Back a week now

It's been a week now since I flew back from North Carolina to France. What a week! Even when you are officially retired, the pace of life sometimes makes your head spin.

Just as I was getting over jet lag, the attic conversion work, with all the hammering and sawing, dust and dirt, got started, last Tuesday. At this point, the attic is completely insulated, and the crew even started putting up some sheetrock yesterday.

Morehead City, N.C., on Bogue Sound

Now the builder's crew has gone away for a few days. They did a good clean-up yesterday afternoon, taking down the plastic sheeting that helped protect the rest of the house while they were working in the entryway and stair well. They swept. They put boards over the big stair cavity so that there is less air flow out there. They'll be back next Wednesday, they said.

The old downtown in Morehead — a train runs through it

Now Bertie the tomcat has arrived. We are keeping him separated from Callie for the time being. Bertie seems to be doing fine from the dietary and bodily-functions point of view. He's eating normally, in other words, and using his litter box.

This morning, however, we noticed that he has a sore on the side of his head, just in front of his right ear. It looks more like some kind of ulcer rather than an injury. Have any of you ever heard of any such thing? Could it be stress-related?

The beach seen from the top of the bridge — that's the ocean
on the other side of the narrow strip of barrier island.

Meanwhile, I'm posting some pictures I took in my home town in North Carolina just over a week ago. It was the last day of my "vacation" — more a visit than a holiday, in fact, and a really good time — and the weather had turned beautiful. I parked the car in town near the high-rise bridge that goes over to the beach. I walked out to the highest part of the bridge and took some pictures.

A motorboat speeding into the noonday sun, under the bridge

Morehead City was a small town when I was growing up there in the 1950s and 1960s. It's still a small town, but the population has doubled or even tripled. A lot of retirees have moved in from both the north (New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, New England, Ohio, Michigan, etc.) and the south (Florida), attracted by the area's mild climate.

People in Morehead City lived in little houses
like this one as late as the 1970s.

The roads are wider and traffic is heavier. Compared to the area around Saint-Aignan, my little N.C. town feels quite urban and, to me, over-developed. The beach bridge, for example, is the third such bridge I have known in my lifetime. The first two were drawbridges, but boat traffic got so heavy that a high-rise span had to be built. Car traffic to and from the beach (40 km/25 miles of sand and water) is tremendous from May through September.

Here's the structure called "the beach bridge" —
it replaced two earlier draw bridges.

Anyway, here are a few pictures. The landscape there — actually, there is a lot more water than land — is strikingly horizontal.

Like cats and dogs...

That's because it's what they are. Not fighting, exactly, but not making friends either. Meet Bertie, the black cat.

Bertie, the five-year-old tomcat, on Walt's knee

Bertie arrived yesterday evening, brought over to La Renaudière by our English friend Janet. Janet used to live in Saint-Aignan, just a mile or two down the road from us. Then she moved to a little town near Blois for a few years. We stayed in touch.

Now Janet is moving back to England, where she has a new job selling high-end properties in France to British buyers. And in the move, she decided to give us Bertie rather than going through all the red tape involved in moving an animal from France to England.

Bertie on top of the stacked washer-dryer, surveying the scene

We hope Bertie will be an outdoor cat. Jan says he is a good hunter. Maybe he'll enjoy hunting moles in the back yard. Callie hasn't been any help in persuading the moles to go live somewhere else. There are at least three or four other cats in the hamlet for Bertie to get to know. Since he's been fixed, there shouldn't be too many problems. Bertie is five years old.

Right now, he is living in the utility room. I put some boards over the top of the laundry sink so that he can sit and look out the window into the back yard. Somewhere I read that cats like that; they start to familiarize themselves with their new environment that way.

If anybody has any good ideas about how you go about fostering friendship between a three-year-old border collie and a five-year-old tomcat, I'd love to hear them.

Attic windows

We had a close call with the windows upstairs. In February or March, I picked out the ones I wanted. But then I never said anything to Jacques the contractor about them. Or at least I don't think I did.

Sometime in March Jacques ordered the two windows we plan to have installed. They are « fenêtres de toit » in French — roof windows, I guess, or attic windows. They're not exactly skylights, because they are down at eye level and can be opened and closed one way or another.

The glass panes in these windows, which we had installed
six years ago, are about 40" x 30". Each attic window will
be only slightly smaller than one of these big panes.

The opening and closing was the issue. The standard attic windows manufactured by Vélux, which seems to have a monopoly on them, feature glass panes in frames that pivot on a horizontal post located somewhere above the center of the glass. Those are the ones I decided I didn't want.

The standard Vélux windows pivot and rotate to open.

In French, they are called « fenêtres pivotantes » ("center-pivot windows" in English) and they are the ones Jacques ordered. The Vélux web page about them says they use « ouverture par rotation » — they rotate open. Yesterday I realized we had a problem so I talked to Coco, the crew foreman, about it. He told me that the windows had already been ordered and that his boss Jacques was in Paris for three days.

What I want is windows that push out to open rather than rotate. I'm not sure why, actually. I don't like the idea of them spinning on an axis. They use a system called « ouverture par projection » — which doesn't translate literally into English. Anyway, that's what I want. The British Vélux site calls them "top-hung roof windows."

Here's the window style that we are getting.
They are hinged at the top and push open.

And that's what we are getting. Yesterday afternoon, Jacques the boss called Coco on the phone and it all got straightened out. Coco went and ordered the push-out windows. He says it will take three weeks to get them. I said that was fine with me, but would it work for him? He said yes, he has a good three weeks work to do upstairs and the timing should be about right.

Here's what the push-out windows look like from the inside.
See the U.K. Vélux web site for more information and pictures.

Meanwhile, we are waiting for our neighbor the mayor to give us her approval. In theory, when you change the exterior appearance of your house, you have to get planning permission. In our case, we don't foresee any difficulties, because most of the houses in our hamlet already have the Vélux attic windows, including the mayor's.

Yesterday, our neighbors who have the summer house across the street stopped by. I told them what we are having done to the house, and they said they had never asked for permission from anybody when they had their attic windows installed.

Besides, we are putting the windows on the back side of our house, so we are not modifying the look of the house from the street. The three-week time frame should give Mme le Maire time to give us her decision before the actual work of installing the windows begins.

The cavity

Ça y est — the hole is cut. The work went well, after some initial confusion about how big the stair cavity should actually be. That made me pretty nervous, but soon we resolved it by looking at the specs for the staircase on the vendor's web site.

The crew spent the day cutting the hole. They tarped off the area and put tarps down on the travertine stairs so that debris and dust in the rest of the house were minimized.

Le nouveau trou pour le nouvel escalier

First they removed the floorboards in the attic, and then they knocked out the ceiling, which is made of thin bricks hanging from hooks off the joists and covered with plaster. Then they reinforced the remaining ceiling and cut out the floor joists to open up the hole completely.

Can you see the opening against the back wall?

Callie took it all in stride. She was a little confused at first, but she didn't seem afraid and she settled right down in spite of all the hammering and sawing.

A calm Callie

Now the downstairs entryway is full of rolls of insulation and big sheets of plaster board (sheetrock). The new radiators are also down there, and the staircase is in the garage.

Jacques the boss said the crew will need to take a couple of days off soon to go finish another job. We hope they won't disappear for too long a time. Jacques also said the job should be completed well before the end of April. Ça, on verra...

Burning it up

As Walt said, the floor of the attic was covered with flattened cardboard boxes. I assume the previous owner put the cardboard up there to serve as extra insulation. We've lived here nearly seven years, but in that time we never went up there to do any cleaning. Since the roof itself has no insulation, it was always either windy, freezing cold, or burning hot up there.

All the cardboard that we threw out the attic window
burned hot and fast. The ash is still smoldering today.

Yesterday we finally picked up all the sheets of cardboard and threw them out the window. Then we had a bonfire and burned them all up. No trip to the recycling center was necessary. We are happy that we don't have strict rules about burning such waste in our back yard. It's one of the joys of living in the country.

Callie found a stick to chew on while the fire burned.

The contractors are here and are starting the work as planned. We know them, or at least the two principals. The general contractor is named Jacques, and the man who is going to do most of the actual work, with at least one if not more assistants, is also named Jacques. But Jacques II is also known as Coco. He did tile work on our front terrace last summer.

Walt and Callie watching the cardboard burn

We were lucky yesterday. The sun was warm and the sky was blue. A light wind was blowing from the south and southwest, which is the perfect direction to take the smoke away from our neighbors' houses. It all blew out over the vineyards that lie to the north and northeast of our property.

I noticed that the rhubarb is coming up out in the garden.

For me, yesterday afternoon was not only the right time for a bonfire, but it was also a chance to go out and inspect the garden. The tilling needs to be done, but I hope the ground has a chance to dry out a little first. We have had some heavy rains over the past few days.

For you who have visited

You might not recognize the place — or at least the downstairs entryway and the upstairs landing. We have now nearly finished moving out all the furniture. The building contractors are supposed to come tomorrow to start the big job.

I assume that the first thing done will be the cutting of the trémie — "stair cavity" is the translation for that word in the Robert-Collins dictionary. The Robert French dictionary says a trémie is « un espace réservé dans un plancher, pour recevoir ... un escalier » — "a space reserved in a floor, to receive a staircase."

The downstairs entryway is nearly emptied out now.

When we put it back together, it will be a room for plants.

In other words, the building contractors have to cut a big square hole in the ceiling above the existing staircase. There will obviously be much dust and debris.

What we have left to do is to take the pictures, maps, and posters off the walls, and move the day bed downstairs into the garage. If we can find space in the garage. Already, other pieces of furniture are in there — an armchair and ottoman, the double bed we took out of the former guest room... and the new stairway itself. It's kind of crowded.

We will finally get rid of the rest of the old wallpaper,
which used to cover the entryway walls and ceiling too.

The last time we had such disruption in our house and lives was five years ago, when we undertook to scrape, sand, and repaint the walls in our main room, the W.C., the bathroom, and the downstairs entryway. I feel like I was a lot younger then.

The stair landing is nearly empty, and the
French doors are shut to keep out dust and debris.
Soon, the old wallpaper will be a memory.

Luckily, we have French doors to divide the living room off from the landing. With tile floors, it's easy to slide furniture around. So we slid the pine cabinet and the old buffet into the dining area without completely emptying them. Then we closed the French doors behind them and slid them back out of the way.

Furniture off the landing is now in the dining area,
out of harm's way.

It would be nice if we had another way to get in and out of the house, but the main staircase is our only access. It will be difficult for a few days, at least, to get in and out. Poor Callie. She is going to be freaked out by all the commotion and noise. So are we.

Callie is trying to figure out what is going on.

Despite all that, the finished result will be great. We are effectively doubling our living space. The first guests who arrive after the work is finished, if they have been here before, will really see a difference. Right now, I think that will be Peter and Jill, in late June. I hope the work is done by the time they get here.

Body and soul

My mind is still in Carolina, and my tired body is in France. Soon I'll get body and soul together again.

Here in Saint-Aignan, we are in the throes of preparing for the most disruptive part of the attic conversion work to start on Tuesday. Today we have to finish cleaning out the area under the ceiling space where the cutout fro the staircase will be. That means moving a cabinet full of china and all kinds of baking dishes, and a buffet full of glasses — not to mention Walt's Eiffel Tower collection. It's all fragile stuff and will require a lot of painstaking work.

Yesterday at sunset, a rain shower moving off toward the east,
with brilliant sunlight shining from the west...

The weather in Saint-Aignan is windy, showery, and chilly. What a contrast it is with the warm, bright, sunny weather we were having in Morehead City when I left on Thursday. Yesterday at sunset we had a very hard shower that moved across from west to east. When it was over, the sun was down near the western horizon and the light was fantastic. The sun sets at 8:30 p.m. now.

... plus a nice rainbow.

It's been so rainy here that it's too wet to plow. In other words, we'll need some warm dry days before I can get to work in the vegetable garden plots. I guess that's okay, because we have so much work to do inside the house right now.

Back in France

I flew out of the little airport at New Bern, N.C., on Thursday at noon. For the first time, the plane from New Bern to Charlotte was actually a jet, not a propeller-driven aircraft. It was a 50-minute flight to Charlotte, with a three-hour layover there.

At New Bern Airport, passengers walk out onto the tarmac with their carry-on bag to get on the plane. If their carry-on is of any size at all, the ground crew requires the passenger check it through to Charlotte. A crew member stands out next to the plane with a cart to collect all the large "carry-ons."

Passengers walking out onto the tarmac
to board the plane in New Bern

On its path to Charlotte, the plane flew down the southeastern N.C. coast to about Wilmington, and then it turned west for the descent into CLT airport. I had a window seat and took some aerial pictures of barrier islands and coast inlets, which I am posting here. I also read an article about chickens in the U.S. Airways in-flight magazine. The article was informative and entertaining. It was an excerpt from a soon-to-be-published book titled Birdology by a woman named Sy Montgomery.

Inlets, beaches, and salt marshes
along the southeastern N.C. coast

My flight to Paris departed from Charlotte and was direct. Security was very light. At New Bern, I had to take off my shoes and jacket. My carry-on bag was x-rayed. There was a perfunctory search through the bag as I walked out of the terminal onto the tarmac to board the plane. Oh, and U.S. Airways charged me $55 dollars for baggage since I checked two suitcases through to Paris. I was not happy to pay that extra fee, which came as a surprise.

The three hours at CLT passed quickly. When I checked in at gate D2 for the direct flight to Paris, there was no security check at all. The ground crew looked at my passport and then asked me how long I was planning to stay in France. They had noticed that I didn't have a return ticket. I told them I live in France and showed them my resident's card. That was that.

Downtown Charlotte and a U.S. Airways Express jet
like the one I flew in on from New Bern

When I got on the plane, an Airbus 330, and sat down, the man in the seat next to mine held out his hand for me to shake and said "Hi, I'm Ken." I replied, "Well, hi, I'm Ken too." We talked for a while — he was traveling with his wife to Avignon, where their daughter is a student. They used to live in France, the couple said — in Besançon, in the east. They were planning to go on a car tour with their daughter, who is on spring break starting this coming week.

Then I watched a movie and some HBO TV shows on the screen on the back of the seat ahead of me. The screen was larger than any seat-back screen I'd ever seen before. The picture was good and so was the sound. The plane was nearly but not completely full. The food was chicken or pasta. I didn't sleep. We landed early, at 6:35 a.m. Paris time.

At Charles de Gaulle airport, Friday about 7:15 a.m.

I had a good two hours to kill before catching my TGV down to Tours. I did that by reading magazines and having a cup of tea and a croissant in an airport café. The TGV left on time but it was a zoo. This was Good Friday, and a lot of people were traveling for the Easter or spring break, I assume. They all had a log of luggage, as did I, and they piled it up on seats and in the little lobby-like space where the train doors and bathrooms are.

I'm glad to be home but it's rainy and chilly. Things are greener than when I left. Callie was delighted to see me again. I slept 11 hours last night but I'm still in a daze.

The British cemetery at Ocracoke

Most people probably don't know how close to the U.S. East Coast the German navy was operating during the World War II years. Between January and July 1942, for example, German U-Boats ("undersea boats" or submarines) sank 400 ships off North Carolina's 300 miles/500 km of coastline.

The people who lived in places like Hatteras and Ocracoke could hear and see the explosions as all those cargo ships were being torpedoed not far offshore. Wreckage and bodies washed up on the beaches regularly.

The little British military graveyard at Ocracoke

I my home town, Morehead City, which is 75 miles south of Ocracoke, the situation was the same. I was born five years after the end of the war, but I remember my parents and other older people telling us kids about those bodies washing up on local shores. The ships torpedoed by the German navy were mostly unarmed cargo vessels. In fact, the hospital in which I was born in Morehead City was enlarged as part of the war effort, because so many wounded merchant marines needed medical care after their ships were sunk.

During those years, people started using the terms "Graveyard of the Atlantic" and "Torpedo Alley" to describe the N.C. Outer Banks and the waters near the N.C. coast. In the early months of the American involvement in the war — following the December 1941 attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii — the U.S. Navy had deployed most of its fleet in the Pacific Ocean.

Meanwhile, the U.S. merchant marine fleet was busy supplying the British with essential supplies and materials in 1941 and 1942. That's why the Germans sent their U Boats to the Cape Hatteras area. They wanted to disrupt traffic on the shipping lanes along the U.S. coast and cut off the flow of supplies supporting the British war effort.

To help protect the shipping lanes on the other side of the Atlantic, the British Royal Navy requisitioned a small fleet of North Sea fishing trawlers, armed the ships with with machine guns, depth-charges, and mine-sweeping equipment, and sent a convoy of them westward across the ocean to patrol the waters off the Outer Banks. One such trawler was the HMT Bedfordshire, newly converted and armed.

In May of 1942, HMS Bedfordfshire was assigned to escort a convoy of U.S. merchant ships south along the Outer Banks from Norfolk, Virginia. The Bedfordshire's destination was Morehead City, where it would be based for the duration of the war. According to records, HMS Bedfordshire was torpedoed by a German U-Boat on May 11, 1942, off Cape Lookout, N.C. (12 miles from Morehead City). The entire crew was lost.

Three days later, two bodies washed up on the beach at Ocracoke. Papers in the pockets of the dead men identified them as members of the HMS Bedfordshire crew. Over the following few weeks, more bodies washed up on Ocracoke's beaches, including those of two more Bedfordshire crew members. An Ocracoke family donated space in its family cemetery and the bodies were buried next to the graves of family members' ancestors. Family cemeteries on the island were family-maintained back then.

In the 1980s, the state of North Carolina deeded the British cemetery in Ocracoke Village to the British Commonwealth War Graves Commission. It will remain British property for as long as it is a cemetery. Later, British authorities had new headstones for the lost sailors erected on the plot, but the Ocracoke Preservation Society decided they wanted to keep the original crosses that had been put up to mark the graves in the 1940s. The British agreed. You'll see both sets of tombstones in my pictures.

These crosses were the original grave markers that stood
in the British cemetery from the 1940s until the 1980s.

The little British cemetery is now maintained by the U.S. Coast Guard. Every May there is a memorial ceremony attended by a British delegation and representatives of the U.S. military. The two HMS Bedfordshire crew member who were originally identified were Sub-Lt. Thomas Cunningham, R.N.V.R., and Stanley Craig, 2nd Class Telegraphist. Two unidentified British sailors lost in the sinking of the Bedfordshire are buried next to them.

You can read more about the HMS Bedfordshire and the British cemetery on Ocracoke here.

Ocracoke Village

Ocracoke, population 750, is surely the most remote town in North Carolina, and maybe one of the most remote towns in America. How many other American towns are accessible only by boat or airplane?

The ferry ride from Hatteras Island takes 45 minutes. The ferry rides from the mainland points where ferries depart for Ocracoke — the villages of Cedar Island and Swan Quarter, N.C. — both take 2½ to 3 hours. You really have to want to go to Ocracoke [OH-kruh-coak] to get there. It's not a place you just stumble upon.

The harbor and the old lighthouse at Ocracoke

The old core of Ocracoke Village is still intact, even though it is surrounded now by subdivisions full of big vacation houses built up on pilings. The older houses are more modest, low frame structures, many with screened-in front porches. In the summertime, even when the arrival of "summer people" doubles or triples the population of the village, I'm sure that mosquitoes outnumber humans. Luckily, constant winds keep them down.

The lighthouse and the lighthouse keeper's house in Ocracoke Village

The old village is built back from the ocean, on the sound side of the island. In the middle of it there is a natural harbor that is so round and calm that it is called Silver Lake. I don't know if it ever was a fresh-water lake. Today, at least, it is a body of salt water that is linked to the waters of Pamilico sound by a narrow channel.

The "streets" of Ocracoke Village

At Ocracoke, many of the streets are not paved. They are sand tracks through stands of live oak trees, and the trees are shaped by the prevailing southwesterly winds. In summertime, the children of Ocracoke go barefoot. Until the last few decades, the houses weren't air-conditioned and people lived outdoors as much as they lived indoors.

A typical old house in the village

The village was settled late by the Europeans. In 1585, Sir Walter Raleigh sailed into Ocracoke Inlet, but his ship was damaged when it ran aground on the constantly shifting sandbars here. He came ashore at Ocracoke and repairs were completed before the ship sailed on north to Roanoke Island. Raleigh left a group of settlers there and sailed back to England for supplies.

Coastal winds twist and shape old live oak trees.

When he returned to the area months later, the Roanoke Island colony had vanished. The next English attempt at colonization, at Jamestown in Virginia in 1607, was more successful. Early plans to establish settlements on the inhospitable outer coast of what is now North Carolina were abandoned.

The town's water tower

As a result, Ocracoke wasn't settled until nearly 150 years later. Meanwhile, the island was a haven for pirates that raided ships moving up and down the coast between Virginia and New England to the north and Charleston and the Caribbean to the south. The most famous pirate operating out of Ocracoke was Edward Teach, who was better known as Blackbeard.

It probably would be a good idea to stop your car at this point...

When it was settled, Ocracoke was home to pilots who knew the local waters and were paid to guide ships through the inlet and into the sounds. Towns had been established along what is now called North Carolina's "inner coast" in the early 1700s — Bath was the first, New Bern [NYOO-burn] the second, and Beaufort [BOH-furt] the third.

Ocracoke grew in importance as a port. Larger ocean-going ships landed there to be unloaded. The cargo was then loaded onto smaller schooners that were better adapted to navigation on the shallow waters of the sounds and transported to the towns on the mainland.

The harbor is called Silver Lake.

Another town on the Banks, located just across the inlet from Ocracoke, was at some point an even bigger port and was named Portsmouth. It declined, however, over the 19th century and was abandoned fairly early in the 20th century. The last people ever born at Portsmouth, N.C., have all died by now. Today, Portsmouth is a ghost town.

Ocracoke is definitely not a ghost town. It has several hotels and motels, many restaurants, numerous gift and souvenir shops, and a couple of general stores where you can buy groceries. There's no supermarket, though — you have to take the ferry over to Hatteras Island for that kind of shopping.

Key West has its roaming chickens, and Ocracoke
has these ducks to greet visitors at the lighthouse.

What Ocracoke Island has is about 12 miles of pristine beaches and dunes, acres and acres of salt marshes, and plenty of sand bars and mud flats where you can pick up live clams, oysters, and blue crabs for your dinner. The local people speak English with an old-fashioned brogue that sounds British to American ears.

The Island Inn at Ocracoke

Walt and I spent a night or two at Ocracoke back in the 1980s. We had a comfortable room in place called the Island Inn, and we enjoyed seafood dinners in the hotel's restaurant. It was a weekend in mid-July, and we swam in the ocean at beaches where there was not another person in sight. One warm and muggy night, we were sitting out on the porch (or balcony) off our room when a big thunderstorm blew in off the sound.

We were entertained by spectacular bolts and fingers of lightning, deafening claps of thunder, and wind-driven sheets of heavy rain. Then the electricity went off. We were in the dark — and there was nearly total silence. All we could hear was the sound of the surf pounding the beach a couple of miles distant. It was like being at the end of the earth. That moment said "Ocracoke" to me.