The Indians left little in the Valley – mounds
to be plowed down, arrow heads, the dust of bones. They lived
like
shadows among the trees, like shadows they have passed...
–
Julia Davis, The Shenandoah
What is notable about this early landscape is what it was
not. Absent, of course, were the grand houses of a gentry
class of tobacco planters. Missing, too, was any significant
disparity between the houses of the great and the small....These
were the dwellings of families neither rich nor poor but
all owners of their own land...
–
Warren Hofstra,
description of eighteenth century Valley
Germans,
The Planting of New Virginia
Walking southward into Virginia, having
departed the state that once belonged to it, I follow Highway
340 as it curves
away from the Blue Ridge, compelling me to bid farewell to
the mountains, cast now in the haze by which they are known.
Here, in Clarke County, the road declares itself early and
often, the Lord Fairfax Highway with horse farms, grand and
humble alike, lining the road. Much of the topography, however,
remains the same as in Jefferson County, granting a measure
of geographical understanding to the district’s reluctance
to align – the bitter legacy of a distant conflict – with
West Virginia. Clark County’s economic and cultural
concerns resemble those of the Virginia Valley region, sharing
little with the mountainous Alleghany counties to the west.
So it is that the identities of the places we inhabit and
our own identities are shaped only partially by us, forged
at intervals by forces outside, until the idea by which a
place or we are known appears to others and ourselves, glimpsed
unwillingly in life’s invisible mirror, as things we
never intended them to be.
Why my ancestors passed this way in the direction of the
Smoky Mountains at the end of the eighteenth century remains
a mystery that I may never understand, the clouds that veil
the stars pressed close, unwilling to abate. Perhaps it was
something akin to the dominant reason for their earlier journey
from Pennsylvania to Maryland, namely affordable land and
greater cultural tolerance or isolation. Or it could have
been something completely unlooked for, something averse
to historical circumstance, a reason altogether unlikely.
Dwelling on this question, I realize that my travel based
supposition, my vague feeling that following their route
today might potentially provide answers or insight into their
reasons for going, is perhaps the most ridiculous aspect
of the entire undertaking, for it hinges altogether on the
indistinct and evasive phenomenon of human experience. Whereas
history may hold close her secrets from scholars and scribes,
experience gladly doles out his brutal knowledge, however
grudgingly, to those who, however foolishly, seek him out.
History and experience are estranged lovers, the latter the
event and the former the teller. Both are mysterious and
perhaps ultimately unknowable, but that is precisely what
makes them so seductive, both to each other and to us. The
Spartan general lies dying on a field of battle 2400 years
ago, perhaps wondering who will tell his story and recall
his glory or dishonor, while the fragmentary data left in
his wake fascinates the young historian, centuries later,
hunched at a desk, in search of lost time, trying to make
sense of, or even imagine, a place and worldview so far removed
from hers that it might be considered alien. As the French
poet Paul Valéry warned, "History is the most
dangerous concoction the chemistry of the mind has produced.
Its properties are well known. It sets people dreaming, intoxicates
them, engenders false memories, exaggerates their reflexes,
keeps old wounds open, torments their leisure, inspires them
with megalomania or persecution complex, and makes nations
bitter, proud, insufferable, and vain. History can justify
anything you like. It teaches nothing, for it contains and
gives examples of everything." Hardly an endorsement
of the discipline. Yet, for all this, for all history’s
faulty detours and dead ends, agendas and distortions, illusions
and compulsions, historians have ever echoed the Roman historian
Livy in ultimately deeming "antiquity a rewarding study."
Passing one of the smaller rural homesteads along the road,
I hear an abrupt bark from the shade of a large oak, followed
by the swift advance of a large, black and tan dog. It barks
as it lopes, tail up, bearing down upon me with bounds and
growls. Rather than running, I loose the straps of my backpack
and pull it around before me, holding it, elbows bent, as
a shield, however ineffectual it might prove to be. When
the canine, a well-fed doberman, gets within a few paces,
he stops and dances from side to side, an inimical jig without
music, save the barks he continues to hurl at me from deep
within his throat. I gradually continue to advance down the
road, backing, talking softly to the dog, remaining as still
as possible, while trying to work my hand into the top end
of my pack. After a few seconds of digging, I find the zipper
to the tent pack and am able to pull free one of the folded
fiberglass tent poles, hard to break and, when wielded, capable
of inflicting intense pain on the sensitive end of a dog’s
nose. The doberman follows but seems content to merely dance
and bark. Watching it, I remind myself that this is no feral,
rabid thing, but a fat domestic with a leather collar, dangerous
to be sure but a creature that someone surely feeds and dotes
upon, probably used to chasing the rare cyclist or wanderer
who appears along his portion of the highway. Perhaps sixty
feet down the road from the place where our confrontation
began, the dog slows as I continue to fall back and then
stops altogether, though its eyes remain fixed on me, its
barks becoming intermittent. I retreat a few more feet and
then turn and continue, the tent pole slipped back into the
pack, the pack reunited with the sweat on my back, torso
and shoulder straps reluctantly tightened. A few paces later,
I glance behind me to see my potential assailant turned away
from me, watering a sign post, leg cocked. He completes his
marking, kicks up some loose gravel with his hind legs, and
trots back down the roadside toward his shady tree, tail
high with pride, identity intact, victor of the conflict,
lord of his territory once more.
On this day, Berryville is a quiet, peaceful town. Sitting
in the cool corner of a shaded parking lot, hiding from my
loyal fellow traveler, that persistent late summer sun, and
drinking from a cold twenty-ounce can of beer, I see the
area as the kind of place where folks are forced to make
their own fun but are probably altogether happy and content
to have things that way. Yet, as with many other places,
this was not its nature more than a couple of centuries ago,
the parochial visage of the mature present grown drowsy and
somber in the wake of youth’s primal howl. Originally
laid out in 1798 as Battletown, the village would alter its
name later in tribute to its swashbuckling crossroads innkeeper
and gamesmaster of the mid-eighteenth century, Benjamin Berry,
who had constructed on his tavern’s front lawn, not
far from where I am sitting, both a bear pit and a fighting
ring, in which he was fond of pitting men or animals against
each other in the hopes of drawing a bloodthirsty crowd,
which he calculated, accurately it seems, would soon seek
refreshment at his inn. Set along this well-traveled road,
the place was ideally situated to attract fresh combatant
and naive victim alike. Among the more storied fighters to
pass through Berry’s ring was a young Daniel Morgan,
then a hard-drinking wagoneer, who bested local champion
Bully Davis in a punishing, bar-wrecking melee of more than
an hour’s duration, which would lead to a rematch several
months later that quickly dissolved into a free-for-all involving
the entourages and friends of both Morgan and Davis, as well
as the more than one hundred spectators who had come to witness
the contest. Eventually Morgan’s contingent was victorious
and the festive rowdies, stoked by blood and thirst, rushed
Berry’s tavern en masse, much to the innkeeper’s
delight.
Departing the placid Berryville of the now, falling in with
the sun once more, I am reminded of how ours is an ongoing
savage history – in spite of the entitled sense of
progress for which we congratulate ourselves – one
we continue to exact upon each other as well as the creatures
of the world we live in. The latter transgression has always
seemed to me the more heinous since the animals who suffer
at our hands cannot understand the material, abstract, or
perverse human motivations that orchestrate their agonies.
I think of the doberman who had pursued me, wondering if
he had been encouraged or trained to go after every foreign
thing that approached his owner’s domain. Then my image
of him, dancing back and forth, nape hair raised – nature
made over again by dream – dissolves into that of another
such dog encountered years before, beneath a roof of corrugated
tin in a nineteenth-century red brick warehouse converted
into a dirty, hot gym, the concrete floor covered in dust
and vague stains, the old steel equipment, nearly all of
it, wearing a thin coat of orange rust. This grimy place
of low grunts and sweaty bodies was owned by a semi-professional
football player who also worked as a bouncer and dabbled
in drug-dealing and dog-fighting. He was, however, for all
these things, not a completely terrible fellow, inquiring
after your health and freely offering his mostly hard-earned
knowledge of the human body. Following him about the dark,
ill-lit building – clammy in winter, ovenlike in the
warmer months – was a massive three-legged doberman,
his absent hind appendage mangled and amputated in the wake
of some ill-fated distant contest. Yet, despite the needless
cruelty to which he had been subjected by his owner, the
dog remained loyal to him, ever at his side, a bane to any
who might threaten him and altogether terrifying to many
of the unoffending weightlifters. On one particularly hot
afternoon, not unlike the one I find myself walking in now,
as I lay on a rusty bench, pressing weight from my chest,
I felt a sudden heavy pressure on my right thigh. Returning
the weight bar to the steel frame above my head, I half-rose
to find the three-legged doberman resting its head on my
upper leg, its brown eyes fixed on my own in that strange
imploring glance of companionship peculiar to dogs. Sitting
up, I patted the dog’s head and rubbed his ears until
he wandered away, probably in search of his master.
The Catholic thinker Saint Thomas Aquinas believed that animals
have no souls. One need know very little about them or theology
to be certain that Aquinas was dead wrong; yet for all our
science, our understanding of dogs and other animals remains
so limited as to render our knowing indistinct – the
knowledge of the other blurred by our preoccupation with
ourselves – our focus fixed closely on our side of
the relationship, our own perceptions – and molded
by the limited collective assumptions of the time in which
we live. Of course, arrogant hypotheses and the uninformed
conclusions that inevitably follow them are not restricted
to our relationships with animals or our own time. While
traveling with a survey team in the area of Frederick County,
the district into which I soon will be passing, in the spring
of 1747, a sixteen-year-old George Washington noted that
the inhabitants "seem to be as Ignorant a Set of People
as the Indians. They would never speak English but when spoken
to they speak all Dutch." Preoccupied with the importance
of his English-speaking survey party, this precocious teen
insists that the German settlers he encounters naturally
should resort to his native tongue, attributing their reluctance
to an inherent Indian-like ignorance and declining to entertain
the possibility that they may have been speaking their own
language out of preference, perhaps even in order to talk
undetected about Washington and his companions. Washington
also neglected to perceive his ignorance of the language
as a personal failing, a symptom of his own incomplete knowledge,
but then he was, after all, only a boy; and, reminding myself
of this, I recall, all too clearly, the thick-headed prejudices
of my own teenage years – that dynamic self-obsessed
period in which we wish irrationally for other things, both
possessions and circumstances, and believe we are privy to
all answers, while the world about us responds too slowly.
It is a phase of development that, unfortunately, fewer and
fewer people of our own time appear willing or able to outgrow.
Approaching Winchester, the town to which Daniel Morgan retired
when his days of brawling and soldiering were done, I perceive
against the western horizon Little North Mountain and Great
North Mountain, eastern outcroppings of the Alleghanies,
the great chain of peaks stretching northward into Pennsylvania
and on toward the Catskills. Having longed for mountains
since departing the Blue Ridge, I am struck by an indistinct
reassuring comfort that accompanies their appearance. John
Esten Cooke, born in Winchester in the first half of the
nineteenth century and destined to witness the monumental
carnage of that century’s, our nation’s, most
tragic conflict, serving in the Confederate army, felt a
comparable solace at the prospect of these hills: "I
know not how it is with others but to me all sorrows and
heart-sinkings come with far less poignancy amid the fair,
calm, silent mountains." Cooke, perhaps possessed of
some vague inkling of what bloody events lay ahead for his
home and himself, also associated mountains with "the
great mist-shrouded future," the nature of time as yet
unfolded, obscured by the mist that hangs from the hills,
resting softly on treetops. Greeting the Alleghanies and
thinking of Cooke, I wonder what they may hold for me.
Upon crossing Opequon Creek into Frederick County, I begin
a long, gradual ascent toward Winchester. Whereas the Alleghanies
had introduced themselves remotely, above the horizon in
the distance, Interstate 81, an immense road that will shadow
me throughout much of my journey but that I hope to avoid
as much as possible, appears for the first time below me,
beneath a highway bridge I am crossing. The massive travel
artery that replaced Route 11, which in turn had developed
out of the wagon road grown out of Athowominee, 81 is a swarm
of gaseous wind, speed, and thunder, trucks and cars interweaving,
packed close, hurtling toward ends and destinations I cannot
guess. Though possessed of a generous median and wide roadside
shoulders, the large thoroughfare is banned to foot travelers;
probably for their own good, but there are places to the
south – if I get that far – where it merges with,
or rather absorbs, Route 11, places where I’ll find
myself reluctantly tracing it, or, without much regret, passing
along an alternate route.
The strip malls and businesses that appear with the interstate
feel claustrophobic after so much walking in the open, amid
agricultural land and the occasional residence. Yet, these
are appropriate enough sights to greet me as I enter this
place founded and perpetuated on commerce. In 1789 André Michaux
described Winchester as "a little town whose Trading
with the Settlements of Kentucky is done by land. The merchandise
comes from Philadelphia, Alexandria and particularly from
Baltimore." A cog in the machinations of westward colonial
distribution, Winchester was a place to buy, sell, and haggle – to
empty the wagon or resupply, depending on your needs. One
notable local merchant whose trade had far-reaching influence
was the German gunsmith Adam Haymaker. Following the European
German tradition, early gunsmiths in North America had crafted
high-caliber flintlock rifles for the purpose of felling
animals as large as a mature black bear. However, soon realizing
that mobility, and therefore considerations of convenience
and weight, were of the essence given the circumstances of
travel, guncraftsmen like Haymaker began engineering smaller
barrels and stocks, maple and black walnut being the materials
of choice for the latter. By the second half of the eighteenth
century the typical gun was a .36-caliber rifle, usually
fixed with a bayonet for the purposes of possible Indian
engagements or finishing a kill. The weapon was lighter,
more accurate, and required less powder.
Beyond colonial Winchester, we need look no further than
the multi-million dollar military-industrial complex of today
to see that weapons and commerce have always gone hand in
hand in the United States, and are still going strong, the
path to economic development cleared through military might,
though the terminology changes slightly, the bluntness of
Manifest Destiny having given way to fuzzy linguistic blankets
such as Nation Building. It is a small semantic irony too
that a century or so following the improvements Haymaker
and others brought to the North American rifle, a gun called
the Winchester, developed by a New Yorker named Oliver Winchester,
would come to be lionized as "the gun that won the West," its
repeating rounds introducing a new deadly quality into firearms
combat. Like other such technological innovations of war,
the Winchester was an implement of dehumanization as well
as progress, both in terms of the way it impersonally vanquished
those who opposed its wielders and the unconscious toll it
could exact on those very wielders, as well as the people
involved in its creation. Having come to believe her family
haunted by the restless ghosts of the thousands cut down
by her husband’s rifle, Oliver Winchester’s wife
Sarah would flee, shortly after his death, from New Haven,
Connecticut, to San Jose, California, where she would use
her husband’s lucrative industry profits to construct
indefinitely an elaborate, one hundred and sixty room mansion,
designed haphazardly with the help of a spiritual medium
in order to accommodate the angry ghosts seeking vengeance
upon her. As the family necromancer explained to Sarah, "You
can never stop building the house. If you continue building,
you will live. Stop and you will die." A Rasputinesque
hoax perhaps, yet I wonder if modern psychology could have
offered Sarah any greater measure of peace, the lives extinguished
by her husband’s invention having come to be the sole
fixation of her own.
Lost amid these musings, I discover that I myself am lost,
literally, in Winchester, wandering in a residential neighborhood,
evidently having missed the signs that would navigate me
through town and onto Route 11, the street I am walking along
devoid of a number, bearing an unfamiliar name. Though curious
at my misstep and apparent inattention, I am not especially
bothered, having found that most people in towns and small
cities – at least in this part of North America – usually
are willing, if not happy, to give directions. As John Steinbeck
noticed decades earlier, "The best way to attract attention,
help, and conversation is to be lost. A man who seeing his
mother starving to death on a path kicks her in the stomach
to clear the way, will cheerfully devote several hours of
his time giving wrong directions to a total stranger who
claims to be lost." Though I have never attempted Steinbeck’s
strategy of merely purporting to be lost, his point about
direction-givers appears mostly true. Asking directions at
the next convenience store, I am not only told where to go
but actually taken there by a carload of friendly female
students from Shenandoah University, a local college somewhere
nearby. Sitting in the backseat of the car, trying to soak
up the air conditioning, my voice sounds to me both tight
and sluggish as I converse. Only later, after I am dropped
off, do I realize that these are the first people I have
talked to at any great length in days.
Since the outset of my journey, I have heard fragments of
numerous voices, but used my own very little, though this
silence is partially by design. Many scribbling wanderers,
especially the journalistic variety, go out of their way
to talk to as many people as they can, seeking out, sometimes
obtrusively, county officials and influential community people
on the one hand, and those they believe to be the local downtroddens
and deviants on the other, ostensibly hoping to arrive at
a kind of voyeuristic sociological montage of the community
at hand. Yet the people on the other end of these questions – rich
and poor, educated or not – usually divine exactly
why they are being questioned, often because the traveling
interlocutor readily and proudly volunteers his purpose and
aim. As a result, the people at hand frequently offer only
embroidered images of their lives and places – appropriately
fabricated responses to forced, synthetic questions. I wanted
to avoid a lot of that if possible. I knew I was passing
through the environments and spaces of others – their lives and places – and to actively seek some kind of
connection seemed artificial and presumptuous to me. My attitude
was that it would come to me or it wouldn’t, and that
whatever did arrive of its own accord would be far more interesting
and authentic than anything I might actively seek out. The
philosopher Buber went fundamentally further, asserting that "the
depths of the question about man’s being are revealed
only to the man who has become solitary, the way to the answer
lies through the man who overcomes his solitude without forfeiting
its questioning power." Though the twenty-first century
human of the United States finds himself wholly interconnected
on the literal, technological level, his fundamental personal
state remains significantly cloistered by the very economic
and industrial forces that connect him, in the abstract,
to the rest of the world. Remoteness then is not something
most of us have to work at very hard in order to achieve.
As the poet Rilke maintained, aloneness "is at bottom
not something that one can take or leave. We are solitary."
So I feel myself passing more like a ghost, transparent as
the wind, a walking stranger in the night or the day, there
and then gone among places and people. It encourages me too
that the first European to enter the Shenandoah Valley, John
Lederer, traveled in much the same way, treating with the
Indians only when invited to do so and remaining ever silent
and courteous at the strange things he witnessed, most of
which he did not understand and could not hope to explain
or even portray – foreigner to a land that did not
know him, one of great mysteries. The poet W.H. Auden said
of the wanderer in his poem of the same name, "Ever
that man goes through place-keepers, through forest trees,
a stranger to strangers."
The kind Shenandoah students have dropped me off near a local
high school on Route 11, a road known also as the Lee Highway
and the 11th Infantry Regiment Highway, the history of human
conflict asserting itself again in these memorial dedications
to distinguished American soldiers of the past. A site of
strategic geographical importance in eighteenth century North
America, Winchester was destined to accommodate its share
of military personalities. At the beginning of the French-Indian
War, long before the town had become a great trading center,
Colonel George Washington, having negotiated his teenage
years and passed into early manhood, came to the area with
orders to raise and train a militia, which in time would
effectively transform the village into a kind of garrison.
However, even as the newly-constructed Fort Loudoun (named
by a grateful Colonel Washington for the British general
who armed the fort and afforded him the legal authority to
hang militiamen for disciplinary infractions) loomed over
the town with its two-hundred-and-forty-foot walls set atop
a hill to the north on an ancient burial ground, the basic
lack of discipline among young Washington’s charges
and the imperative need for readiness forced him to resort
to draconian methods in literally "whipping" his
men into shape. Profanity, for instance, brought twenty-five
lashes from the cat-o’-nine-tails, feigning illness
fifty, and drunkenness a hundred. Although whipping post
justice was not new to Winchester – in the mid-1740s,
for example, a girl received twenty-five lashes for bearing
an illegitimate child – the offense of drunkenness,
despite the harsh penalty, remained particularly prevalent
and difficult to stop since locals had developed as a prosperous
side-racket the selling of gin and liquor to Washington’s
men. Late in the summer of 1756 the young colonel threatened
the townspeople not to allow "the Soldiers to be drunk
in their Houses, or sell them any liquor, without an order
from a commissioned officer; or else they may depend Colonel
Washington will prosecute them." For all this warning
and intimidation, threats and whippings in some cases were
not enough. In one particular instance, two men were hung
from a newly-constructed gallows before the town, shortly
after the arrival of a group of new militia recruits – a
spectacle Washington felt would "be good warning for
them."
It is odd to think of young Washington, for whom so much
destiny and distinction still lay in wait, chiding and bullying
his men and the townspeople, frustrated at their stubbornness,
their lack of fear in the face of verbal and physical intimidation,
their indifferent stoicism and strong will when punishment
was visited upon them – though it would be these same
traits that eventually would transform many of them into
fine soldiers and, if they managed to live into the 1780s,
archetypal Americans. Odd too that on the site of an old
Shawnee camping ground Washington was training a force to
help bring about that tribe’s destruction, history – even
when rooted in a single place – steadily moving toward
the next conflict, the next seizure and occupation: the traces
of the conquered buried along with their culture, the conquerors
having begun already the unconscious journey toward their
own indefinite downfall, the vague legacy of the defeated,
departed and approached again.
I am glad to get out of Winchester, although the sprawl that
emanates from its center makes it difficult to say exactly
where it really ends. I do not really feel the Valley either
until Winchester is left in my wake, the topography revealing
itself again, less impeded and concealed by the deeds and
constructions of humans. A long strand of low rich land stretching
northeast and southwest, the Shenandoah Valley lies cradled
between the Blue Ridge to the east and the western Allegheny
Mountains, their name drawn from an Indian word meaning "Endless." Because
the Shenandoah River flows north, general directional travel
references are reversed here: heading south as I am is referred
to as "going up the Valley." By the eighteenth
century, few Indians inhabited the region, though they still
passed through frequently on hunting and trading expeditions.
When European settlers arrived, parts of the Valley already
were open with meadows that could be converted easily enough
into agricultural fields, their openness a result of those
periodic Indian burnings, purposeful land-clearing forest
fires, not unlike those employed by foresters today, set
to facilitate crop growth and attract game.
Nearly all of the early forest that remained in the Valley
would be cut by settlers. This while resting beneath, enjoying
the shade of, its most common tree, then and now: a modest
roadside white oak, this particular one perhaps half a century
in age, its bottom branches hanging so low I can brush the
tips of the leaves with my fingers while sitting on the ground,
my back against the trunk. Writing in 1796, Isaac Weld Jr.
noted at great length the already palpable development of
the Winchester area in the context of the still largely uninhabited
Blue Ridge:
In the neighborhood of Winchester it is so thickly settled,
and consequently so much cleared, that wood is now beginning
to be thought valuable; the farmers are obliged frequently
to send ten or fifteen miles even for their fence rails.
It is only, however, in this particular neighborhood that
the country is so much improved; in other places there are
immense tracts of woodlands still remaining, and in general
the hills are left uncleared.
The wilderness transformed into plentiful fields, wheat became
the dominant crop in the Valley during the second half of
the eighteenth century and would remain so for more than
a hundred years. There are fields of it even now, grown from
verdant green nubs into swirling wind-blown oceans, golden
with new grain. Both during the American Revolution and decades
later, when Virginia seceded, it was the Valley that provided
bread and forage for its armies and horses, though great
fields of hemp were cultivated as well in the time of the
former conflict, primary material in the making of rot-resistant
rope and paper.
For all the transformations humans have inflicted upon the
Valley, it remains even now an altogether spectacular visual
landscape, framed by ancient mountains and drained by the
numerous rivers and creeks that ever enrich and refresh its
soil. In his own time, Weld too was struck by the beauty
of the landscape, celebrating in particular the special appeal
of those venerable trees fortunate enough to have been spared
the axe:
The hills being thus left covered with trees is a circumstance
which adds much to the beauty of the country, and intermixed
with extensive fields clothed with the richest verdure, and
watered by the numerous branches of the Shenandoah River,
a variety of pleasing landscapes are presented to the eye
in almost every part of the route from Bottetourt to the
Patowmac, many of which are considerably heightened by the
appearance of the Blue Mountains in the background.
Though the Valley is much changed, there remain places where
Weld’s visual description is as accurate now as it
was over two centuries ago, much of the land still farmed,
rolling – laying well, you might say – and most
of the visible Blue Ridge clothed in dense forest, huge tracts
of it owned and preserved by the federal government.
Along the highway again, passing over Opequon Creek, a body
of water I’d already encountered once, I am reminded
of the well-known expression by the ancient philosopher Heraclitus:
that one cannot step into the same river twice. Though bearing
the same name, the Opequon beneath me is, for all practical
purposes, a disparate body of water – fed by different
streams, containing a variant water chemistry – from
the one I had crossed to the north. So too both it and the
whole Valley are vastly different entities within their respective
identities from what they once were in the past – though
each occupies the same geographical position and may appear
in places similar. I remind myself of this condition from
time to time: that this is merely, and can only be, despite
the occasional temptation to imagine it otherwise, the Valley
of my own era.
More discernible and easier to keep in mind, since they are
ever before and beneath me, are the changes to the trail
I am following: this highway of asphalt, concrete, and rock
that once was Athowominee, a muddy footpath, overgrown in
places by weeds and grasses, only cob webs and sapling branches
to greet the face of the infrequent traveler. In the wake
of the French-Indian War what had been a modestly-traveled
wilderness path for Indians and, increasingly, frontier settlers
was widened and graveled in an effort to make wagon travel
easier. Local counties generally shouldered the expense,
though the funds they put forth generally came back to them
or were surpassed as a result of increased travel and commerce
along the route. In addition, it was local farmers who performed
the labor in the winter months or during the slow time between
planting and harvesting. Thus, much of the money expended
went to local residents and, by extension, back into the
county economy.
Above the village of Stephens City, originally Stephensburg,
I climb a plateau where I can see the Blue Ridge and Alleghanies
off in the distance on either side of me, a perspective that
affords a kind of context both for the Valley and my place
in it. Unfortunately, the prospect also affords a clear view
of 81, the large multi-wheel trucks, the size of toy models
at this distance, dwarfing all other traffic. Though I dislike
the appearance of the interstate, I am glad it is there for
the purposes of my labors, the thought of all that traffic,
all those massive trucks, crammed onto Route 11 not a very
pleasant or practical one. Of course, long ago the route
had accommodated a significant portion of the overall commerce
in the North American colonies. Instead of long lines of
trucks, the late-eighteenth century traveler would have encountered
herds of livestock – cattle, goats, sheep, pigs – being
led to market, either in the nearest town or perhaps even
to the great livestock capitol of Philadelphia. Other essential
merchandise – salt, sugar, medicine, tools, gunpowder,
manufactured goods – was transported either by wagon
or packhorse train. And then there would have been the locals,
walking or riding to work or church, and the far-bound settlers,
afoot or perhaps sitting amid their possessions in Conestoga
wagons. Ironically, many local folk then felt the same way
about Conestogas as modern travelers do regarding tractor
trailers, the wagons’ heavy bodies and wheels creating
deep ruts and mushy holes when the ground was wet and huge
clouds of dust in the arid heat of late summer and early
fall. Just as massive truck tires explode and litter the
highway, so wrought iron nails would shake or jolt loose
from the wagons, dropping to wait unseen in the dirt for
an unsuspecting traveler – perhaps the next barefoot
farm boy, sent to town for a few grams of salt or sugar,
maybe, if he was lucky, a piece of hard candy for himself.
Late afternoon, shadows long, grass already dampening, resting
before I strike the tent, having received permission to camp
at the edge of a pasture, I hear a cow bell in the distance,
and, closing my eyes, try to imagine, as best I can, this
time of day for those distant travelers who passed this way
before me. Along the road, in the fields, amid the gentle
dusk of a Valley summer, the packhorse and wagon teams unhitched
and hobbled, the long day’s sweat and imprint of harness
thoroughly scrubbed away from the horses’ flanks by
the attentive human master for whom they constitute a livelihood.
With bells placed about their necks, they wander deeper into
twilight, grazing, until darkness fills the Valley and the
drowsy traveler, laid out beside a fire or stretched on a
straw mattress in or beneath his wagon, can no longer see
them. Yet this does not trouble him as he gradually succumbs
to slumber amid the damp grass and all his worldly goods,
for across the field there drifts, lighter than air, a kind
of lullaby of wind chimes: the soft tinkling of horse bells.
However we modern individuals might choose to imagine it,
traveling was no romantic matter for drovers and wagoneers,
the livestock and goods they managed a necessary hindrance
and burden ensuring their ability to set food before their
families. Bent on speed and efficiency, they would have carried
little else with them beyond their goods, the bare minimum – an
essentialist mentality that still exists today for those
who happen to travel long distances on foot or horseback.
Next day, wandering here along the road, my wagon on my back – a
forest green Lowe Alpine backpack of polyethylene foam, roughly
a foot across and two feet in length – contains everything
I deem necessary on a daily basis, though even an experienced
hiker may discover over the course of his journey that he
is carrying things he really does not require, in which case
they are usually left behind, given away, or mailed home.
Subtracting weight from a pack is a fundamental and persistent
objective of all wanderers since it increases comfort and
ease of movement while lessening the unrelenting strain upon
the back and knees. Along this road, my own material existence
is reduced to a two-pound tent, summer-rated light sleeping
bag, foam pad, lightweight battery-powered headlamp, small
flashlight, stove and one-liter fuel bottle with cook pot,
Kabar knife, three twelve-ounce plastic water bottles, one-ounce
bottles of disinfected rubbing soap and sunscreen, half-roll
of toilet paper, small stainless steel bowl for both drinking
and eating, dried fruit, meat, and garlic cloves (to deter
insects) in ziplock bags, clay pipe and tobacco pouch (a
nonessential vice), bandana to keep the sweat from my eyes,
a white cotton shirt, one pair of shorts, underwear, one
pair of liner socks and two pairs of wool socks, wool pullover,
rain pants, poncho, moleskin one-ounce bottle of hydrogen
peroxide, and a jackleg collection of road maps for Maryland,
West Virginia, Virginia, and Tennessee, torn from their travel
books and held together by a plastic, as opposed to metal,
paper clip. Everything else on my body, worn and in use.
Perhaps such lists can only appear mundane, mere corporeal
distractions from greater abstract purposes. On the other
hand, it may be closer to the truth that they, the visceral
and the mental, are intertwined, perhaps even hopelessly
tangled. Among all the world’s thinkers, probably it
was the philosopher Spinoza who pursued most doggedly the
confluent nature of mind and body as mutual determinants
of human existence. In fact, as my journey unfolds, I find
my bodily needs and mental musings increasingly overlapping
and giving way to one another: the mind that hungers in the
monotony of travel, the body that wonders in the midst of
its fatigue. To be sure, there are times when I wish for
additional equipment or information, as well as various other
things, but these desires eventually give way to the more
perspectived and abstract observation that I generally have
with me, amid this twenty-five to thirty pounds of mass on
my back, all I really need. Obscured, or rather drowned out,
by conditioned cultural and corporeal concerns, this brand
of thinking – a kind of applied minimalism – comes
to twenty-first century Americans with great difficulty,
ours being an unprecedented arcane culture of wealth and
excessive ownership, the frivolous objects in our basements
and the ever-appearing, labyrinthine roadside storage complexes
hardly necessary to our existence.
By and large, such gluttonous consumption would have been
foreign to the local residents of over two centuries ago – homes
small and spare, possessing for the most part, only what
they made or grew – though there were notable exceptions.
Leaving the area of Middletown, I pass the opulent limestone
estate Belle Grove, built in 1797 for Major Isaac Hite (Heydt),
a descendant of German immigrants from Alsace who attended
the College of William and Mary and served in the American
Revolution. In 1731, Isaac’s father, Hans Jost Heydt,
had bought ten thousand acres of land in the Valley and led
a party of German families down Athowominee from Pennsylvania,
onto Maryland’s Monocacy Road and over into the Shenandoah.
Though Jost did not own slaves, his son, years later – grown
immensely wealthy through the gradual, efficient, and lucrative
sale of his father’s real estate – eventually
would come to have in his possession more than a hundred,
a bizarre anomaly in the region. As Isaac Weld Jr. summarized
in 1796, "On the eastern side of the ridge cotton grows
extremely well; and in winter the snow scarce ever remains
more than a day or two upon the ground. On the other side
cotton never comes to perfection; the winters are severe,
and the fields covered with snow for weeks together." Furthermore,
with a few exceptions, the nights were too cold in the mountain
and valley region of Virginia for cultivating the less hardy
variety of tobacco grown at the time. This and other environmental
variations between western and eastern Virginia, along with
the inherent cultural differences among western settlers
and the Anglican planters of the east, conspired to make
the slave plantation an oddity and the African-descended
population extraordinarily sparse, though it would grow steadily
in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Frontier Germans
in particular took pride in their independence and self-sufficiency,
developing small farms that could be run efficiently by the
family with occasional help from neighbors during episodes
of construction, planting, and harvesting. These lifestyle
differences from eastern Virginians eventually voiced themselves
through legislation. With the aid of lawmakers like Jefferson,
western Virginians – the more numerous Scotch-Irish,
as well as the Germans – increasingly pushed for greater
influence in government, ultimately disestablishing the Anglican
Church and abolishing the laws of primogeniture and entail,
which they generally viewed as decadent and unfair.
The influence of the east, however, with all its benefits
and evils, did penetrate certain portions of the Valley:
on the rare large plantation like Hite’s and around
Winchester, where nearly everything could be sold or traded,
including the labor of slaves and indentured servants. Frontier
Germans were especially unlikely to own or acquire slaves
as a result of their religious convictions, economic frugality,
and their own recent vivid experiences with thraldom. Coming
to North America, families that had fled the Germanic states,
including my own ancestors, would have endured a hellish
six to eight week passage across the Atlantic from Hamburg
or Bremen. Despite the terrible conditions they had lived
under in the Palatinate, few were penniless when they departed
their homes and the southwestern Germanic states were among
the least feudalistic, meaning some individuals actually
had owned their land. However, all but a few were quickly
exploited out of whatever money or possessions they might
have had on them. Frequently, they were purposely detained
at ports while local merchants orchestrated a practiced racket
of gradually sucking dry whatever money they had brought
with them. Once onboard, their goods were often looted by
the crew as their physical health began to diminish in an
environment highly conducive to malnutrition and epidemics.
As Gottlieb Mittelberger remarked, "During the passage
there doth arise in the vessels an awful misery, stink, smoke,
horror, vomiting, sea-sickness of all kinds, fever, purgings,
headaches, sweats, constipations of the bowels, sores, scurvy,
cancers, thrush and the like, which do wholly arise from
the stale and strongly-salted food and meat, and from the
exceeding badness and nastiness of the water, from which
many do wretchedly decline and perish." Mittelberger,
like many others, traveled on a cargo ship haphazardly altered
for travelers through the construction of a makeshift deck
built between the upper deck and the hold. Since it would
be collapsed after disembarkment to make cargo room for the
return voyage, the deck was loosely built, primitive, and
uncomfortable. The ship’s hatches provided the sole
ventilation and were clamped shut when the weather turned
foul. Latrines were scarce and the middle deck was entirely
open, affording little privacy for women, who sometimes found
themselves molested by the ship’s crew. By the mid-eighteenth
century, shipping tactics and conditions, particularly on
vessels owned by an especially nefarious English company
called Stedmans, had refined themselves nearly to the point
of rivaling the Atlantic slave trade in overall cruelty and
dehumanization. Between 1750 and 1755, two thousand passenger
corpses were cast into the ocean.
Onboard, travelers were expected to provide their own meals
and, having little or no prior knowledge of sea travel, they
usually misjudged their provisions; if their supplies gave
out, they had to buy food from the captain, for which they
were charged exorbitantly – a calculated measure to
bury them deeper in debt. Those who brought with them chests
full of dried meats and fruits, brandy, and medicine often
were forced to leave them behind or store them on other ships,
which again placed the traveler at the mercy of the ship’s
commanding officer. If a passenger died during the passage,
family members were charged the individual’s fee, a
particularly tough blow if the sole survivors were women
and children. If a child’s guardians both died, the
minor would become the property of the captain who would
then sell the child as a means of exacting payment for the
parents’ fare. Plummeting into debt meant having your
family become servants in the New World. The going price
for a man was ten pounds for three years of servitude; some
were bought for up to seven years, and children were owned
until the age of twenty-one. In return for this specialized
variety of slavery, the owner would pay off whatever debts
the traveler owed the captain – the process was called
the "redemptioner system." The eighteenth-century
German immigrant arriving in Philadelphia harbor would have
been allowed to disembark only if his sea passage was paid
and he had no outstanding debts. Those who owed money waited
to be sold off, the healthier going first and the sick and
the weak sometimes dying onboard, too useless for purchase.
Being bought by a master carried with it no guarantees of
fair treatment or extended care. People could be swapped
or sold if they did not fit the owner’s plans. As one
period advertisement read, "For sale, the time of a
German bound girl. She is a strong, fresh and healthy person,
not more than twenty-five years old, came into the country
last autumn and is sold for no fault, but because she does
not suit the service she is in. She is acquainted with all
kinds of farm work, would probably be good in a tavern. She
has still five years to serve." As horrific as this
process might sound to twenty-first century readers, the
sum and utility of a human being set in the bargain value
context of a newspaper’s classifieds section, we must
do our best to keep it situated in the context of the time,
during which such prospects did not seem completely unpleasant
alternatives to the mauling periodic violence and ongoing
deprivation of early eighteenth century life in the Palatinate
or Bavaria. Furthermore, as with all slaveholders, there
were good masters and bad ones, and the degree of youth,
strength, and potential knowledge of a trade affected the
manner in which people were treated, the adept learners and
hard workers quickly becoming indispensable to their masters,
the weak and the slow loathsome burdens. Difficult for the
modern thinker to grasp, the system was devoid not only of
civil rights, but of any rights at all; and though it is
said to have been increasingly "humanized," the
practice was not abolished altogether until the 1820s.
Always departing – not unlike my ancestors, though
my conditions remain decidedly more favorable – I feel
myself nonetheless ever present in the place through which
I am passing – the living domain that is the visceral
continuum of the traveler, experienced and remembered. It
is fanciful in any event and perhaps ultimately irresponsible
to wish to disappear entirely, dissolve ourselves utterly,
from the inevitable conflicts that afflict the human who
lives among other humans – the cruelties we collectively
visit upon animals, each other, and the world itself – as
well as the more harmless manifestations and vestiges: abstract
cultural clashes, the packed professional wrestling arenas
and football stadiums – those grand American coliseums,
the coarse weekend battletowns of our time.
Outside forces propelling us into scenarios and identities
we could never have imagined, ours remain lives that drift
indefinitely so long as they are. And sorrowful is the soul
swept on a strong current, rudderless, until at last it finds
that stagnant pool, where still waters offer up the morbid
image of what it truly is – this dying thing it never
intended to be. Yet so long as there is intention there is
hope, for intention is a window that opens upon the heart.
Being can never be dead so long as we mean to become something.
And we can do worse than mean well.
January 2007
From guest contributor Casey Clabough
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