Open Writing

In my column last week, “You Can Go Back,” I talked about my return to New England for a vacation, and some of the special things my wife and I did there. Our plan for the return journey to Florida included a side trip to a quarry in Virginia where I hoped to purchase some soapstone for my next two sculptures. “Virginia is For Lovers” is the State’s slogan.

In the past, our twice a year travel to and from New England has followed the traditional route for East Coast snowbirds, Interstate 95. This time we planned a different route, Interstate 81, which parallels the Allegheny mountains down the middle of Virginia, and through Tennessee and Georgia. It would take us through country unfamiliar to both of us.

I 95 is one of the earliest interstate highways, and runs from the Canadian border to Miami in Florida. As such, it is a major trunk road for business and commerce, and for generations of snowbirds and other vacationers. Though it is well maintained, it has that well-worn look of a favorite sweater with patched elbows and frayed cuffs.

When we first travelled it, more than twenty years ago, the environs away from the major cities were mostly agricultural, with little towns that life had passed by. Only rarely was there a restaurant or a hotel where one could break the journey. Time has changed all that. Hotels cluster at major intersections, and restaurants range from fast food, to diners, to more up-scale establishments.

Our return this year would follow what we anticipated would be a newer highway, with very different scenery from the eastern seaboard’s flatlands that are typical of I 95’s path. As we traveled west, through what, three days later, would be the epicenter of a major earthquake, the Virginia countryside that we had anticipated began to emerge.

Rolling hills gave us an advanced view of the road that followed their undulations, and tall deciduous and evergreen trees lined our way. Everywhere was lushly green; a strange sight at the end of a hot summer that would normally have burned the grass brown, and which spoke of the heavy rains that have characterized the season.

Soon, we began to see the Appalachian mountain chain on the horizon, pale mauve in the distance. The Appalachians are part of the two backbones of the American continent, the other being the Rockies, but are geologically much older, and therefore less massive. They represented an insurmountable barrier to the Western Movement of population in the 17 and 1800’s, until the discovery of the Delaware Water Gap, and the Cumberland Gap.

Even then, the terrain discouraged all but the most hardy, or most desperate, and many would-be settlers only made it as far as the Alleghenies and put down roots there. Some of them became the Mountain Men of legend.

Part of our motivation to take this route home was to visit the Alberene Soapstone quarry. This required a departure from the main road, on a narrow, winding, downhill ride that seemed to be taking us to the bowels of the earth. The quarry its self has seen better days, but is experiencing a renaissance with the current fad for upgrading kitchens with soapstone counter tops. It is also valued by sculptors like me for its soft, but dense consistency and its ability to take a high polish.

Soapstone varies in color from a pale rose to various shades of gray. The Alberene rock offers palest gray to almost black, with an amazing variety of speckled and veined features. Like gluttons we loaded up the car with as much as it would carry, and resumed our journey. It would take us almost three days to get home.

Interstate 81 took us through some of the most spectacular beauty I have experienced in America. The highway rose and fell before us, lined by foothills with apple green, upland grazing land that contrasted the dark green of the stands of trees. Behind them, tall mountains rose; some shaped like conical volcanoes, other rounded by the elements and the millennia that have passed since they were thrust up from the earth’s crust.

At the road’s edge were the strange, otherworldly shapes of trees, now cloaked in thick Kudzu vines that were slowly choking them to death. The shapes were like enormous ghosts, which in a way they are.

Soon, we were out of Virginia and into Tennessee, where we picked up Interstate 75, which would carry us home through Georgia to Florida. Tennessee has it’s share of the Alleghenies too, but once past the Blue Ridge Mountains the landscape gradually gives way to less dramatic scenes, but nonetheless beautiful.

Georgia seems like Florida without the palm trees, flat and featureless. But the State has its own beauty; the famous Georgia Pines, and the Live Oaks, which are deciduous, but do not shed their leaves. Draped in diaphanous moss, these grand old ladies are truly the Southern Belles of Colonial days.

Place names there have a lyrical quality: Savannah, Vidalia, Grovania, Unadilla. And Valdosta, made famous by the movie “Fried Green Tomatoes.” But though the names tempt one to linger, by then the place we wanted to be was home. Hurricane Irene was moving towards Florida from the Caribbean, and if it continued on track we needed to secure our condo. Fortunately it passed us by in a stroke of luck that had characterized a wonderful trip.

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