May 22, 2023

Rural Retreat, Virginia, is just south of Wytheville along I-81. I’ve flashed by the sign dozens of times over 40-plus years of driving Virginia’s western spine. This time I moved to the right lane, signaled, and turned.

Two miles along, Rural Retreat appeared. A side street, a church, a railroad station. I passed modest homes and large Victorian houses surrounded by brilliant rose bushes. The main street turned onto a hill topped with an enormous orange silo emblazoned, “Rural Retreat.” From the peak of the hill a panorama of vernal pastures reflected the glorious sunlight. Twenty miles out the misty silhouette of the Shenandoahs rose.

In the same way, the mountain views behind me, along I-26 north of Asheville are mesmerizing, the effect of the dark peaks magnified by the near-emptiness of the road. I headed up that way solo last Wednesday. After the Rural Retreat detour I stayed with I-81 to New Market, then U.S. 211 through Luray and for five miles through Shenandoah National Park. The road is well-kept, the climbs and descents as sharp as I remembered.

In late June we’re heading to Franklin County, Tenn., west of Chattanooga, then in July to eastern Pennsylvania.

We no longer avoid interstates, the broken white lines lead us. But the joy of the road is in the local segment as much as and often more than in the destination. The rural roads are where you find serenity, maybe memories. They’re lined with forests, mountains, meadows, and cultivated fields exploding with growth. Open roads show you the country, right now a rich, luminescent green.

We took a back route months ago that seemed like a shortcut to U.S. 11, South Carolina’s southeast-inclined state highway. The road wound through the nearby suburb of Taylors, across the busy retail-clogged highway found in every city or town. Soon we were away from traffic in Pickens County, passing lush pastures where livestock grazed, farmhouses and barns stood in the distance. I don’t remember where we were going. I remember the places we saw getting there.

It’s like that everywhere. Crossing into New Hampshire from Massachusetts on U.S. 3, also called the Everett Turnpike, the tree coverage shifts from mid-Atlantic deciduous to rough New England North, tall pine, thick dark patches of forest. A few homes here and there, then clusters of low-rise office buildings around Nashua. The past races back for me to Manchester, a grubby mill town less than 50 years ago, now still trying to be suburban high-tech.

The pine forests along Rte. 3 haven’t changed, they show up just north of Chelmsford, Mass. They connote for me that intense four-year stretch, the late Sixties, the convulsing years of the peak of the Vietnam nightmare that scarred millions, but now seems even to middle-agers like ancient history. In winter, from our college hilltop the city was hidden by the smog of oil heating, white clouds curling upward above the snow, smothering the city.

Today the mills that belched pollution are apartments, condos, and offices. Interstate 93 still runs through the heart of the city on the west bank of the brown Merrimack River that curdles into angry rapids as it rushes south to pass through Lowell and Lawrence. The forest breaks around Concord, then becomes thicker and darker again approaching the White Mountains.      

We had a family wedding a few years ago, I think near Thornton, a good hike up I-93. We could see Mount Washington to the northeast. The next day we headed southeast on a narrow, winding state road. We chugged through the old lake town of Laconia, past Lake Winnisquam and Lake Winnipesaukee and a rush of motels and cabins, then back into deep woods on a local highway to Portsmouth.

We crossed the fast-moving Piscataqua River past the naval base into Maine and took pictures at Fort McClary, which looks out over the Atlantic. It’s an odd spot, established for coastal defense around 1800, named after Andrew McClary, who died at Bunker Hill. But then Maine and New Hampshire never needed coastal defense. The fort now is a state park.

So that was thousands of country miles into the past. Now there isn’t the time, we take the highways. There’s always a medical stop, home maintenance, some other obligation or distraction, the old folks’ list. The big glamor states we haven’t seen, Alaska and Hawaii, seem right now like distant planets. Four others, Arkansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oregon are farther down the list.

Awhile back Sandy wanted to visit Laurel, Miss., to see the old homes. I wanted to go to Hattiesburg, supposed to be an interesting place. I still want to see Luckenbach, Tex., which Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson sang about. We missed it by a couple of miles in 2018. We’d like to see Niagara Falls.

My 2018 road atlas lies on the living-room sofa, the non-interstate U.S. highways that span the country, routes 2, 6, 20, and 50, traced with colored markers. They seem to look up at me.

The detour to Rural Retreat took me a short way east, through a small, pretty community perched mainly on a hillside that gave a view of pristine, near-empty country. The stately homes on large lots offered clues to a prosperous history. The whitewashed rail station is the center of town. A few small businesses and retail operations line the main street, VA 749, which heads south toward a census-designated place, Sugar Grove, barely a spot on the map.

Planning travel can become a bookish, inward-looking hobby, then an excuse for not going. The journey to the unknown, the small town in the boondocks, along the winding road through forest and mountains may take the place of something else, some chore or obligation, something unnerving or uncomfortable looming in our lives. But gas prices have dipped a bit. Everyone talks about going. We should stop thinking about it, pack, and leave.

May 15, 2023

Last Wednesday, about noon, workmen installed a huge “Outdoor World” sign above the entrance to the giant sporting goods store here, previously known as Cabela’s. A clerk inside said it still will be called Cabela’s but also Bass Pro Shops (BPS), which owns the nationwide chain.

In 2017 Bass Pro Shops acquired Cabela’s, the company founded by Richard Cabela in 1961 when he tried to sell artificial fishing flies by mail order. By 2012 the business had revenues of $3 billion and 17,000 employees. Cabela’s had stores in 25 states and mailed 120 million catalogs each year.  Bass Pro now is organizing the stores into five types. They’re all “outdoor world,” but some are named Outdoor World, including ours.

The Greenville store, like others in the group, is massive, a couple of hundred thousand square feet of floor space. It’s a celebration of roughing it, hiking, camping, fishing, hunting. The aisles in the fishing-gear section are canyons lined by forests of rods, thick, sturdy ones for baitcasting, giant surfcasting rods, thin, graceful flycasting poles.

The store gins up enthusiasm for fishing and gives kids a thrill with two tanks stocked with game fish, big ones. They glide gracefully past the glass. The idea is that if you get your fishing gear at Outdoor World you’ll land a lunker just as big.

A cousin, Bill, an experienced fisherman, had recommended Spectra Power Pro fishing line. Cabela’s, or Outdoor World, seemed the logical place. I picked up the line for my grandsons. An employee mentioned the store will install line on customers’ reels, a chore I wanted to avoid.

The front of the store is like lots of department stores, displaying fashionable men’s and women’s sportswear. Venture further and you’re in fishing: the rods, reels, lures, line, other tackle. The store will sell you a kayak or canoe, paddles, oars, life jackets. Then camping: Outdoor World has the ultra-water-resistant insulated clothing, cold-weather tents and sleeping bags, lightweight cooking kits, miniature propane stoves. It carries the freeze-dried high-nutrition meals, backpacks in every size, shoes and boots for every terrain.

The store offers survival and first-aid gear, generators, battery chargers, high-powered camp lighting, metal detectors and prospecting equipment, camp furniture like lightweight folding chairs and benches large enough for your living room, mountain bikes and biking accessories.

That’s the general outdoors fun end of the store. The rest is all about hunting: Rows of cammy bodysuits, waders, headgear, enough for a battalion of guerrilla warriors. For archery, high-tech bows, arrows, arrow points, crossbows, bow sights, bow cases, fishing bows, tree stands, targets.

You then get into the business end of the business: firearms. Richard Cabela was an enthusiastic big-game hunter and supporter of the NRA. In 2012 Cabela’s contributed more than $1 million to the NRA. The Cabela’s/Outdoor World gun inventory is catalogued under “hunting.” A few years ago an investment newsletter reported that one-third of the chain’s revenues came from firearms.

The gun department, in a rear corner of the store, is an arsenal: hundreds of rifles, shotguns, handguns. Among the long-gun makers: Savage, Browning, Winchester, Tikka, Springfield Armory (SA). Of course it’s all about hunting: deer, antelope, elk, moose, bear, wild boar, bison, whatever. The hunting section has the tree blinds, the ammo, the targets. The website features SA’s M-Lok AR-15 assault rifle, priced at $929.99, “built for self-defense, giving you peace of mind in knowing that SA has your back.”

The store offers handguns by Glock, Walther, Sig Sauer, Beretta, Smith & Wesson, Taurus and others. Prospective buyers of the Heritage Rough Rider single-action revolver with a stars and stripes grip are told to “enjoy the look and feel of a classic revolver design, built with a nod to the traditions of the Old West.”  

A gun library near the gun counter displays used guns for sale, more rifles, shotguns, handguns, ARs. You see a 2003 Springfield rifle used by the Army in World War I. Strangely, or maybe not, the Cabela’s website features the Soviet-developed Kalashnikov AK-47 automatic rifle, deployed to the Cold-War-era Warsaw Pact armies and terrorists worldwide.

I qualified as expert in the Marine Corps with the M-14 infantry rifle, an 11-pound semi-automatic weapon exquisitely designed for war. By 1972 the Corps was replacing it with the M-16, a flimsy plastic-stock killing machine that fires a lighter round than the M-14, that on impact tumbles inside its target, hardly ever leaving any wounded. The AR-15 is the civilian variant, favored by mass murderers, now sold at an Outdoor World near you for under $1,000. You can get a used one for less.

The Outdoor World firearms guns on display all are locked in racks or display cases. But a quick survey finds news reports of gun thefts at the chain, from West Chester, Penn., to Hammond, Ind., to Lexington, Ky., to Oklahoma City to Charlotte; Woodbury, Minn., Kansas City, Calgary, Alberta, lots of others. The Fort Mill, S.C., store had three robberies. Some arrests are made, some guns recovered, not all.

You can buy assault rifles at other places, Adventure Outdoors, Camping World, Big 5 Sporting Goods. Some Walmarts sell them, others don’t. The U.S. has about 53,000 licensed gun dealers.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation, the gun industry trade group, said in 2022 that Americans (including police forces) own 20 million assault rifles, which it calls “modern sporting rifles,” up from 8 million in 2004. NSSF says Americans own something like 434 million firearms of all types.

The boys, their mom, and I had a lighthearted visit to Outdoor World. We watched as a young guy loaded the new line on their reels. We looked at tackle, I bought a new rod. The place was nearly empty while we were there, which was fine with me. Like lots of people, Sandy and I have pretty much stopped going to malls and other crowded places. Walking city streets, I look around.

May 8, 2023

The chapel, built of brick, is the size of a large living room. One wall adjoins the main church. The ceiling is high and centered by a large chandelier. The altar is covered by a deep red cloth, set off by large potted plants on both sides. The eucharist is locked in a gold receptable called a monstrance, perched on the tabernacle above the altar. Candles in four-foot-high bases stand in front of the altar, the tiny flames steady, silent, and bright against the dark background.

It’s not a lovely place, a little on the garish side. I’d like it plainer, more austere. The chapel is nearly empty most of the time, one or two people may be there, praying or meditating. Silence is the rule. Silence, always.

This goes on at lots of Catholic churches and some non-Catholic ones, those with chapels adjacent to or part of the main building, on a schedule of church members who sign up for an hour or more per week on a 24/7 schedule of perpetual adoration. The point is private prayer, contemplation.

The chapel routine is one of countless ways ordinary people seek contact with the source of their faith, the transcendent, sublime, elusive, majestic idea they may call God, or something else, or nothing at all. Some walk on the beach at sunrise or at midnight, others stare out from mountain vistas or practice yoga, expanding their minds privately or with others.

Some folks jog, listening to podcasts, others gather in groups to ponder Bible verses or the Koran, or teachings of the Talmud and Torah, or the Bhagavad Gita. Some nod at stemwinding harangues by televangelists, on TV or in giant megachurches. With some, beer, wine, or booze is involved.

For a change we drove out to a church in the country for Sunday Mass. Arriving, we saw no one else. We had got the date wrong. We ended up at a tiny church tucked in the boondocks of this huge county. It was a casual, easygoing Mass. After the closing prayers the priest called a young boy and young woman to the altar, wished them “Happy Birthday” in English and Spanish and blessed them. The congregation applauded. New to me.

On the drive home we passed two Baptist churches across the street from each other, their parking lots near-full. Sunday worship was going on full-tilt everywhere. Some of it is for show, going through the motions. How much? I recall a gaggle of priests and nuns at the January 2020 March for Life in Washington breathlessly applauding Trump as the “pro-life” president, the same one who confided to his erstwhile legal gofer, Michael Cohen, “I bet [my supporters] think it’s cool that I slept with a porn star.”

The struggle—to seek the divine, the immortal, the ineffable—always is at risk of falling into routine, which means it no longer is a struggle. Immediately after February 24, 2022 we heard prayers for Ukraine in every church—now, hardly ever. The churn of daily headlines: the shootings, the wars and famines, the soap operas of political corruption, drain from us the contemplative will which, if we allow it, may part the veil of the mystery of faith.

The silence of the chapel is one way of brushing aside the cobwebs and distractions, and laying bare the reason anyone goes there. The silence drives an awakening, an understanding that prayer isn’t verbal babble. It is whatever we hope it is, whatever we conceive of that transports us from our rushed schedules and hectic priorities to confront what St. Thomas Aquinas calls the Act of Existence. The existence that is for Thomas simply being: the vastness of everything we can imagine: the universe, the tangible, touchable world in which we live, our sense of ourselves and our surroundings, those we love.

All this remains a bit of an abstraction, Aquinas generally now lives in dusty philosophy and theology courses, and not just Catholic ones. But who, besides seminarians and the diminishing number of philosophy majors, are taking those courses, although now you can get them online. And no area of human interest has had more books written about it than spirituality. For every Sunday morning TV preacher, bookstores and the internet offer hundreds, maybe thousands, of how-tos on getting right with God.

One is out there, The Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross, the Spanish mystic who traces his turn from despair, the “dark night,” to the ecstasy of salvation. It’s his own intense, agonizing journey, and a tough read. But the title captures something of the place where so many find themselves, in this generation of smart, sarcastic cynicism. That is a place from which to extricate ourselves and run away. Run away, but to where we don’t have a clue.

Years ago we visited St. Peters in Rome and strolled through the huge square. You can buy a rosary blessed by the Pope. We’ve been to St. Paul’s in London, Notre Dame in Paris, to another Notre Dame, the one in Montreal, and to St. Patrick’s in New York. A cousin was married at the San Juan Capistrano Mission in California, famous for the sparrows. Years ago, when our kids were small we went to Christmas Eve Mass at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington. At all of them, you can buy souvenirs, postcards, get lunch.

All those places are stunning, beacons of faith, like every parish church everywhere, like the one we visited a week ago. I read up on it, the congregation, until they raised the money to build their modest church, attended Mass at a nearby Methodist church.

It’s true that not as many attend services as in past generations or even decades.  Pastors blame lots of things for that, the internet, the distractions of modern life, the sex scandal. But faith is elusive. It’s not in the tracts or the texts. Faith is a solitary thing, scary, even. That was St. John’s lesson. It comes in silence, in a dark night.                      

April 24, 2023

Everyone knows Habitat for Humanity, the outfit that builds homes for people who struggle with life’s challenges. President Jimmy Carter made it famous. Ordinary people step forward and pick up tools and building materials and work together to create modest livable spaces, each house about 1,000 square feet.

Habitat for Humanity International was founded by Millard and Linda Fuller in 1976, expanding the concept of an organization they had established with Clarence Jordan on Jordan’s farm in Americus, Ga. Supporters contribute funds to build houses at no profit and pool resources to maintain a “Fund for Humanity” that enables construction of more houses. Habitat operates in all 50 states and 70 countries, and has built houses for some 46 million people.

In this town Habitat has built 411 houses over the years. Six more are going up on the west side, about ten miles from our place. I drove over the day before my assignment to be sure I could find the site. It was bright and hot, a crew of a dozen or so was working on three houses, the other three looked nearly complete. A team hammered roof sections into place on one house. A guy was clearing rocks from the foundation of another, two men on ladders were taking measurements for gutters. Two women marked lines for raising a wall for the third house.

Habitat projects call on volunteers, some with extensive construction experience, others with moderate skills, and people like me, with no skills. Years ago I built a prefab shed in our backyard, which mainly required following the manufacturer’s directions. It took a week of assembly, fixing mistakes, and reassembly. I once sunk posts for a kids’ swingset, poured concrete, and years later removed them when the kids lost interest. Home construction? Never.

The folks at the Greenville site were a mix of volunteers and contractors. Habitat hires professional electricians, plumbers, and sheetrock people. The low-skill volunteers do the grunt work, hauling roof sections, hammering nails, making simple measurements. 

It rained hard early on my volunteer day, turning the site into an ocean of red Carolina mud. The supervisor pointed us to stacks of hardhats, safety glasses, nail vests, and hammers. “Don’t take those hats off while you’re on the site!” he yelled.

He split the group of about 40 into four-man teams, each with one experienced guy, for wall construction on the already-completed house foundation. The lumber was stacked on skids, the anchor pieces coded by room:  2x4s for interior sections, 2x6s for exterior, with shorter pieces for window frames. Our team hauled them bucket-brigade style to a workspace on the foundation. The team lead had the printed designs. We lined up the lumber.

Soon the site was racked with ear-splitting hammering. We nailed the boards in place, galvanized nails for the treated wood, simple sinker nails for the dry pieces; two nails for the 2x4s, three for the 2x6s. As teams completed their sections they leaned them against the nearly-completed house next door. Within a couple of hours around 20 wall sections were stacked against the neighboring house.

At a third site nearby teams installed vinyl siding. A Habitat supervisor cut sections while team leads sent workers scooting up and down ladders, fitting the siding sections together. Another team shoveled mulch.

At times the hammering subsided and the pace of work eased a bit as the teams caught their breath. Hammering nails (did you know?) is hard work. After a dozen or so, I slumped, gasping, climbed to my feet and restocked my vest.

By mid-morning the rain had stopped, blue sky broke through. By noon we felt the sun’s heat on our necks. As the temperature rose we moved more slowly, hauling, positioning, measuring, nailing. Sometimes we got the measurements wrong and pried nails out for do-overs. But we kept stacking wall sections.

We stopped for lunch around noon, staff people set out chairs and grilled burgers and hot dogs. We stuck our hardhats under our chairs, stretched our legs, talked with teammates, and closed our eyes for a few minutes. The morning shift left, reinforcements arrived for the afternoon session.

Someone said we’d be lifting the sections into place. That didn’t happen, the morning shift ran behind schedule. We could still see stacks of lumber on the trailers. We straggled back to the worksite and checked our design paperwork, and hauled more boards into our work area.

As we started work that morning, the project supervisor introduced the young man who with his family would become the owner of the house. They had had a tough time, the supervisor said, but he didn’t dwell on that. And yes, he would be paying a modest mortgage. The house, after all, was shelter for a young family, but it wasn’t free. And there he was, working with the volunteers, hauling wood, pounding nails, doing his share, sweating with the rest of us.

We quit around three and tossed our hardhats and hammers in a Habitat truck. Staff people carried gear to a utility shed next to the site. The Habitat people, in their bright green shirts, thanked us, with a generous “God Bless!” The organization has a distinct religious-spiritual tint, many volunteers are recruited from local churches.

I turned in my gear and slogged to the car, dragging pounds of Carolina mud on my boots, jeans, shirt, and gloves. The vinyl-siding team was still at work, wearing far less mud. The work looked impressive, professional. Good for that family, I thought. Good for all of us.