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
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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.
