November 9, 2026

We made it to the Biltmore Estate in Asheville after years of avoiding it. Of course it’s a major stop on the regional tourist circuit. The drive from Greenville was a little over an hour. We wandered through the garden and the botanical explosion of domestic and exotic plants in the Conservatory. We stood in line with our tickets to get into the house.

It was Election Day, but otherwise any other day at the place. The crowd’s focus was on wandering the property and staring at the house furnishings. We chatted with folks from Illinois, Florida, New York.

The centerpiece of Biltmore is the Versailles-like house (179,000 sq. ft., 250 rooms) built by George Washington Vanderbilt II, grandson of “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt, who created the Vanderbilt fortune, estimated in today’s dollars at close to $3 billion.

The Commodore, who started his business career as a teenager piloting a boat carrying passengers from Staten Island to Manhattan, left a legacy as a ruthless, grasping, albeit visionary tycoon. George’s father was the Commodore’s son William Henry Vanderbilt, who followed his father in the railroad business and, it’s said, doubled the family fortune.

George was a different sort. Instead of investing in productive businesses, he spent his inheritance building Biltmore, competing with elder brother Cornelius, who built the nearly-as-extravagant Breakers estate (138,000 sq. ft.) in Newport, Rhode Island. In 1888 he bought 125,000 acres of North Carolina wilderness. Most of the land was eventually sold. The entire estate now encompasses roughly 8,000 acres, some sources say 8,600. 

Construction of the house called on 1,000 laborers and 60 or 70 stonemasons. Vanderbilt went to Europe to purchase furniture, carpeting, tapestries, artwork and ornaments, much of it antique. The house, covering four acres, was completed in 1895.

Vanderbilt lived there, puttering in experiments in horticulture and animal breeding. In 1898 he married his wife Edith. They had a daughter, Cornelia, who was born at Biltmore.

We drove about three miles from the street entrance to the parking lot, then boarded a shuttle bus to the main campus. The driver said 3,700 visitors were expected that day. We headed first to the gardens and paused to take in the spectacular view of North Carolina’s western mountains, majestic in fall colors.

Near the Conservatory a team of gardeners were uprooting still-blooming chrysanthemums to make space for other things, I guessed a Christmas display.

We toured the Conservatory then walked to the house. The line for entry stretched about three hundred feet. A guy in a three-piece suit scanned our tickets and another staff person handed us an audio device with a keypad. Pressing a number corresponding to a room starts a musical background to introduce a two- or three-minute spiel in a warm female voice describing the space, the furnishings, the artwork. You move on to the next room, press the next number.

The first room was a wide, sunken foyer filled with giant plants. We looked it over and walked through a massive dining area accommodating a nearly-room length table and perhaps 30 chairs. We stared at sitting rooms stuffed with gigantic chairs and sofas, then a library fitted with ceiling-level shelves housing 65,000 volumes.

A portrait of white-haired Cornelius Vanderbilt hung above a ten-foot-high fireplace. He stared down, glowering, as if registering disgust at the spectacle his wealth had created.

We slogged up dozens of concrete steps that curved to the second floor, where we glimpsed a couple of bedrooms separated by a long study filled with furniture and with large desk where, the audio guide told us, George, Edith, and the property manager discussed estate business and planned events. “As was common at the time, the husband and wife occupied separate bedrooms,” the audio voice chirped.

Still on the second floor, we watched a video that offered shots of bedrooms, several furnished with canopied beds, most surprisingly modest yet surrounded, again, by clusters of ornate furniture. In one room we noted a painting of Vanderbilt daughter Cornelia as a young girl, set off by portraits of two unidentified, unsmiling men. 

The crowd wandered through the spaces, most holding their audio devices to their ears. I put mine in my pocket, then left it in a box in the video room. Sandy and I skipped the stairs and took a creaking elevator, operated by a senior citizen in a uniform, to the main floor and left. We sat for a while on a bench.

The crowded hustled through a café and souvenir shop. Shoppers browsed through teeshirts, sweatshirts, jackets, jewelry, blankets, Christmas tree ornaments, and other knickknacks labeled “Biltmore.” Samples of Biltmore wine were available in thimble-sized paper cups. I tried the pumpkin cider.

We moved on to the Antler Hill Village, site of several restaurants, the Biltmore Winery, and Inn at Biltmore. We were hungry, but the restaurants were closed. A food truck sold sandwiches.

We headed to the parking lot, tired after the visual onslaught of house-sized rooms crammed with stuffed furniture, massive doors, drapes, chandeliers, jungle-sized plants, giant portraits of Vanderbilts.

The Vanderbilts hosted a continuing parade of prominent people and celebrities. The novelist and designer Edith Wharton, critiquing Breakers and other monuments to wealth in Newport wrote, “I wish the Vanderbilts didn’t retard culture so very thoroughly. They are entrenched in a sort of Thermopylae of bad taste, from which apparently no force on earth can dislodge them.” Yet she called Biltmore a “divine landscape.”

I thought of photos I’ve seen of Trump’s Oval Office. I imagined Elon Musk’s house, which of course I’ve never seen. George Vanderbilt and his crew outdid them both. I thought of all the money spent on Biltmore, a monument to that stretch of American history defined by the euphemism, “Gilded Age.”

It was getting dark. We jumped on the winding four-mile woodland road out of the place, fought through local traffic to I-26, and headed home.

November 2, 2026

The wedding reception in the middle of the Massanutten Forest seemed a dream. Longtime friends smiled, hugged, and told their stories under the pavilion at Caroline Furnace camp, a spot in the middle of Fort Valley, Virginia. We didn’t know all of the 200 people there, but it seemed we did.

The wedding was the first reason for the trip. Like everyone else who showed up, we could not miss the connection with the people and the place. Fifteen or sixteen years have passed since my first visit to the camp, which is a church camp borrowed by trail runners each May for staging a 100-mile trail race. Many, like me, never finished the race, but took away the mysterious magic that rises from the forest and mountains.

Fort Valley is 30 miles of rolling country nestled between the eastern and western Massanutten ridges that rise over Fort Valley Road, U.S. 678, the winding two-lane between Strasburg and two gravel pathways called Crisman Hollow and Morland Gap. The asphalt becomes Camp Roosevelt Road, which circles east into a steep drop, then into Luray. The descent shows off the stunning Shenandoah Valley out to the deep-green peaks of the national park.

Shenandoah Park draws the crowds. There are picnic areas, well-manicured trails, tourist gathering places. There is wildlife.

The Massanuttens, 10 miles west of Shenandoah, isn’t a park. Few beyond the locals visit.  The west ridge looms above the road, the east ridge rises a mile beyond the wide pastures and stretches for miles through the deep green. Heading north or south, the occasional vehicle passes a hiker, farmer, or newcomer recently resettled from some crowded place.

It is one of those places that soothes the heart. You take it with you.

We spent our last weekend with friends Pat and Mike in Strasburg, north of Fort Valley. Their farmhouse kitchen window offers a photo-perfect view of Signal Knob, a 2,000-foot granite tower, the majestic northernmost high point of the Massanuttens.

Mike and I drove to Winchester to see George Washington’s office, which he used as a surveyor and later as a British officer. The city is full of history, dating to the 1750s, when England and France, supported by Indian allies, fought to control Virginia and Ohio territories. During the Civil War Union and rebel forces fought savage battles near the city for control of major rail lines and the rich Shenandoah Valley farmland.

We walked a few blocks to Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson’s headquarters museum. A docent recited a hagiographic tale of Jackson’s life, leaving out the part about his betrayal of his oath to defend the U.S. Constitution. She gestured at a nondescript couch. “This was Robert E. Lee’s sofa. No one is allowed to sit on it,” she said in a reverential tone. With that we cut short our visit. I did get a photo of the famous Handley Library a block away.

That evening Sandy and I headed for Caroline Furnace. Fort Valley Road skirts Passage Creek, which flows north into the North Fork of the Shenandoah just past Strasburg. We recalled how the creek poured over its banks and across the road after torrential rains days before the race in 2013. The flooding spread to the camp, stranding our van in the mud.

The George Washington National Forest shows up, extending hundreds of miles south through western Virginia past Roanoke. The woods thickened. We slunk along past Elizabeth Furnace and shards of the Massanutten Trail, which loops down from the western ridge, crosses the creek, then winds high up the east ridge.

It was a slow slog as the road turned sharp corners to straightaways that showed off gorgeous pastures along the east ridge, the little churches, firehouse, post office, and general stores. We puttered past the access roads to Powell’s Fort, Veach Gap, and Woodstock Tower, which is perched on a steep cliff looking west, a launching site for paragliders. Here and there new homes had gone up.

From a long way we could make out Duncan Knob, another massive block that looks over the Shenandoah River’s South Fork. Farther along is Gap Creek, where the trail rises to a ridge called Kern Mountain, then meets seven-mile-long Crisman Hollow Road out to U.S. 211, which links Luray with I-81 at New Market.

In the morning we left Strasberg at 8:00 AM and drove the 450 miles home. Interstate 81, down the spine of Virginia, is always spectacular. Woodstock, Edinburg, New Market are markers. Harrisonburg, Stanton, Lexington, Roanoke, Christiansburg follow. From Fort Chiswell, I-77 leads to Charlotte. We made Greer, South Carolina, at 5:00 PM.

The home front has been bracing for election day. The signs are out, Darline Graham, Republican and Annie Andrews, Democrat for U.S. Senator. Graham’s name is in delicate cursive, I guessed to accent the candidate’s gender. Few others litter the roadsides, Republicans running for local offices are unopposed and don’t need to campaign.

We passed from the red-state culture to blue, then back. We watched the North Carolina piedmont transition to Virginia forest, then to mid-Atlantic passageways. On an afternoon we sat at the Glen Rock Duck Pond in North Jersey, catching our breath, a moment of quiet.

The morning after the return there was a CT scan. We read the radiologist’s report, now look ahead to the next one. We had Fort Valley for a while, the forest wedding, the friends who sipped coffee with us. Precious connections sustain us. We watch the years flash by in the eyes of those close. We whispered a prayer, got some rest.

October 26, 2026

It had been at least five years. Ridgewood, New Jersey, once home, now is an alien place. But then, everything changes, becomes unrecognizable. What was familiar and comforting has been replaced. Long-ago neighbors are gone, the new ones are strangers.

From South Jersey we found I-295, which runs north through several western counties to Trenton. We stayed with it to Bordentown then picked up the Turnpike to exit 11, the Garden State Parkway. The 15-year-old EZ pass died, we paid cash at the toll booths.

We left the parkway at the first Bergen County exit at Fairlawn. One turn leads to U.S. 4, ten miles of fast road eastbound to the George Washington Bridge, spanning the Hudson to New York. I recalled the bus stop at a gas station at the Rte. 4 overpass, where my father waited for a New Jersey Transit commuter bus to the city most work days for 35 years. Neither the bus stop nor the gas station remain.

We crossed into Ridgewood and passed the square little Cape Cod my younger brother owned for decades. On Newcomb, two streets farther along, we stopped in front of the square little Cape Cod where I lived as a kid. The grass was richly green, no doubt cared for by a lawn service.

The neighborhood, once all square little homes with one bath, now is pocked by fake mansions, some with giant decks, facades, columns. Original structures have been built over or demolished and replaced by monsters, fitted with giant windows and peaked roofs.

Ridgewood, with its stock of lovely homes, some more than 100 years old, had over decades become a nesting place for New York’s financial community, investment bankers, stockbrokers, traders, Tom Wolfe’s “masters of the universe.” Money transformed the place into a ghetto of ostentatious wealth. The median home value is above $1.2 million.

Expensive restaurants and boutiques crowded out the dime stores and lunch counters. Pricey imported cars clog the streets. The downtown movie theater became an arts center. The grounds of the town swimming pool, long a retreat for strolling, now are fenced and gated.

The parish church near the town center has installed large video monitors high on the front walls, I guessed to ensure the folks in the rear pews don’t miss anything, the church is that long. The parochial elementary school across the street, which closed long ago, now is something else. The site of the fire house on the next block is occupied by a parking garage.

We got lunch at the Daily Treat, my mom’s favorite hangout for years. It was early afternoon and quiet, a few seniors were scattered at the tables, the servers were three white-haired guys. We fit in, but the place felt old, tired, exhausted.

We threaded our way north to Franklin Lakes, which resembles Ridgewood with more forest and less traffic, passing through the little suburbs of Ho-Ho-Kus, Waldwick, and Wykoff. Christ the King cemetery is gorgeous, unchanged since 1984, when we first visited for my dad’s funeral. We found the parents’ and brother Bob’s graves and whispered a prayer.

We stayed with sister-in-law Maria in Fairlawn and got caught up with her and the kids, Joseph and Christine, who’s training for this weekend’s New York Marathon, her third.

In the morning the Parkway south was a fast rush hour through industrial Bergen. We crossed the Passaic River to Passaic County, Clifton, the Oranges, Clark, Perth Amboy, into Monmouth County. We left at exit 109, Red Bank and Linden, and turned onto Half-Mile Road. An enormous Marriott hotel sits at the intersection. The office building where I worked in 1986 had vanished.

Downtown Red Bank sits along the wide Navesink River. We passed Riverview Hospital, where our youngest, Kathleen, was born. We picked up River Road past Riverside Garden Park. A mile farther on is Harrison Avenue. We counted addresses to 104. The house, still blue, showed care, new landscaping, a deck, attractive trim. We recalled the moving van parked in front in June 1986, then again in June 1987, when we moved out.

A fence on the south side of the house encloses a subdivision, built probably thirty years ago, that replaced the pleasant wooded tract we enjoyed as renters. Our landlord had petitioned the borough for a variance to subdivide the property for development. It was initially denied, but he kept at it until they gave in.

By late morning Broad Street, Red Bank’s main thoroughfare was busy. We parked, fumbled with the parking computer, then walked south, past the old Fidelity Federal Bank building where we had received approval for a mortgage. The closing was just days away when we canceled. Fidelity has been replaced by a couple of financial planners.

Broad, like East Ridgewood Avenue, is a mix of cute boutiques, cafes, restaurants, a Starbucks. We stopped at St. James parish church. It seemed unchanged from ‘87, when Kathleen was baptized there, Laura was in second grade at the parish school. Michael was set to start kindergarten; that didn’t happen.

One Saturday evening Mass we sat with the kids, who were restless and finicky. An old man in the pew behind us touched my shoulder, motioned at the kids and said, “You’re a wealthy man.”

We knelt for a few minutes then headed back to the car, others were circling, looking for scarce parking. I tried to recall a shortcut that avoided traffic, but got turned around and zigzagged among dead-end streets. Eventually we got out of town.

The Parkway took us six miles south to I-195, a fast no-tolls east-west route across Jersey’s famous Pine Barrens. Forest, swamps, a few isolated houses and farm plots showed up. I had read the Barrens is an interesting place, worth a visit. Maybe next time.

October 19, 2026

We passed through Charlotte on I-85 mid-morning Friday, getting a look at the brand-new data centers being born across northern South Carolina and into North Carolina. The target was son Michael’s place in Collingswood, New Jersey.

The Charlotte rush hour was light. A marker for us is Belmont Abbey College, just west of the city. The campus chapel, topped by a tall steeple, is just off the interstate. Our youngest girl, just married out in Idaho, graduated from the school 15 years ago. Back then, Idaho, Wyoming, and Colorado were not on her destination list. Things change.

The Carolina piedmont stretches north through Kannapolis, Greensboro, Elon, Durham, Raleigh, Chapel Hill, the college and research centers, the heart of the state, roughly equidistant from the rugged country west of Asheville and the beach towns south of Wilmington. There’s a Vietnam veterans memorial at one rest area, but the interstate is the interstate.

We moved through Durham and settled in for the near-empty stretch north of Lake Gaston, just south of the state line. The extra lane disappears after Butner, forest crowds the highway for 80 or so miles. South Hill is the first Virginia milestone, followed by Meredithville, Alberta, Rawlings, before the shift to I-95. Rush hour builds into Petersburg.

Six years ago we walked the Petersburg battlefield, actually there are three. It was a ghastly nine months for both sides. This was June 1864-April 1865, when three Union armies were mowing down the surrounded, starving rebels. It ended in April when Lee rode into Appomattox, but the Confederate “Lost Cause” myth lingers. It may have been born at Petersburg.

Near Richmond Phillip-Morris has tented over its giant Marlboro cigarette statue, maybe to tone down the company’s image as a manufacturer of addictive poison.

Beyond a slight rise the Richmond skyline shows up, the state capitol now obscured by a rush of highrise construction in recent years. I took it as a sign of new optimism in the state, which still has a hold on me after 33 years. The highway gridlock seemed, well, normal.

We picked up speed around Ashland, past the King’s Dominion amusement park at Doswell, where Sandy took the kids a half-dozen times. Well before Fredericksburg the southbound traffic slowed. The long-distance Washington commuters slogged past, those who thought they’d escape the suburban swamp by settling 50 or more miles south of the Beltway. Instead they’ve extended rush hour nearly to Richmond.

Fredericksburg now is a monster of mini-highways lined with strip malls and pocked with traffic lights. This is the segment that sits along the interstate a half-dozen miles from Old Town, where a touch of history and cute boutiques spawned massive sprawl east, west, north to Stafford. Traffic clogged the right lane as drivers exited wherever they could to jump on old Route 1.

The signs for the Quantico Marine Base showed up at Russell Road, the eastbound route past Chopawamsic Creek to the base, where so long ago I spent a hard couple of years at Office Candidate School and Comm School, eased by happy hours at the Officers Club. Westbound is Camp Barrett, the legendary Basic School or TBS, where second lieutenants endure six months learning infantry tactics in mud and forest, suffocating in summer, freezing in winter.

We inched past the Corps’ National Museum, which captures the cauldron of triumph and anguish of Marine history, Tripoli to Belleau Wood to Iwo Jima, Khe Sanh, Fallujah and Helmand Province. Nearby, brave men and women rest at Quantico National Cemetery.

We passed Prince William Forest Park, where I aced my Basic School orienteering exam and ran dozens of races across the park’s 15,000 acres over more than a dozen years.

We stayed at longtime friends Christine’s and Alex’s place in Lake Ridge, just south of the Occoquan River. Alex was in Boston with elder daughter Katie for the Head of the Charles, the country’s premier crew event, Katie is a star, heading for a Division-1 university.

Christine made dinner, we stayed up afterward recalling family, kids’ achievements, work, races, travel, faith. The family will be heading to Hawaii in January for Alex’s 18th running of the Hawaii Ultrarunning 100-miler. We left early, planning to return mid-week.

We plowed up I-95 and -395 through D.C., the decades-old route, across the Beltway back to I-95, through Baltimore. We reached Philly, heading for the Walt Whitman bridge over the Delaware to Jersey, missed it, swung around on city streets to the Ben Franklin bridge.

Collingswood emerges from Camden County’s industrial-highway swamp, an island of stylish old homes, cafes, bookshops, churches. We strolled Haddon Avenue, “restaurant row,” and browsed small businesses, a rebuilt furniture place, curiosity shops. Michael’s third-floor two-level walkup is built into an old church that retains the stained glass, I guessed Episcopalian.

I grew up in Bergen County, opposite New York; South Jersey is mostly foreign country.  I visited the Lockheed Martin ship radar plant in Moorestown for work a couple of times and did an overnight in Atlantic City for a friend’s Marine Corps wetting down when he made colonel.

Years later Sandy and I spent a short weekend in Cape May for a whale-watching trip, an anniversary gift from the kids. We saw no whales, the next day we rushed across the deep-south Jersey cranberry farmland to the Memorial Bridge.

By late afternoon Collingswood was chilly and windy. Michael made dinner, we got caught up with him. We hit the Turnpike this morning heading north to Ridgewood and Fairlawn in Bergen. Parents Joe and Patricia, and brother Bob Walsh lie in Christ the King cemetery in Franklin Lakes. We’ll stop for a prayer.

October 12, 2026

The scene captures mountains, sea, and forest, set off by white mist. The moon glows above the mountains, which appear pale, their summits rising above the mist in the distance, which is impossible to determine. The water is glassy-calm, mirror-like.

We passed this place on the ship last month, plowing through the Inside Passage, which is the tourist route to and from Alaska, Vancouver, and Seattle. The attraction is the view of glaciers and mountains. More than that, remoteness, the stark wildness of nature, which may bring the senses either to wonder or trepidation.

I could not sleep, keyed up by various things. The cruise was supposed to be an antidote to all that.  I stepped out on the deck, I could feel the ship’s gentle movement, ahead under ten knots.

The moon illuminated the channel in a shimmering river of light. It was an image of purity, the air crisp and clean, nature left alone. Inside, Sandy slept, her breathing hushed and even. Others may have been awake and watching, I heard nothing. The vastness of the panorama, the shining water merged with dark, rugged forest-covered spits of land, overpowered small thoughts, pettiness, memories.

Months earlier, restless, I sat on the foredeck of a river craft on the Mekong River in Vietnam at 4:00 AM. I had walked down the passageway and pushed through the hatch to the narrow landing one deck above the bow. The boat rode at anchor midriver. A mile to the east the lights of the little river town of Cai Be glowed through the blackness.

The impressions are indelible. Some sights can’t be forgotten.

We did the Alaska sick call in Skagway, then all that ended. We made it to Idaho, but things must be done, appointments kept. We thought about New Jersey. The destination would be the Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia, meaning I-85 through North Carolina to I-95 in Virginia and around Washington to Philly, then the Commodore Barry Bridge over the Delaware.

Years ago we’d drive from Virginia to North Jersey, which meant 95, a punishing trip through Baltimore, into and out of Delaware and across the giant Delaware Memorial Bridge. From the bridge, on a clear day, the towers of Philadelphia are faintly visible to the north. Just below on the Jersey side is the DuPont Chemical megacomplex. Beyond the bridge are the Turnpike and I-295, which loops west up to Trenton.

We’ve done the trip many times. North Jersey was home for me as a kid. Forty years ago we moved from Nashville to Red Bank in Monmouth County, a sort of New York landing zone, 40 miles from the city. Our youngest girl was born there. Second daughter Marie was a toddler. The older two kids, in cute uniforms, went to the local parish school.

Red Bank offered promise, a settled community of well-kept homes clustered along the Navesink River with a busy, prosperous downtown. We rented a place a mile from the shops and restaurants, the kids made friends up and down the street.

It came apart when the federal contractor that hired me lost its biggest contract. Six of us, the contract team, were out on the street. I bought my first computer, an AT&T box with 12KB of memory that ran WordPerfect and Lotus, and started publishing semi-monthly Defense Technology Viewpoint. A few months later New Jersey lost its meaning. We found the house in Virginia and moved out of the rental a year to the day after we moved in.

The Jersey year detached us from the South. The kids picked up something of their Jersey grandmother’s New York roots, her interest in culture, history, world affairs. They escaped the mediocre Tennessee schools. Northern Virginia worked out as a tradeoff, close to multicultural D.C., and good schools, balanced by exploding suburban sprawl and perpetual traffic gridlock. That was 1987.

In following years Virginia tried to relieve congestion by building the Springfield Interchange and widening I-95 between Woodbridge and Washington. The project created high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes restricted to vehicles carrying four occupants, the driver and three passengers—later reduced to three occupants.

The HOV lanes gave birth to the “slug” system, whereby drivers without enough passengers would pick up strangers—“slugs”—to use the restricted lanes. “Slugging” became a way of life for Northern Virginia bureaucrats, a sort of regional cultural eccentricity.

Now, back in the South, the work-school-college years are a sort of blur. We recall vaguely the trip to London for the Farnborough Air Show in 1988, then Paris for the Paris Air Show in 1989. The crash-landing of a Soviet Mig-29 fighter (the USSR still existed) at Paris stands out, for some reason. We went to Rome in 2003 for an anniversary and got to the papal audience in St. Peter’s Square. We found a good spot in the crowd, Pope John Paul II stared down at us.

We went back to Tennessee over the years, to a lakeside cabin near Sandy’s hometown a couple of times. We ran road races, the Nashville marathon eight times, and showed up at weddings and funerals. Sandy’s mom passed in 2015, her sister and brothers-in-law a couple of years ago. We’ve done the family reunions.

The view of the Alaska moon, the water, the mist, the mountains, from my perch on the ship’s upper deck returns and lingers. It seems at the moment to overpower memory, as if the vista of nature’s majesty draws us away from the past. We struggle to move forward, holding on to the beauty of the moment.  

Maybe we’ll do the Inside Passage cruise again someday, and stand again looking out in the moonlight. Probably not. Memories survive or fade. Nature and its beauty, its mystery and lessons, may remain.