Long Way Home (6 page)

“Why is that?” I wondered if a bleak outlook necessarily accompanies the aging process. Steinbeck, though in denial, showed evidence of it. Often the future looked pretty bad to me, as well, but I wasn't an eighteen-year-old computer whiz versed in the potential applications of nanotechnology.

“There's too much modern stuff,” Ed declared cheerfully. “Too many white collars and not enough blue. Machines do the jobs on farms that eight or sixteen men used to! 'Course, the young fellas in Culpeper don't want those jobs, not really.”

“You sure about that?”

“I am sure. They're too spoiled for hard work,” Ed said with absolute certainty. “That's where the Mexicans come in. They're good people, hard workers. They're good to me, and I'm good to them. You know what really bothers me?”

I braced myself for a major revelation.

“I can't stand all this red tape. If I want to build a pigpen, I've got to get a permit now. Why is that? I know what I'm doing.” There it was, Emerson's self-reliance in spades. “I'm a Baptist and never been in trouble in my life. Never been in a jailhouse, either. I've had a couple of speeding tickets, all right, but everybody gets a few of those.”

The granting of permits was front-page news in Culpeper, in fact, especially regarding the use of firearms. If a varmint ravaged your vegetable patch in the old days, for instance, and deserved to meet its Maker, the sheriff simply issued one. He still would, but only if you had at least an acre of land. In a crowded subdivision, a bullet could go astray and wound an innocent bystander, he asserted.

The sheriff's stance had infuriated the Virginia Citizens Defense League, based in Newington and described as “gun fanatics” and “loonies” by their foes. Some members of the league attended a town meeting with pistols on their hips, harping on about the right to bear arms even though they lived elsewhere. The matter was referred to committee.

Ed Perryman scanned Main Street for further threats to his well-being, but the coast was clear. “Good luck to you, then,” he said, gingerly stepping off the curb. “Looks like I may get to celebrate my birthday after all.”

I continued on to East Street, a hotbed of McCain supporters. Virtually every household advertised its preference for the senator. The homes were as grand as I'd imagined, beautifully groomed and defying the inroads of time, set apart from the hurly-burly in an enclave of wealth and privilege.

East Street might back McCain, but Barack Obama's foot soldiers had taken command of Main Street. The Campaign for Change operated from an upstairs suite of offices cluttered with fliers and bumper stickers, puff pieces and photos of the candidate. In its cramped alcoves, volunteers busily addressed envelopes and worked the phones under the watchful eye of Nish Suvarnakar.

Suvarnakar radiated an utter devotion to Obama. As the regional field organizer for Culpeper and Rappahannock counties, he cared about little else except getting his man elected. He had no time for small talk, and no interest in the fineries. When I blundered into the suite, haphazardly as usual, he grilled me long and hard about my purpose before he answered a single question.

Tall and imposing, with a controlled fierceness about him, Suvarnakar had earned a degree in comparative literature from the University of Pittsburgh in 2001. He'd dabbled in acting there, and you could see traces of it in his manner. He fixed his audience—me, that is—with his gaze and never wavered from his message. As an organizer, he was especially effective with African Americans and the young.

Obama's troops had stolen a march on McCain's, he explained. The campaign had opened their office two months before the Republicans caught on and responded in kind. Probably they'd been resting on their laurels, I thought, since Bush had romped through Culpeper County in 2004 with 64 percent of the vote.

Though Suvarnakar worried about the chances of a perceived “black man” in the South, he sensed a restlessness in town. Independents and some GOP stalwarts seemed ready to distance themselves from the Bush administration and its policies. They felt terribly let down, he believed, and disinclined to waste another chance. There was a bit of play in the system, a glimmer of hope for those who shared Suvarnakar's convictions.

In the interest of fairness, I knocked on the Republicans' door, too, but it was still locked at noon, so I walked over to North East Street to see Eppa Rixey's stately white house, now divided into apartments. A curbside display pictured his Big League Chewing Gum card and his “Life Time Free Pass to National League Games,” an honor bestowed by Commissioner Ford Frick.

Unlike most ballplayers of his era, Rixey was a blue blood with a master's degree from the University of Virginia. He began his career with the Phillies fresh from college and later moved to the Reds, racking up 266 career wins—a record for southpaws until Warren Spahn broke it in 1959. Respected for his dry wit and gentlemanly qualities, Rixey greeted his election to the Hall with typical modesty.

“I guess they must be scraping the bottom of the barrel,” he quipped, perhaps thinking about the 251 games he'd lost, and passed quietly away that same year.

BELMONT FARM DISTILLERY
lay behind a cornfield off Cedar Run Road on the outskirts of Culpeper. Chuck Miller and a hired hand were toasting chunks of apple wood over an open fire when I pulled up, while sparks and ashes sailed around them and Willie Nelson sang “Bubbles in My Beer” on the radio.

Miller's straw cowboy hat, punched through with holes, looked as if the dog had made a meal of it. He didn't seem to mind, though. The hat might even have been a favorite of his, rescued from oblivion the way some men hang on to a faded flannel shirt or ravelly sweater for the comfort it gives. He cultivated an air of eccentricity.

A lanky former airline pilot, Miller played the country boy to the hilt. He liked to tell how his bootlegger granddad never once got caught by the law, only by the IRS. The revenuers forced him to sell eleven of his houses—that's right, eleven—to pay his bill for back taxes. Good old granddad had whispered his secret recipe for moonshine in his grandson's ear, Miller swore, and one almost believed him.

He and his wife, Jeanette, bought their 189-acre farm in 1975. It had always been a grain and livestock operation, and they dealt in grain, hay, horses, and cattle at first, too. Now corn is their major crop, enough to make 150 cases of liquor per acre.

Deep in concentration, Miller looked up at my approach. He has jolly eyes, bright blue, and a practiced smile.

“We're toasting some apple wood,” he said, fiddling with his hat brim.

“What will you do with it?”

“Put it into a mesh bag, then sink it into a vat of whiskey. It adds some flavor.”

Miller makes two whiskeys, Kopper Kettle and Virginia Lightning. Kopper Kettle is a triple-grain product—wheat, corn, and barley—mashed and fermented in copper tanks, then double-distilled in a potstill before aging for two years in a barrel. Virginia Lightning is pure corn whiskey. It's not as raw as real moonshine, but it weighs in at a solid 100 proof and can knock your socks off. Kopper Kettle's a smoother, milder 86 proof.

True moonshiners haven't entirely disappeared from the Virginia hills, in fact. In Franklin County, the state's moonshine capital, folks horde more sugar, a primary ingredient, than they could possibly consume. A Mason jar remains the favored container for white lightning—also called popskull, skull cracker, ruckus juice, happy Sally, and plain old rotgut—occasionally with a peach at the bottom for color.

NASCAR might yet be a speed demon's fantasy if it weren't for moonshine. Some of its early heroes honed their tactical skills by outrunning the authorities on their delivery routes. Junior Johnson got his start at fourteen, for example. As for the word “bootleg,” it derives from the colonial period when the rascals who sold whiskey to Native Americans, often to the disgust of their compatriots, tucked a bottle into a boot and covered it with a pant leg.

Chuck left the apple wood to his helper and guided me around. Once he wanted to open a winery, but the vineyard he planted kept flooding, so he hit on the moonshine scheme instead, renovating an old workshop for the distillery and incorporating materials from a defunct church, including two pews. He has a pack rat's affection for his two-thousand-gallon potstill, solid copper and built at the end of Prohibition, and also owns an antique Filabelmatic rotary gravity pressure filler for his bottles, a relic from 1945.

“You're a good scavenger,” I complimented him.

He took it in stride. “Gotta be if you're going to make it in this old world.”

“What can you tell me about your secret recipe?”

Miller looked askance. “Nothing. It's a secret.”

At the distillery's gift shop, Chuck introduced me to Jeanette. The shop stocks an assortment of geegaws, apple wood chips among them, and there's an Informational Room where you can watch a History Channel video about Belmont Farm, or read about it in
National Geographic
. Miller doesn't miss an angle when it comes to promotion.

After breathing the vapors from so many vats and barrels, I felt ready for a free sample, but the law forbids Chuck from pouring any, so I bought a fifth of Kopper Kettle on faith, and my faith was later rewarded. With nothing more to be said of distilling, the talk turned to the presidential candidates. Miller saw lots of similarities and enumerated them.

“One, they both want out of I-raq,” he contended. “Two, they both want progress in Afghanistan. But McCain supports free enterprise, and that's better for businesses like us. Obama will raise taxes. He's a socialist. I'm not in favor of killing little babies, either.”

Jeanette cringed. “It's just so emotional this year. Chuck and his brothers fight about it all the time.”

I remembered John Steinbeck's return to Monterey in
Travels
, and how he battled nightly with his Republican sisters. “We ended each session spent with rage,” he wrote. “On no point was there any compromise. No quarter was asked or given.” There wasn't much compromise in Chuck Miller, either, nor did it seem likely he'd be swayed by the Campaign for Change.

S
HENANDOAH NATIONAL PARK
would have provoked John Steinbeck's dismay. An industrial-strength giant, the park encompasses two hundred thousand acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and generates millions in tourist dollars every year. A great many visitors never leave their cars except to use a restroom, admire a view, or purchase a souvenir, and the main roads can be as choked as the New Jersey Turnpike.

With more time and better gear, I'd have escaped for a night into the eighty thousand acres designated as wilderness, but I only had my sleeping bag and a cheap tent I'd grabbed on the fly in Culpeper, too flimsy for any challenging camping.

Lewis Mountain, set aside for African Americans when Shenandoah was still segregated—a system of apartheid that lasted, rather incredibly, until 1950—is the most rustic of the four developed campgrounds. I reserved a site there and joined the motorcade on Skyline Drive, a road that runs for 105 miles along the crest of the Blue Ridge between the Shenandoah River Valley and the green hills of the Piedmont.

The motorcade moved at a funereal pace. At every turnout, somebody had braked to photograph a scenic vista that seemed about to wilt from overexposure. “One goes, not so much to see but to tell afterward,” Steinbeck rightly commented. Here stood nature, reduced to a postcard image, and I cursed the traffic and thought, as I often did on the trip, that Americans had become a docile, sheeplike breed.

Unable to contain my displeasure, I ditched Skyline Drive for Hawksbill Mountain, another top draw, and hiked up a rocky, moderately steep trail to the summit at forty-one hundred feet, the park's highest point. Below lay the turbid Shenandoah River, where redbreast sunfish and black bass were dying from pollution just like the oysters and crabs of the Chesapeake, although not as rapidly.

There'd be no singing of “Oh, Shenandoah” that afternoon. My Pete Seeger moment had come and gone. Instead I chatted with a man prowling the summit, who held a gadget new to me.

“It's a GPS Ranger,” he told me. “It shows you what you're looking at.”

“You're looking at the mountains and the valley.”

He grinned. “You're kidding, right?”

“Right.”

“It's more the background stuff. How Hawksbill came into being. The geology of it.” He handed it over for inspection. “There's videos and music.”

“Is it expensive?”

“It must be, store-bought. But I rented mine for ten dollars at the Byrd Center, Mile 51.”

“Ever heard of Thoreau?” I asked, recalling my recent reading of Emerson.

“Sure have. He wrote
Walden
.”

“Thoreau could study a tree and judge how tall it was without any instrument except his eyes. Same with a mountain.”

He seemed skeptical. “No lie?”

“Nope, I'm being serious.”

Americans used to travel to beautiful spots to get away from it all, but they bring it all with them now. The campers at Lewis Mountain had transformed it into a suburb complete with patio furniture, Weber grills, stereos, and battery-powered DVD players. One old boy had even dragged up his recliner and sat in the shade of an RV awning, regally dispensing peanuts to gray squirrels.

I decided against putting up my tent, too intimidated to wrestle with it in front of the spectators. Some had already popped open their first beer of the day, and they'd be delighted to watch a floor show starring a greenhorn from New York acting like a Webelo desperate for a merit badge. Instead I retreated to Lewis Mountain Cabins, where fortunately they had a vacancy.

The cabin was okay. It was just fine, in fact, secluded from Skyline Drive and enclosed by the woods, with shake shingles outside and knotty pine paneling within. One could protest the absence of paperback thrillers, a cribbage board, and some cooking utentsils, but beggars can't be choosers.

On the deck, in a sweet wash of twilight, I returned to Emerson's jottings about Thoreau. When asked at a dinner party which dish he preferred, Henry David would reply, “The nearest.” He despised such gatherings and said with a sneer, “They make their pride in making their dinner cost much; I make my pride in making my dinner cost little.”

I hadn't lied about Thoreau's gift. As Emerson attested, he could ascertain “the measures and distances of objects which interested him, the size of trees, the depth and extent of ponds and rivers, the height of mountains and the air-line distance of his favorite summit …” Thoreau's GPS Ranger came built-in.

My own dinner cost little except for the pricey Manchego I bought at the market in Sperryville. Otherwise I ate bread and tomatoes, feeding the crumbs to a hungry jay.

Shortly after dawn, I woke refreshed and set off on a long walk before packing up. The park is almost wholly forest away from the developed areas, with more than a hundred species of trees. Once you've gone half a mile or so, you're alone and wonder if you'll be lucky and see a white-tailed deer, or unlucky and meet a black bear.

The bears were still roaming and foraging in late September. They'd continue until a cold snap sent them into their dens, normally in October or November. Given that information, I convinced myself that a bear, if not Bigfoot himself, was stalking me when I heard a racket in the underbrush.

The racket grew louder. I cocked an ear—two bears at least, I figured, but the commotion died down and resolved itself into a flapping of wings. Spared a hideous mauling, I crept forward until I stood about twenty yards from a flock of wild turkeys feasting on acorns, berries, grasses, or some combination thereof.

The turkeys were giants. The biggest males must have tipped the scales at thirty pounds or more, powerful enough for me to keep my distance. They didn't spook and disappear at the sound of my footsteps, either, too preoccupied with their rooting around or perhaps slightly domesticated, since hunting is banned in the park, although poachers do sneak in.

Benjamin Franklin promoted the wild turkey as a better symbol of the Republic than the bald eagle, “a bird of bad moral character”—a carrion eater, not a raptor—“that does not get his living honestly.” Wild turkeys, albeit vain and silly, were native to America, Franklin argued, and so courageous they'd assault a grenadier of the British Guards should one invade their farmyard with a red coat on.

VIRGINIA IS A
very comely state, I concluded as I crossed the park to Luray. I'd only covered a small section of it, but if I failed to wind up in a cabin on a California river, I'd settle for a bungalow around Flint Hill with a white-faced jockey on the front lawn holding a lantern, or else a ring for hitching up a horse.

Those lawn jockeys cropped up all over Virginia. In my errant days as a frat boy long ago, I helped to liberate one during a sodden run to Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs on a hapless, last-minute search for a date. My pals named the jockey Johnny, and he began to accompany us on such expeditions until he fell to his untimely death from a second-floor window—strictly an accident, everyone claimed.

This story, though extraordinarily brainless, still amuses me. What's youth for if not to supply the evidence that you really have matured despite what others might think? People are remarkably various when it comes to what produces a smile. In Virginia, for example, a ride-around mower is a surefire way to generate a grin for their operators.

Actually, I first noticed the phenomenon in Maryland. The men and women riders always looked supremely content. I never saw anyone frowning or furrowing a brow. The mowers are more potent mood elevators than Prozac, maybe because they lend a sense of industry in those idle moments when a lack of purpose seems to be our destiny on earth. Anyway, I wanted one for my fantasy spread in the foothills.

Luray lies between the Blue Ridge and Massanutten mountains in Page County. It's another peaceful rural town of about five thousand—long-term residents, retirees, some commuters, and a smattering of vegans, therapists, and holistic practitioners. The valley farmers raise beef cattle, hay, and a little corn.

Tourists frequent the famous caverns, where they can wander through a garden maze and listen to the world's only Stalacpipe organ, where electronically activated rubber mallets strike the stalactites to produce tones. (It's questionable whether the world needs more than one, really.) They rent canoes, kayaks, rafts, and inner tubes to drift down the South Fork of the Shenandoah River, and fish and swim in Arrowhead Lake.

At a bank where I used the cash machine, I waited behind two elderly women who were loudly conversing. Volume control is a problem for some Americans. The loud talkers don't seem to care that anybody in a twenty-yard radius can hear every word they speak. Maybe they're unconsciously bothered by the vastness of the United States, and feel they must combat it with noise.

“I can't read in bed no more,” the first woman bellowed.

“I can't, either,” shouted the second.

“I like to read settin' up. I won't go near my lounger now.”

“Me, neither! I take a straight-back chair.”

“Good Lord! Give me a straight-back chair every time.”

“It's better on my spine!”

“Mine, too!”

Luray's Main Street, lined with cute shops, went up a hill and then down it. The amenities were excellent—an arts center, a theater showing five first-run movies, a gourmet grocery. Along Hawksbill Creek, the bird life was abundant. The blue streak of a kingfisher flashed by, while a heron dredged for fingerlings. Trout season opened soon and would last until next June.

The joggers on a path by the creek all greeted me with a nod or a gesture. I almost tired of saying hello. Not every small town is so friendly, but Luray seemed determined to be welcoming. More than half the residents both live and work there, and they're attached to the community.

As in Culpeper, they're active in their churches—about thirty or so, nearly all Protestant—and belong to the VFW, the American Legion, the Masons, and the Rotary Club. They're also conservative and Republican. A team of Luray girls had recently played teeball on the White House lawn, in fact. George Bush won 65 percent of the vote in Page County in 2004.

The folks in such rural areas had the fewest bones to pick with Washington, it appeared. The more distant they were from a big city, the more they approved of the state of the nation. Perhaps, too, the locals were only concerned with local issues, not with what happened beyond their neck of the woods.

Whatever the case, I knew one thing for certain: I needed a real dinner after my steady diet of cheese, bread, and tomatoes. The Mimslyn Inn came recommended. Its Circa '31 restaurant, so called because the inn opened in 1931, reportedly served the best food and finest Virginia wines in town.

The Mimslyn is Luray's most majestic building. It looks like an antebellum mansion and functions like the stuffiest of country clubs. An antique dress code at Circa '31 “suggested” a jacket and tie—I'd already broken that rule—and encouraged women to forgo slacks in favor of skirts or dresses. The restaurant's patrons were dining with a listless solemnity that would rob a good T-bone of its juice.

As I pretended to browse a menu and racked my brain for an exit strategy, the hostess assisted me.

“Our Speakeasy Bar does casual fare,” she sniffed. “Might you be more comfortable there?” Never had I been so happy to be dismissed.

The Speakeasy was a misnomer. There wasn't any sense of illegality or trespass, only a football game on the tube and a pair of tipsy guys attending to it. I asked for a glass of Virginia Chardonnay, thinking it might salvage the evening, but it tasted thin compared to the robust Chardonnays of California, although maybe I'd chosen badly. Luck had deserted me that evening. About to cut my losses, I rose from a barstool just as a waiter dropped a plate from his tray at my feet, where it shattered.

“Sorry,” Jon Mayes apologized.

This was Jon's last day on the job, so wouldn't you know an accident would happen? He'd signed up to join an archaeological dig that started the next morning—not abroad but in Virginia, he explained as he cleaned up the mess.

The Speakeasy was so quiet we had an opportunity to talk. At twenty-six, Jon admitted to being confused about life. Almost every young person in Luray, Stanley, or Alma was confused, he thought, torn between the demands of tradition and the desire to follow their own destiny.

As a child, Jon had been taught to respect America and the flag, and to revere the bravery of our armed forces during World War II, a heroic period still honored and celebrated in Luray. The town embraced its military heritage and would not soon forget the sacrifices its soldiers had made.

For those of Jon's age, though, the world had rushed in and filled them with new ideas and choices. Their dreams and wishes were often at odds with the older generation, and they felt guilty about it, as if they'd betrayed their families. Jon did not support the war in Iraq, for instance, yet he'd only confess it to close friends.

Luray resisted change because of its reverence for tradition, he believed. People are mostly satisfied with their lot and won't risk endangering it. They're only dimly aware of international affairs and not much interested in foreign countries. You can't say a negative word, however, or the older folks take offense. They don't understand how confining Luray can be if you're twenty-six and intellectually curious.

“I hope your dig goes well,” I said in parting.

“Well, it's an improvement,” Jon replied. “It's something. No more plates to drop, anyhow.”

THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY
outdid itself on the first of October, my sixth day on the road, all sunshine and blue sky. A fleet of cumulus clouds drifted by, and the mountains turned a dusky shade of purple even at noon. Green fields fanned out toward the horizon with cattle here and corn stubble there.

Trees grew in copses by barns and along creeks and streams. The temperature hovered in the mid-seventies, T-shirt weather again. Instead of the patchwork look of Iowa or Kansas, the farmland was gently contoured and more visually arresting. I took some photos, but the valley demanded a Constable or a Corot to do it justice.