Month: September 2016

August 23 to September 22, Bushwood, Buena Vista, Blue Ridge

 

We had decided to stay in the east to attend an old-time music festival in Virginia. After some deliberation we decided to make a dash home to Bushwood to air the house. The hot humid summer was taking its toll on the shuttered house, we feared, and we weren’t far wrong. Some of the woodwork had a coating of mildew that would hot have improved with time, and a couple of bushes were asserting themselves into the crevices of the abode. We wiped down the tabletops and bookshelves, hacked the greenery into submission, slept in spacious accommodations, watched TV, ate at Quades, went to Bill Longley’s funeral, touched base with the neighborhood, did some truck maintenance. I was reluctant to return home and add an asterisk to our future claims of having travelled for a year in the Scamp but home ownership has its responsibilities. Now there’ll be a footnote in the record book.

 

Bill Longley passed the day we arrived back in Bushwood. He was a well-respected guitarist and a member of the Piney Point Playboys, the cajun band with Annie Jean, Brenda and Bernice. Bill came to our house most Sunday mornings for rehearsal. He was a steady and lively guitar player and the most authentic-sounding interpreter of old country songs. RIP brother Bill.

After a few days we headed out again, stopping outside Crozet VA for the night after tiring of driving. After setting up camp I realized that we were only a few miles from the home of some old friends. It was too late to get together and we had a nice talk on the phone but I regret not having figured out earlier that we would be in the vicinity. Sorry Chip & Angie. These are folks Brenda and I each knew through a separate set of contacts years before we met one another, when we were teenagers. It’s a small world and for some of us it was even smaller circa 1970 in the greater DC area.

We arrived in Buena Vista VA on Wednesday to stake out a good spot for the music festival that was to begin on Friday. Half the attendees had the same idea so for all intents and purposes the festival began two days early. Ultimately there were probably over 200 campsites at the festival—tents, RVs, trailers—with more than twice that in attendance, I am guessing. Starting in the evening they played into the small hours. Start walking around and a group is playing “Soldier’s Joy,” walk fifteen steps and a different ensemble is playing “Flop-eared Mule,” and a little further on a tune you never heard. I said “starting in the evening” because during the day the temperature hit a hundred degrees and few felt like holding a fiddle under the chin or an instrument next to the body. I had been here once before, Brenda had attended 4 or 5 times, and the days then were as music-filled as the evenings, but this heat wave stifled the desire to play. We had our group of friends in a little tent-trailer compound with overhead cover and the weekend went by pleasantly, getting up every few minutes to chase the shade around or refill a cup.

 

When others were away at workshops or otherwise occupied Lucy and I drained the meltwater out of the ice chests into buckets and soaked our feet in the cold, cooling our heels. We learned you can get something like brain-freeze in your feet.

Things broke up Sunday but Brenda and I decided to stay in place for another night. Of course the weather broke the next day and the park became pleasant. It really is a pretty setting in Glen Maury Park in Buena Vista, alongside the Maury River a few miles before it joins the James, just below the Blue Ridge Parkway.

 

A few other folks stayed into Monday also, enough to get up a decent jam Monday night. One of them was Mississippi fiddler Harry Bolick who recently discovered a raft of documents from WPA researchers about fiddlers in his region. He was traveling around with a supply of the book he wrote as a result, Mississippi Fiddle Tunes of the 1930s, published by University of Mississippi Press. Speaking of that era, I had conversation with the fellow camped next to us in his RV, Skip Ashby. He leads an old-time band that his father started in the late 1930s called the Free State Ramblers. The band is one of the oldest non-institutional bands of any kind to be in continuous operation for over 80 years. Nice guy—we talked about the declining state of the natural world and other uplifting subjects. He lives in Virginia and we discovered a mutual connection, Steve Hickman.

Another guy I met at the festival had detoured off the Appalachian Trail, nine miles away, to take a break from his trek to Georgia. I saw him on Sunday hiking out and gave him a lift to the trailhead while he told me stories from the trail. At the trailhead another kid approached me and offered me five dollars to give him a lift to some town whose name I forget; he and his buddies had taken a kayak trip down the James and somebody had to go back and get the truck. I gave him a lift, declining the fiver. He grew up in the area and though we were only fifteen miles from Buena Vista he said he had never been there. “Never had a reason to go there I guess,” he said when I expressed surprise. Fair enough.

Our next destination was a campsite on the grounds of the Mt. Airy, NC fairgrounds. We hadn’t counted on there being a fair that night. The campsite was right at the entrance to the fairgrounds and promised a long night of traffic noise and dust. We chose to go to a private campground which was a sterile, barren drag of a place, ‘nuff said. We went into Mt Airy which has taken advantage of being Andy Griffith’s birthplace and has fashioned itself into a makeshift Mayberry—recreations of Floyd’s barber shop, a museum of Andy Griffith Show memorabilia, an old police car, a general devotion to some kind of imaginary time and place. I give them some credit for trying, but you can’t escape the idea that you are in a town that has recreated itself in the image of a fictional TV show for no other reason except that its main actor was born there ad the setting of the show was piedmont NC.

Stayed a few days in a pleasant state park in the sandhills region of South Carolina, just outside Columbia, SC. South Carolina gave up the confederate flag relatively early (put it up in 1962 and took it off government grounds in the 1990s) and has avoided the ugly confrontations and conservative backlashes that other southern states still succumb to. The state museum in Columbia even managed to portray Sherman’s destruction of that city and the civil war generally in a matter-of-fact way, without innuendo or code talk. My museum would have been harder on Sherman than their state museum. Good hiking around the lake at Sesquicentennial State Park,

 

and you can fall asleep to the sound of machine gun fire from the neighboring Fort Jackson.

A long drive along the backroads to Savannah GA and one of our favorite campgrounds to date, Skidaway Island State Park. Spacious campsite on a sea island; palmetto trees and massive live oaks heavily draped with Spanish moss with epiphyte ferns sprouting from the branches and cavities. (“the trees were festuned with Spanish guitars and epiphones.”). We stayed here five nights, enjoying the variety of hiking trails and environments. The sea islands are sandy prominences in a vast plain of low grasses that flood twice daily to a depth of a few inches–the savannas of Savannah. We took trips into Savannah and Tybee island, old haunts of ours, from the time when Zach went to college here, which we loved revisiting.

 

One crosses Moon River en route to Skidaway Island, and I was excited to see a bit of Americana—obviously this would be the Moon River that Savannah native Johnny Mercer wrote of when he lent the words to Henry Mancini for the tune by that name. But no, it is another Mayberry. The city of Savannah renamed the inlet Moon River in honor of Mercer, post mortem. Another simulacra.

We were sorry to leave Skidaway for Jekyll Island, 90 minutes further down the coast. The natural environment here in Jekyll is similar to Skidaway, but the campsites are very close together and the feel is less wilderness and more geezer camp. Jekyll island, famous as the playground of the robber barons of America’s gilded age, is now a state-owned property but the state leases out everything to predatory vendors. Even as campers we had to pay $6 to get on the island and have to pay that again if we decide to go off-island to get some fairly-priced food or other commodities. It does have a nice bike trail that goes around and through the island, and we rented bikes yesterday to take advantage of it. And there is ocean access, altho it is the least inviting iteration of the Atlantic I’ve ever seen—too warm, kind of muddy looking, shallow waves. We did have a nice long walk on a deserted beach at the south end, and saw unusual, to us, shore birds including a large flock of black skimmers. Huge shrimp trawlers ply the waters just offshore here, a half dozen at a time. In all, I would have preferred staying in Skidaway for another week. Trodding where the Rockefellers and Goulds have trod doesn’t do it for me.P

 

 

**************************

Postscript 9/22

I didn’t do Jekyll Island justice. We took a couple of walks along two beaches that were broad and beautiful and deserted. We were the sole posessors of miles of beach. One is the at the south end called Glory Beach (another instance in which a place was renamed to commemorate a fiction; this beach was named after the movie “Glory” some of which was shot on this beach) and the other is Driftwood Beach which we hiked to via the fishing pier at the north end of the island. No people, no houses, no signs of civilization except the sight of St. Simon Island to the north and the shrimp boats.

 

 

 

August 13 to August 28, Outer Banks and Tidewater Virginia

We had a classic beach experience. Fourteen people in the oceanfront house, family and friends, doing the time-honored rotation—house to ocean to umbrella shade to ocean to house; the occasional trips out to shell shops, beer stores, and local attractions; trying to wrangle a consensus for dinner. A week of sun and surf,  playing with the grandkids Clementine and Tavish.

Got some work done on the trailer and truck. While getting the trailer’s wheel-bearings repacked the mechanic called my attention to one of the tires which was dangerously worn on the inside, near to coming apart. Brenda had read me some horror stories from the Scamp-owners forum of tires delaminating on the highway. Frequently the tire comes apart and rips through the wheel well and tears apart the electrical, plumbing, and gas connections that come together there. We were lucky to have caught the problem, and I was lucky to find a guy who had the right size tires in stock and made time to mount them. He also had to be the looniest mechanic in the Outer Banks, jabbering nonstop about everything and nothing; absolutely starkers.

I have to remark on how unbelievably clear the water was in Nags Head. In water that came up to my chin I could see the ocean floor in perfect detail. I have been coming to these beaches since I was a kid and have never seen the ocean so transparent. Also, it was teeming with fish, seemingly-endless flows of minnows and foot-long fish (herring? mackerel?) the whole week we were there. I have never seen any aquatic resource get better over time before this. A fluke of the sea.

Everyone else headed north to Maryland or airports at the end of the week; we went west a little ways to a campground in Rocky Hock, NC on the Albemarle Peninsula. A quiet spot near a little lake with a white and a black goose. One of our cats had an eye infection or irritation from a piece of sand so we took a trip to a nearby vet who was very accommodating. The campground was near Edenton, NC which is quite an attractive place, a sort of small-scale Charleston. Edenton was founded in the 1600s by adventurers from the Jamestown settlement, and was, for several decades, the colonial capital of the Carolinas. Its heyday was in the mid-19^th century when the rail line allowed the town to capitalize on its seafood and its cotton mills. Fabulous mansions were built by the town’s many notable citizens, and scores of them still stand downtown, some for sale in the two million-plus range. Near the old cotton mill are a couple blocks of identical one-story mill-worker dwellings, some looking unchanged since they were abandoned in the 1950s, some gussied-up and selling for $200,000+. We knew nothing about Edenton before visiting so it was a pleasant surprise to find it such an inviting town to walk around. (If you go, don’t be tempted by the drugstore that advertises freshly-made lemonade and orangeade—they both taste like sugar.) Driving out after a three day stay, in nearby Southhampton, VA we saw historical markers noting the rise and fall of Nat Turner whose turn on the stage played out here in the 1830s. Since then, in just the last week, I have heard a lot about Turner—press about a new movie, and a bit in the New Yorker in connection with the African-American Museum on the mall. This must be Nat’s year. I remember reading Styron’s book The Confessions of Nat Turner when I was a kid and it might be time  for a second look at that.

We drove north, and west a little, to Mount Medoc State Park which sits on the edge of the piedmont where it falls off to the coastal plain. Mount Medoc is not much of a mountain, barely even a hill at 325 feet. The park thinks they sidestep the issue by claiming that it was once a mountain in the distant geological past. By that reasoning you could call it anything—Vast Inland Sea of Medoc; Medoc, Center of the Supercontinent Pangea.

A well-kept camp facility, really nice trails through the woods, up the “mountain,” along the river. The wooded trails were draped everywhere with spider webs; it’s that time of year. Brenda made me walk point to intercept all the webs. I walked along swinging a stick up and down in front of me, and Brenda did the same just in case I missed one. We must have looked like a couple of medieval penitents on a pilgrimage through the forest.

Shortly after we arrived in camp the local state police officer assigned to the park came by. He assured us he would be on the job, coming by every hour or so to cruise the park. He gave me a piece of paper with his emergency number in 3 inch high letters. I thought, “Geez, quite a security presence here.” Next evening Brenda and I got to wondering why, for the second day,  we were the only ones in the large campground. Connecting this with the police presence I wondered if there hadn’t been a recent spate of murders in the park, or maybe it bordered a prison or something. Brenda checked online and found a possible explanation—BIGFOOT HAD BEEN SIGHTED HERE WITHIN THE PAST FEW WEEKS! It was a statewide news story, complete with accounts from frightened townspeople who saw “something cross the road” or who had lost a cat recently. A local man took casts of large footprints found on the very trail we had just hiked. I couldn’t help but look around every few minutes for large lumbering hairy beasts. Here is my haiku “Mount Medoc Yeti”:

Bigfoot sighting here

And even though I don’t believe

I look, half-hoping.

 

A local man had established a “museum of cryptozoology” in his home to document the bigfoot sightings that had occurred in the region in recent years. He was, in fact, the guy who found the footprint in the park. The “museum” was just a collection of odds and ends of unremarkable artifacts and framed newsprint. The cast of the footprint found in Medoc was unrecognizable as a foot, sasquatch or otherwise; he might as well have, and indeed may have, poured plaster of paris in a Kroger bag. (Kroger is a supermarket chain found in the south and the Midwest. A guy I knew from West Virginia said a paper shopping bag from Kroger was “West Virginia Samsonite.”) Interestingly the curator of the museum was a seemingly-sane and engaging guy who only moved to North Carolina a few years earlier, after retiring as a writer for the New York Daily News. I don’t recall anything he said as revealing that he actually believes in Bigfoot; Brenda thinks he is taking advantage of peoples’ interest in paranormal things to make a few bucks. The museum in Littleton NC is free, altho you feel obligated to make a donation. Call the guy up and he will invite you over to see it.

We made the perilous descent from Mount Medoc and took up residence in Jamestown Virginia at a county park called Chickahominy River. Since coming back into the states almost a month ago the heat has been extreme and debilitating, and the further south we went the more humid. We wondered if it had been this hot when we were kids and just didn’t notice. I did some cursory research that wouldn’t stand up under peer review and found the following: in every year of the 1960s the average temperature in Washington DC was in the low to mid 80s for the month of August. The maximum temperature in August for eight years of the decade was at or below 90. In 1965 and 1968 the maximum temperature was 95. In August of 2015 and 2016 the average temperature was 92 and the maximum 101.

We visited the state-run Jamestown site. The National Park Service has a park at the original site of the settlement but it is almost all outdoors and it was too hot to go there. The state-run site is extensive, with a 20 minute movie, a fairly-interesting museum that took an hour to go through, and life-size recreations of the ships, the fort, and an Indian village, peopled by costumed interpreters with accents and accoutrements of varying degrees of accuracy. (“Hey Powhatan, where do you buy your eyeglasses?”) I was curious how the displays would handle the recently-discovered (2013) evidence of cannibalism among the first settlers and the movie did cop to it with a brief reference.

After a few days along the fetid Chickahominy we went to VA on the Chesapeake at the mouth of the Potomac. I had long been curious about this area, home to Omega Protein, the perpetrator of genocide against the Bay’s menhaden population. The campground, Chesapeake Bay RV Camp Resort (another campground almost entirely to ourselves) was in a piney wood by an inlet of the Bay about ten miles from Reedville. The camp is on a downhill slide—the founders are aged and the kids are incapable or uninterested. It was okay by our standards but unless somebody gets motivated this place is going to be overrun by weeds and spiders come spring. There are some vicious screeds on Yelp about this place that make for good reading, along with an equal number of less-interesting entries that are positive.

Historical markers of the area are uninteresting for the most part. George Washington’s mother came from here, Northumberland County. Jessie Ball is a favorite daughter with a roadside marker noting her birthplace, a small national historical site of a schoolhouse where she was a teacher and principal, and a roadway named in her honor. She was famous for marrying Alfred Dupont and spending some of his umpty-ump millions on charitable works. You might not be able to buy your way into heaven but you can spend your way into the consciousness of Virginians.

 

Reedville has a watermen’s museum that was closed during our stay, a couple of restaurants, a handful of 19^th century homes worth the restoration they have received. The whole Northern Neck of Virginia, between the Rappahanock and Potomac Rivers, is a pleasant landscape of hills, farms, river- and bay-side views. It is sparsely-populated, possessing a handful of small towns, notable manses, and historic sites. Most of it is played-out farm fields, reduced to sand through centuries of tobacco farming. The area seems something other than southern even tho the region’s glory days were allowed by plantation economy. I suspect that the Northern Neck is still peopled by descendants of early settlers.

The pleasure of traveling as we have is spending time in places and regions that, in previous travels, we had just blown through en-route to someplace else. To have the time to soak up the atmosphere of Kentucky, the various ecozones of North Carolina, Tidewater Virginia, rural Ohio, has been enjoyable and enlightening. Some ideas I have long held about certain places and peoples were little more than caricatures or stereotypes based on scanty information; with the addition of each additional detail gleaned from actually being in a place I feel a little more connected and sympathetic to that place. So don’t you go bad-mouthing Lenoir City, Tennessee around me, you hear.