Digging Up Our Awesome Driveway

1st Week of April 2007 - Don't be alarmed. This was planned. The electric and telephone have to go in before the mat and gravel are put down. Here's Sam, with Byron watching the master, starting at the power pole which just happened to be right next to the driveway. I'd like to give Sam credit for this, but I think he'd agree we just got lucky. The cable behind Byron is copper for telephone and, unheard of in them thar hills, fiber optic for Internet and cable TV. No extra charge to us, this is just where they chose to start offering the service.

This reel of power cable,

has to go in this conduit.

Electrician Bob Garland and Sam.

This was cool. They attached a string to a ping pong ball, attached a vacuum cleaner to the opposite end of the conduit and sucked the ball and string through. Then they attached this line to the string and pulled it through. To the end of that line they attached the power cable, tied the line to the ball hitch of the truck and pulled the cable through.

Cleaning Up

1st Week of April 2007 - What a mess!

Sam burned the tops and also the stumps only to the point where they would burn no more. He hauled 44 big truckloads of stumps to the grinder. Cha-ching!

Sam's son, Byron Proffit, chain saw operator extraordinaire.

Our Awesome Driveway

March 2007
Here are way too many pictures of our approx. 900' driveway. At one time we considered asking our neighbor (not Sherry) to sell us easement along our lot line to avoid all this excavating, but we would have missed seeing all this pretty acreage.

There are two 3' diameter, 20' long culverts here that we helped Sam place.

This is a "wet-weather" babbling brook. I'm going to plant a flowering dogwood on the left and place a rustic bench in front of it.

At the top!

Some of the logs destined for the neighbors.

The building site.

Oh, yeah.

Happy Birthday 2007

We spent about a month clearing the land so we asked Larry's kids if they'd like to come and visit while we were ensconced at the Little Main Street Inn in Banner Elk. Valerie and husband, Chuck, and our grandson, Evan, came from Owensboro, KY; unfortunately, grandkids Nathaniel and Hillary couldn't make it. Michael and Cherell and grandkids Kyle and Lexi came from Charlotte, NC. Larry and I both have March birthdays so we celebrated all on St. Patrick's Day. All week long I had been looking for a restaurant that would be serving corned beef and cabbage but wasn't having any luck. I mentioned it to our innkeeper, Lori, and she asked her friend, a chef at a restaurant in town, if he'd make it. He agreed and it was excellent. And Michael treated us all! Except our innkeepers decided to come to the restaurant and they sent dessert over to our table.

Later in the month we checked out a local pizza place. Just for conversation, we asked if he delivered. When we told him where we'd be living he told us he goes as far as the Baptist church at the foot of the mountain so we'd have to meet him there. Now whenever we pass that church we say, "Wanna get a pizza?! (Seinfeld reference.)

The end of March we were invited to Ruth and Boyd McCloud's for dinner (Sherry's parents). Sherry advised me not to bring a bottle of wine because her parents, being strict Baptists, would pour it down the drain. So I brought flowers and chocolate -- my preference anyway. What a spread! Larry was in hog heaven because we had fried chicken and milk gravy (I don't make fried chicken -- or milk gravy.) I especially liked the good, down-home biscuits and I asked Ruth if she'd part with the recipe. She sheepishly said, "They're from Market Day."

As we were winding down our stay I got a call from my sister, Maureen, out in Colorado. She had moved there in August 2006 and was planning her first trip home for Easter which was the 8th of April. It was a little sooner than we planned on returning but I wanted to see her so I turned to Larry and said, "Do you think we could leave a couple of days early because Maureen's fixin' to drive in from Colorado..." Maureen shouted, "Fixin'?" I said, "What?" She said, "You said fixin'!" I said, "I did not!" She said, "Yes, you did!" I reckon I did.

March 2007 - Time to Clear the Land

Our first day "up the mountain" we had a visit from our neighbor, Sherry McCloud. She introduced herself and asked us for our names. Larry said, "Larry and Lolly." Sherry repeated our names and said, "Larry and Lolly -- why that's so cute I could just puke." Then she laughed and let go a stream of tobacco. We were a bit chagrined, but it was all very friendly. Sherry was interested in what we were going to do with the cleared trees. The deal we made with Sam was that he essentially owned the trees with the exception of a small quantity of hardwoods that he would haul to the mill, sell, and give us credit for. The rest he would sell to the pulp mill and the cost of trucking and fuel would cancel that out. But Sam was happy to leave them piled on the land so that Sherry could spread the word that anyone interested in cutting and splitting the logs for firewood was welcome to them. It seems a lot of our neighbors have wood-burning stoves to heat their homes and water. It eventually all disappeared and we felt right neighborly about it.

The thing I find so funny about Sherry dropping in that day is that I envision her down at her place saying to herself, "I believe I'll go meet the new neighbors -- oh, wait a minute," then she loads up on chew and says, "now I'm ready." After having this conversation with Sam he teased me that once I lived down here I'd feel the pressure to fit in and that I'd eventually take up the habit myself. I told him it would be a cold day in hell, but now when I see him he asks if he can "bum a dip." (Sam doesn't imbibe.)

Here we go!

Happy Lolly.

The view starts to reveal itself.

Selling Our House

On the 12th of January 2007 we closed on Old Beech Mountain. Now it was time to list our house. Rather than wait for spring when there would be a lot of inventory on the market, we thought we'd get a leg up and list it in January. We were told there's always a market for tranferees and that was our most likely target. We've always been pretty meticulous about upkeep and, as all sellers probably think, we thought our house was pretty special and it would fly off the market. Larry took these pictures with the Christmas decorations still up thinking it would be for the last time.

We also told our hangar neighbor at Kenosha airport that we were going to be selling the hangar. He leapt at it and asked us not to tell anyone he was the buyer or the amount we agreed upon. We had a handshake deal. Silly us.

Meet Sam Proffit

November 2006 is also when we met the inimitable Sam Proffit. (I swore I wouldn't publish any unflattering pictures of myself but I just had to include a picture of Sam. Besides, Larry says this is a good picture of me, a fact I find quite depressing.)

The first thing you notice about Sam is that he is the slowest talkin' man in North Carolina. The second is his quiet, unassuming way. The third is his wry sense of humor. Because I asked everyone I met about snakes in these mountains, he told me about professors at Appalachian State University (in Boone, our nearest "big" city) trying to reintroduce the rattlesnake. To this he said, "My question to them is, why don't we start in your yard?" Oh, and the answer to that question from most everyone was that I didn't have to worry about snakes at 4,200 feet. Whew!

Sam is a logger, but with that business drying up in NC he's getting more into excavating. He was recommended to us as the man who could find the best path into the property as well as where to site the house. We were armed with a compass and topographical maps, Sam was armed with his cup of McDonald's coffee.

Because the land is so wooded, we entered near the back of the property near those Christmas trees I mentioned earlier. It seemed to be the levelest spot and we wanted to be far from the road anyway. Sam said, "I think we should start walking out here." We tied a ribbon on a branch and waded in. A machete would have been helpful. He took us up, down, around, over, under and even through some thick rhododendron bushes, tying ribbons all the way. We came out very near the middle of our road frontage. Sam never spilled a drop. (See that sagging pocket on the front of Sam's T-shirt? We later learned that that's where he parks his coffee cup all day when he's operating heavy equipment.)

We told Sam we'd be back in March to clear the land and be ready to start building in April or as soon as our house sold. Ha!