For the month of August, our children Jack, Emma, and Henry will each write an essay for our Travels Across America and Lessons in Life Substack publication. We are giving them no explicit directions or instructions. We want them to write about what they want to and share with you all what they think is important and what they have learned and enjoyed by traveling across the USA. We hope it will inspire you all to hit the road as often as you can with your families, too. Whether it’s a trip right up the street to a National Historic site or a long journey by plane for 100s of miles across the country, just go! Life is short.
This week we hear from Jack. I am a little biased but I sense a little Whitman, a tad of Thoreau, and a hint of Jefferson in his words. Judge for yourself and enjoy.
To truly know the lands of one’s home is to know them with the same rigid familiarity, the same comforting reliance, as knowing the details of the human body. When the tributaries of the woods run as true as the veins coursing under the skin, that is home. You can feel it deep in the soul, nourishing the mind with assurance that this place, its space and its sounds and even its smell, are yours. No matter the distance, it will remain this way because, in truth, it is all you know.
Developing a home takes time, but once it takes hold, after that gradual rooting into your synapses, experience by experience, it is the standard by which you will compare all other places. No forest will exactly match the olive shade of my beloved Shenandoah woods. Every sandy coast I trek across will find itself lined up with the golden sands and deep blue of my Tidewater homeland. Everywhere I travel, sweet Virginia will follow, a blueprint etched into my mind.
My homing process, gradual as they come, is a collection of excursions and roots, driven and burrowed all across this cherished land. And what a land it is! What a beautiful, enthralling state with which to tie memories and emotions. In less than a moment, I can transport myself to any number of natural and human-historical landmarks.
As I close my eyes, leaves crunch underfoot in the holy land of the Blue Ridge. A cathedral of branches, bathed in the heavenly glow of the early evening, arch over a dug-out path, beseeching its mortal visitors to seek the enlightenment it gained over millions of years.
Then, in a flash of light, I am back in the dusty, hollow confines of Fort Monroe, the brawny, man-made bulwark erected against the lapping, briny waves of the Chesapeake Bay. Its passages echo the histories it has seen, a patchwork of faces and stories which embody Virginia’s persistently changing role throughout our nation’s story. Pass one cell and you might hear the clank of chains on Jefferson Davis’s shackles, a traitor at the end of his line; walk further, and you will sense the gentle scritch and scrawl of Edgar Allen Poe’s pen on parchment. The common thread of these personal recollections, and I suspect the force governing my own mind’s tether to Virginia, is that strong and mysterious energy likely governing the world we know. Though I dare not claim to know its mechanisms, I know it is love.
For though the natural splendor and historical yarns are enough to hold fast one’s mind years later, I have left the picture unfinished. At my side, always, in these journeys through time, are those I love. Returning to the Blue Ridge, shuffling over the leafy ground at my shoulder, is my mother, quietly reflecting in the pews of this natural church. Her keen observations of the surroundings, tempered with silent contemplation, help lay the foundations of my own practice in the “dérive”, the revolutionary, psycho-geological tool of walking with intention and without boundaries.
And there, standing at the precipice of the fortress walls, is my father, gazing out to the Bay’s horizons and digging deep through the endless mental library, forged in years of page-turning, to find precisely the right anecdote demanded by the moment. And there it is! The sky darkens, the seas infuriate themselves, and two steel behemoths, Monitor and Merrimack, rise to the surface, summoned to mercilessly destroy the other. Cannons roar, bullets whiz, but, in the end, both are forced to begrudgingly concede. The silent gaze goes on.
But look again! Who stands alongside my father, ears and eyes wide, asking questions my own imagination could never conjure? Baby sister Emma quietly inquires to him, discovering, unveiling, learning, as she always does. Her example sets my base for tirelessly searching for and demanding full truths.
And who is that streak of lightning darting mischievously amongst the trees? The sly, foxlike shadow of little Henry seeks to avoid our gaze, as the complex cat-and-mouse game within his own homing mind is played over and over along the path. His youthful joy and keen feistiness are childish models I will follow long into adulthood.
I conclude this story with another tale, one which soothes me to the bone to retell. It is when land and love once again curled around one another to form that unbreakable bond of memory. It did not form in the innocence of childhood, but in the awareness and maturity of adulthood.
Once again gazing across the purple haze of evening in Shenandoah Valley, the outline of true love complements the wispy cloud trails of the misty mountains. The trailing orange rays of the sinking sun set the mountain aflame, before bathing it in a soft glow. The feeling is familiar, the past year of my life a constant exchange between passionate fire and golden tranquility. The love, though different, again is the shepherd guiding me back through the waterfalls, tides, and groves of my old Virginia home.
The land and the love are intertwined; both weave in and out to carve the canals of memory, of home. And wherever I roam, they are there to greet me with the warmth of a gently tended hearth. In times of change, I retreat to them and once again seek their embrace. The soft moss in the woods of the First European Landing again brushes my shoulder, deep in the cozy cabin of nostalgia. The roar of the James rips me free from loneliness or anguish. The land is the eternal tether.