Blue Ridge etc. cont'd

Day 3, Skyline Drive and Charlottesville

July 2

OK. Today was a walk in the park. Actually a few walks in the park and a lot of driving too.

The motel in Front Royal was a few blocks from the northern end of the Skyline Drive, which goes through the Shenandoah National Park. It’s a great place to see and, like the Cowpens battlefield, the visitors’ center even has a movie to give you an overview when you’re getting started. Hill people used to live there until they were bought out in the 30s to make a national park, which may have been the first of the big nature parks—think Yosemite or Yellowstone—on the East Coast.

I think they have big cats here, and certainly have bear. We saw deer, turkeys, birds of prey, blue birds, but no panthers or black bears. Maybe some bear poop, though.

The park is full of information about the Civilian Conservation Corps, which built much of it. And places with names like Hogwallow Flats and Bacon Gap. There is also a Thornton Gap. (Is the founder any relation of yours, Jack?)

The Skyline Drive is 105 miles long, 35 mph for much of the way. It took us nine hours to do it. That’s because of the stops.

The road twists and turns, and of course there are abundant scenic overlooks. Many of them have signs talking about points of geology, settlement, reforestation (recovery from settlement), and of course Stonewall Jackson. It’s kind of fun, too, to come up to a sharp bend, and there’s an overlook on the left. So if you want to stop, you have to get over quick because there isn’t much of a sightline.

The signs have taught me, for instance, that those bare spots you see on distant hillsides are loess, the slide-prone fields of loose rocks. “Loess” is almost an anagram for “loose,” but that may be coincidence.

We walked on the Appalachian trail for short stretches a few times, including part of a nature hike near the south end called Frazier Trail with overhanging rock formations. As it was when we walked to school, the trails are uphill both ways. Well, not always. Sometimes you get to the top and you have to slide down. I believe the purpose of all this is to humble us and remind us of the hardship of our mountain-dwelling forebears.  Also grateful for WiFi and hot showers.

We also went walking in a high meadow that, according to the information at the visitor center, was indeed not made by settlers killing trees. It is a fairly flat place full of grass and wildflowers. There is evidence, we were told, that the Indians used this site more than 10,000 years ago. It may have been a rendezvous point where different groups met to trade. There are narrow trails, which look like they were cut by small game, that criss-cross the field. So we walked some of them to channel the indians.

There are other trails that would be fun to follow if I get back here sometime when the temperature is under 90.

There is something decidedly spooky about Eastern hardwood forests. The woods grow taller by a couple of stories than the Pine Barrens. They are full of shadows, and we were looking for rattlesnakes, though we didn’t see any.

I know this all sounds uncharacteristically wholesome for me. There are no bars, strip clubs, spacecakes, or murder sites. But there is Stonewall Jackson, although it is indeed, uncharacteristic of Virginia that I should see only one reference to him in the course of more than 100 miles. According to one of the signs, overlooking the Shenandoah Valley and Massanutten Mountain to the west, some gap in the mountains visible from the Drive was instrumental in his 1862 campaign in the Shenandoah Valley. Jackson used his superior knowledge of the terrain and the mountain passes, we were informed, to outmaneuver and confuse his Union opponents. He was apparently a flexible guy. He could stand like a wall and move fast, too, as circumstances dictated.

The photo for today is of a novelty of the region, as seen from an overlook on the Skyline Drive. It called Stony Man, and has nothing to do with Stonewall Jackson. It's like the Indian face you see when you go through the Delaware Water Gap.

We got to the Hampton Inn in Charlottesville around 6:30 or 7. It’s on the edge of a huge shopping mall. The old city of Charlottesville is surrounded by that late 20th century prefab suburban sprawl. The man at the desk told me about a place called The Boat House, which is locally owned and specializes in local wines. All right, in the middle of the national franchise world there’s a local joint.

And we could walk there, so I wouldn’t even need to behave. It is decorated with sculling memorabilia, including citations to winning University of Virginia crew athletes.

I was expecting Virginia wines to be light and fruity, without too much serious flavor. Like New York and New Jersey wines I’ve tasted. Not so. Pollak merlot is really fun; it just fills your mouth up. We had two Barboursville wines, a cabernet sauvignon and a pinot grigio (Joanna was having roast chicken), that were also very good. Plenty of flavor, the change between going in and going down. Fruit and spice and everything nice.

When we got to the Boat House, the first thing the waitress asked was how we did in the storm. She said there are still a million and a half people down here with no electricity.  We actually encountered little evidence of the storm. We had met the lady with no air conditioning at Rose Hill Manor. A man packing his car at the motel in North East, Maryland, after we checked out on Sunday morning told us he was a “storm refugee.” He was from Silver Spring and had cleared out on the basis of weather reports and storm warnings.

A store near a camping ground just off the Skyline Drive was open, but had no power. The gas station near the southern end of the Drive also was without power. The store was open and running on a small generator, but the pumps weren’t operating.

Except for some fallen tree limbs, we hadn’t seen any other storm damage than that in the past 400 miles.

It’s very strange. We’re traveling through a disaster area and can’t even tell.

The disruption caused The Boat House to pull a few things off the menu, but the waitress said they still had a “couple of lobsters.”

Maybe that’s disaster in the land of plenty.

I can understand that. I'm running out of wine.

Good night, all.

Harry

July 3

Hi Harry,

You are in the best winemaking area of Virginia all around Charlottesville. Barboursville produces world class Bourdeax style wine called Octagon, Horton with award winning Voigner, Kluge now Trump and Veritas produce some very good sparkling wine and others just to name a few. They say the best varietals in Virginia are a Voigner, Petit Verdot and Cabernet Franc (Mr Jefferson's grape) and one day one or all will be Virginia's signature grapes.

John T.

Day 4, 

Monticello, just like a nickel, and a long way to Kentucky

sent July 4, a.m.

The car and the shuttle bus did all the climbing yesterday.

We started by crossing Charlottesville to reach Monticello.

When you get there, you park at the foot of the hill (maybe Thomas Jefferson invented parking lots too) and take a bus to the big house.

We took the half-hour tour [Editor’s note: Harry is believed to have deleted a lame Gilligan’s island reference here] and saw the cool stuff we’ve all heard about—the dumbwaiter for wine at the sides of the dining room fireplace, the rotating door with shelves for bringing food in, the bed that connects the bedroom and the office. 

Longhairs in profile: Harry meets the President.

Jefferson is buried in the family cemetery, where Congress put an obelisk over him. 

There is a sign that the cemetery is still the property of Jefferson’s family. I guess when the family went broke and had to sell the place, they were allowed to hang on to the graveyard.

People in the recognized bloodline are still being buried there, another sign says.

Speaking of bloodline, the photo of the day is a representation of Harriet Hemings, whose mother was Sally Hemings. 

The sign next to her image says nothing about who her father was. Appropriately enough, the effigy of Harriet has a very fair complexion and is in the cellar under the main house.

The Hemings-side offspring of the president needed DNA evidence before they could even come to the family picnic.

Besides the subtle aside to Harriet, the tunnel under the house has replicas of some of the functional rooms that were there. 

There was lots of wine lore in the cellars under Monticello. Jefferson bought the wine bottled, apparently because it was easier to adulterate and easier for people along the way to siphon some off if it was shipped in casks. The bottles were packaged in wooden barrels with straw for cushioning. They came all the way from Europe on small ships. I wonder what the breakage was. 

There is also a beer cellar. It seems Jefferson started a brewing revolution in his area by putting to work a British soldier who was captured during the War of 1812. He was a brewer by trade. He taught one of Jefferson’s slaves.

They made the beer from wheat and sweet corn—like Bud and Miller today. Then they learned to make ale, and things got really good, I guess. There are snippets from letters by Jefferson to his friends, offering to apprentice candidates to his own brewer.

And of course with a slaveholder’s expectations, he essentially told them, my guy can teach them if they are capable of learning.

The kitchen garden outside the big house has all kinds of herbs and vegetables. We saw one growing under terra cotta pots. This, the gardener told us was sea kale. Keeping it covered when it's young assures tender shoots. 

I had made reservations at what I thought were places a reasonable distance apart. I was wrong on this one. It’s about 400 miles from Monticello to Middlesboro, Ky., so we didn’t have time to stop for lunch, let alone Davy Crockett’s Birthplace State Park.

The drive through mountain country is wonderful. Grand vistas of blue hills, narrow valleys, dark stretches under the trees, Wal-Mart in the distance.

We barreled into Kentucky just before nine. Anyhow, that’s why this message is coming at an odd time.

We had to call Pizza Hut for food. I had a bottle of wine in the trunk—a Grande Reserve pinot noir Bourgogne. According to the label, it was put into bottles in the region of production by Josephine Dubois. What a job she must have, standing in the wine cellar with the spigot open, filling one bottle after another. Are her fingertips purple?

I have to sign off. We have to go climb the Cumberland Gap. And just like Thomas Jefferson, we need to get more wine. 

Happy Fourth.