Mountain of My Dreams: The Later Years

By Richard T. Antony

In the late 1970s, Richard convinced his wife, Sandra, they should leave their promising professional careers and comfortable suburban lifestyle to start an azalea nursery in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. With no horticultural training or business experience, few mechanical skills, and absolutely no idea what they were getting themselves into, numerous adventures followed. In the third book in the planned four-book series, Richard continues the couples colorful story, a story of triumph and despair, of high expectations and harsh reality, and of the people who touched their lives along the way. In the tradition of Laura Ingalls Wilders Little House series, Mountain of My Dreams shares the true story of one familys memorable, often remarkable 30-year journey. Much more than just another back to the land chronicle, this is a heartwarming tale of a man, a woman, and their belief in each other. If youve ever wondered why the less-traveled road is less traveled, you need to read their story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jul 25, 2007
• ISBN: 9781467801409

Richard T. Antony

Richard Antony lives in beautiful Rappahannock County, Virginia with his wife, Sandra, and their two children, Christopher and Allison. When not repairing their aging farm vehicles or Rube Goldberg-inspired potting line, Richard manages information technology programs at SAIC. His first book, Principles of Data Fusion Automation, reveals what he does during his day job. Mountain of My Dreams tells the other side of his story.

Book preview

Mountain of My Dreams:

The Later Years

Book 3

Richard T. Antony

AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive, Suite 200

Bloomington, IN 47403www.authorhouse.com

Phone: [phone]

©2008 Richard T. Antony. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or Transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 7/19/2007

ISBN: 978-1-4343-0154-3 (sc)

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1: Down on the Farm

Chapter 2: It’s All Small Stuff

Chapter 3: Under the Gun

Chapter 4: The Lawn Ranger in His Later Years

Chapter 5: Allison

Chapter 6: Nursery Happenings

Chapter 7: Life Goes On

Chapter 8: Mountain Living

Chapter 9: Weather You Like It or Not

Chapter 10: Summertime Blues

Chapter 11: Endings and Beginnings

Chapter 12: Rounding out the Millennium

Chapter 13: Year 2K

Chapter 14: 2001: Earth Odyssey

Chapter 15: Treasure Island (Part I)

Chapter 16: Treasure Island (Part II)

Chapter 17: 2002

Chapter 18: When it Rains, It Pours (2003)

Chapter 19. Bad Vibrations

Chapter 20: New Challenges

Chapter 21: Isabel

Chapter 22: Truckin’

Chapter 23: Country Living-Part II

Chapter 24: Hard Times

Chapter 25: Life Goes On

Chapter 26: A Second Honeymoon

Chapter 27: Continuing Education

Chapter 28: A New Year Dawns

Chapter 29: More to Tell

Chapter30: Nevera Dull Moment

Dedication:

This book series is dedicated to my father who believed his effort to interest me in writing had been in vain, my maternal grandfather who taught me things I needed to know that I didn’t learn in school, and Sandra, my best friend, ever-faithful companion, and devoted wife.

Credits:

Without the decade-long support of numerous individuals, my family’s back-to-the-land experiences would have been relegated to our collective memories, memories destined to fade with the advancing years. Sandra though deserves the lion’s share of the credit. In addition to helping me through numerous periods of self-doubt, she read and reread all the stories, providing many important suggestions. Once she realized I was a slow writer (a vastly more troublesome condition than being a slow reader), she took on many of my former nursery responsibilities to give me more time at my computer. In addition to providing unfailing moral support my mother proofread books one and two at age 86 and book three at age 88. Finally, a special note of thanks goes to Elaine Winsor. Not only did she convince me I needed an editor she undertook the task of forcing me to follow at least a few of the rules.

Color versions of the photographs included in this book series can be found at www.longmountainnursery.com.

Prologue

Life is a journey, not a destination.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

What a wonderful life I’ve had!

I only wished I’d realized it sooner.

Colette

Real joy comes not from ease or riches or from the praise of men,but from doing something worthwhile.

Wilfred T. Grenfell

A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.

Thomas Carlyle

I like the dreams of the future more than the history of the past.

Thomas Jefferson

During the mid 1970’s, Richard and Sandra Antony lived in a comfortable, three-bedroom home in the Maryland suburbs. Both had promising professional careers not far from their home. Serious gardeners, they harvested and canned great quantities of fresh produce each year from their large backyard vegetable garden.

Outwardly content, Richard harbored a long-held dream of living in the mountains. In 1977, the young couple purchased 25 acres of mountain property in rural Rappahannock County, Virginia, where they planned to retire in 35 or 40 years. Although neither of them realized it at the time, this singular event opened a door that would soon lead them off the well-traveled road.

Even before they went to settlement, the Antonys began spending nearly every weekend camping on Long Mountain. Over the ensuing months, they found it harder and harder to return to their stressful lives in the city. Within a year, Richard began searching for ways to move to their retirement property sooner rather than later.

When a neighbor suggested they might be able to make a living growing azaleas, Richard jumped on the idea. The family soon built an experimental nursery in their suburban backyard to permit them to learn both the technical and practical aspects of commercial azalea production. Over the next several years, Richard read everything he could find on plant production and nursery management. In 1981, with help from his father-in-law, Richard built a 1200 square-foot barn to serve as the base for their future operation. In 1985, the couple took up full-time residence in their recently converted barn.

Book three picks up their story in 1992. Older and far less naive, Richard and Sandra now have two children: Christopher, 11, and Allison, four, a fleet of aging farm vehicles, a Rube Goldberg-inspired potting line, 30,000 plants, and more dreams to fulfill. Readers who have been following the family’s story will not be surprised to learn that they will soon confront many familiar, as well as unfamiliar obstacles as they continue their journey down the less-traveled road.

Chapter 1: Down on the Farm

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed bythe things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.

Mark Twain

Experience enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.

Franklin P. Jones

Major impact

The day seemed entirely unremarkable, a typical mid-Atlantic winter morning-gray and overcast. A bone chilling drizzle began by the time I reached my office at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. I’d been working at GMU for the past several months on a one-year sabbatical from my government job. If things went according to plan, I would have a technical monograph ready for publication before my year ended.

As the day wore on, the rain grew progressively heavier. I rarely went out at noon, but I felt especially grateful that Sandra had packed my lunch that morning. By the time I left for home, the rain appeared nearly over. Still, the wet pavement snarled traffic on Braddock Road and along Interstate 66. By the time I reached Warrenton, I was finally able to travel at the posted speed limit.

I had been thinking about my evening nursery chores as I approached the intersection of Route 211 and Route 522. Suddenly, I had an adrenaline rush like nothing I’d ever experienced before. A small white station wagon had begun pulling into my lane. The driver apparently hadn’t seen the stop sign with its huge red flashing light. He surely hadn’t noticed my 1971 Nova barreling toward him.

During the next few accelerated heartbeats things seemed to be happening in slow motion, creating the illusion that I had plenty of time to work through a litany of damage control strategies. Instead, my right foot went reflexively to the brake pedal as I jerked the Nova steering wheel to the left, away from the vehicle that now nearly filled my windshield.

Even if my vehicle had been outfitted with anti-lock brakes, I don’t believe it would have made much difference. In fact, I’m not sure I’d fully depressed the brake pedal when I simultaneously felt and heard a gut-wrenching thud as my heavy Nova plowed into the side of the much lighter station wagon. Steam began issuing from under the Nova hood even before the two vehicles came to rest.

Except for the sharp pain in my right leg, I felt fine. The Nova had no airbags, but the shoulder belt had kept me from being thrown against the steering wheel. My neck didn’t hurt, so my headrest had apparently prevented whiplash. At the moment, none of this seemed to matter. An instant before impact, I’d noticed two small children in the back seat of the white station wagon.

I tugged at my door handle but the door refused to open. The Nova’s frame had obviously buckled. Only after throwing all my weight against it did the door finally swing open. Placing one foot on the ground at a time, I gripped the doorframe with my left hand and rose slowly to a standing position, uncertain as to whether my aching leg would support me.

As I limped toward the station wagon, the driver rolled down his window. I could hear a child crying. Leaning down, I asked if the children were alright. Instead of answering, the man glowered up, his face contorted by rage. A moment later he began screaming that I had caused the accident. In a threatening tone, he told me that if I’d hurt his kids, I’d pay. The woman in the front passenger seat appeared oddly passive and barely looked in my direction as the man continued to rage on.

I began backing away as the station wagon door swung open. A young man, in his mid to late twenties, emerged and began moving toward me. I backed away more, trying to maintain a safe distance between us. The guy looked like he might start throwing punches at any moment, not that I would have blamed him. If someone had hurt my kids, I’d probably become unhinged myself.

I desperately wanted to say something to defuse the man’s anger, but I knew that my insurance company wanted me to remain silent. Through the back car window I could see both children moving. While I took this to be a good sign, it did not necessarily mean they hadn’t been seriously injured.

As we paced like fighters in a ring, I came close to saying to the young man that I was sorry I’d hit his car. In truth, I’d never been sorrier about anything in my life. Still, I remained silent. If the guy found a good lawyer, anything I said would end up being used against me. Although I couldn’t see how expressing either regret or empathy could be construed as an admission of guilt, I didn’t care to see how his lawyer would pull it off either. So, I kept moving, keeping an eye on both the young man’s hands and the steam continuing to rise from under the Nova’s buckled hood.

The siren grew steadily louder. The wailing sound had always seemed both ominous and disturbing to me. At the moment, though, it promised the arrival of an officer of the law who would take charge of a volatile situation. The state trooper, all the lights on his cruiser pulsating, pulled in behind the Nova. He got out, lit several flares, and walked over to the station wagon.

After conversing with the occupants for several minutes, he turned to me and motioned for me to follow him to his squad car. Sitting in the passenger seat, I told the trooper everything I could remember. Regrettably, it wasn’t much.

The trooper wanted to know what my speed had been, if my lights had been on, and which lane I’d been in when the station wagon first entered the intersection. He asked several times if I’d seen anything that might have blocked the driver’s view of me.

I told the Trooper the truth. I knew my lights and windshield wipers had been on and that I’d been traveling in the right hand lane at the 55 mph speed limit. That’s about all I could remember. I recalled seeing nothing out of the ordinary until the station wagon entered the highway.

I knew people frequently suffered short-term memory lapses following a blow to the head. But, as far as I knew, I’d experienced no head trauma. Mortal fear seemed the only explanation for my memory loss. I could tell by the officer’s questions that he wanted me to remember that I’d been following a large truck that might have blocked the driver’s view of me. It’s conceivable that a panel van or some other large vehicle had been turning onto Rt. 522 from eastbound Route 211, screening my view of the station wagon and the driver’s view of me. Unfortunately, I had no memory of either of these situations.

A defensive driver by nature, I made it a habit to notice cars that seemed to be approaching stop signs at a high rate of speed, the driver possibly intent on skating through the intersection. No matter how much I thought about it, my memory of the white station wagon began when I spotted it entering my lane. Whatever else I saw either got erased or too deeply repressed for my conscious mind to drag out.

When the trooper finished with his questions, I asked him what I needed to do. He said he would file an accident report. I just needed to contact my insurance agent and report the incident. A tow truck had already been dispatched for my car. Someone would let me know whether I would be paid to have my vehicle fixed or whether the insurance company planned to total the vehicle.

The officer next wanted to know who had been driving the station wagon. When I answered that it had been the man, his eyes widened. He’d apparently gotten a different story during his conversation with the occupants of the white station wagon. Only later did I learn from my insurance agent that the man’s driver’s license had been suspended following an earlier traffic accident.

The officer said that I could either go to the hospital with the rescue squad or have someone pick me up. Sitting in the backend of a truck for the 25-mile trip to Fauquier Hospital with the family I had just slammed into seemed about as smart as whacking a hornet’s nest with a #2 pencil. When I said I’d prefer to go home, the officer got on his radio. Fifteen minutes later, Sandra, visibly shaken, arrived in her Isuzu with both kids aboard.

For nearly 25 years, my sleep had been plagued by two recurring nightmares-a house fire and a car accident. Inexplicably, both of my dark fears had now seen the light of day.

I replayed the accident in my mind again and again that evening to try to determine if I could have done something to prevent the mishap. Mostly though I fretted about the children. Sandra suggested I call the state police to see what they could tell me. I resisted for a while. When I finally placed the call, a brusque dispatcher told me that they could offer me no information whatsoever about the accident.

Privacy considerations be damned, I needed to know if anyone had been seriously injured. Even though I didn’t expect to get much sleep that night either way, I had to find out something. Once again, Sandra came to the rescue, suggesting that I call Fauquier Hospital to see whether any of the family members had been admitted. Thankfully, the Admission’s Department had no one with that surname staying with them. I slept poorly that night, but at least I slept.

After being plagued by house fire dreams for so many years, it seemed odd that I never had another following our fire. Just as strange, my car crash nightmares abruptly ended following my accident. If I didn’t know better, I’d be tempted to think that both nightmares had actually been premonitions. Even if they had been, I’m not sure what I could have prevented either calamity.

New wheels

Sandra’s dad offered me his 1983 Mercury Cougar as soon as he learned that I’d totaled my Nova. Dad had bought the sporty red car while courting his second wife, Leona. Happily remarried, he said they no longer needed two vehicles. We went back and forth on the matter for some time. I had no intention of accepting the car until he said that it would mean a lot to him to see me driving it.

I picked up the Cougar on our next trip to West Virginia. During the following decade, I drove the car nearly every day. Perhaps not surprisingly, I thought about my father-in-law nearly every time I started the engine. Dad passed away several years after I took possession of his car making me even more grateful that he’d twisted my arm.

Excedrin-time

Everyone we met who lived in a custom built home seemed eager to share stories of the problems they’d had dealing with their contractor. None of these folks seemed particularly fussy, but we didn’t know any of them that well either. Because we’d heard so many tales of woe, I felt especially grateful that we’d linked up with a competent tradesman. Bruce had built a lot of houses and we liked every one we’d seen.

In hindsight, I missed a lot of the warning flags. For one thing, our builder seemed disappointed to learn that I had an engineering degree. What I did for a living seemed irrelevant, so I simply dismissed the matter. He appeared even more disappointed when he discovered that I had built the house we presently lived in.

A quick-witted fellow, Bruce apparently realized that an engineer with even a modicum of construction experience might be familiar with building codes. Such an individual might spot dry-rotted lumber being used during the framing. He might notice leaning foundation walls and bulges in the stud walls. Such a person might even be bold enough to question why the forms for the front porch didn’t slope away from the building or why the wood frame rested on the brick fagade and not on the cinder block walls.

Even if I’d known nothing about the building trade, I couldn’t help notice the enormous stack of tulip poplar trunks harvested from the building site that sat rotting on the ground, logs the builder had promised would be taken to a sawmill to help us pay for our new house.

The whole custom built house experience turned out to be a real eye-opener and it became increasingly difficult to stop looking for problems. In the end, we required the assistance from three individuals, a local builder, my brother-in-law (a county building inspector in Maryland), and a structural engineer to resolve just my major concerns.

Ironically, if I hadn’t been able to monitor the project on a daily basis, I could have saved myself (and Bruce) a great many headaches. The experience, however, did prove highly educational. Among many other things, I learned that I’d probably been a little hasty in passing judgment on our formerly fussy friends.

Landon Ladies

We learned about the annual Landon Azalea Festival from Frank White, a commercial azalea grower we’d met through the Azalea Society. Landon Academy, a preparatory school for boys in Bethesda, Maryland, was home to the widely acclaimed Perkins’ Garden, an extensive planting of azaleas and rhododendrons.

To help raise money for their scholarship fund, the school held an annual spring festival that included a widely advertised plant sale. Frank had been selling plants to Landon each spring for many years and suggested we might want to try to do the same.

Sandra called the school and got referred to the volunteer heading up the event that year. Bobbi came to our backyard nursery in Adelphi, Maryland to inspect our plants. She seemed pleased with our selection and worked up a sizable order.

This initial contact with Bobbi turned into a three-decade relationship with a succession of festival organizers. Sandra, however, formed an especially close bond with Bobbi who headed the plant sale committee for many years. In 1992, when Bobbi learned that a defective fungicide had damaged our stock plants, she not only encouraged us to take cuttings from her private collection, but she arranged for us to collect cuttings from plants on the Landon School grounds.

Trapped

I realized it had rained all night, but it still surprised me to see so much standing water along Route 626 as I headed for the office. Concerned about creating a bow wave that might sideline my vehicle, I crept through all the low spots.

Driving down the hill just beyond Goat Hill Farm, I spotted red taillights ahead. Once I got a little closer, I discovered two cars had stopped 100 feet short of the bridge over the Rush River. The trickle of water that normally ran under the bridge hardly seemed to qualify as a river. Rush River lived up to its name this morning.

Although the bridge appeared to be covered by just a few inches of water, the lead car’s backup lights soon flicked on. Seconds later, the second car turned around and headed back the way I’d just come.

I’d heard the warnings plenty of times-never cross a bridge covered with water. I could see the headlights of cars on Route 211, the four-lane highway I needed to take to get to work. The road was just a thousand feet away, tempting me to ignore my better judgment.

My alternate route to the four-lane meant doubling back and traveling several miles on a gravel road. If I chose that route, I wouldn’t reach Amissville in time to meet up with Farrell. When we organized our carpool, we agreed to the five-minute rule. We’d wait five minutes beyond our scheduled departure time and no more. It took me a while, but I eventually chose the longer, but safer route.

It poured all day. When I got home that evening, I learned Rappahannock County had suffered devastating floods. Besides extensive property damage throughout the county, Kirk Davis, the father of one of Christopher’s classmates had died while attempting to save his truck from the rising waters.

Downed trees and other debris had apparently dammed a portion of Rush River several miles upstream from the bridge I’d contemplated crossing that morning. When the debris shifted, a wall of water sped downstream carrying away everything in its path. Rescuers recovered Davis’ body hours later and many miles downstream.

The flood devastated Harris Hollow, the low-lying region along the banks of Rush River just north of Little Washington, permanently changing the river’s course in several spots. The road that ran along the river remained closed to through traffic for many weeks. When it finally did reopen, Sandra suggested we take a look.

Crowding into Sandra’s Trooper, we headed for town, turned right just past the Inn at Little Washington then took the next left hand turn. Although road crews had been reworking the area with heavy equipment for nearly a month, the place looked like a war zone, making me glad we hadn’t seen the area when the waters first receded.

Not again

Heavy rains created a strikingly similar situation a few years later. At 4:00 a.m., the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather radio began broadcasting flash-flood warnings. If I hadn’t promised to take a truckload of perennials to Fairfax that day, I would never have considered taking my usual route to Route 211. Because I’d be driving our 1984 4-WD Ford F250 pickup, a vehicle with plenty of road clearance, a little water on the bridge hardly seemed like something to get worked up over. Sandra’s memories of the recent tragedy apparently remained far more vivid than my own and she insisted I take the longer route.

Although Route 627 crossed no rivers, the trip that morning turned out to be memorable nonetheless. Jarvis our full time employee had placed several plants in the pickup cab, overflow from the tightly packed rear camper compartment. I often traveled with plants on the seat and normally didn’t mind the company.

On that particular morning, the combination of high humidity and the moisture given off by the plants had fogged all the truck windows on the inside. Even with the defroster set on high, staying in the center of the narrow, twisting gravel road, a road that grew softer by the minute, became an increasing challenge. The torrential rain, the suffocating blackness, the nearly opaque windows, and the unstable road surface suddenly seemed like a good reason to have called in sick.

I’d just emerged from the heavy woods when I spotted a truck stopped in the middle of the road. Pulling in behind, I got out and walked over to investigate. A thin man in a light jacket was hacking away at a good-sized tree lying across the road. The man, I now saw, was wielding the claw end of a small hammer like a hatchet. The stranger continued throwing thudding blows against the 10-inch diameter tree even after we began speaking.

The tree turned out to be a black locust, its wood nearly as strong as cast iron. With only a socket wrench set and a long handled screwdriver available to me, it seemed clear that I needed to return to the farm for my chainsaw. Either that or it would be lunchtime before the man did enough damage to the tree to get by it.

Even though I’d already experienced all the challenges I felt up to for one day, my trip home proved even more daunting than my outbound trip. Unable to turn around on the narrow road, I had no choice but to drive two miles in reverse until I reached a spot where I could turn around.

With plants completely blocking my view out the rear window, I had to rely on my side mirrors. Despite the pouring rain, I rolled down both the driver side and passenger windows. Even if the F250s backup lights had been brighter, the trip would still have been a nightmare. It’s no exaggeration to say that I could have walked faster than I drove.

It must have taken me nearly 30 minutes to get back to the fallen tree. To my astonishment, the hammer man and his truck had vanished. The guy had somehow whacked the tree enough to make it sag in the middle. He’d then apparently just driven over the whole mess.

I fired up my chainsaw and soon had the road cleared. As I drove toward Route 211, I expected to spot the man’s truck parked along the shoulder. The mystery man had, after all, driven over a lot of locust branches, each covered with dozens of three-inch stiletto-like thorns. A single spike struck at the right angle would doom any ordinary tire. After 10 miles, I gave up looking for someone changing a flat. Either the guy headed in the opposite direction on Route 211 or he had bulletproof tires.

Dumb and dumber

Sandra had set out dead plants along the edges of the growing zones and I had promised to pick them up. As soon as I started the Honcho, I noticed the brightly glowing red light on the dash. An inscription just below the light read Brakes. I’d never seen the light on before but I knew it must indicate a problem. I turned off the ignition, got out, and raised the hood. The front brake master cylinder reservoir was completely empty. Dropping to the ground, I slid under the rear of the truck and quickly spotted a trickle of fluid on the inside rim of the right rear wheel.

I should have switched vehicles but I always used the Honcho to haul dead plants to Boot Hill. Besides, the front brakes still worked.

I soon had the Honcho bed piled high with an assortment of dead and dying specimens. We’d had a decidedly bad weather pattern the previous fall. The temperature remained warm for too long. When the inevitable freeze came, the sap was still up. As a result, hundreds of plants had suffered severe barksplit.

Shifting into Drive, I headed for Boot Hill. After dumping the soil from the last container on the pile, I hopped back into the driver’s seat and started the engine. Mission accomplished. Now, I just needed to move the Honcho to the level spot near my workshop where I could work on the brakes as soon as I got the replacement parts.

I hadn’t moved more than a few feet up the steep bank when Christopher shouted, Dad, what are you doing? You just told me the Honcho brakes don’t work.

You don’t need brakes to go uphill, I said, smiling to myself when I realized that my comeback, delivered on such short notice, sounded pretty good.

Christopher knew all my safety lectures by heart. When he realized that I intended to ignore his first warning, he yelled back, Dad, it just rained. The grass is slippery.

The Honcho has the best traction of any vehicle we own, I said confidently. I stepped lightly on the gas and proceeded up the steep slope with all the confidence of a 14-year old. Halfway to the top, I felt the wheels begin to slip. Instinctively, I hit the brakes. With only two of the four wheels providing any stopping power at that point, the vehicle began sliding backwards. I could hear Christopher shouting something but I had no time to listen. I had to act.

What I did next had to be one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done. Realizing that the Honcho had an automatic transmission, it suddenly occurred to me that I might be able to halt the runaway vehicle if I could lock all four wheels. I just needed to shift the transmission into Park. In hindsight, my hastily conceived plan sounds ludicrous. At the time, it was the only plan that came to mind.

I stood on the brake pedal then jerked the shift lever counter clockwise. The horrible grinding noise served only to draw attention to my folly. With the transmission now completely disengaged, the heavy out-of-control Honcho picked up some serious speed by the time it slammed into an enormous tulip poplar.

Shaken, but not hurt, I got out and surveyed the damage. The truck bed had shifted forward nearly a foot, leaving a deep impression in the back of the cab. The gas tank had been ripped from its carriage. The driver’s side door barely opened and the rear bumper looked askew. In less than 60 seconds, the Honcho had gone from needing a new wheel cylinder to requiring reconstructive surgery.

On a more positive note, the incident provided an invaluable lesson in humility. I’d jumped on Sandra decades earlier for disengaging the Case tractor clutch on a steep hill. Sandra had no prior experience driving a tractor; I’m still looking for a decent excuse for my actions.

Chapter 2: It’s All Small Stuff

Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not get bent out of shape.

Anonymous

What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to dowith diligence.

Samuel Johnson

Only my hairdresser knows for sure

Although nearly unheard of in an age given over to hair salons with catchy names, hot music, and plenty of chrome, I preferred going the same barber I’d had for decades. Fashions came and went, but nothing moved me to switch either my hairstyle or my stylist.

As a result of our long relationship, I’d gotten to know my barber quite well, something I knew I’d miss if I switched to a glitzy salon where stylists switched jobs a couple of times a year. Quiet and private by nature, I preferred the intimacy of the small, one-chair shop.

Because my barber worked by appointment only, there was rarely anyone else around during my hair cut, something that encouraged me to open up during my visit. I’ guessing but my barber seemed to enjoy our conversation as much as I did.

Beyond the pleasant surroundings and congenial atmosphere, sticking with the same barber had practical advantages. For one thing, I never needed to begin each session by describing how much hair to take off or where I liked my part. Ditto for warnings about my receding hairline and thinning upper story. Most important, I never worried that I might get scalped before some important event or business trip.

If I hadn’t been so pleased, I would never have recommended that my son try out my barber. Paying big bucks for a hair cut seemed ludicrous, especially because Christopher frequently showed up at home with a buzz cut. Naturally, my recommendation went nowhere. Sandra’s dad had an expression that fit the bill perfectly. Trying to talk a teenager into anything is as productive as arguing with a signpost.

Christopher could continue to drive 25 miles to Warrenton, wait in line, and pay half a day’s wages for a brush cut if he wanted. For me, I plan to stick with the tried and true, unless of course, Sandra decides to throw in the towel (and her scissors).

Not so special

When we first adopted Christopher, I knew just one individual, a co-worker, who had adopted. In my mind, at least, Sandra and I were plowing new ground. Within a decade, however, the adoption scene dramatically changed. My best man, my sister, Sandra’s sister, and a score of our friends had adopted at least one child.

This new adoption mania came up during a conversation with my mother one day. Mom immediately reminded me that her mother had been adopted. Sandra then chimed in that her mother had been adopted. Mom next asked if I remembered that two of my three brothers-in-law’s mothers had been adopted.

I’d been way off base. Rather than breaking new ground, Sandra and I had been little more than honoring a long-standing family tradition.

The Riddle of the Sphinx

The bruise on my left shin from my car accident took months to heal. The pain in my back and the tingling in my feet didn’t develop until several weeks after the collision. Over time, the pain grew perceptibly worse. Before the accident, I’d had a stiff neck a few times, but I’d never experienced lower back pain even when doing heavy lifting.

When we first started the nursery, my biggest worry had been our psychological, not our physical strength. Especially during the early years, we’d had to cope with plenty of emotional and psychological challenges. By pooling our resources and resolve, we had successfully weathered many storms.

From the beginning, though, we understood that nursery work involved a great deal of manual labor. Fortunately, both of us seemed to have been blessed with strong backs. I knew we’d eventually need to turn over the physical labor to younger folks, but I expected to be a lot older before that happened. At least that’s what I’d thought before I found myself on a collision course with a white station wagon.

My back was hurting as I knelt down on my mother-in-law’s kitchen floor in Mineral Wells, West Virginia. I intended fix Leona’s lazy Susan cabinet. The bearings dragged terribly and I just needed to figure out why.

I was lying on my side in the kitchen. I felt a twinge of serious pain after pushing upwards on the rotating platform with my left hand while trying to spin the assembly with my right hand. It must have been my fifth or sixth try when a lightning bolt shot up my spine.

I jerked, falling flat on my back as the searing pain nearly took my breath away. Moaning and writhing, I quickly found that a fetal position offered the most relief from the knee-buckling pain radiating from the base of my spine.

Sandra reached me first. I didn’t know what to tell her to do except to massage the base of my spine. When rubbing proved ineffective, she brought me Leona’s heating pad. I’d had bouts of sciatica over the years and heat had always helped. Not this time. The heating pad made my back feel nice and toasty but it had almost no effect on the pain.

My first introduction to life-altering pain had come five years earlier during an acute kidney stone attack. That experience had been pretty rough but my back attack seemed to raise the bar. Beyond coping with the searing pain, the episode proved incredibly humbling. I required help from both Sandra and her sister to sit down on the toilet.

Although we’d planned to return home from our annual Thanksgiving visit the following morning, a long car ride now seemed out of the question. I desperately wanted to be home, but I saw no way to get there. There wasn’t room to lie down in the Trooper and I knew I’d never survive an eight-hour trip in a sitting position.

A co-worker in the 1970’s had described how he’d been forced to sleep on the floor after wrenching his back. At the time, I could not imagine any pain bad enough to force me to the floor and concluded that my coworker had a flare for the dramatic. I spent the first night following my own trauma on the living room floor.

When my bladder began pressing on my spine well before daylight the next morning, I knew I couldn’t wait until someone woke up to help me to the bathroom. I had to get there on my own and it needed to be soon. I considered crawling. It was just 20 feet away. The thought of pulling myself up by clutching onto the commode sounded disgusting enough to make me search for an alternative.

Crawling around the living room, I pulled the seat cushions off both sofas so I could construct a ramp that I hoped would help me get vertical. Following a series of painful moves I made it to my knees. In jerky, painful stages, I finally reached a standing position and shuffled to the bathroom.

We remained in West Virginia all that day. Over-the-counter pain pills, heating pads, and frequent massage helped, but barely. Sandra drove me home the following day. Beyond the fact that I survived, I remember nothing of the trip.

Farrell drove me to work the following day. After helping me out of his truck, I launched myself forward, taking infantile-like stumbling steps toward the building entrance assisted by my father-in-law’s cane. I looked and felt like a hobbling old man. Coworkers held doors for me. A friend asked if I needed his help to get to the parking lot at the end of the day.

Physical therapy

From sheer ignorance, I’d always lumped physical therapists, chiropractors, and acupuncture practitioners into to the same profession: medical quacks. As Sandra helped me to my first physical therapy session, I held out little hope that anything short of massive doses of barbiturates would do any good.

My cheery young therapist spent our first session charting my pain levels as she forced me to execute a series of painful mobility tests. She’d ask me to twist to the left then measure how far I got before I began screaming. After each action, I had to rate the pain level on a scale of zero to 10. I remember saying 10 a lot during the interview.

When the testing ended, I asked the therapist whether she thought she could help me. Absolutely, she said confidently. She then explained that my back muscles had gone into spasms. As a result, my spinal cord had become misaligned. She warned that it would take time, but she assured me I could expect to make a full recovery.

During my Monday, Wednesday, and Friday visits to Health South in Warrenton, I received moist heat treatments, electrical stimulation and performed a series of simple exercises. I got placed on the rack a few times. Each treatment modality no doubt did some good, but the only noticeable improvement came during the realignment sessions.

Sitting on the edge of the table, my therapist would approach me from behind. Putting her left arm over my chest, she would place her right thumb on one of my vertebrae and tell me to twist either to the left or the right. As I did, I could feel her applying gentle pressure to the vertebrae. After holding the position for a few moments, she would tell me to straighten. She’d then move to the next lower vertebrae and we’d repeat the process.

Each realignment session took just a few minutes but brought blessed relief. When I asked the therapist to explain the miracle, she said it involved simple mechanics and I did all the work. She merely restrained one of my vertebrae each time I straightened. Following a dozen realignment sessions, I felt nearly normal. The exercise and moist heat treatments continued until I could no longer bear making the 30-minute trip to Warrenton.

Planned break-through

When I asked my supervisor what planned accomplishments meant in terms of my research, he said, Just fill out the form.

The idea of scheduling research discoveries seemed ludicrous, perhaps even an oxymoron. I could explain my past accomplishments and outline my research objectives. I could define metrics for evaluating the effectiveness or efficiency of a new algorithm, data structure, or search mechanism, but how could I schedule a break-through?

Thomas Edison worked tirelessly in his laboratory, no doubt hoping for a break-through every day. He made plenty of discoveries during his career, to be sure, but I doubt he scheduled any of them. Given the long history of failed predictions, many by brilliant people, I would have thought the Federal Government would have discovered long ago that you can’t predict the future.

To me, the all-time best example of a failed prediction came from the commissioner of the US Patent Office in 1899 when he stated, Everything that can be invented has been invented. Given the millions of patents that have been issued since that time, it seems safe to conclude that the commissioner lacked vision.

Similar historical anecdotes seem nearly inexhaustible. In 1903, the President of Michigan Savings Bank advised Henry Ford’s lawyer not to invest in the Ford Motor Company. In 1929, the US Department of Labor declared, 1930 will be a splendid employment year. In 1943, Thomas Watson, IBM Chairman of the Board stated that, There is a world market for maybe five computers. A 1949 issue of Popular Mechanics offered a truly insightful prediction. Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.

As the Wright brothers were preparing to make history, an editor of a Dayton, Ohio newspaper wrote, Man will never fly. To add weight to this opinion, The New York Times wrote subsequently, To build a flying machine would require the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians, from one million to 10 million years. The Patent Office confirmed the verdict by stating that the plans the Wright Brothers had submitted were inadequate and the machine could never function as intended.

Even bad predictions sometimes turn out to have a silver lining. Sandra credits her high school guidance counselor with her success in college. Despite being a straight-A student throughout high school, Sandra’s counselor warned her that she would likely not make it through college because she had garnered her good grades in high school by being an overachiever. Working hard will not be enough this time.

Sandra’s experience hardly seems unique. One of Albert Einstein’s teachers took the boy’s father aside and told him, It doesn’t matter what he does, he (Albert) will never amount to anything. Hopping mad as a result of her session with the guidance counselor, Sandra made up her mind that she would prove her advisor wrong. She did, in fact, graduating from University of South Florida with a 3.4 grade point average. In view of Sandra’s reaction to her advisor’s prediction, rather than ridiculing Einstein’s high school teacher, perhaps we would do well to recognize the great debt society owes this man.

In 1883, Lord Kelvin, president of the Royal Society, predicted that, X rays will prove to be a hoax. Edison declared that alternating current would be useless. Einstein said in 1932 that, There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. While serving as the Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared that airplanes would never be useful in a battle against a fleet of ships.

In view of the historical record, I gave some serious thought to explaining to my supervisor that scheduling breakthroughs made no sense. In the end, though, I decided he’d given me sound advice and I just filled out the form.

Chapter 3: Under the Gun

Do what you can, with what you have, right where you are

Theodore Roosevelt

Let yesterday be your lesson, today your study and tomorrow your test.

Mary Jo Pham

Storm of the Century

During the week of March 13, 1993, several National Weather Service computer models indicated that a major winter storm might be about to form in the Gulf of Mexico. Within days the monster, in fact, did materialize. It began by pummeling the west cost of Florida with hurricane force winds, tornadoes, and a 12-foot storm surge. By the following day, heavy snow covered most of the southeast. Over the weekend, the massive storm raced up the eastern seaboard paralyzing the region with high winds and heavy snow. As the storm’s center crossed Virginia, weather stations recorded their lowest barometric pressure ever.

Even though it had not yet been labeled the Storm of the Century when it reached our area, we had little doubt that it was a storm like no other in our memory. If we’d still been living in our little house, Long Mountain would have shielded us from the brunt of the mighty winds. Living on the top of the mountain now, winds sweeping across Tiger Valley created a Bernoulli effect, greatly increasing both their velocity and ferocity. The whiteout conditions easily rivaled classic mid-western blizzards.

With forecasters warning that we might receive more than two feet of snow, I saw little choice but to clear the roads as the snow fell. Otherwise, we’d become snowbound. Our big tractor could push six inches of snow, but no more. If the storm got ahead of me, I’d be forced to dig out thousands of feet of roadways, a job that would literally take days with our tractor’s under-sized loader bucket. Working outside around the clock under life-threatening conditions involved an element of risk, but I saw no alternative.

The wind felt wickedly cold as I mounted the tractor to begin the first round of snow removal. Easy to start in warm weather, our 1967 Ford occasionally became finicky during the winter. This time, it simply would not start. I eventually deduced that the tractor had an ignition problem, which meant that I needed to check the points. Easy to do in all our other vehicles, checking the tractor’s points presented some real challenges.

If the tractor had started, I could have raised the front-end loader and gotten better access to the distributor. Of course, if the tractor had started, I wouldn’t have needed to check the points. In my bulky gloves, I couldn’t even get the distributor cap off. After struggling for several minutes, I gave up and removed my gloves.

By the time I had the flashlight positioned and my head wedged between the loader struts so I could see the points, I’d the lost the feeling in most of my fingers. The engineers who designed my tractor had apparently been contortionists, sadists, or both. With blue unbending fingers, I tried again and again to open the points to do a visual inspection.

I eventually switched to Plan B-slipping a piece of emery cloth between the points. By moving the paper back and forth, I could remove any oxidation that might have built up on them. After fumbling awkwardly for several minutes, I gave up on this too. That forced me to go to Plan C, my final option. I needed to remove the entire point assembly.

With no feeling left in my hands and my feet now becoming numb, I knew I needed to work smarter and a whole lot faster. I also needed to be extremely careful. If I dropped either of the special screws that held the point assembly in place, we might be stranded on Long Mountain until spring.

I had been out in the deepening storm nearly 30 minutes by the time I finally got the newly cleaned points reinstalled in the tractor. Fortunately, the tractor started on the first try. At that point, I left the engine running and drove up the mountain in Sandra’s Trooper. The instant I entered our kitchen my hands began screaming.

I’d had plenty of experience working outside in the winter, so I knew to expect a painful aching sensation as my hands thawed. I’d never felt pain like this though. Sandra led me into the bathroom when I told her I felt I needed to vomit. As I leaned against the wall to steady myself, my wife placed both of my hands under her armpits. While I moaned and thrashed, she held my hands tightly, saying several times that she could feel them growing warmer. I knew she was probably lying but appreciated her comforting words nonetheless.

It took five minutes for the pain to begin to subside. Although Sandra begged me to sit down and warm myself by the fire, I knew I needed to clear the road. Donning a dry pair of gloves, I headed out the door.

It took well over an hour to clear the front driveway and the road that ran down to the nursery. Maintaining all the nursery roadways seemed hopeless so I didn’t even try. Keeping our primary roads open would, in all likelihood, be challenge enough.

I re-plowed the road every few hours. As the wind speed continued to increase, snow began drifting back onto the road. The wind, however, turned out to be both friend and foe. It worked against me on the roads, but did a fine job of clearing the snow from our polyhouses. No sooner had an inch or two built up on the plastic than a powerful gust would hit the nursery, rippling the poly and sending the accumulated frosty white layer airborne.

Although I had every intention of staying with the program throughout the night, Sandra convinced me that it would be foolhardy to be outside after everyone was asleep. I made my last pass on the roads at midnight.

It hardly seemed possible, but the storm grew worse as the night wore on. I remained in bed, but barely slept, fearful that the near-hurricane force winds might be destroying our polyhouses, ripping shingles off the roof, or weakening a tree that was about to drop on our house.

At first light, I jumped out of bed and went to the window. The road I’d worked so hard to maintain had vanished. Five hours on the tractor working in perhaps the worst conditions I’d ever experienced had been a total waste of time.

The storm I’d tried to keep up with had literally leveled the playing field. If I’d known at the time that I’d pitted myself against the most powerful winter storm to hit the continental US since the Blizzard of 1888, I might have cried Uncle at the outset. I would surely have saved myself a great deal of time and physical abuse for no real purpose.

Publish or perish

I enjoyed my time at George Mason University and felt thrilled to be writing a technical monograph. Even if the University Press published the manuscript as I hoped, I had no illusions that it would lead to either fame or fortune. Just having the opportunity to pull together a decade of research on machine-based reasoning seemed reward enough. I’d already published quite a few papers but bringing everything together in a single document would make my research more accessible.

Because I’d recently agreed to co-author a technical paper with a colleague, Dr. James Llinas at the University of Buffalo, I didn’t actually begin outlining the monograph until just before Christmas. After reviewing the lengthy list of initial topics I’d come up with, I realized I needed to dramatically narrow the scope of my new project. Otherwise, the manuscript would be, at best, half-baked by the time my sabbatical ended. Deciding what to leave out turned out to be tough.

Certain subjects seemed vital. I’d had an epiphany of sorts in the late 1970’s after building a highly successful radar target classification algorithm. Despite the classifier’s excellent performance it ultimately occurred to me that a skilled human could easily out-perform my algorithm. In fact, a human could outperform virtually any computer program that relied exclusively on the spectral analysis of Doppler radar return for a very simple reason. My cleverly devised algorithm completely ignored a vast array of commonsense knowledge and context that a trained analyst would incorporate without giving the matter a second thought.

Convinced that exploiting knowledge not typically associated with conventional sensors was one of the keys to effective information fusion, I had focused much of my early research on finding ways to better represent and reason with large spatially organized databases. Consequently I had to include a discussion on how available domain knowledge could be effectively applied to problems of interest.

The advent of computers in the middle of the last century had led a lot of smart folks to predict that machines would rapidly match, and then quickly surpass, many forms of human problem-solving. When the new and highly promising field of Artificial Intelligence failed to deliver robotic assistants and other advanced products after more than a decade of intense research, the field went underground.

In the early 1980’s, AI re-emerged touting a new technology-expert systems. This time, Artificial Intelligence seemed poised to deliver on its earlier promises. In theory, this new technology could clone the best minds on the planet. Early successes in speech recognition and medical diagnosis lent credence to these wild-eyed predictions.

Expert systems quickly became the hottest technology in the fusion community. Like other promising approaches both before and since, expert systems had an Achilles’ heel. In reality, only novices solved complex problems by the books. True experts relied on a combination of broad experiential and deep subject matter knowledge. While an expert system chained rules together (sometimes hundreds of them), human experts reasoned by analogy, exploited divide-and-conquer strategies, and recognized the similarity between a current situation and past outcomes, reasoning not readily represented by sets of If-Then rules.

Because expert systems proved to be just one of several promising technologies that offered more sizzle than substance, categorizing the strengths and weaknesses of various problem solving paradigms seemed another essential subject to cover in the monograph.

A great deal of my research focused on deficiencies of existing database systems, so I needed a section on the underlying principles of integrated spatial and non-spatial databases.

If I intended to stitch these diverse subjects together, I needed a framework for combining disparate information sources. Beyond simply proposing a theory, I wanted the monograph to offer viable alternatives to the reasoning approaches I planned to bash, so I felt I needed to include examples of robust algorithms that clarified the principles I intended to set forward. Perhaps most importantly, the examples would demonstrate that artificially intelligent algorithms were feasible to design and code.

Even pared down to the essentials, coalescing these ideas and completing the manuscript in the nine months remaining in my sabbatical looked hopeless. Nine years seemed about right. Before becoming totally overwhelmed, it occurred to me that I needed to stop agonizing and start writing. When someone said, Pencils down, I would need to decide whether to pass my paper to the front of the room or keep scribbling.

I ran into Dr. David Hall at a meeting part of the way through my sabbatical. Scholar, teacher, researcher, author, and friend, I’d known Dave for five years at that point. On the way to our cars at the end of the meeting, I described my newest project and some of my frustrations. Rather than commiserating, Dave offered a challenge. Think bigger, Richard. You should consider writing a book rather than a monograph. Dave’s suggestion had a nice ring to it but no way could I do that.

I mentioned Dave’s suggestion during dinner that evening. Sandra said she understood my misgivings but she could tell the idea intrigued me. Later that evening, we discussed the matter again and she recommended I give the idea some serious thought. I had a decent start on something. A full-length textbook, though, seemed too great a leap.

The topic came up again at dinner the following evening. To help me see the possibilities, Sandra reminded me that I had built a house on Long Mountain even though I’d never tackled anything like it before. The house, like the book, had started out as a far more modest endeavor. Sandra had selected the perfect metaphor. And, she was right too. Once we completed the barn, converting it into a house had seemed like an entirely manageable project.

When my sabbatical finally ended, I’d completed less than half of what would one day be a 450-page technical book. To my immense relief, my supervisor at Vint Hill allowed me to spend a significant portion of each day working on the partially completed book. Eventually, however, he announced he had other things for me to do. I could hardly blame him.

I now faced a new decision. Under the best of circumstances, it would take me another year