The retiring captain sits comfortably at an empty desk, enjoying his final working day. Brown at desk
Brown at desk
The retiring captain sits comfortably at an empty desk, enjoying his final working day. Brown at desk
Brown at desk
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I’ve never met a Canadian I didn’t like.
I’ve been to Canada. I’ve socialized with Canadians visiting the states. I’ve conducted responsible commerce with the fine folks from Canada.
They are fabulous people. Great neighbors. They (for the most part) love America and speak English, which is helpful to me since I can’t speak jack.
And God knows, if there ever was a Canadian gift to America, it is Curling.
Canada has gorgeous forests filled with wood that burns beautifully when so prompted. They recently suffered widespread wildfires in those beautiful woods.
Canadian officials blamed climate change. President Trump blamed Canada’s “willful negligence” and poor forest and brush maintenance.
Forest fires create smoke. Smoke drifts in the wind, wherever it blows.
The prevailing winds blew the wildfire smoke south into the USA. Trump threatened new tariffs over it. Meanwhile, the United States and Canada were already beating each other senseless with tariffs.
The Smoke Tariffs weren’t little. They were 50-percent tariffs. On important stuff, like cheese curds, fishing rods, Pigeon leg bands, hockey sticks, and girls’ skirts.
Really?
And Canada says, What a crock. We’ll tariff you because you tariffed us.
And we said, Oh yeah? Well, we’re gonna CHANGE THE NAME OF A LAKE.
That’ll teach you to let smoke drift our way..
Next thing you know, Lake Ontario has been renamed by Presidential Executive Order 14422 on American maps to … LAKE AMERICA!
So there. Take that, you tree-burning, smoke-creating people north of the border.
You have to learn how to control your wildfire smoke. Learn some thermodynamics, hydrodynamics, and meteorological physics.
I hereby recommend that we sensible people display our sensibility by responding sensibly with respect and friendship toward our heretofore tolerant neighbors.
With local relevance.
Let’s rename Lake James to Lake Canada.
I ran this brilliant idea past the North Carolina Department of Lake Names. Jim Calhoon is the director.
“This concept is smart on three levels,” Calhoon said from his badass Valhalla V-55 fishing boat on Lake Mattamuskeet. “First, you’re right. Canada is our pal. Second, you’re right. Canadians are sensational neighbors. Never complain. Until recently, and for good reason. And third, you’re right. Let’s show some respect.”
“So you’re saying I’m right?” I said.
“Damn right you’re right,” he said. “It’s great on three levels. Wait a minute …”
Suddenly there’s a lot of “Reel ‘er in” shouts. And, “Where’s the net?” And, “Hell, that damn thing is prehistoric.”
Calhoon rejoins the interview and says, “Sorry about that. Caught something big there. To regroup: You proposed to change the name of Lake James, arguably Burke County’s greatest amenity besides Lakeside Park and Bud’s Korner Kitchen, to —”
“Yes,” I said.
“— to change the name from the guy that brought electrical hydrodams to the Carolinas, this Duke fella?”
“Yes,” I said. “James Duke. But that was a century ago. Let’s rename it after our friends and neighbors to the North.”
There was another pause. Suddenly Calhoon was heard shouting, “Damn, Jim. Thing’s got some TEETH! Throw it back. Like now!”
I heard a gigantic splash.
Calhoun said, “OK. I’ll bring it before our Board. Don’t see a problem. Especially if you get an okay from the Lake James, er, Lake Canada, nonprofit. Suggest you give Jamison a call.”
Jamison was chief of the Lake James Preservation Society. I called him. Explained the deal. He listened. Understood.
“To get it straight,” Jamison said. “We’re changing the name of Lake James to Lake Canada to show our support for our friends and neighbors to the north.”
“Exactly,” I said.
“Love it,” he said. “Nothing but a revenue generator.”
“Just like that?” I said. “Not even gonna think about it?”
“What’s there to think about?” he said. “Name change on a state park? Big bucks in marketing value. All the sign changes. Map reprints. PR galore all about Good Intentions. Good Neighbors! We’re in.”
I thought about that. I said, “Don’t you need to bring it before your Board?”
“Board don’t know a Catawba Catfish from a Lakebottom Bluegill,” he said. “Their job is to approve the motion and check “YES” when told. Like now.”
“You’ll take care of the marketing?” I said.
“Done,” Jamison said.
“Who’s gonna tell Trump?” I said.
“That’d be you, bigman,” he said.
“Who’s gonna tell Canada?” I said.
“That’d be me,” he said. “Along with a donation card.”
Columnists
A hurricane, a haiku, and a little bit of hope
M. Matthews
As I write this column, four tropical storms are churning in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
You, likely, will have heard of none of them as this column hits the press. Lala is disintegrating in the central Pacific. In the eastern Pacific, Karina and Lowell may evaporate.
Tropical Storm Dolly also dissipated in the Atlantic before ever threatening land. Of course, had she survived her northward journey, Burke County might have been drenched.
Thanks to Hurricane Helene (September 2024), we know the drill.
If Tropical Storm Dolly had become a hurricane, we might never have forgotten her name like we won’t forget her namesake, the late great Mrs. Parton.
Hurricanes in our extended forecast remind me of the ones that marked my three decades living in coastal Virginia.
In September 2003, I tracked Isabel pinwheeling across the ocean to my front door in Portsmouth. Silt from the Nile coursed through her barometric muscle, swirling orange and red in satellite images, category five, eyeballing landfall.
When I was a child, hurricanes thrilled me. As Isabel crashed ashore, my own young sons vibrated with excitement.
Neighborhood trees convulsed like a restless man unable to get comfortable in his own death bed. The Western Branch of the Elizabeth River, visible from our living room, frothed white through gnashing teeth.
Wind groaned. Trees cracked. Water and worries rose.
She was lovely, this hurricane, like an alligator.
The morning after the storm, an eerie silence and lethargic timelessness took hold. Bright sun. Punishing heat. A million-percent humidity.
Power lines down. Roads and stores and gas stations closed. These were the stilled moments cleansed pristine by nature’s perfect violence — before chainsaws and the clacking of generators growled to life.
Trees were down everywhere. The fabric shell of the downtown amphitheater was blown to bits. Mud coated our communities like a dirty bathtub ring.
But we survived.
Our sons wielded sticks in the yard, jousted, choreographed sword fights, battled aliens. They were relieving stress that comes when the world turns upside down.
A young mother peddled by on her bicycle with her two boys.
“I’m mad at myself,” she said apologetically. “My kids can’t find anything to do without the TV. When I tell them to go outside and play, they hardly know how. And it’s my fault.”
Modern childhood is difficult without personal devices and electricity.
My family took meals on the porch. For the first time all summer, we heard the crickets and frogs — and those clacking generators. We enjoyed the piney air, the bright stars glowing in darker than usual skies. Inside, the airless house was too hot.
I became aware of people I once took for granted. Gas station attendants because we needed gas and candy bars and newspapers. People who delivered ice and bread. City workers who restored the downed pumping stations. Utility crews and arborists from bordering states who swamped our region to help.
After three days, when we got power and groceries, we invited neighbors lacking both to our house for a homecooked dinner. We told stories about subsisting without television and hot water and ice cream. And we broke into something I would never have predicted. We recited poetry we had memorized as children and coeds. “Snowbound.” “Leaves of Grass.” “The Road not Taken.”
Pete, a Navy chopper pilot who had weathered worse storms in Vietnam, got us started with his original haiku: Make waves, for when left/undisturbed, even holy/water will stagnate.
They say in times of revolution poets are the first to be shot. Poets dare to craft language from fear, emboldening us to reach beyond it. Despots hate empowered people.
The storm forced everyone outside.
In my mother’s backyard across the harbor, I watched a tree surgeon from Raleigh remove the wrecked pecan tree hanging precariously over the garage. From 50-feet up, he meticulously dropped branches in three-foot sections, log by log, until he stood on the ground next to the 10-foot-high, branchless trunk.
Watching him work was poetry in motion.
“That’s my church,” he said, pointing up to neighbors’ oaks. “When I’m up there it’s easy to know God is the creator. No man could make a tree.”
He spoke of Alabama after a twister hit a church. He arrived when they were still extricating bodies from beneath bricks, the slate roof, and wet pages of scattered hymnals.
“They didn’t have anything,” he said. “No house. No family. Nothing but hope.”
A few blocks from us, the Nances’ riverfront house had flooded.
By Sunday, scout leaders, church members, and neighbors began hauling detritus into a rented dumpster. Rotting fish, crab, and pounds of bacon and burgers from the dead garage freezer had created a monumental stench.
They lost their whole first floor except for their cooking utensils and pictures on the walls. Twelve-year-old Brian lost all of his shoes. But no one was hurt, and their dog was ecstatic to entertain visitors.
Ink-eating newspaper headlines told the story. Hunkering down: Region girds for Major Hit as Hurricane Takes Aim. Swept Away. The Long Road Ahead. The Big Mess. A Slow Struggle Back.
My mother from Hampton occupied our guestroom before the storm. We didn’t want her to weather its fury alone.
A few days after Isabel, we drove Mom — through the moonscape of downed trees — to her house in Hampton on the other side of the harbor.
Even our three little sons were speechless.
In the rearview mirror, I was wounded by the wreckage on my mother’s face. I watched her in the backseat watch the neighborhood she and my late father loved — disheveled neighbors raking thrashed lawns, sunburned men on roofs crawling like ants tacking down tarps and sawing off leaning trees.
Mom wept quietly.
Our sons, concerned for their grandmother and troubled by her tears, patted her hands.
Mom could not speak, but her cherubic grandsons could.
They whispered her name.
“Roro,” they said. “Oh, Roro.”
Matt Matthews (he, him, his) is co-pastor with his wife Rachel of the Waldensian Presbyterian Church in Valdese, a cool congregation of the PC(USA). You may reach him at 864.386.9138.
Editorials
Maps, addresses, and a lesson in citizen action
The Rutherford College Town Hall has a Connelly Springs address. Confusing? You bet it is.
There is something almost comical about the way communities overlap in Burke and Caldwell counties.
Valdese Avenue is in Morganton.
Morganton Street NW is in Valdese.
Morganton Boulevard is in Lenoir.
Lenoir Street is in Morganton.
Valdese Street is in Drexel. It used to be Valdese Avenue, but that’s another story.
Road names are one thing. They often reflect where a road leads, where it once led, or what community mattered when the road was named.
U.S. Postal System mailing addresses are different.
When a home, business, town hall, or major development is physically located inside one incorporated community but carries another town’s name in its mailing address, the issue stops being quirky and starts becoming consequential.
Across North Carolina, the consequences have shown up in unexpected places: businesses discovering they applied to the wrong permitting authority, homebuyers misunderstanding their school district or municipal services, delivery drivers having no idea where to go, properties disappearing from real-estate searches, businesses finding themselves ineligible for government grants, and emergency officials warning that inconsistent addresses can complicate response.
A mailing-city name may have been created for the convenience of moving physical mail, but today that address is copied into hundreds of public and private databases that make decisions about where we live, what services we receive, and even how property is marketed.
BURKE RIVER TRAIL GETS INVOLVED
That is why the recent work by Beth Heile and the Burke River Trail Association deserves recognition.
BRTA’s research found hundreds of addresses inside Burke County municipalities carrying another community’s name. Drexel, Glen Alpine, Rutherford College, and Rhodhiss are at the center of the current effort, although the problem extends into other towns.
(The Paper wrote a series of stories earlier this year about confusion caused by mismatched addresses, particularly in Glen Alpine.)
In its impressive body of research, responsibly and authoritatively documented, complete with interactive GIS-based maps. BRTA took the issue considerably further than municipal pride or problems when computer systems, delivery services, and government databases disagree about where an address belongs.
The association began working through the federal bureaucracy to find a solution.
BRTA took up the issue across the four communities because of its potential impact on town identity, economic development and community pride. It then kept pressing for a workable answer.
The association raised the concerns with U.S. Rep. Tim Moore during a recent Burke Chamber business roundtable and again at a meeting in Rhodhiss. Moore’s office asked BRTA for additional information and examples, particularly involving town identity and economic development.
BRTA also contacted U.S. Sen. Ted Budd’s office. His office opened a case with the U.S. Postal Service.
And something useful happened. A path forward emerged.
A PATH FORWARD
The Postal Service has advised that incorporated towns can request changes to the mailing-city names assigned to addresses. Options may allow a municipality to be added as an acceptable mailing designation or, in some circumstances, become the preferred designation.
Importantly, the problem may be fixable without changing ZIP codes or fundamentally disrupting postal delivery.
This is worth pursuing because municipal identity matters.
If a major employer locates in Drexel but carries a Morganton mailing address, Drexel can lose some of the recognition that comes with that investment.
If a major redevelopment project is in Rhodhiss but publicly identified as Hickory, Rhodhiss loses visibility.
If Rutherford College Town Hall carries a Connelly Springs address, something as simple as telling someone where town hall is, or even ordering a to-your-door pizza, becomes unnecessarily confusing.
Small towns already work hard to be noticed. They recruit businesses, revitalize downtowns, restore historic properties, build parks, and try to create communities residents are proud to call home.
They should not have to compete with their own mailing addresses. A place ought to have a reasonable opportunity to call itself what it is.
A LARGER LESSON
There is a larger lesson here, too.
Good citizenship does not always arrive at a microphone. Sometimes it looks like studying maps. Sometimes it means counting hundreds of addresses. Sometimes it means gathering records, making calls, meeting with officials, and continuing to ask questions when the first answer is inadequate.
That is what makes BRTA’s work noteworthy.
The research and diligence exhibited by Heile and the Burke River Trail Association are a powerful example of concerned citizens becoming involved in a sensible, responsible way for the betterment of their communities.
They identified a local problem, documented it carefully, and then worked toward a practical solution.
Communities need more of that.
Beth Heile and BRTA deserve credit for doing the work. The towns involved should seriously consider using the opportunity now available to them through the Postal Service.
An address is a small thing until it is yours.
Then it tells the world where you are.
Our towns deserve the chance to make sure it tells the truth.
