First Saturday Green 101

Passing summer on a country road

By motomynd

Several times a week my wife and I walk or run the section of country road that curls past our home in Central North Carolina. We used to drive 30 minutes round trip to take to the trails of a local state park or a former dirt track raceway. This year we decided to explore closer to home and establish a better sense of place for where we now live.
    Despite our initial doubts about pounding pavement instead of dirt, the change actually enhanced our training. When the mowing crews come through, we run long, slow distance on the soft shoulder of the road. When the grass grows tall and harbors hidden ticks, snakes, and beer bottles that broke on impact after being hurled from passing windows, we walk the level sections of hard surface and sprint up the hills. So far our feet, knees, and tendons seem no worse for wear.
    We saved drive time this summer and saw more wildlife than at the state park. We also discovered that the three or four cars we saw each outing posed less interruption to our workouts and conversation than did the inconsiderate trail hogs walking five wide, yelling into their cell phones, at the old speedway. Why is there never a serial murderer waiting to sneak up on the unwary and expendable when you really need one?
    My wife and I link scenery with hiking, yet the views from this road challenge those from many of our favorite trails.

Heading west from our house, our first “neighbor” is a 100-acre woodlot unmarked by so much as a driveway. During the winter it hosted the largest population of woodcock I have ever seen in one area in my life. They flew north in late March and we greatly missed their insect-like buzzing calls and aerobatic flights at sunset. By early May, whip-poor-wills arrived in numbers that rivaled the woodcock, and their ghostly calls gave life to the darkened forest as we returned home from our evening workouts. We miss the woodcock, but the whip-poor-wills take the edge off the missing.

Full Moon

Hummingbird

Butterflies

Newt

Black Rat Snake

Copperhead...why we don't run in the grass

    Past the woodlot is our first human neighbor, a retired school principal who lives on a 300-acre farm that has probably been in his family since this area was first settled by Europeans. In general this region of North Carolina, where many people who can’t put together a coherent sentence own hundreds of acres granted to their ancestors by the English crown, is a great case for a 50 percent inheritance tax. In the case of our retired principal neighbor, we are pleased his land still looks much as it probably did 400 years ago, and we are glad he has control of it, instead of someone who collects cars and pickup trucks that have lost their wheels and most of their paint.
    Past the farm is another 100-acre woodlot. Then comes a smaller plot of 50 acres or so that is part forest, part grass and has a small stream running through it. On one of our outings we saw two beavers dead by the side of the road, apparently struck by a vehicle. We still ponder that. Have you ever seen a beaver crossing a road? We haven’t.
    Next, at our usual turnaround point after a sprint up the hill, is another 100-acre farm. It still hosts its original farmhouse from the 1800s, and a newer residence that the owner says was added in the past 20 years, “right after they paved the road.” Yes, we live in an area where the road has been paved barely two decades; if only they could have waited we could have the scenery and a gravel road. That would have been perfect!
    The old farmhouse, with its wraparound porch and flaking white clapboard siding, make me wistful for my childhood home in Virginia. It too used to be in a country setting where bob-white quail called all summer and deer slept under the apple tree in the backyard. Then a developer bought the adjacent farm and built several hundred houses as close together as building codes could possibly allow. The development brought with it several kids my age to spend time with, but I spent my teen years missing the deer and the call of the bob-white.

There were three absolutely wonderful aspects of this summer: my much younger and very fit wife became pregnant with our first child, so I could still outrun her; the temperatures were more like those I enjoyed when I spent summers in Upstate New York, rather than the hellish record heat of 2012; we added more than 60 new bird species to our local “life list” in only three months.
    A fringe benefit is that we finally met quite a few of our neighbors, in only our third year living here. A couple of them are actually very nice, in a down home “we like you strangers from out of state as long as you agree with everything we say” sort of way. Given a choice we would still rather spend time with the white-tail deer who have taken up residence in our backyard. So that is what we do, tempting though the 4th of July tractor pull and every other Saturday night “whole hog barbecue” may be.
    One of our neighbors drives a white pickup truck, wears a soiled blue baseball cap, and always seems to have a beer bottle in his hand. The first month of summer he would just stare as he drove past. By the second month he would blow the horn and yell something we still haven’t deciphered as we have not yet been able to master the local dialect. Now he almost always slows the truck, revs the engine, and leers at my wife as he drives past. We keep waiting for the day he finally stops the truck and gets out and does something that gives me legal opportunity to make him wish he had stayed in the truck.
    Before anyone gets excited, that is not vigilante mindset: It is merely the “be prepared” thinking first instilled in me in Cub Scouts. Could we avoid a problem by simply living in fear and not daring to walk a public road? Sure. But if we didn’t go out of our way to avoid bullies and thugs in downtown Washington, DC, should we really have to do it amongst the “salt of the earth” country folk of Central North Carolina?
    The poet Robert Frost wrote that “good fences make good neighbors.” In DC, using a crowbar as a walking stick helped assure good neighbors. Here it is “Grizzly Bear Counter Assault Pepper Spray” and concealed-carry handgun permits. With a bit of evolution, Frost’s line has timeless meaning.
    We think the guy in the truck is who probably shot three deer on different nights over the summer months, and left them dead by the road. We sort of hope our seemingly inevitable confrontation with him comes sooner rather than later, as it may save more deer. Anyone who shoots a two-month old fawn, still covered in bright-white spots, and leaves it dead in a ditch, needs to learn a lesson about leaving his gun and his beer at home. We are always happy to enlighten the locals about the polite ways of the real world, even if we can’t master the language.
    The things one has to think about while enjoying the calls of birds, the evening breeze, and the marginal sunsets that wash across the landscape in these parts. It was a bucolic summer, with just a touch of the edge that added to the excitement of running the greenways of Washington, DC, and walking the downtown area at night. Our beer-drinking pickup-truck driver doesn’t begin to get the adrenaline pumping like the strange people who used to lurch unexpectedly into our Pennsylvania Avenue studio, charging unexpectedly through the door much the same as the character Kramer made his dramatic entrances on the old Seinfeld TV show—but he is about the only potential excitement we have in these parts, so he will have to do.

Our country setting

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Copyright © 2013 by motomynd

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