May 24, 2021

Sometimes I wonder: what was I thinking? Last week was one of those times. It went like this:

“Agent Vishat, are you there?” (Name altered.)

Silence. Or what I think of as silence when the Best Buy “chat” agent signs off without saying goodbye.

It was 7:28 PM. At 7:13 he had ordered me to “Open the tools/app Under Sensors tab, navigate to GPS sensor (if available) and confirm latitude and longitude are being detected.”

I typed, “Where do I find the tools/app?” 

Silence.

I typed, “Where do I find the Sensors tab? I’m not a computer expert.”

I stared at the screen. Minutes passed. More minutes. I never heard from Agent V again.

He joined a select group, my third chat agent of the day. Earlier I thought I was communicating with Agent Pradack. Just then I noticed the power cable lying on the floor, unplugged. I had jostled the laptop and yanked the cable from the wall outlet. Moments later the battery ran low, the screen went black. I mumbled something. Replugging it, I got back to the chat room and met Agent Vishat, but only long enough for him to disappear.

Before Pradack, I was chatted up by a guy who promised me a call in 38 minutes. An hour passed, no call.

I waited for Agent V for about 15 minutes, then surrendered and shut down the laptop. I guessed he and Pradack were having drinks in a bar across the street from the call center and laughing at my humiliating confession that I’m not a computer expert. 

Those few minutes ended my very strange week in the tech world. I hope it has ended. It started when I tried to navigate to the website of Garmin, the big precision instruments company that about a year ago sold me a GPS watch. Shortly afterward, the watchband broke. I set the watch aside for a few months. Finally I decided I wanted a new band.

I found what looked like the website for Garmin, showing images of watches and other navigation devices. A “chat box” opened. “What is your issue?” someone typed.  I can do this, I thought, and replied, “I’m looking for a watchband for a Forerunner 25.” The typist answered, “A technician will call you in three to five minutes.”

That’s customer service, I thought. The company makes a phone call to sell a watchband?

Sure enough, in five minutes Charles called. “Are you with Garmin?” I asked. “Of course,” he said. “I can upgrade your computer’s GPS and apply the upgrade to all your other devices.” I thought well, I haven’t used the watch in a year, it must need upgrading.

“I need to take control of your computer,” he said. He directed me to a link called Ultraviewer and instructed me to select “remote control.” That seemed reasonable. He’ll take care of this, rather than have me attempt to follow his techie instructions. I clicked, he took control of the laptop.

“Uh-oh,” he said. “You have 6,000 foreign intrusions. They are likely from Russia.” He showed me a screen filled with rows of data labeled “foreign.”

That’s awful news, I told myself. What about my anti-virus protection program? “That has expired,” Charles said. “Don’t worry. I’ll get rid of the intrusions and install protection. It will take 30 to 45 minutes.”

For nearly an hour I stared open-mouthed at the laptop screen as thousands of rows of technical stuff flashed by. Is this what computer viruses look like, I wondered. I saw numbers, letters, symbology, as if I had been dragged into some deep technical ocean depth, the Challenger Deep of software. Finally it stopped. Another screen flashed in front of me that resembled the earlier “foreign” stuff. All the rows were gone.

“That will be $299.99,” Charles said. In shock I gave him my credit card number. I wasn’t planning on $300 for computer work that morning. He sent me a receipt from Mysoft Squad.

The next day I felt uneasy, although the computer seemed fine. I wondered about Mysoft Squad. I looked it up and found a Better Business Bureau link filled with angry complaints about scams by ripoff artists who target people looking for GPS products and software upgrades, in many cases from Garmin, and sell them fake services. I was directed to file a report with the Federal Trade Commission. Friends and family advised me to get the computer checked. I dragged it to Best Buy, they did their standard sweep, found nothing wrong.

I wanted my money back but the credit card company won’t dispute a claim unless you tell the vendor you don’t want his product or service. The last person I wanted to talk to was Charles.  Did he actually do anything in his hour controlling my laptop? I described the rows of data that flashed across the screen to the Best Buy rep. “All that stuff was fake,” he said. “The website was fake, too.”

I wanted some assurance that the GPS, wherever that is, was okay. So I called the chat line and met P, V, and the first guy whose name I never got.

It’s now a cliché: technology has transformed life. Many, maybe most of us use computers to get through the day, every day. Intrusions? Viruses? Who but a trained computer engineer really understands what they are?  As with other things in life, when we want new tech stuff, or to fix broken things, we look for someone who says he’ll help us right now. Someone like Charles.

We did cancel the credit card. Garmin is warning customers not to be snookered into buying GPS upgrades or other products by phone. The FTC warns that “many of the targets of these scams are vulnerable elderly people.” Well—thanks for that, FTC.

May 17, 2021

The Grandview Lodge is tucked away on a quiet road that leads from Waynesville, N.C., up steeply onto the eastern edge of the Great Smokies. Across the road, a fast-moving stream rushes down the mountain. The walls and floors have been finished with a deep dark stain. The walls are decorated with fading decades-old black-and-white portraits of local folks. The lobby was furnished—littered—with odd antique household items. Classic hit tunes echoed faintly from an old stereo. A stack of dog-eared novels that were popular ten or twenty years ago sat on the front desk next to a sign that reads, “Forget your book? Read one of ours.”

We got to the lodge a week ago Friday, making several wrong turns, it’s well off the beaten track. The place is run by a husband and wife, who live with their children on the property. It was quiet when we arrived in early afternoon. The husband showed us the spacious dining area and a wide porch, furnished with old rocking chairs, that wraps around the house and looks out at the road. He named several local restaurants. The wife, in blue-jean overalls, showed us our room, more dark wood, austere but comfortable. I asked about morning coffee since we weren’t staying for breakfast.

When we returned in early evening I drove past the lodge and continued a couple of miles up the road, which twists higher and steeper. We both got nervous as the grade grew sharper. Looking back, the Smokies rose in the north just beyond town. The peaks are green only as high as spring has crept, then winter-brown to their summits.  As night fell they glimmered faintly blue-purple as a gentle mist engulfed them.  

Back at the lodge we saw a few more guests, but the place still was peaceful. We walked out to the porch and tried the rocking chairs. A chill was moving in, we didn’t stay long.

The lodge summoned for me images from odd bits of history I’ve read about those parts. Generations had passed since the place was built, likely as a stout bulwark against Cherokee and Choctaw war parties. Two centuries ago western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee was a violent wilderness. Scottish and Irish farmers, traders, and down-and-outers poured over the Appalachians to fill in the rough boundaries of the Mountain South.

We were there partly to reprise our ambitions for our 2018 road trip along old U.S. 66 halfway across America. As in this rustic spot, at all our stops we wondered what happened before we arrived. Our thinking, our priorities, our plans have changed, turned upside down since then. Sickness, the pandemic, and our move South have done that. But we still feel the spark.

But the reminiscing was a distraction. The main event of this two-day junket was my Black Rock mulligan, my do-over of the mountain climb (March 29 post) that I attempted with old friends, mostly other former Virginians. I fell short on that chilly mid-March Saturday.

We rose as dawn broke and drove west to the trailhead near Sylva, 20 miles past Waynesville. There I met up with a new friend, Mike, who gave up his competitive position in the Black Rock field that day to help as I turned hypothermic. He drove out from his home near Asheville for what for him was a conditioning climb he really didn’t need. I was counting on him to bail me out of my failure to achieve something I knew I could achieve.   

We scrambled forward up over the first climb, kicking rocks, then up a long straightaway. We slogged onto the switchbacks, up, up, then farther up, as the peaks to the west fell away below. We felt faint sunshine as the trail wrapped the mountain’s south side, then a bracing chill when we turned north. In just over three miles, at nearly 3,000 feet of elevation, we reached the break in the underbrush that opened to the final one-third-mile-long single-track chute trail, 650 feet of climb to the base of the summit. Mike pointed to the turn, which winds up nearly out of sight.

We pushed into the chute, searching for footing with each step, grabbing for roots, branches, rocks, finally stepping out to the highest point I had reached that March day. The rest is pure climbing. We tiptoed up and around and over house-sized boulders until we could slither onto the final not-quite flat surface of the top of the mountain.

We sat at the top for 30 minutes, stunned at the vastness of the green-blue peaks surrounding us that stretch across parts of three states. Far below us, eagles glided on updrafts. The air was still and silent, not a branch stirred. We picked out the specks of buildings bunched together in Sylva, five miles away. We bumped fists. Then we slid off the rock and down through the chute. I checked the Black Rock box.

As we drove home that afternoon I wondered why I bothered. Why does anyone, after missing the brass ring, reach for it again? In my memory the mountain stared at me. Wat does failure mean? Who wants to live with it? Mike and Sandy were willing. With a few tweaks I could climb Black Rock. I missed it once. So I went back.

May 10, 2021

The little house in which we landed here in the Upstate has too-small closets, oddly placed light fixtures and switches, a creaky, paint-chipped deck. That is, it has character, which is what we looked for, instead of a sleek new-build shell in a treeless subdivision. Three weekends in, we did without hot water for three days when the water heater failed. Our first new home in 33 years has rewarded us as we hoped it would, but still challenges our modest management skills. Except for the water heater, that means ignoring the nits or pushing them into the undefined future.

None of the rough edges, the ones we could see, mattered much in February when I first saw the house. It has a backyard—rectangular, uniform, level. Half the area then was a mix of dead grass and weeds. But the other half is set off by a border showing that someone at one time had planted a garden. Then I knew I wanted the place.

People in great cities grow vegetables, fruit, flowers. Affluent and low-income neighborhoods nearly everywhere are home to people who find joy in planting, cultivating, harvesting, often for the benefit of others. City governments encourage community gardens, which by midsummer may explode in colorful bounties of produce. These may be islands of civility, calm, peace, often in wider spaces of chaos. The labor of growing things that are good for people is itself a virtue.

Our idea was to plant a garden. We recalled the success of our Nashville garden, where the soil was black and rich and everything grew, tomatoes, green beans, squash, okra, even melons. When ripe the veggies fell off the plants. Occasionally I worked it, hoeing and pulling weeds, but not much. Sometimes we harvested enough to give away.

I tried again at our Virginia home, but the soil there is poor and filled with chunks of waste concrete buried by construction crews decades ago. The yard is shadowed by huge trees that block sunlight, but don’t ease the jungle-like humidity and heat of the Potomac River basin in summer. I gave up on gardening early.

When I was a kid my parents had a garden in their New Jersey backyard, I recall giant tomato plants. Gardening in the South, though, prompts my imagination of lyrical and mysterious, poignant, even ghostly things. It was to these parts and others that before the War for Independence rich growers pushed poor or unlucky folks west, out of the fertile Virginia and Carolina coastal lowlands to make room for tobacco, rice, and indigo. They were forced to scratch out a living in what then was wilderness. They horse-plowed the tough red clay found everywhere around here to plant subsistence plots. Small, isolated backwoods communities were pocked with poverty and hardship, feuding, and violence.

My idea was a garden, not a farm, to pretty up the yard by planting the brown, bare back half quickly before it was overrun with weeds. My daughter recommended a soil test, they sell cheap ones at Lowe’s. The “pH” looked good for tomatoes, a few other things. I commenced digging holes for three tiny plants, quickly hitting the concrete-like clay. I leaned on the shovel, panting and gasping, then stuck the plants in and sprinkled them with Miracl-Gro. Within days one withered.

I envisioned an Eden-like kaleidoscope of floral color and planted sunflower, marigold and zinnia seeds, nixing the already-started beds. Nearby I stuck in basil, sage, cilantro, and okra seedlings to jump-start a green look. In the plot along the back fence I planted beans, squash, cantaloupe, lettuce. Every day for a week in the warm Carolina sun I hacked away at the clay, scraping long trenches with the pick the former owner had left us, then bending double to spread the seeds and water them. Each morning afterward my back ached and throbbed.

I glanced only briefly at the instructions on the seed packages. I didn’t pay much attention to the intricacies of exactly when in springtime to plant, or how deep or how far apart the seeds should be sown. Still, each morning I looked out impatiently at the yard.

A week or so after I finished, in late April, the TV weather lady warned of an approaching freeze. “Cover those new plants,” she chided. I either didn’t take her seriously or didn’t want to bother. Sometimes, as we know, these TV weather people try to scare you. They call for snow in your town, it doesn’t snow. They predict sunshine, it’s chilly and overcast.

This time she got it right. The mercury sank to 30 F, maybe lower. I looked outside, the leaves of my okra and sage were withered and dead. At Lowe’s Garden Center an indifferent or overworked staff had left the outdoor beds uncovered. Row after row of tiny plants were killed by the cold.

I surveyed my backyard garden, brown and bare, my silent spring. Only the sunflowers were timidly emerging. The dirt stared back at me, the sticks I used to mark my planted rows tilting forlornly where I had inserted them in the soil, marking only the faint imprint of my spade. I watered yet again. Within days the two plots were faintly dotted with green as the long-established weeds, the clover, chickweed, buttercup, and others I didn’t recognize surged to the surface. The stuff I planted, still no-shows.

I tramped back to Lowe’s and bought more seeds: spinach, onion, peppers, more beans, more squash, more marigolds and zinnias. Grinding my teeth, I scraped new rows, planted and watered the seeds, threw the hose down and stomped into the house. I wondered: what’s wrong with my soil? Excess lime? Toxic chemicals? Do I know what I’m doing? I bent over and glared at the surface. Weeds, then nothing.

Since then the days have grown warmer. I’m still watering, but not as often. I’ve quit with the Miracl-Gro, wondering if I overwhelmed the seeds. I’ve learned to relax. I see us still getting our vegetables at the Food Lion all summer then next fall and winter.

Then the other day I saw something. Tiny sprouts had emerged, a fraction of an inch long, about where I had planted the beans. I could see microscopic, bright-green leaves peeking out where I thought I had sown the lettuce. An irregular row of inch-long seedlings was visible where I left the zinnia seeds. I then spied the tiny, bent leaves of a squash plant about where I had planted it.

I stepped back, from ten feet away I saw only the weeds. But Spring was breaking out in my garden. The seeds I bought and planted apparently were alive, after all. Well, some of them. So far, just tiny bits of green, no promise of bushels of ripe vegetables by late summer. We’ll still be waiting in line at the grocery or farmer’s market. But something is out there.                

May 3, 2021

We headed north towards the North Carolina state line, starting from the burbs on the usual route up U.S. 25. My daughter Marie drove, the two boys were in their kid seats behind us. The destination was Chimney Rock, maybe an hour southeast of Asheville. She cut onto I-26 just south of the border then abruptly onto U.S. 64 east, which took us quickly into the mountains. Just after passing through Bat Cave, N.C., we craned our necks to look up at the peaks, which seems to rise suddenly from the fast-flowing Broad River.

We pulled into the village just outside the Rock, gaping at the sheer bare granite wall that we learned was formed before the Cretaceous Period, and now looms above the river and nearby Lake Lure. Chimney Rock became a state park in 2006 when the state purchased the 1,000-acre tract from the family that established it and opened it to the public in 1902. You can walk 449 stairs from the parking lot to the observation tower or take a 26-story elevator ride. At the summit the visitor stands before a panorama of the valley and the lake that extends 50 miles or more to the hazy eastern horizon. You then can teeter up a narrow walkway to the top, where the rock tower has separated from the mountain. There’s a railing, some folks venture close to the 2,280-foot drop. I kept my distance, yelling nervously at the boys, who showed no fear.  

The place is one of those phenomena of God’s creation that seizes the visitor’s emotions. Nearly everyone has had the experience somewhere: the humbling recognition that something before us, something we may have stumbled on, not only takes our breath away but also demolishes our presumption that we’re too smart, too world-weary, to be awed.

The Grand Canyon would be another such place, among countless others. As we crossed a stone bridge to Chimney Rock, watching the Broad River rush almost in anger over giant rocks took me back, the way old guys get taken back. I was on a bus from the Bozeman, Mont., airport to the hamlet of Big Sky for some now long-forgotten conference.

From the bus window, as we left the Bozeman suburbs and entered thick evergreen forest, I watched the road curve close to the rushing Gallatin River. The white water slashed in torrents through narrow gorges, announcing that I was in a different world. The dark, wild river spoke of the creation of beauty in that faraway, alien place.

That bus ride now was nearly forty years ago, the early 1980s. I got off the bus and let that unsettling impression form in memory. Soon afterward I reoriented to office life, staff meetings, and tamer bus rides along city streets and interstates at the less-than breakneck pace of the bureaucrat-commuter. But the images remained, along with the certainty that that brush with the unrestrained, indifferent power and loveliness of the natural world can transform human souls.

That lesson, which seemed insightful and complicated when it occurred to me, actually is simple, childlike, crystal-clear for anyone who ventures outdoors and looks around. I felt it elsewhere, on rough hikes in Virginia mountains, on wide beaches, but also on urban streets and sidewalks where men have succeeded in creating beauty and grace.

After escaping the unearthly Chimney Rock tower we settled at a picnic table for our peanut butter sandwiches. Marie noticed an older guy wearing a Tennessee Vols cap seated nearby. We chatted, I mentioned we lived in Nashville years ago, he asked where. “Near Vanderbilt,” I told him. He said he’s from Clarksville, up near Kentucky; he had ten years on me. His wife had passed, he’s now dating a woman from Knoxville, his high-school sweetheart, who also lost her spouse. Unlike us, they walked the 449 steps. I told myself I’ll try that if I can last ten more years.

We walked the winding two-mile Hickory Nut Falls trail to the base of the falls, which tumble 2,580 feet to a rocky pool then cascade on to the river. The observation platform wasn’t enough thrill for the boys, they hustled down over the wet, slippery rocks where the exploding water bathed us in spray. Finally we retrieved them, the younger one ran back down the trail ahead of us. As we walked to the car the Tennessee couple passed us and waved. On to their next four-score years’ adventure, I guessed.

Outside the park we walked down to the river, which curls through the little town and watched the blue-green water crash over giant boulders. As the kids waded in the shallows and threw rocks, I recalled that day I watched the Gallatin in Montana, also lined with deep mountain forest but 2,000 miles away, in a different mountain range, history, and culture, replicated here in this rough and beautiful eastern wilderness.

We thought we should get on the road, but others passed by and chatted a bit, about what a pretty place this is next to New Jersey—why do they pick on Jersey? We let the kids play along the river a bit longer, getting some extra time in that mountain woodland, maybe creating their own memories of a few hours in touch with the serenity of God’s natural world. Maybe when they’re in their thirties or forties, even later, with kids of their own, they’ll think of that day. And maybe remember that grandpa was there.

April 26, 2021

Death. We see grim news of it every day. Day after day. But when do you think about your own death? Who wants to? No one I know. But on rare occasions, perhaps in a sink of depression, thoughts of our own mortality come to us. Some experience conversion, epiphany, resolve to change their lives. Others decide to create a living trust.

We did just that. Not because of depression or epiphany; like almost everything I do, I did it, or we did it, because we heard about it from someone else. It may have been our daughter and son-in-law, who set one up. Or it may have been one of those late-night cable TV lawyers with an 888 number, the ones who also will get you out of jail.

A trust is a legal entity that, when the trustees pass on, manages the trust’s assets without tangling with the probate court which, if it steps in, can mean long delays and legal expenses. My mother’s will took months to resolve. My brothers, still in our hometown, did all the work. I didn’t pay much attention, but it amounted to a huge distraction in their lives. Sandy’s mom’s will, which involved the sale of her modest home, turned into a year-long slog, handled bravely by another son-in-law. Almost weekly we got baffling letters from a law firm overseeing her “estate.” That inches-thick sheaf of papers, in a box somewhere in the garage, is getting recycled as soon as I find it.

The concept of a trust was obscure to me. The term summoned thoughts of Gilded Age robber barons, railroads, Vanderbilts, Carnegies, people with money to burn or hide. I guess Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos have trusts. Still, the argument about cutting paperwork and avoiding legal bills prompted us to call the attorney we had met with awhile back to see if our Virginia wills conformed to South Carolina law. For that chore, we sat with him at a beautifully polished table in the library of a lovely antebellum home. He looked them over, said they were okay and, to our amazement, didn’t charge us anything.

So a month ago we visited him again. He explained that a trust is more expensive and way more complicated than a will. It essentially becomes the repository of your assets even before you pass from the scene. The lawyer gives you the legalese, you listen, ask him to translate it into elementary-school language, you listen again, then ask again. We squinted, but said we’ll go with it. He took our check. I gritted my teeth as I wrote it, recalling the $1,000 for breaking our apartment lease, another surprise cost.

We came back three weeks later. His polished table was covered with forms and a thick blue three-ring binder that contained our wills, powers of attorney, “certification of trust,” and the trust document, which runs to 50—that’s right, 50 pages. For us? My jaw sagged. We signed away, form after form. I thumbed through the binder—never had I dreamed my demise would rate so much legal lingo. The trust consists of 26 (XXVI) articles, each with multiple sections and subsections, printed on glossy, probably fireproof paper. I paused at Article IV, “Administration of My Trust During My Incapacity.” It lays out how our bills keep getting paid after I’ve become decrepit. In everyday English, things keep humming along.

Then the hard part began. We had homework. The trust only works if the people who hold your assets know it exists. We started with a trip to the nearest branch of Bank of America, where we had obtained the check we needed for the closing on our house. For that errand we were shown into the office of the manager, who doubles as a Merrill Lynch salesman. He welcomed us to South Carolina, then gave his Merrill pitch. “Stocks? Bonds? A BOA credit card? Think of the points you’ll earn!” We stared at our watches until he gave up.

To record the trust as designee on the bank signature cards, we got a repeat performance of the Merrill briefing until our eyes turned glassy. He’s probably got some good deals and advice. But when you’re ears-deep in abstract financial talk, who cares?

Finally we got out of there. I started on the phone calls to Fidelity and our old faithful, USAA, where we have tiny accounts. It would have been easier to cash ‘em in than to fill out the forms, but I have trouble grasping the big financial picture. I finished the forms. I didn’t scan and email them or save them to a web “portal.” I licked stamps and mailed them.

We’re still thrashing about with this. I set the big blue binder aside without reading to the end. The attorney urged us to stick it in a fireproof safe or safe-deposit box, that’s still on the to-do list. But the spunk I felt last month to focus on death, which, bottom line, is what the trust is all about, has ebbed a bit. It can be exhausting. It does keep you jogging, going to the gym, watching the calories and the desserts, as you go through the motions of postponing the inevitable. But I looked over Section 1.01 of the trust: “… for the purpose of transferring property to my Trust or identifying my beneficiary, or pay-on-death designation …”

Every so often I browse through the financial pages checking the stock market (up or down?) wondering what the fine print of the trust will really mean to our beneficiaries when the time comes.  The market is beyond our control. At least we’ve checked the heavyweight legal document box—both of us, as “trustees,” along with the Vanderbilts.