Westminster

August 18, 2025

We were in Westminster, Maryland, for just a few hours to honor a giant. Alan, a leader of men and women who love mountains, had just left us. Hundreds of friends and admirers showed up at a memorial service in his hometown, tucked just below the Pennsylvania state line.

We didn’t hesitate to make the trip. Alan was a tough guy, tough by being gentle, soft-spoken.  He wasn’t an everyday friend, but for years I saw him three for four times a year. A Maryland native, a craftsman with wood, he spent lots of time in Virginia’s mountains. He ran long trail races and did other hard physical things, but smiled at strangers, offered good words to anyone. His life defined kindness, serenity, peace.

We took a new route, I-85 to I-77, which extends north from Charlotte to Wytheville, Virginia, the turn point onto I-81. The Viriginia welcome center host sold us on detouring through Hillsville to visit the Rock Hill General Store on U.S. 100. We passed through Hillsville, found the place and walked through the eclectic offerings of tools, souvenirs, hard candy, along with a tour busload of old folks. We passed on the free soda.

Route 100, the detour back to I-81, winds through another of Virginia’s many stretches of woods and pastures separated by a few fundamentalist churches and gas stations. We sped through Sylvatus and Barren Springs and crossed the New River, at a point before it widens and quickens into white water. The pretty, empty country refreshed us after the interstate truck grind from Charlotte.

Traffic crawled through Harrisonburg up through New Market, a rural rush hour. We exited at Mount Jackson-Bayse onto U.S. 11, which passes through familiar places, Woodstock and Edinburg, Toms Brook, venerable, pretty spots in the shadow of the Massanutten Ridge. We visited with friends Pat and Mike at their farmhouse in Strasburg, just off the Shenandoah North Fork. From their kitchen window they look out at the dark silhouette of 2,000-foot Signal Knob, the northern tip of the range.

On the first morning a few folks from the old Virginia running group gathered at the base of the mountain and set off on the trail, which curls up for four miles in switchbacks more rock than soil. The fast young people sprinted ahead. At the summit I caught my breath and stared north and west at the panorama of farmland out to the West Virginia peaks.

The gravelly fire road dropped steeply into thick Virginia forest. No sound broke the serenity. After a mile the road intersects the narrow Tuscarora trail, which winds, littered with Massanutten rocks, up the western ridge. I breathed hard. At the top arrows on a worn signpost gave directions. I skipped down for four miles and finished alone.

The climb had been planned, but the gasping, out-of-breath scramble over endless boulders seemed somehow the right gesture at the time of our farewell to Alan. He would have been there, had been there many times, on the hard paths of this mountain range and countless others.

Westminster is tucked in farm country hard by the Pennsylvania border. No major roads reach there. The place is known, oddly, as the site of the famous, or infamous farm of Whittaker Chambers. In the darkness of the 1930s Chambers was a member of the American Communist Party. Years later he rejected communism and in August 1948 publicly accused high-ranking State Department official Alger Hiss of being a Soviet spy.

Initially no one believed Chambers. He produced documents he had hidden in a pumpkin on his Westminster farm. The documents, dubbed the “Pumpkin Papers,” incriminated Hiss. He was convicted of perjury in January 1950, and served nearly four years in prison.

All that aside, we navigated into Loudon County through traffic-choked Leesburg to the Point of Rocks bridge on U.S 15, which took us to Frederick. From there we guessed our way, groping northwest out into farm country, passing miles of corn, pastures, barns, through Woodsboro, New Midway, and Ladiesburg to Keymar, then east to the fringe of Westminster.

The place is near the Hashawa Hills Bear Branch Nature Center, where Alan and his family and friends spent lots of time. He put on a trail running event at Hashawa in February, when winter in Westminster gets cold, with deep snow. In 2015, when I showed up, it was -5F.

The service was wrapping up but we met with Pam and friends, many young guys and gals and their kids, community folks. Then some with as many decades as ourselves. Paul, Greg, Anstr, Quatro, Kevin had stayed into the last few moments. We talked a bit in recollection, which is what happens at these meetings, but also of new things, plans, work life. Everyone looked well. We browsed the photos which did justice to Alan, his family, and his life.

Slowly, folks made their way to the parking lot and back through the winding green byways of Carroll County. We could have avoided “historic” Westminster, but we plowed through the quiet streets of frame rowhouses and gorgeous Victorians. A fountain ringed by benches and lovely oaks centered Westminster City Park. We parked, I walked a bit through the small-town peacefulness. It seemed to summon thoughts of Alan.

We bore down on the roads, avoiding Frederick, tacking southwest into the maw of Greater Washington. I saw signs for Montgomery County, the nexus of Maryland’s most affluent D.C. suburbs, also of intensely gridlocked traffic, which is I-270. We paused before falling into the Sunday afternoon rush hour. Traffic crawled eventually across the Cabin John Bridge.

Our sojourn into the serenity of pastoral Maryland, just south, really from Hanover, Pennsylvania, came to an abrupt end. We looked back with a bit of regret, it had been too quick, somber yet full of meaning. A good man left us. He brought people to gather in beautiful, quiet places, greet each other with warmth, talk of hopeful things, and move forward.