North Carolina

A week or so ago, I got two books in the mail that I wanted to share with you: The North Carolina Birding Trail Coastal Plain and Piedmont trail guides. I wrote a story for NC State University’s College of Natural Resource’s CNR magazine about the North Carolina Birding Trails, and I was so inspired by the effort to link communities together through this series of still-evolving trails that I ordered the first two guides. The western North Carolina version is scheduled to be released sometime this year.

I think I expected some run-of-the-mill guides, with standard maps and descriptions, but these felt so different to me. They don’t explain too much — after all a guide is just that, not a handholding expedition into the forrest — but they are filled with some unique details, I think. They include maps and photos and amenity details (ranging from camping and handicap access points to viewing platforms and hiking trail information). But they also include nearby attractions, such as museums and botanical gardens, along with bird species you might find.

This year, I’d like to explore some of these areas, and the guides include spots I’ve been really curious about, including the Dismal Swamp Canal in Camden County (just south of the Virginia/North Carolina border) and the Rachel Carson National Estuarine Research Reserve in Carteret County (which you can only get to by boat) and , in the Piedmont, the Sandhills Game Land in Richmond and Moore counties (one of the largest intact longleaf pine ecosystems left in North Carolina) and Eagle Point Nature Preserve in Rowan County (where Bald Eagle and Osprey are common sights). I’m going to put them on my list of places to visit as I’m traveling about the state, which I seem to be doing pretty regularly. And now with our overseas travel budget put on hold, some in-state exploring is an exciting prospect.

If you’d like to get your own, visit the N.C. Wild Store, where the two guides are currently on sale for $10 each. That is a total deal, I think, for helping inspire some new roaming and roving across North Carolina.

When I was in high school, my dad, sister and I spent a lot of time volunteering. We worked at a camp for the developmentally disabled, taking groups of teenagers and adults on summertime field trips like horseback riding and swimming. (I even got a black eye in the pool one day when another volunteer tossed a kid onto my head. Ouch!) One of the reasons I chose to go to Warren Wilson College was because of its emphasis on community service, and as a junior and senior, I worked in the college’s Service Learning Office designing and editing a national journal about why and how colleges and students should incorporate community service into their academic programs.

After a hiatus of sorts — family and work responsibilities can overwhelm at times — I find myself compelled, again, to be more involved. President Obama’s call to service was and is such a moving message to me that it’s inspiring me, again, to find more ways to contribute to my own community.

One of the best places I’ve volunteered with so far has been at the Asheville-based MANNA Food Bank. While I’m a deep believer in organizing for real, systematic change in the community, I also believe in meeting people’s needs now, particularly for basic needs such as housing and food. Consider this:

• There are more than 35 million people who are hungry in the United States. Nearly 40 percent of these people are children, and 10 percent are elderly.
• The numbers of people living in poverty in the 18 western counties range from nearly 10 percent to 20 percent of the population.
• The numbers of hungry people in Western North Carolina are twice the national rate, which is one in 12. That means one in every six people living in Western North Carolinian is hungry. I know there are people in my neighborhood who use local organizations to get help. There are probably some in your neighborhood, too.

Last week, Pat and I volunteered at MANNA to sort apples and make packages of food for elementary school kids to take home over the weekends. These tiny, back-pack sized packages of canned vegetables and spaghetti and meatballs go home with children who receive free or low-cost lunches at school — nationally, 30.5 million children received these lunches every day in 2007.

While we volunteered, we learned, as has been reported locally, that even though food donations have remained steady at the food bank, demand has really spiked across the region, leaving MANNA’s food resources stretched. It’s worth noting here that Charity Navigator, an organization that serves as a consumer watchdog on charities, gives MANNA only two of four possible stars (four being the best), mainly — from what I can tell — because growth in both revenues and expenses have decreased and their working capital ratio is also very, very small.

There are many root causes for hunger — low wages, unemployment, poverty. These need long-term — and sometimes political — solutions. In the meantime, I want to help make sure my neighbors have enough food to eat and that kids have enough food to eat over the weekends, when they aren’t at school and can’t get lunch there. If you want to help, too, there are lots of volunteer opportunities directly through MANNA, or you can sign on with Hands On Asheville-Buncombe, which offers volunteer opportunities in a wide variety of areas — from working on hunger to the environment. Statewide, the North Carolina Hunger Forum is working to cut hunger in half by 2015. There’s also a Raleigh-based group, Stop Hunger Now, dedicated to stopping hunger internationally, and Feeding America can give you some places to start helping other locations.

There are hundreds of hunger-fighting organizations across the country, so if you’re thinking of donating donate money to these or any other organization, take a little time to do your homework first. Look at nonprofit researchers GuideStar or Charity Navigator and check with a consumer protection agency (like the Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance) to make sure you’re informed about what your money will do. Ask around and see what works for you, what your neighbors or colleagues recommend. 

Either way, now is the time to help. Part of my goals for the year include volunteering at least 40 hours. I’ll let you know where and how that works out. But, I’d like to know about you, too. Did Obama’s call to service move you to action? What are you doing and/or planning to do to make your community a better place for everyone?

I love Christmas trees. When I was a kid, we’d go to the farm and cut down a scratchy cedar tree and erect it in the never-used living room at my parents’ house. I love cedars. They smell so heavenly, which kind of makes up for their deadly pricks that leave sore scratch marks on your arms days after you’ve had a run-in with one. I loved the lights and the handmade ornaments my mom made after she got married, when they had exactly $0.00 in their bank account and had to rely on ornaments made of toilet paper rolls and tin foil.

Yesterday we went to the tree lot tucked behind the Farmer’s Market. I’ve decided that I love the Farmer’s Market, despite its tendency to be more of a wholesaler market than a true farmer’s market. It’s my type of place, which is, essentially, one filled with old people and hoop cheese. What can I say? I’m from rural North Carolina, after all.

We pulled up, parked, and … bought the first tree we saw. Yep, for all the tree love I have coursing through my veins, it never fails that we pull up to a stall, walk about five feet and find the perfect Frasier fir. We bought it from a man with the bluest eyes you’ve ever seen, who lives in Little Canada, a tiny community off the Tuckasegee River in Jackson County. Across North Carolina, there are an estimated 50 million of these trees on over 25,000 acres, and he and his wife have 14 acres of land filled with these trees. A couple of years ago the two put out 1,200 baby trees by hand. It took them three days. 

I imagine that they go to sleep and night and dream about trees. They have to watch for red spiders, which crawl in the little bitty buds at the tips of the limbs and make them explode. They have to use big, long machete-ish knives to sheer the trees into the perfect cones. They have to worry about drought and frosts. And that’s just until they get them to the market, where he’ll be until Christmas Eve, watching over the trees he’s selling there and trying, I imagine, to make a small profit. Years of work go into this season. The 12-foot trees (which we did not buy, by the way, because that would just be silly) take eight to nine years to grow. He said the drought we’ve had has slowed down their growth a bit, making them a little bit fatter rather than a little bit taller. Sometimes they think about going out and setting them all on fire, he laughed.

I understand this, the love-hate of the work you’ve chosen. It’s a fine, fine line, even for Christmas trees and even if, in the end, what you grow brings someone like me who stands talking in your forest of swinging trees, pulling at the leaves and smelling the piney scent on her hands and dreaming of lights.