By Bob Gibson
DailyProgress.com blogger

DUCK, N.C.— North Carolina’s Outer Banks stores history and collects new evidence of the international economy.

Once quaint and now cosmopolitan, this spit of land offers daily examples of how the more things stay the same today the more they change.

Three dozen years of trips here offer a glimpse of the timeless surges of nature—the birds and tides and storms that sweep through—and the fascinating stream of new people who preen and shop and sell.

Ibis fish ponds swollen by a week’s rain. Polish, Russian and Irish young people process Visas for milk, newspapers and gas.

One Northern Virginian sharply questioned an Irish clerk at a grocery for not having a copy of the Washington Times one day last week when the Washington Post, the New York Times and papers from Richmond, Norfolk and Newport News had all safely negotiated floodwaters to Duck.

The Irish clerk was not the only person in the store who had never encountered a customer irked by not finding a Washington Times in Duck. Its on-line omnipresence failed to mollify the malcontent willing to plunk 95 cents into Korean coffers.

Birds migrate here from South America, clerks from Poland and conservatives from Chantilly who would never fork over $2 for a super early edition of the Post.

Foreign accents have migrated through these once-isolated shores for centuries, but with many more recent arrivals filling the Outer Banks from throughout the East and Europe the distinctive Elizabethan English of earlier settlers here has waned.

Traffic rivals Charlottesville’s, but only on two-lane Route 12, the one artery north of Southern Shores.

The history of lighthouses and wild horses remains in a way overwhelmed by parades of glass beach houses imitating stone cathedrals.

Daughter Stella sits and observes approaching swells and breakers punctuated by lines of gently gliding pelicans and observes that the scene reflects millions of years.

Stella, more than sisters, insists on experiencing the yin and yang of low and high tides even if water temperatures mimic global cooling.

Only occasional meals and the lure of World Cup soccer tear the youngest nature girl away from shaming her dad into ice-water body surfing.

Daughter Helen brings her own European adventures to the beach from six months of teaching English to young Germans.

Her own love of a young German has taken her from France to Japan to Leipzig and Croatia.

Reconnecting with family at the beach offers all a timeless dip in a pool of good cheer.

Daughter Logan is wintering in South Africa, teaching English to eight-year-olds who in turn have taught her to sing the Swaziland national anthem in their own tongue. Her laughing presence is much missed.

A crowded Duck beach offers timeless shrieks and the pounding of waves crashing that good things to read can drown out.

Last year’s loss of a father-in-law brings waves of memories. A boat trip among dolphins, unflinching good humor, civic optimism and a love of ice cream help a family recall the spirit of a former Williamsburg mayor whose shared times we loved.

Politics fades from view at the beach. People don’t mention it as it occupies a favored status of things left behind.

Political contests lack the timeless enticements of beachiness.

Politics, ever so timely, can wait.

He’s back...and he’s cuter than ever.

Yes, “American Idol’s” Chris Daughtry is featured in a story on EW.com about the upcoming three-month American Idol Live! tour.

Entertainment Weekly calls Fluvanna High School graduate Daughtry “The Man Who Was Robbed of His Rightful Title” and talks with him about everything from his new solo career to a new tattoo.

Daughtry and his fellow Idol-ers will play at the Verizon Center in Washington, D.C., on July 28 and at the Richmond Coliseum on July 29. Click here for concert ticket information. 

Bob Gibson
Daily Progress political blogger

Virginians are in love with their trees.

There is an emotional attachment that many of us have formed with the trees on our land.

Mess with those trees and people feel a real and emotional sense of loss.

Timber theft and the mistaken harvesting of other people’s trees are big problems over wide portions of rural Virginia, at least to those with missing timber pegged by Department of Forestry officials at more than $4 million to $7 million a year.

Reaction from readers of last Sunday’s front-page “Missing Timber” story also indicates that Virginia’s legal procedures to deal with the loss of trees involve cumbersome civil court proceedings that take time and often do not yield satisfied victims.

A handful of people who consider themselves victims of timber thefts in Buckingham County said cases are difficult to take to court and win.

One man said he is descended from slaves and has been told he could not prove who owned the land from which he said his trees were taken.

Another man, Alvin Clark, said someone took five acres of his timber along Spreading Oak Church Road off Route 20 in the past two years.

“We owned a lot of cedar trees,” said Clark, whose grandmother, Alice Greene, lived on the land until she died there nine years ago at age 104. “My grandmother was born and raised on that property,” but in recent years the owners did not live there.

Timber is a valuable commodity often owned by absentee landowners, and, often by multiple owners, said longtime Buckingham County Circuit Court Clerk Malcolm Booker. Timber “is our major crop,” Booker said, and it’s a crop that a lot of people harvest.

Not all landowners know their property lines. Not all loggers know either. Not all trees that should be marked by owners are marked.

A bigger problem with timber theft, at least in Buckingham, appears to be that people in many cases do not know exactly who owns what land.

A lot of the county’s residents inherited an interest in some property from an ancestor who died without leaving a will, Booker said.

“It passes down through two or three generations and you could have 50 or 75 people who have an interest in the property,” he said. “One family member, he’ll cut far more than he has an interest in, and it’s a family thing.”

Forestry department officials said that because the loss of trees from theft or trespass is seldom prosecuted as criminal theft, landowners are encouraged to rely on a 2-year-old timber law that establishes an enhanced civil lawsuit procedure for recovery of some losses.

“They seem to not get a lot of help from local commonwealth’s attorneys and local sheriff’s departments, partly because [authorities] don’t know the values” and partly because of understaffing and concentration on larger felony cases, said Regional Forester Ed Stoots in Abingdon.

“Most of them kind of put it back on the landowner to hire an attorney [and a consulting forester to determine the value of lost timber] … to sue civilly.” A good hardwood tree can carry a stump value of hundreds of dollars and be worth far more when cut.

The enforcement tools available to the Department of Forestry are state environmental laws that protect streams, not victims of missing timber.

I weighed my decision.
Be an extra on “Evan Almighty” or be a pink lady in the Women’s Four Miler Training Program.
Did I mention that I don’t like to run?
Well, Saturday morning dawned. I grabbed my costume and headed out.
I was one of hundreds to answer the casting call.
I was a Pink Lady.
There were no regrets.
Just smiles … everywhere. And hugs.
One young woman came up to me. She said she had never been comfortable doing things with a group of women be-fore. Too catty, I guess.  But she said that she came to the University of Virginia track … and cried.
The support for one another was overwhelming.
“This was the way it was supposed to be,” she said.
Yes, I ran, but I had so much fun I didn’t realize what I was doing.

Bob Gibson
Daily Progress political blogger

I very much enjoyed meeting the bloggers who visited Charlottesville over the weekend.

In many ways, it seems to me there are more than 100 new people covering Virginia politics than just a few years ago and they aren’t in my newspaper business. They blog.

They blog information and opinion and feeling and their contributions are most welcome.

If any of the bloggers read blogs over newspaper Web sites, and I assume that is many, then the rest of this post is what readers of The Daily Progress saw on Sunday about the conference.

Bloggers who write about Virginia politics debated ethics and each other Saturday as politicians watched and got to know many of the most active voices of the newly powerful political blogging community.

A two-day conference on political blogging attracted Virginia’s lieutenant governor, attorney general, three members of the House of Delegates and a crowd of dozens of active bloggers to the University of Virginia.

“A year ago, I didn’t even know what a blog was, and now I’m looking at blogs and reading blogs and I’m worrying about whether you are saying nice things or nasty things about me on blogs,” Lt. Gov. William T. Bolling told the Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership’s second annual Summit on Blogging and Democracy. “Now I’m doing blog interviews.”

“Maybe this whole blogging thing has the potential of bringing back responsibility to campaigns,” Bolling told about 90 people Saturday afternoon. He urged the political bloggers to “hold us responsible once we get elected for doing the things we said we were going to do.”

Daily Press editorial writer G.C. Morse said the blogs played a role in launching Democratic U.S. Senate nominee James C. Webb’s campaign. He warned, however, to be wary of politicians. “Don’t slobber over these people. Some of them are playing you.”

Waldo Jaquith, a Charlottesville blogger, said Virginia has more than 90 political blogs and more individuals who post items of news and comment on them, with about a 2-1 ratio of Democratic bloggers to Republicans updating the information.

Many more people read and comment on the Web logs, including individuals who comment anonymously or use pseudonyms to mask their identity.

One definition of blogging drew laughter from the crowd: “Imagine being in a bar and never being interrupted,” Morse said of the ability to sit and opine to the world from a computer.

Bloggers discussed ways to maintain credibility and keep false information and nastiness from poisoning the reputation of blogs.

“There is a little bit of credibility loss when you use a pseudonym,” Charlottesville blogger Michael Snook said. “Some people won’t take it as seriously.”

Several bloggers gave partisan liberal blogs credit for helping Webb win Tuesday’s primary over Harris Miller but blasted a paid Webb partisan blogger for creating and distributing a cartoon attacking Miller that they called anti-Semitic in nature. Miller, who is Jewish, was depicted as a money-grubbing businessman with a crook nose and cash falling out of a suit pocket.

Conference participants also blasted the practice of using paid bloggers, not identified as paid by a campaign, as U.S. Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., did in 2004 when he defeated then-Sen. Thomas Daschle by about 4,000 votes.

Del. Bob Brink, D-Arlington and one of a handful of delegates who have blogs, said he attended the conference “to learn what are the rules of the road for bloggers. That’s something that came up in spades in Webb-Miller” when some of the partisan bloggers started attacking each other in vicious terms.

“I wanted to get to know some of the players,” said fellow blogger Del. Kristen Amundson, D-Mount Vernon.

Michael Shear, the Richmond bureau chief for the Washington Post and a blogger, said bloggers are not journalists, but “I think there is some pressure to make sure blogs don’t scoop us.”