July 1, 2024

Accidents happen, we all say. You and your wife or husband and extended family and friends may go for years without a scratch on their fenders. Then Boom! You’re exchanging insurance information with some other driver. Or the experience may be worse, far worse.

We all know about the appalling human cost of auto accidents. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reported 40,990 traffic deaths in the U.S. in 2023, actually a decrease of about 2,000 from 2022. Beyond fatalities is the litany of further tragedy, serious injuries and costs of medical care for victims, and sometimes years-long trauma.

The economic costs are the next punishment—enormous sums laid out for repairs, some covered by insurance, some not, legal costs, the bickering with insurance, replacements for totaled vehicles. Then the deductibles and rate hikes for people who file insurance claims. And so on.

Twelve years ago Sandy skidded on an icy highway ramp, the car scrunched against the ramp. No injuries, but the car was totaled. Years earlier I collided with another car, no injuries, both vehicles still drivable, but everything else, waiting for the police, a traffic ticket, repairs, higher insurance rates: scary, nerve-wracking, expensive. But you don’t swear off driving. If you live in the suburbs you need your car.

You almost always stay lucky. We grind our teeth at the guy following too close and yell when somebody cuts us off or merges without signaling, but the vast majority of drivers reach their destinations in one piece, day after day. The morning and evening news reports are full of coverage of road “incidents.” Traffic reporting is by itself an industry. But in any community a tiny minority are involved. Rush hour flows slowly, but usually safely.

Even so—everyone has their awkward car story, or sobstory. We pulled into a a Stop ‘N Go to pick up bottled water. I ran in and ran out, climbed back in the passenger’s seat. Sandy backed out. Then the crunch. The parking lot had a slight upgrade. A car parked in a space twenty feet behind us was not clearly visible to her, maybe our rear-view mirror was out of line. But we crunched. She let out a yell and pulled forward. We jumped out.

The woman who owned the other car, a white 2021 Subaru Outback, had just parked and was halfway to the store entrance. She turned and walked towards us. “Oh dear!” she said, or something like that. Sandy was upset. She apologized, and apologized again.

The white-haired lady was pleasant and understanding. “I turned around and thought, is that my car? But it’s not that bad,” she said. “It could happen to anyone.” She and Sandy talked, slowly calming down. “I’m seventy,” she added, for no clear reason.

“I’ve always driven BMWs, but I got this Subaru because it’s supposed to be safe,” she said. “I guess we need to exchange insurance information?” I walked to our car and retrieved our insurance card. She reached into her glove box and rummaged around for hers.

I looked at the rear of the Subaru from ten or so feet away, it looked okay. I got closer. The bumper was scratched, with black marks against the white surface. Looking closer still, the panel next to the bumper above the right rear wheel had separated an inch or two from the body.

From where I stood the rear end of our car also appeared intact, but from closer the right side of the bumper was punched in, the ride side panel pushed slightly out. A tail light was smashed, the red glass in pieces on the ground.

We all recognized what had happened, really not much. The NHTSA doesn’t count this kind of accident. Two vehicles, only one moving, one occupied, the other empty. No complicated circumstances, no rain or fog or alcohol or distracting other traffic. A collision. Not much of a collision. But still.

It was high noon, about 95F. The sun blazed down on us. The lady seemed not to notice the heat. She suddenly reached for her cellphone and said she needed to call her husband. We waited while they talked. “He wants us to call the police,” she said. We shook our heads. “We’re in a store parking lot, they won’t come,” one of us said. She nodded. “My husband Bob is coming, he’s just a few minutes away. He’s eighty.” I nodded, puzzled at that.

We stood, sweating. Ten minutes later Bob drove into the lot. I didn’t know what to expect, but he shook my hand, then looked at the damage and shrugged, as if to ask what’s the big deal.

We took photos of each other’s insurance cards. We were all the same ages or close, we could have been friends. But we waved and drove away. At home I called the insurance company. After waiting on hold for a bit, I was transferred to someone. I scribbled her directions and gave her the other driver’s insurance information.

Later that afternoon an adjuster called and made an appointment for us at a local body shop. “You have a $500 deductible, we pay the rest,” she said. “We’ve reached out to the other driver.”

I thought I could hear in her voice a note of—well, boredom. A back-in to a parked car in a parking lot. Not exactly high drama to an insurance adjuster. As trivial as they get, she probably was thinking.

The damage was bumper work, barely visible, but had to be done. Not traumatic, not life-changing, but our accident, our 12-year-old Volkswagen versus her three-year-old Outback. I guessed the body shop guys would look at our bumper and exchange puzzled looks. They would jump right on repairing the nearly new, stylish Outback.

We’d meet our deductible and hold our breath waiting for the rate increase. Eventually we’d get our car back with the bumper good as new. We’d keep driving it, maybe a bit nervously. We’ll take care to adjust the rear-view mirror, and watch out for white-haired ladies in parking lots.

June 24, 2024

A year ago we were still talking about our wood picket fence replacement. Finally we chose the contractor who gave us a discount. We were relieved to get it done. Later I noticed some of the segments were a little out of line, some installed higher in the earth than others. Was it the slope of the terrain? Or me picking the low bidder and not checking his work.

The new fence was treated for moisture protection, so we thought. Now the anchor posts, pickets, and crossbars were dark and gray. The contractor had quoted $500 for painting, another guy said $800. As usual with home improvement, we put it off.

Here we encountered the homeowner’s perennial conundrum: which repairs and upgrades do you contract out and which do you attempt? After all, people who would never unclog a toilet will hammer a nail to hang a picture, or even mow the lawn. Actually, around here few people mow lawns. Our next-door neighbor, whose postage-stamp-size lawn is smaller than ours, contracts for mowing.

At the time, $800 or even $500 seemed like a lot to paint our fence, which is all of 185 feet long across level ground. Now, a year later, it would cost more. So—obviously, that is, to me—this would be “do it yourself.” It would involve no climbing or heavy lifting. It was not time-sensitive—we already had let it go a year. It would require no complicated, expensive tools or materials. It’s painting, after all.

We’re veteran painters. Over 20 years we painted the interior walls of our Virginia house two or three times. The worst of it was covering a rich, deep red with light gray. The red shone through one coat of the gray, even with primer, then two coats. Eventually we needed five coats, drawing our rollers over the same square footage again and again. Lesson: never paint your walls red.

You can gaze at something you want to change in or around your home and envision the work completed. We had looked at the deep red of our walls we had tired of and saw instead the delicate light gray we had chosen to replace it. Now I stared out at the dingy gray pickets and saw them as bright, glowing white. But we had to actually do the work.

At Home Depot I asked the paint guy for three gallons of white. Three gallons seemed like a start. He reached beneath the shelves and pulled out a five-gallon drum and carried it to the counter. “Five gallons works out cheaper,” he said. He lifted it into my shopping cart, and this was a skinny guy.

In the parking lot I strained to lift the drum into the van, it must have weighed 100 pounds. I heaved it in and stood for a moment catching my breath. At home I lifted it out and paused again, gasping. I shoved it in the garage.

Part of the DIY plan was to hire the grandsons, pay them a few bucks, let them paint for a couple of hours, or until they got tired. They could slap paint on and learn the rewards of work. They could be my Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, I would be Aunt Polly. The ten-year-old proposed $75.00 for two hours’ work. I thought, whoa, let’s talk about it.

That would be a few weeks off. Painting to protect the fence from moisture meant more than slapping paint. The edges of each picket had to be painted. And the crossbars and undersides. And the undersides of the crossbars, both upper and lower.

I walked the length of the fence and counted: 288 individual pickets. Most of the undersides of the pickets were embedded in the soil. That meant excavating an inch or two beneath the surface to unearth them, just to draw a single brush stroke across the underside. Would a contractor do that for a $500 paint job? I don’t think so.

The work suddenly got complicated. Utilities run beneath the yard and beneath the fence. We called the utility people to mark the gas, electrical, and fiber-optic lines so I didn’t cut them with my shovel. They spray-painted the line paths in yellow, red, orange. The orange ran under the fence at a couple of points.

In mid-June South Carolina is hot. One side of the fence is shaded, the other two stand all day in the blazing sun. I had bought the paint ($200.00) and brushes. No turning back. Slowly, deliberately, I started at the north end and brushed grass away from the pickets. One picket, two, three. I dug down, clearing soil. The sun broiled the yard. I gulped water.

I set the shovel down and painted the lower 12 inches and the undersides and edges of the half-dozen pickets I had excavated. I moved on and cleared another half-dozen or so. I quit after an hour, went inside, got out of my dirty, sweaty clothes and sprawled in a chair.

The next day I clipped away the brush and weeds on the easement side of the fence facing the neighbor’s yard, tearing through his overgrown ivy. I pounded away with my shovel, picket after picket, two, four, six, ten.

For the painting I lay on my back on a tarp and daubed at the edges and undersides. I stretched and twisted, reaching behind my head in yoga-like positions to do the hard-to-reach edges. One picket, two, three, and on and on. In the far corner of the yard I tore through weeds and old shrubbery to access the pickets. I dug and painted, dug and painted.

This went on. Days later I finished the shaded side of the yard and emerged in the 85F-plus sunlight. I pulled my tarp forward, painted a few more pickets. At the far end of the yard the pickets were embedded in tough weeds and tree roots. I chopped away with the shovel to get to the picket ends and finished a few more.

Each morning I stirred the paint, poured it in a pail and painted away, dug away, painted a little more, pausing to gulp water. On Father’s Day afternoon I was out there, digging and painting. I turned the last corner of the yard and pruned the sharp leaves of a yucca plant that grew hard against the fence.

The next morning my neck, shoulders, and arms ached, as they had ached for a week. I stirred my paint and grabbed my shovel, the blade now dulled by unearthing thousands of rocks and chopping thousands of tree roots.

I finished the last picket of the final section, which met the gate on the south end of the yard. I tossed the brush on the tarp and leaned on the shovel and looked at the work. The lower 12 inches of each picket gleamed uniformly white, like well-polished teeth. The upper ends remained bare, dingy, waiting for paint. The grandsons will take care of it. That’s the plan.

June 17, 2024

Kim, Mike, Ed, John, and I carried seven 2×4 boards to the center of the workshop and laid them out in the pattern of the side wall of a shed. Two of the pieces, which would form the base and the top of the wall, were 84 inches long, the other five, the wall-support pieces, were 72 inches.

This was the start, the first step. We did this four times to arrange the four walls on the concrete floor. The platform, which would be the floor of the shed, already was complete.

We hammered galvanized three-inch nails into the top and bottom pieces to fasten them to the wall supports. Mike fired longer nails with a nailgun to attach the four wall sides to the platform. The staccato crack! echoed sharply through the place.

We lifted the prefab roof frame pieces into place at the top of the walls, fitting each end into a precut notch. Mike nailed them securely. The shed started to look like a shed.

This is one of the things Habitat for Humanity does in the workshop at the rear of the ReStore, the Habitat-operated thrift store on our side of town. Kim, the workshop manager, directs this team of veteran carpenters, all volunteers, in building ancillary structures that become part of homes Habitat builds for its clients, people who need homes.

Soon it was ten o’clock, Kim called a break. We grabbed bottled water and cookies and chips, and settled into chairs, catching our breath. My shoulders ached from lifting and hammering. We talked about Habitat projects going up in a couple of downtown neighborhoods. With the state primaries approaching, a couple of the guys got into the candidates. Kim listened but said nothing. I nodded and closed my eyes.

Retired folks aren’t all playing pickleball or going on cruises. Some work at projects that pay nothing, but that achieve some good for people who don’t have much, who need a break in life, need to get out of shabby, overpriced apartments in bad neighborhoods. Marginal neighborhoods need new housing. That is Habitat’s mission. To get there, it needs volunteers to step up and contribute. Like these guys, skilled craftsmen, all in their sixties and seventies.  

I got up from the break table and walked, stretching my legs. The workshop is also a warehouse, as long as a basketball arena. Lumber in multiple sizes and cuts is stacked against the side walls. Two long cutting tables stand in the center, covered with sawdust and remnants. A couple of power saws lay on the floor. Supermarket-type shopping carts hold electric drills and jigsaws, hammers, nail aprons, safety glasses. Bins of nails, screws, and fasteners of every size line a back wall.

The business of Habitat surged forward. While the workshop team creates, the thrift store staff are offering pretty good prices to people who shop there, mostly folks with limited income, but others just looking for deals on still-usable stuff. We all know people who buy brand-new things, decide they don’t want them, and drop them, still new or nearly new, at the ReStore. 

 In the long dimly lit corridor between the workshop and the store, employees and volunteers were inspecting donated furniture and appliances, moving stuff from stockrooms to the store shelves, making repairs. Carts of building materials, sheetrock, paneling, shelving, even framed windows in various sizes stood waiting to move to the showroom. A couple of guys were hauling damaged items to the dumpster.

I recall that the inventory at the ReStore near our Virginia home seemed a cut above that at Goodwill, the Salvation Army, and the church-run thrift stores. You could find used and new microwaves, computers, TVs, and kitchen gadgets—can openers, blenders, coffeemakers, and so on—that actually worked. All that displayed alongside the stacks of dinnerware, utensils, and other home goods people buy, use for a while, then donate at the thrift store.

Beyond are racks of clothing—shirts, coats, dresses, sweaters, stuff crammed together, loosely organized by size. Next to the clothing department is furniture, chairs, sofas, tables of every size and type, desks, chifforobes, lampstands, nightstands, bedframes, some of it slightly chipped, but still presentable. People are there, looking for deals.

The team was getting back to work. We lifted the weather-treated particleboard outer wall sections into place. These were precut to the size of our shed. Mike and I took turns with the nailgun fastening them into place. But then, whoops—we got one side out of line. Ed grabbed a claw hammer and pulled the misplaced nails. We took a breath, remeasured, tried again, and got it right. We learned from our screw-up and got the other three sides nailed correctly.

We lifted the prefab upper front and back panels into place and nailed them. Kim walked around, checking each seam, pressing caulk into the nailholes, and there were a lot of them. Still, the roof was missing.

“We’ll shingle it at the site,” Kim said. “Shingles are really heavy, and the mover doesn’t want to move that much weight. They’ll bring their truck in, haul it to the property of the folks who are getting it. Then putting the roof on will only take a couple of hours. Mike and I will do it.”

It had been a four-hour shift, but seemed longer. At other local Habitat sites volunteers may choose morning, afternoons, or all day. Here, the four hours left us beat.

We were hot and tired, but we picked up brooms and swept up the sawdust, wood scraps, and bent nails. Kim settled into her chair and finished paperwork. The shed was the last workshop project for a couple of weeks, although she would be in her office, coordinating, planning, doing management chores. The rest of the team were looking forward to some downtime.

“Thanks, everyone,” Kim said. She pointed to the fridge. “Grab a water and a snack on your way.” We all headed to the door. She smiled and waved. “See you soon.”

June 10, 2024

The people who staff Cancer Survivor’s Park near downtown Greenville put on an expo, giving some publicity to local hospitals and cancer patient support groups. One of them, Casting for Recovery, set up a booth near a quiet inlet of the Reedy River, which runs through the city.

The group offers a novel therapy for breast-cancer patients and survivors: fly fishing. The headquarters is in Bozeman, Mont., but CFR has offices nationwide. Here in the Carolinas women may attend sessions on Lake Logan, near Canton, N.C. They get coaching on fly casting and the chance to catch fish. One woman wrote, “for three days, I put aside all worries of cancer, of chemo-brain and of surgery scars and just thought about fishing. It felt so great to be in the water with sunshine on my face.”

We have family members and friends who lived through breast cancer, so we climbed over the rocks to talk to the CFR folks. One of the staff, Kim, took me to the water’s edge and demonstrated casting with the whip-thin rod. She drew her forearm back without moving her shoulder then extended it quickly. The line, fitted with a tiny hookless fly, flew gracefully.

The organization’s brochure says that “the gentle motion of fly casting can be good physical therapy for increasing mobility in the arm and upper body. Couple that with the emotional benefits of connecting with nature. It’s powerful medicine.”

Certainly all that is true. Fly fishing is said to offer a sublime sense of oneness with the rod, the line, and the natural world, whether the fisherman or woman catches anything or not. Decades ago, on a visit to Montana, I went fly fishing on the rushing Gallatin River with someone who knew what he was doing. I didn’t catch anything but the memory stayed.

Hemingway, in his early story, “The Big Two Hearted River Part II,” hands down the hypnotic attraction of fly fishing and all its mystery and complexity. Nick Adams is in the woods alone.

“Nick took his fly rod out of the leather rod case, jointed it … he put on the reel and threaded the line through the guides. He had to hold it from hand to hand, as he threaded it, or it would slip back through its own weight. It was a heavy, double-tapered fly line.”

Then: “There was a tug on the line. Nick pulled against the taut line. It was his first strike. Holding the now living rod across the current, he brought in the line with his left hand. The rod bent in jerks, the trout pumping against the current. Nick knew it was a small one. He lifted the rod straight up in the air. It bent with the pull.”

Not everyone loves Hemingway, in his later years his slide into alcoholic egomania showed up in his work. But the Nick Adams stories in his early collection, “In Our Time,” set in the Upper Michigan woods, report with eloquence and beauty the mystical allure of fly fishing. 

We’ve been on the fringes of the sport. In 2012 we stayed for a couple of days in Ennis, Mont., about 60 miles southwest of Bozeman. Outside town there’s a sign, “Ennis: Population 800,  10,000,000 Trout.” In the town square a statue of a fly fisherman stands, arm raised, about to cast. Ennis sits along the Madison River, one of the state’s richest trout streams. The little town’s two sporting-goods shops are stocked to outfit the fly fisherman’s every need. You can hire a guide.

We didn’t get around to trying it then. You need the gear, the unique, thin rod, the compact reel, the weighed line. Then the flies. According to sports chain Bass Pro Shops, “Fly tying offers more than just the opportunities to catch fish. Tying flies can be creative self-expression. It can be art. It can be meditation.”

Fly-tying is for some a religious pastime, with rules for types of flies by season, water temperature, materials. You have to know something about the bugs the fish eat, and when they want them. Then too, the clothing, the logistics, licenses, getting there. It’s expensive to travel to Ennis to fish the Madison and other fabled fly-fishing waters of the Far West. It can be expensive to be creative, to meditate.

You don’t have to go to Ennis or Wyoming. Although I haven’t seen any fly fishing near here, Casting for Recovery programs are offered in every state. The point is more casting, more recovery.

As I stood with Kim next to that little pool off the Reedy, she flicked her wrist to whip the line out over the water. As in Hemingway’s story, she turned her thumb up to control the line, guiding it to the exact spot she aimed for. It settled gently on the surface. On my attempt the line collapsed in a tangle at my feet. “You’ll get it eventually,” she said with a grin.

Fly fishing has a starring role in the 1992 Robert Redford movie, “A River Runs Through It.” The film is based on a partly autobiographical novel by Norman Maclean, a University of Chicago scholar with roots in Missoula, Mont. His poignant, tragic story follows the lives of a Presbyterian minister and his sons, Norman and Paul, and their love for fly fishing and graceful artistry with a rod in the gorgeous waters of the Blackfoot River.

At the close, Paul, the troubled brother, battles through white water to land an enormous trout. His father breaks a smile: “You’re a fine fisherman.” Norman narrates: “My brother stood before us suspended above all the earth like a work of art.” He continues: “Life is not a work of art. This moment could not last.” And it doesn’t last.

In the film, the sparkling beauty of the river inspires and guides the lives of the fishermen, even while they confront darkness and pain. Casting for Recovery, with its fly-fishing therapy, reveals the same truth, and the joy of engaging with nature, for understanding, and healing. 

June 3, 2024

We left Fort Valley, Virginia, at 6:30 AM in dim light and pouring rain. The plan was South Carolina by 4 PM. We turned out of Caroline Furnace Camp onto S.R. 675, or Camp Roosevelt Road. The mountain forest bordering the road pressed in, the foliage deep, dense, heavy with the storm.

I squinted through the driving rain and around the sudden bends and turned west on 675, now Edinburg Gap Road. In two miles we passed the natural spring where local folks fill bottles with the pure, cool water that gushes from deep within the earth. For years, when visiting, we stopped at the spring.

The delicious water is part of the magic of the place. Fort Valley isn’t a city, town, or village. It’s captured in the name, a valley that is more of an idea about gorgeous wilderness and farmland framed by a few winding narrow roads. The valley lies between the east and west ridges of the 100-mile long Massanutten Mountain range. Strasburg and Front Royal are the north end, Harrisonburg approximately the south end.  

Strasburg and Front Royal, ten miles apart, are adjoining exits off I-66 near the intersection with I-81, which extends south 325 miles along the western Virginia spine to Tennessee. From westbound 66 past Front Royal, Signal Knob mountain, the northernmost tower of the western ridge, looms on the horizon. Closer in, the Massanuttens stare down. U.S. 55 links the two towns. Halfway along, Fort Valley Road appears.

The road follows fast-moving Passage Creek into mystery, which is the George Washington National Forest. Within a few winding miles the valley opens, lovely farm and pastureland framed against the eastern ridge. At dawn, and I’ve seen it at dawn, the sunlight splays brilliantly but gently down the ridge, across the rich green.

Miles along, a few modest homes appear, along with the Fort Valley Museum, open one or two days each week. The road passes indistinctly defined places, Saint David’s Church (named for an actual church), Seven Fountains, King’s Crossing. These intersect with side roads to oddly named niches in the forest, Powell’s Fort, Veach Gap, Boyer’s Furnace, which beckon to rocky, deep-woods mountain shelters and trails.

Here and there we see signs of new and recent construction. A few folks have abandoned the congestion of northern Virginia and found refuge here, at the end of narrow driveways into thick woods.

Heading south the terrain rises and falls, the eastern ridge high above the pastureland and following the horizon, bounded outside the valley by the Shenandoah River’s South Fork. The ridge offers a miles-long buttress protecting the enchantment of the place from the dreck and neon of outside. Farther along, the ridge rises into a peak loosely called Habron, above a clearing along the Shenandoah called Habron Gap.

On the western side, rich, thick green fields stretch from a high point, Woodstock Tower. The ridge drops steeply, allowing a jump-off for hang gliders and a panoramic view of West Virginia hills ten or so miles away. From the precipice you see the traffic crawling by on I-81.

Fort Valley Road meets 675 at Kings Crossing, just below the valley’s center. It’s then about three miles to Caroline Furnace, a Lutheran retreat center established in 1957. The center offers camps throughout the summer, when we visit in May it’s rented to the Virginia Happy Trails Running Club as operations center for the club’s 100-mile ultra-trail race.

We bunked at the guest house, restored and renewed by the company of good people, mostly old folks like ourselves who used to run races. And like us they now come to help out but mainly to be present with strong young people, to share the sense of the moment of their event, their challenge of giving, courage, sacrifice.

A mile past the camp S.R. 675 intersects with Morland Gap Road, which heads due west, and Crisman Hollow Road, an unpaved gravel surface that winds through more forest to U.S. 211. Crisman is a seven-mile primitive campers’ world and access to more forest trails, Gap Creek and Scothorn Gap, which bisect the valley. Highway 211 returns to civilization, east to Luray, west to New Market, then I-81.  

If you don’t want the interstate you can visit Luray, a small town supported by a big tourist attraction, Luray Caverns. The place, a National Natural Landmark, brings in 500,000 visitors each year, but the town somehow has resisted souvenir and tee-shirt shops. You can stop at a visitor’s center and walk a three-mile greenway. Five miles east on 211 is Shenandoah National Park rises, bisected by spectacular Skyline Drive.

The valley has its workday commuters. Pickups of locals start before dawn for Front Royal offices and Strasburg shops. The valley has no business center, no supermarket, no restaurants. Internet and cell-phone coverage means installing a local router.

Similar places exist throughout rural America. Forest covers much of the country, local people everywhere stand against the onslaught of industry, retail, mining, fracking, and on and on. Fort Valley’s industrial base once consisted of a few pig-iron furnaces, Caroline Furnace, but also Elizabeth Furnace, Boyer’s Furnace and, south of 211, Catherine’s Furnace. These places were abandoned by the Civil War. Stone ruins remain.

Somehow, the serenity lasts, as if outsiders like us had pledged to come only once or twice a year, to step into this universe of quiet pastures and deep forest. To walk these paths and climb these torturous trails is to see nature, wildlife, but hardly ever a human person. A farm truck will rustle down a gravel road. On the Shenandoah side, a few homeowners rent canoes. Campers visit for a week, then leave. The place returns to silence, and its own magic.