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Reality Emerges After Respite In The Mountains

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By STEVE OTTO | The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 6, 2008

As years go, this one was not off to a promising start.

It was around 7 in the morning, which meant it was still dark in the North Carolina mountains we had come to, hoping to relax for a few days before getting back to a new year and the daily routine.

It's not that we had stayed up late whooping it up. We had put a log on the fire and turned on the TV to watch the ball drop. Somehow we didn't get around to the bottle of champagne in the fridge, instead toasting the new year with hot chocolate.

All the two dogs knew was, it was time to do their business and they couldn't have cared less that it was New Year's Day, pitch black outside and the thermometer had a reading of 12 degrees.

One of the dogs, you might recall, is our puppy Tennessee, who weighed roughly 8 pounds and was suffering from every disease known to dogkind when we picked her up on a country road two months ago in the Tennessee hills. She's now more than 30 pounds, apparently part horse and couldn't wait to go tearing off into the dark with me frozen stiffly in tow.

Seeing Through Fresh Eyes

The thing is, even in the cold darkness, things had a clearer perspective. Politics, $100-a-barrel oil, the war on terror, a collapsing economy all took second fiddle to smelling out critters burrowed in the near-frozen ground or staring at a sky brilliant with stars that you don't see in urban Tampa.

We inhabit a world where the news is force-fed to you 24 hours a day on cable TV, where blogs clog the brain and even your telephone now connects you instantly to an electronic babble of information so overwhelming you see people meandering the streets with devices attached to their ears apparently talking to either themselves or the wind.

Cell phones don't work in this part of Transylvania County near Brevard and the radio station's call letters, WSQL, stand for the local attraction - white squirrels.

Real People, Real Stories

When we finally came inside and I put another log on the fire, I picked up my copy of the Transylvania Times, my second favorite newspaper. It's a wonderful community paper that comes out three times a week with stories about real people and things happening in the area. I learned that down the street in Cedar Mountain, two relatives of Joe and Christine Pace have fallen off ladders and broken or torn something. Now Christine reports her Aunt Lila fell and turned her face black and blue.

I turned to the "Birds in Focus" column and there was a reminder the titmice needed to have the suet feeders filled more this time of the year and maybe you should scatter some corn for the sparrows.

Unfortunately, we do have TV and the rest of the world was right there next to the fireplace. The good news was, politics would have to take a day off on the tube for football. The bad news was, USF had been blown away the day before, Florida State had run out of gas with many of its players suspended and now the Gators were adding to the string of losses for our state.

By the end of last week, football had again been replaced by the winds of politics and again Florida came out on the short end as candidates tromped through the frozen towns and either gained momentum in Iowa or disappeared from view without Floridians having so much as a sound bite in the results ... a bad start for an ominous year.

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