A Change of Scenery

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The March winds blew Madeline down from the north this past weekend. A last minute four day break-from-work presented itself, and so she bought a bus ticket and headed south. While Virginia still refuses to embrace spring, as it should by now, it will take even longer for New York City to let winter go on its frigid way. And gray, blustery Virginia is a little softer, a little more hospitable than gray, blustery New York City. Madeline has enjoyed her nearly five years as a big city girl. She has taken the vitality and diversity and excitement that living in a city gives a person, and planted it permanently in her soul. Wherever she travels in the future, wherever she plants roots on the eventual spot she chooses to call home, the city-spent days and months and years are her own. The travels of youth banish the regrets of old age.

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But Madeline is truly a southern girl at heart, and her love of history and nature could not have been better nurtured than in the countryside of Virginia. Growing up just east of the Blue Ridge Mountains, hometown is wine country and horse country with trails to hike and the hallowed grounds of Civil War battlefields to visit. She was a history major at Roanoke College, and driving from home to campus and back again on school breaks took her through the Shenandoah Valley for hours. One can't pass an exit on I-81 without an invitation to tour historic homes or, say, an afternoon visit to the Virginia Museum of the Civil War. It's a drive that makes being stuck driving around and behind way too many semi-trucks for way too long completely worth it.

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My proposal that we head up into Shenandoah National Park on that Friday was met with enthusiasm. Even with the gusty winds attempting to blow a person over the edge at every single scenic overlook, it was four hours well spent. It was as clear a day as could be hoped for. Brilliant sunshine and blue skies followed us from the entrance to the park off of route 211 to our turn-back-around point at Big Meadows where the Harry F. Byrd visitor center is located. It was a comfortable section of Skyline Drive to enjoy when an entire day couldn't be spent driving the length of it. The visitor center is well worth a stop, especially to learn of the unfortunate history of how the park came to be. It was the Condemnation Act of 1928 that took property from the landowners scattered throughout the mountains. Some 500 families were forced from their homes to create the park, and this cruel act by the government is hard to overlook while one is appreciating the spectacular beauty that is the park. It is hard not to believe that a national park such as this could have been made, the land preserved for the enjoyment of future generations, without forcibly evicting people from where they had chosen to settle. A smaller park, maybe? Given the residents some kind of options to move but still have their homes on the mountains, on the land that certainly had become a part of them? Two excellent books on the subject are "Answer at Once": Letters of Mountain Families in Shenandoah National Park, 1934 - 1938, compiled by Katrina M. Powell and Shenandoah: A Story of Conservation and Betrayal by Sue Eisenfeld.

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Madeline made her way back to New York before another unnecessary nor'easter sullied the arrival of spring on the East Coast. She will come south again at the end of May for a week of hiking and wineries and blue skies smiling down on the Blue Ridge Mountains. As the first day of spring slogs on, snowy and cold and a useless Tuesday, I will just have to remind myself that for every snowflake that can fall in March, there can be those Fridays with sun and mountain tops and starkly beautiful valleys shimmering in the distance.