August 24, 2020
We made it to Widewater State Park last week, getting out the way of the paint crew. The point wasn’t to see Widewater, exactly, but a slice of Virginia—the Potomac shore—that doesn’t get much attention. The place abuts the desolate riverbank maybe 20 winding miles south of Quantico, 25 miles north of Fredericksburg. The drive is kind of a chore, off U.S. 1, then local roads into thick woods, vernal in the summer humidity. You see a few homes, then trees and fields, a CSX track cut straight through forest, a few more lonely-looking houses, more trees. I can’t remember more than two other cars in 20 miles.
As we struggle to extricate ourselves from Virginia—at this point, departure is still in our heads—I recognize, and regret, that we’ll leave without walking through and learning from the mystery and power of so many of the wild, beautiful places around us. But then, everyone moves on. Experience of any place always is incomplete, finite. Our time is finite.
Not much was going on at Widewater. Kayaking and a short hiking trail are all that’s available. We saw exactly one person in the parking lot, a woman going for a run on the trail. We drove in, looked around, then left and headed to Fredericksburg. We checked that box, a minor one, and moved on.
The drive reminded me of my visits, years ago, to the Navy base at Dahlgren, on the river farther south. The Navy tests new shipboard deck guns there by firing them over the river, it’s that wide. Those trips, along State Road 218, took me through similar terrain, maybe with a bit more up and down. But the state’s Potomac shores don’t resonate much. Geography isolates the area, miles east of I-95. Fredericksburg, the nearest city, gets along on tourism and the retirement industry. The miles of woodland along the east-west backroads fill up with lush, fast-growing plant life in the stifling summers, thick masses of kudzu and other vinery. The Potomac, shallow, slow-moving, murky (but semi-clean, it’s now reported), gives the region a thick jungle-like feel. Although an outsider, I get the sense that not much ever happens here.
If you head farther south beyond Dahlgren on 218 you get to Colonial Beach, another off-the-main-road, more or less seedy place where some folks go for long weekends. We spent the night in a beat-up B&B there some years ago, on a detour to somewhere else. Neglect is the word that occurred to me. A casino disguised as an old paddlewheeler sat offshore, technically in Maryland, where gambling is legal. (The Virginia-Maryland boundary is at the Virginia shoreline, so the body of the river is in Maryland.) I hear the casino’s long gone.
Further on, you’re in the rural Northern Neck. Twenty-five years ago the bishop of Arlington, wanting to get rid of a controversial young priest, packed him away to Kilmarnock, the far southern end of the Neck, at the only parish for many miles. And I mean many miles. I heard of him again maybe two years ago, now in a mountain parish on the opposite side of the state.
Potomac Virginia leaves light footprints. Moving south from D.C., you have tourist-overrun Old Town Alexandria, now mostly famous for its real estate values. Then majestic Mount Vernon, directly across from Fort Washington, part of the capital’s Civil War defense, never needed. Next is the Army post, Fort Belvoir. Then not much for the few miles to Pohick Bay and Mason Neck parks, mainly circuitous hiking trails hard along Belmont Bay.
Down from Mason Neck, a stretch of swampy woods, the Occoquan and Featherstone “wildlife refuges” line the shore. They’re bordered by several miles of Woodbridge’s finest auto-repair shops and an Amtrak-CSX track in a neighborhood where no one wants to live. Leesylvania State Park is a nice spot, with a marina and walking trails, but as with the other river-border parks, not worth (to me) the price of admission. Then you come to Quantico, “Q-town,” the three-street afterthought with a rail station next to the Marine Corps base, the “Crossroads of the Corps.” Again, farther on, not much. Then Widewater.
I know we’ll depart this neighborhood eventually, after 33-plus years, having spent most of our non-working days, weeks, and months missing the unique stories that surround us. I don’t know much of it, but history surely was made in these near-empty rivershore places. Colonial troops tramped through those forests in 1781 en route to Yorktown to defeat British General Cornwallis, ensuring the new nation would be born. In early 1862 Union General George McClellan reluctantly sailed his Army of the Potomac downriver to Fort Monroe for the Peninsula campaign, eventually a humiliating failure. Lincoln fired him soon thereafter.
That’s the famous, or relatively famous history, the big-war history. I know that if we poked around a bit more, we’d stumble on unique stories of ordinary folks, not generals or even colonels, who lived productive lives here, but now are forgotten. I think about that as I recall stories of another Virginia culture, the mountain people of the Shenandoahs, who worked small subsistence farms and mines until they were pushed off their property in the early 1930s, when the feds established the National Park. No one thinks about them any more.
So appreciation and regret are colliding for us: the spruce-up of the house comes along with a blank slate, the future somewhere else. The plan now is to persevere, to figure these things out, without being distracted by the perversions of government we read about every day, which become more bizarre every day. The Democrats assure us things will be OK in November, when Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Xi Jinping lose their guy in the White House, along with the sniveling criminals and moral gnomes who work for him.
That would play well in these parts. It’s still a crapshoot. Today, setting aside all that, we’re counting the blessings we see around us while seeking the stories around us, hoping to learn from those stories lessons that will endure, here or anywhere.
On the Road 