco farmers for many years but which expanded to make make equipment for winemakers. Ron has also started a vineyard, Lu Mil Vineyard. He served in the state legislature for several years, and he has served on a number of boards having to do with economic development and agricultural tourism.

Ron gave Jane and me bottles of his new muscadine wine. I can’t wait to try it.

On the left is an alcohol-free juice made from the native muscadine grapes. On the right is a new muscadine wine that Ron is now producing.

Priddy’s General Store

Turnip greens

The grocery store in Walnut Cove had turnip greens this week for $1.29 a bunch. As Michael Pollan says, eat more leaves. Especially at a good price.

By the way, what you see on the countertop is what we around here would call a mess of greens. When I was in elementary school, a teacher once derided one of the children for saying “a mess of greens.” The teacher said that that was not proper. How sad. It is perfectly proper, but it does mark one’s dialect as Appalachian English. I have previously written about stigmatized dialects.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives an example of this usage from 1503: “You have very good strawberies at your gardayne in Holberne. I require you let us have a messe of them.”

Mess means a portion of food sufficient to make a dish. As I understood the term growing up, it particularly meant a portion of food brought from the garden. I never heard anyone talk about a mess of bacon.

Here comes the asparagus

Waiting for the water to boil

One of the grocery stores in Walnut Cove had some very nice, slender asparagus yesterday for $2.29 a pound. It went really well with mushroom quiche. All three eggs in the quiche were laid today. Tomorrow the hens will be rewarded with the asparagus ends.

Coffee substitutes

I’m amazed how easy it was to give up coffee. I decided that the caffeine couldn’t possibly be doing me any good. And besides, when one no longer has to go to work each morning, the caffeine kick really isn’t necessary. For years I was very San Francisco-ized in my taste in coffee. I drank it only in the morning, but I liked it rich and strong.

I’ve been using a brand of coffee substitute that I got at Whole Foods. It’s made from roasted barley with chicory. When you drink the first cup of it, you certainly know it isn’t coffee. But by the third cup, adaptation happens.

With coffee, color is everything. The color of the Roma coffee substitute, before cream and after, is the same as coffee. I am unable to achieve the proper color with soybean milk (it produces an awful gray color), so I’ve gone back to buying half and half, which gives that wonderful golden brown.

Another wonderful thing about being retired: There is no longer any temptation to eat and drink on the run, or at a desk, or in front of the TV. I always sit down at the table.

Mid-January: What's green in the woods

Moss

Holly

Another clump of moss

The ferns have lain down in the cold.

How did the squirrels miss the hickory nut?

Ice in the little waterfall

I believe this is wild ginger.

Rhododendron or mountain laurel … I can never tell them apart.

Running cedar. It grows on the ground with long runners.

Honeysuckle. You can’t kill it.

Arbor vitae. I’ve planted a lot of them.

The house is on the side of a steep hill, with woods behind it and below it.

A captive indoor begonia looks longingly toward the woods.

Two recommendments

For your DVD list: Jane Eyre, BBC/Masterpiece Theater, 2006. Perfect. Ruth Wilson, who plays Jane Eyre, is Jane Eyre.

October Sky, 1999. Based on a true story, Jake Gyllenhaal is a nerd boy growing up in the West Virginia mountains who doesn’t want to be a coal miner. Instead, after seeing Sputnik pass overhead in the October sky, he dreams of building rockets.

The history of fireplaces

My fireplace burns propane.

While watching on DVD the 2006 Masterpiece Theater / BBC production of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, I realized that, though some features of houses have changed a great deal over the years, fireplaces have changed very little. There was the Rumford fireplace — a more efficient fireplace — that was becoming the state of the art at the time of the American revolution. And of course coal-fired fireplaces and gas-fired fireplaces were developed. But the elemental fire and hearth are things that humans have had in their houses for as long as they’ve had houses.

Though today fireplaces have a certain utility as backup sources of heat in case our modern heating systems go down, they are not really necessary, and that is not how we justify their cost, which is considerable. We have them because we want that archetypal presence of hearth and fire in our homes. If you walk through a building supply super-store like Home Depot this time of year, you’ll even see simulated “electric fireplaces” for people who don’t have chimneys.

In Walden, Thoreau had a lot to say about the cost of our houses. He wondered why people want such big houses when much smaller houses would do, even though people sometimes spend a lifetime paying for their home. Thoreau saw this as enslaving ourselves to our houses.

If anything, houses now cost even more now than they cost in Thoreau’s day. These days, probably a third of the cost of the house goes into systems that didn’t exist in Thoreau’s day — central heating and cooling systems, electrical systems, fancy plumbing systems, and so on.

The cranky and eccentric Thoreau was quite cynical complaining about houses: “Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have.”

It was in Thoreau I encountered a reference to the Rumford fireplace: “An annual rent of from twenty-five to a hundred dollars (these are the country rates) entitles him to the benefit of the improvements of centuries, spacious apartments, clean paint and paper, Rumford fireplace, back plastering, Venetian blinds, copper pump, spring lock, a commodious cellar, and many other things. But how happens it that he who is said to enjoy these things is commonly a poor civilized man, while the savage, who has them not, is rich as a savage? If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man — and I think that it is, though only the wise improve their advantages — it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

The history of nerds

From an old advertisement

It occurred to me recently that, by now, somehow had probably written a history of nerds. I Googled. Indeed, someone has: American Nerd: The Story of My People, by Benjamin Nugent.

I have not read this book, though I’m considering buying the eBook version for my Sony Reader. I am curious to know when Nugent begins his history. As I reflect on the history of nerds (they’re my people, too), it seems to me that nerds have always been with us. It’s just a matter of figuring out who they were and what they were drawn to at any particular point in history.

American nerds, it would seem to me, burst onto the scene fully liberated and empowered when amateur radio got its start around 1900. When computers became available, ham radio ceased to be cool, though there are still plenty of hams. About 650,000 people hold amateur radio licenses in the United States, though not all of them are active. Most people have no idea how cool ham radio was, once upon a time. Just the word itself, radio, used to express the cutting edge of human progress and ambition. They named those wagons Radio Flyers because radio was cool.

Times change. Now we have digital nerds. They rule. They are highly paid. No one kicks sand in their faces.

In a sense, it seems to me, ham radio might be considered the first real democratization of nerdness. Scientists have always been nerds, but most scientists had educations and equipment that was far beyond the average person. Orville and Wilbur Wright certainly must have been nerds, as were other people who worked on inventing flying machines. But working out the science of aerodynamics, and building flying machines, was way beyond the means of most people, intellectually and financially. Thomas Edison was a nerd. Nikola Tesla was a nerd. But Edison and Tesla were uber-nerds, with tremendous resources at their disposal.

Because nerds have always been a common human type, and because the equipment and knowledge for actualizing one’s nerdness have not always been available, I have to suppose that, in the past, many nerds lived and died with no means of exploring and exercising their nerdness. They could only read books, and dream.

I find that very, very sad.

Fried apples

Fried apples are a Southern standby. The grocery store apples have been good, and cheap, this winter. When the choices are poor in the produce department, those apples start looking more and more like a winter vegetable, which is not how we usually think of them.

Slice them fairly thin and cook them gently in a tablespoon of butter. Some people prefer them plain. I like them with a little raw sugar and cinnamon.