'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Country roads, Virginia

I wrote here Friday that I'd been playing hooky from "a residential conference", though in fact the gathering in question was the 333rd annual session of Baltimore Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).

I shan't write much here about what went on at the conference. The business part of the proceedings was largely tied up in lengthy consideration of a gay-rights/ anti-homophobia issue within the broader Quaker community that is a hard one to come to unity on. Still, I think some good progress was made. And meanwhile, it was good to re-connect with some old friends who are also Friends.

I did, however, want to write a little about the pleasure I got from driving back on Friday afternoon to Harrisonburg, Virginia--location of the session--from my hometown here in Charlottesville...

Because Lorna (the youngest) would be home a bit this weekend, I left my car here for her to drive, and took Bill-the-spouse's car, known by some as "the skateboard". Actually, it's a 1982 Fiat Spider and it's considerably wider than a skateboard, if not very much longer or higher than one.

But the neat thing about it is, in good weather you get to put the top down...

Well, I've driven to Harrisonburg in it before, a couple of times, and I knew that driving in it on the interstates is really, really scary. Especially I-81, which is the main interstate that goes north-south along the Shenandoah Valley. In most places, I-81 is only two lanes wide each way, but the Shenandoah Valley is a big agricultural zone--and also has some not-shabby manufacturing plants, too. So I-81 is always jam-packed with fender-to-fender tractor-trailers, roaring along well over all the posted speed limits.

Bill's 'skateboard' is so small that the driver can almost see under most of those trucks. And you certainly have to wonder if any of their drivers can actually see you at all.

Not good for the nerves or the general personal equilibrium.

I decided, instead, to take "country roads": US-250 west from Charlottesville, up and over the Blue Ridge on it; then US-340 north along the Shenandoah Valley--parallel to I-81, but east of it; then find a road to take me over to Harrisonburg.

The weather was fabulous, though the humidity obscured some parts of the vista of the Blue Ridge as I climbed it from Charlottesville. C'ville is about 15 miles east of the BR, as the crow flies, but the folks who built US-250--like those who built I-64 some 40 years later--figured the best place to take the road across the ridge was at Rockfish Gao, a little south of Charlottesville. So no, the crow didn't fly. US-250 was almost empty: three broad lanes of tarmac nearly all to myself, rising gently through the forested eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge. Kudzu vine clothing the entire forest in some places.

When you get to Rockfish Gap, a lot happens all at once. US-250 snakes under both I-64 and the long "parkway" that snakes along the top of the Blue Ridge-- from Front Royal, Va., in the north right down to Georgia in the south. And then immediately, US-250 starts its gradual descent into the Shenandoah. Two miles later, I was at the edge of Waynesboro, a small manufacturing town dominated by some large DuPont chemical plants.

Down at the eastern base of the Blue Ridge, I'd passed a big lumber yard, and being in the open car the sweet smell of pine sap filled my nostrils. I carried that sweet smell all over the mountain; but in Waynesboro it was suddenly a heavy barrage of lawn-chemical-smell that assailed me... Took quite a few miles of driving north along US-340 till that stink cleared out.

US-340 is sometimes posted as the "East Side Highway"--east side of the Shenandoah Valley, I guess. Then sometimes, it becomes the Stonewall Jackson Highway, named for one of the many Civil War Generals who charged with their forces up and down the Valley. Like 250, it goes along pretty straight and almost empty. There's some farming thereabouts: corn and soybeans, mostly. There are a few small towns. And churches, churches, churches galore... meanwhile, the heavy blue mass of the mountain looms up to one's right.

I wasn't quite sure where to strike off left toward Harrisonburg-- I figured it would be posted. It was: and on something called Port Republic Road, which I knew went pretty darn' close to exactly where I was headed: James Madison University, right outside H-burg. After seeing that sign, I had to find a place up ahead to turn round and come back to the turn-off. Now, the smells were much more of mown grass, out drying to hay in the late afternoon sun. That, and a persistent smell of baked tarmac.

Well, I'm not an expert on Civil War history (or "War between the states" as we call it round here-- Just kidding! "We" don't call it that, though many folks round here do... It's an arcane point of southern identification.) But I guess Port Republic Road was a pretty important route in those days. Nowadays, just near the little town of P.R., the road crosses both the South Fork of the Shenandoah River and the North Fork; and pretty darn' close to each other, so I'm guessing they meet near there as well... Anyway, as I tooled along in the 'skateboard' I passed quite a number of those heavy metal "historical markers" with which Americans like to mark their landscape, and I guess most of them referred to some Civil War episode or another.

So from the tiny town of Port Republic, it wasn't far to the place where I met a back road up to James Madison U. There, the road went through lush farming land: long rows of near-ripe corn standing between big white farmhouses, most with large old barns out back and high, clustered silos for storing the grain. There were dairy farms that looked to be just about the biggest kind of a dairy operation a family-owned farm could run. Here, a good proportion of the churches were Mennonite, and a couple of others were big Church of the Brethren steeplehouses. (Both of those latter denominations are among the historic "peace churches" here in the US, so as a Quaker I'm always glad to see them... We Quakers are less numerous than those two; plus, our meeting-houses aren't so readily recognizable as such. So we make far less of a visible mark on the environment.)

So I rolled up to the parking lot near the conference center having made good time. Maybe 75 minutes from door to door. And that was including some indecisiveness at the beginning, when I'd started by heading out on the Interstate before deciding otherwise...

Then in the evening, we had a huge treat: a talk by a guy called Tony Campolo who's both an outspoken evangelical Christian and an outspoken political liberal. Most importantly of all, he really walks the walk of trying to live a Christ-like life of caring for the poor and challenging the powerful. What a great guy. But that's a whole 'nother story.