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Then and Now

Then and Now

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Yesterday I braved the rain long enough to dash out to an art exhibit at an old schoolhouse in our neighborhood. While I was looking at collages and watercolors and oils, I was imagining what it was like to learn the three Rs in a two-room schoolhouse (first through fourth in one room; fifth through seventh in the other); a pot-bellied stove for warmth, big tall windows to let in the light. The building hasn’t been a school since 1931, but it became a clubhouse for the Vale Home Demonstration Club. A modern version of that organization, the Vale Club, still holds fairs and bazaars and other events in the building.

A woman working at the exhibit told me that several years ago a former student had come by. “He told us all about the place,” she said. “But he just passed away.”

The school still stands, though, in large part due to the dedication of those who loved it enough to find other uses for it. In March, the Vale Schoolhouse earned a place on the Virginia Landmarks Register.

The buildings that link us to the past are a precious and limited commodity, but often we are too busy to learn their stories.

photos appeared in Oakton Patch 3/29/11

Family Stories

Family Stories

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Betty Leet Bell is my Dad’s first cousin, which makes her my second cousin, or my first cousin once removed. One thing she is without question is a genealogist. She has spent years researching the births, deaths, marriages and deeds of those who can no longer tell their own stories.

Yesterday we went to visit Betty and she told us about a cousin who danced in the dream sequence of the movie “Carousel,” a great-grandmother (above) who died of the measles after giving birth to her tenth child, and another relative whose pet was a talking crow.

One of Betty’s stories concerned two store-front lots in Lexington. When she was researching the ancestors on her mother’s side, she learned that in the 1790s her great-great grandfather bought these two parcels of land for a hatter’s shop.

A couple years later, when Betty was researching her father’s side of the family, she learned that these were the exact same lots that her dad purchased in the 1930s when he was looking for a place to build his furniture store. One hundred and forty years (and several intervening owners) separated these purchases. It was one of those historical coincidences that Betty says is not that uncommon when she’s digging into the past.

Maybe it was just the commercial potential of these lots that spoke — generations apart — to these two very different men. Or maybe there was something about that spot, the way it looked in the morning light, or smelled after a good, hard rain; maybe there was something about that place that spoke to each of them.

A House, A Photograph, A Story

A House, A Photograph, A Story

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Today I’m in Lexington, about to go for a walk in a neighborhood that is not my own but which has meaning for me because my parents live here. In class the other night we talked about whether you can know a place without knowing its history. The consensus, if there was one, was that a place is shaped by its history, but you don’t necessarily have to know that history in order to be shaped by that place.

This house was where my Great Aunt Sally died more than 80 years ago. We drove by the house the last time I was in Lexington and Dad told the story of going with his father to his Aunt Sally’s wake in this house when he was a little boy. Dad also spoke about a racetrack across the street from the house, a track that preceded Keeneland, Lexington’s current track. I couldn’t resist taking a few photos of the house. It is quite different from all the other houses on the block. It looks like a castle.

A few weeks after my last visit to Kentucky there was an article in the Lexington Herald-Leader about this very house. It was home to Courtney Mathews, an African-American horse trainer who probably trained 1902 Kentucky Derby winner Alan-a-Dale. Mathew’s funeral was held 13 years later in the same house where my Aunt Sally’s took place. It’s a house that may soon be named to the National Register of Historic Places. The same house I photographed on a muggy June day 71 years later.

I guess this shows which side I take in a discussion on history and place.

Back to School

Back to School

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The class begins Wednesday. I will write about it often, I’m sure. But it’s worth recounting how I came to take it. As readers of this blog are aware, I write often about place and how it shapes and soothes us. In fact, it was in large part to write about place that I started A Walker in the Suburbs.

A few weeks ago I was reading about an author I’ve come to admire. His name is Forrest Church, and sadly he is no longer with us. I have a blog post in mind about him and his books, too, but more about that later. What happened that morning is that I was reading reviews of his book Love and Death (yes, I go for the cheery titles!) and a line jumped out at me: “This book is about living, or as Rev. Church says, ‘To live in such a way that our lives will prove worth dying for.'”

This comment stopped me in my tracks. It made me think. More than that (because I am always thinking) it spurred me to action, to boldness. Am I living my life so it will prove “worth dying for?”

In many ways, yes. But in one important way, no. My writing life, which matters greatly to me, has been flat-lining for years. This blog has helped a bit, but not enough. I am anxious to write more deeply and extensively on this subject of place.

And so, I looked into taking a class. And dear reader, you will have to believe me here, the very first class I saw was A Sense of Place: Values and Identity. I think it was meant to be.

“A Native Hill”

“A Native Hill”

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I have been reading Wendell Berry and thinking about home. In his essay “A Native Hill,” Berry describes a conversation he had with a New Yorker who tried to convince him to stay in that fair city for the sake of his literary career after Berry announced he was moving home to Kentucky. Berry admits that the literary world mattered to him then (and I suppose it still does), “but the world was more important to me than the literary world; and the world would always be most fully and clearly present to me in the place I was fated by birth to know better than any other.”

The man persisted, politely, that Berry, like Thomas Wolfe, “could not go home again.” The man’s argument, Berry says, “was based on the belief that once one had attained the metropolis, the literary capital, the worth of one’s origins was canceled out; there simply could be nothing worth going back to. What lay behind one had ceased to be a part of life, and had become ‘subject matter.'”

Berry’s point, which he makes so fully and beautifully in this patient, expansive essay, is that he has been more fully alive and conscious in his home place, in Port Henry, Kentucky, than he could have been elsewhere. He knows the people and the place, has walked every square mile of its hollows and ridges, understands and accepts its less than perfect history. And because he has been more fully human living in Port Henry, he has (I extrapolate) been truer to himself as a writer, too.

I could not be Wendell Berry — I am neither as smart nor as stern as he (and I am not a man) — but I admire his thinking and his writing, his economy of word and thought. And I imagine I will be writing about him again. In the meantime, I illustrate this post with a picture of a hill I have come to love. It is not a “native hill” — it is neither in my home state of Kentucky nor my adopted state of Virginia. It is in between. It is a hill I pass on the long drives through West Virginia that keep me tethered to the land I love.

Vista

Vista

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What does the eye appreciate, the eye that evolved to spot antelope across a distant horizon, the eye that often looks no farther now than the tiny screen of a smart phone?

It likes the greensward, the open expanse of turf, like the swelling savannahs of our evolutionary past. And there, where earth meets sky, if not an animal of prey then an emblem of our ambition: a city to conquer and admire.

I once spent time in this place, the Sheep Meadow of Central Park. In fact, I once lost a set of keys somewhere on this vast lawn. I walked by the meadow daily and mediated on this vista. It is a uniquely American view, embracing our love of cities and of countryside, promising both peace and prosperity. It is a sigh of relief, a gasp of delight.

The Fleet

The Fleet

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Because it is summer and because we have almost five drivers (our youngest will soon have her license), there are a fleet of cars outside our house.

Ah, driving! It’s what I do when I’m not walking. It’s what I used to do far more often than I do it now, when the children were younger, when my days were dictated by carpools. But it’s what I still do far too much. It is the flip-side of walking in the suburbs — driving in the suburbs.

What kind of mind is engendered by driving? It is not the calm mind that I described yesterday, a mind on a walk, a mind attuned to its environment, a mind living in the moment.

The driving mind must live in the future, must think several steps ahead. Perhaps that’s why (and I’m making a leap here), the suburbs have a reputation as lacking in ambiance. Because they are creatures of the automobile, they must live forever in the future. They have no time to be present.



photo: Planetforward

Stream Valley

Stream Valley

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A few days ago I walked a small section of the Cross County Trail, from Miller Heights to a rock bridge across Difficult Run. I was pretty close to Vale, I think, and I paused to read a sign about stream valleys and their value to indigenous people: rich soil, nuts and berries to forage, animals there for the same purpose and ripe for the hunting. Obviously water there, too. These green secluded places were early hunting and fishing grounds. They were home.

Now these same places are helping save the area as it once was; it is through the stream valleys that the Cross County Trail (which runs from one end of the county to the other) is threaded.

We walk the paths our ancestors walked. But we walk for different reasons. We walk our dogs; we walk for health. Our livings are made elsewhere. We work for money. We work for prestige. We come to the trail to work out.

But the shaded packed dirt of the Cross County Trail may yet give us back our lives. Or at least it may give me back mine — by helping me learn to love the place I’ve landed.

Mossy Hill

Mossy Hill

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You would think that out here in the congested Northern Virginia suburbs it would be next to impossible to lose a hill. But that is exactly what happened. At least for a while.

My children found the rise, named it the mossy hill, and took me there for the first time nine or ten years ago. I was impressed. It was high enough to give a good view of the stream valley below. It made me feel like I was somewhere else entirely, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge or Ozarks, somewhere with more sudden elevations, those squiggly lined places on the topographical maps. But instead I was only half a mile from our house, roaming through a suburban woods.

And then the kids got older, left for track or band or music lessons; the mossy hill was forgotten. I tried to find it many times but the path there had disappeared, vanished under the ferns and sticky vines. But last winter, Tom and used a topo map to find the place again. We looked for those squiggly lines. We approached the matter scientifically. And now I can find the place by heart.

Yesterday Copper and I walked there. We sat on top of the rise and looked into the woods below. The sun struck the ferned forest floor in patches of golden light. Cicadas provided the soundtrack. It was a humid, still, late summer afternoon. The mossy hill was mine again.

Out is Up

Out is Up

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A climb to the top of the Vienna Metro parking garage yesterday gave me pause. And not only because I was winded from the steps. It was because of what I saw from that perch. The long-planned retail and housing development beside the Vienna station is finally underway. Urban density is coming.

I have mixed feelings about urban density. I appreciate the efforts of Robert E. Simon (founder of the planned community, Reston) and other urban pioneers who have envisioned new ways of living in the suburbs. (In Simon’s case, it was to create European-style “new towns” in the middle of Virginia hunt country; his experiment has been only marginally successful.) And yes, it is true that our long driveways and wide lawns, our streets without sidewalks, do not foster walking or biking. They keep the automobile king.

But from my vantage point yesterday all I could see were bulldozers and barren soil stripped of grass and trees. The price of urban density is suburban leafiness, the openness and beauty that drew us here in the first place. But up there on the fifth level of the Metro Parking Garage, the future was clear: The way out is to build up.