Ocracoke Waves on Squarespace

Empty Beach, Emerald Isle, NCThere is no question that we live in a world where it is harder to get to know your neighbors.  Twenty or thirty years ago living outside of cities, you needed to know the people living around you.  Otherwise it was hard to survive. You depended on your neighbors.

Today, even in the rural south, people can can live beside each other, and never get to know each other.  The service economy along with technology has made that possible.  You don't even need to have a land line telephone.

Information which was often conveyed person to person is now more likely to be computer to person.  At the same time stores have become more impersonal.  The local hardware store is even under attack.  There are areas, Reston, Va. comes to mind, where the local hardware is more likely the local Home Depot. You get your information from a paper handout or a computer website.

I recently wrote about how technology isolates us as we travel along the road.  Everything from Google Map directions to ATM machines, pay at the pump, and fast food drive throughs put us at a distance from people. 

Consider years ago, you went into a local restaurant, perhaps talked to someone who had been working in the same spot for twenty years.  Now you are more likely to either drive thru a place that has only been built for a few years or visit one of the many chain restaurants along our highways.  The employees in those places are often there for a few months and then are gone.

With governments increasingly moving to web services, more self checkouts in the stores, and even grocery stores that deliver, the chances of making real lasting contact outside of your work place or your church are slim.  Those with school age children and kids playing team sports are the last frontier of people actually meeting outside the home.

Back when people actually took two weeks of vacation, a neighborhood boy often mowed your yard while you were gone.  Someone might even check your pets and feed them.  There were neighborhood parties.  It's hard to have a party if you don't know the people you are inviting.  When you moved to a community, you asked neighbors for advice.  Now we use Google's clever intelligence.  I have postulated the Google provides the glue to hold the modern world together.

In our service oriented, technology driven economy, we run the risk of ending up with few neighbors that we really know.  We are more likely to forward an email than we are to drop over to chat.  Years ago neighbors might tackle a project together.  These days we hire someone.  We may get to the day when few people know how to do anything but their jobs.

Our experience on the road becomes that of someone in an electronic cocoon receiving our information from a satellite. Our lives in a modern neighborhood can be almostly completely divorced from those around us.  More and more kids are driven to school and don't even ride a school bus.  The block party is on the endangered list

It just might be a lonely way to live. I suspect that is why I love the small town environment of the Southern Outer Banks.  It isn't yet quite as bad as the picture I paint, but we have come a long way down the road towards isolation.

We have had dog family members over the years. It has always been an accepted fact that wherever your feet need to be, a dog will occupy that spot.

Our last Lab, Chester, had a habit of camping on the rug in front of the sink.

These two grand-dogs, Dozer and Byerly, have found the spot where I need to put my feet while writing. It is an interesting challenge working around big dogs.

You know they will be near food, but they also want to be near people. They would much rather rest their heads on your feet than on the floor.

I don't think it has anything to do about comfort. I believe it is pure devotion to being as close to their human pack members as possible.

We have decided that we probably will not get another dog ourselves since we travel so much, but we do enjoy the visits from the grand-dogs.  It is fun to play with them, and it has a practical side.

A few days of chasing down the remnants of dog hair is pretty easily doubles your resolve to stay away from those puppies at the rescue mission.

Another law of the dog world is that the amount of sniffing done is inversely proportional to your need to hurry. If you are really in a hurry, there will be a spot in your yard which has been the same for a thousand years, and your dog will need to spend at least ten minutes checking out how the molecules have changed in the last ten minutes.

There is also a guarantee that comes with each dog. It states that when you have on your best clothes, your dog will be at its dirtiest.

That is merely another one of the unshakable laws of the dog world. Since we love our dogs, we will put up with all the laws with no complaints.

 The seasons have changed.  The fall leaves are long gone here in Roanoke, Vriginia.

Sometimes a single dominant color can really bring life to a photo. The blue color in the picture of the Roanoke Valley makes me feel the cold of the winter morning, just as the colors of this beach photo leave me searching for a temperature.  

When the beach images on this webpage come up, I can almost feel the warmth of the sun on my back. 

I often find the inspiration to write about a particular subject from a picture that I have captured.  Sometimes I even find it hard to write without a picture.

Yet  I am much more comfortable writing with a picture that is fresh in my memory.  It is almost like the heat of the memory leaves the picture after a while, and I have to find something else to hang my star on for inspiration.

For years I was able to roll out of bed and take photos of the Roanoke Valley sunrises.  It was so easy that I snap some pictures and then roll back into bed if I still needed some sleep.

Photos like the one of this sunrise in the clouds that I have on my free images webpage gave me a lot of inspiration over the years.  If you look through my favorite images that I have on these pages, it is easy to see how one place can produce so many varied pictures with colors that convey a tremendous amount of meaning.

We have become such a visual society that I wonder if our pictures will end up defining us.

Last night in a post, Invisible digital ink, I had some thoughts about our dependence on email to the exclusion of writing real letters might require more books to be written in the moment.  It is almost like we have to capture our thoughts and bind them up while we still know what they are.  Weblogs help, but who knows how permanent they will be.

No one will be able to dig through all those emails that we have accumulated.  The pictures, however, just might get a life of their own and survive.

I am alway excited when someone takes one of mine to another state or hangs it on a wall.  I gave a lot of my recent large scale landscape prints to our church in Roanoke.  Eventually you run out of walls in a house, so I was excited to find some new walls.

Maybe there a few of my photos will be around for a number of years.  I pretty sure those great colors will speak for me long after I am gone. 

Coastal ColorsJust a few weeks ago, we were enjoying the fall colors in Virginia mountains in Roanoke.  I was surprised then by the fall colors which had been predicted to be dull due to the drought.

We found the mountain colors pretty intense, but we even more pleased to see some really nice fall color in our subdivision on the NC Carolina coast.  

These Bradford Pear trees as you drive out of our subdivision are good example of the fall color that you can find on the coast if you take the time to look.

For some reason our trips to Virginia have coincided with cloudy weather.  That has made the colors on the coast even more impressive since we have seen lots of blue sky and sunshine this fall.

While the weather has been extraordinary, see Endless Summer, we have had some frost, and the expectation is that this weekend will see some temperatures as cold as we see in our winter.

One of the great benefits of living near huge bodies of water is that the climate cools down slowly in the fall.  It also warms up slowly in the spring.  

I am hoping to get back out on the water as much as possible if the weather will cooperate a little more.  The White Oak River is one of my favorite spots.

It is nice to find some fall color on the coast.  It was sone of things that I missed the most as we have increased our time near the ocean.

Winter is a special time at the coast.  Other than the fishermen in the fall, the locals pretty well have the place to themselves. 

Things are quiet, but some of the best pictures of the year are taken in the crystal clear winter skies.

Come visit, there is plenty of room. 

Fall Colors

We spent some time driving around the Roanoke Valley this weekend enjoying the fall colors.

The prediction had been for a drab fall.

That has not been the case.  The valley leaves seem to be wearing some of their best fall garb. 

What has been disappointing is the haze that seems to be stuck in the Roanoke Valley.

Hazy Roanoke ValleyI am wondering if the haze has anything to do with the dry weather or if it is just the increased truck traffic on Interstate 81.

Over the nineteen years that we have lived on the mountain that overlooks the Roanoke Valley, I have seen the view become obscured.

We still have some beautiful sunsets and sunrises, but they are fewer and farther between.  I have not done a scientific study, but I can tell you that I can look straight up in the sky and see blue sky.

Yet when I look in the valley, I see haze.  Often it even appears to be spreading from Tinker Mountain where the Interstate cuts into the Roanoke area.  My website of sunrise pictures in the valley shows many with early morning fog but few days with haze.

I hate to see this valley become another place where pollution rules your life.

The saddest part is watching the natural beauty that draws everyone to the valley become hidden in the haze.