November 14, 2022

We walked the tree-lined brick paths of the campus of Belmont Abbey College just after sunset. The twin Gothic spires of the basilica rose into the darkening sky. We pushed the massive door open and walked into the silence. We saw no one else.  Sandy knelt in the last pew. I looked around. It was nearly 7:00 PM, time for Compline, the monks’ evening prayer.

Since our daughter graduated from the school, run by the Benedictine monastic order, the fundraisers there fire a steady stream of emails and letters at us. A week earlier one of them announced a talk and piano recital by Rev. Robert Nixon, a Benedictine from an abbey in a remote corner of Australia. Sounds exotic, I thought. His topic: “The Love of Learning and the Search for God.” He would touch on the lives of the Benedictines, including St. Anselm, the patron of my alma mater. I pushed for going.

Belmont Abbey, in Belmont, just south of Charlotte, is 80 hard miles up I-85. South Carolina has been widening its stretch of the road for years, and for years it’s been a death trap—the actual words of a state coroner last summer. At least 30 of those 80 miles, maybe more, are narrow chutes past rows of jersey walls and construction cones that bring traffic to a halt any time of day or night between the state line and our place. Still, we needed to get out of the house.  

The drive up was tough, past construction crews and their rows of earth-moving vehicles, but we arrived at the campus a bit early. We brought a picnic dinner with us and ate at a table outside the campus theater, where students were rehearsing MacBeth. As we walked to the basilica, a monk appeared with his breviary. “Come to Compline,” he said with a smile, and hurried off.

We waited. At seven the lights went on and the monks filed in and took seats around the altar, the way Benedictines do in obedience to the Rule of St. Benedict, who founded the Order 1,500 years ago. One waved at us to join them. We stood with the others as the Abbot entered. Father Nixon took a seat next to Sandy. When the prayer ended we found a place in the front row. The crowd flowed in. I set my recorder near the lectern.

He introduced himself, joking about his thick Australian accent. “As you can tell, I’m not from around here,” he said. “I live at the Abbey of the Most Holy Trinity at New Norcia, in western Australia.” No one in the audience had ever heard of New Norcia. “If you saw the movie ‘Crocodile Dundee’ you know what it’s like,” he said. “Crocs, venomous snakes, wallabies, kangaroos, scrub, desert.” The crowd laughed.

He was a young man, I guessed late thirties. He explained that in his former life he was a classical pianist, then after turning 33 entered the seminary, studied philosophy and theology, and discovered a gift for Latin. At New Norcia he found his vocation as a Benedictine. His mission now is translating the ancient works of Christian scholars from the original Latin, in the tradition of Europe’s medieval monks. He is director of the Institute for Benedictine Studies at the Abbey and a fellow at Trinity College of Music in London—but still gets on the road for speaking tours and concerts.

With all that finished, he escorted us through the experience of the Benedictines, through Christianity’s fierce philosophical and religious debates, heresies, and wars that continued through the Early and Later Middle Ages, into the Renaissance, to this day.     

He paused and stepped to the piano and played for us, a hypnotically beautiful piece by Rachmaninoff that resounded off the stone walls of the basilica, filling the place with the magic of classical piano. Then he stood and walked back to the lectern.

“My title is inspired by a book by a great Benedictine of the 20th century, Jean Leclercq: The Desire for God and the Love of Learning, he said. He went on:

“I would like to suggest that all human learning is a search for God. Whatever we’re studying, we’re studying the work of God, the creation of God—whether it’s the humanities, whether it’s the natural sciences, whether it’s philosophy or theology, ultimately everything which exists is of God, contains the trace of God, something of the glory and goodness of God.

“When we try to search for God, we find ourselves encountering something of a brick wall, a blank slate. We think, ‘Well, I’m looking for God, but what is God?’ But God is ultimately beyond our understanding. God has given us this created universe, given us the glory of the human person for the sole purpose of coming to know him, of coming to love him. Ultimately all of our love, all of our desires, are part of this one single desire, for the ultimate reality, for the only true reality, which is God Himself.”

He turned back to the piano, and played again, the sound of his keystrokes rose above us.

He moved on, sharing insights on the great Benedictines, St. Benedict (480-547), who founded the Order in 529; St. Gregory the Great (540-604), who also was Pope and a nephew of Benedict; St. Bede the Venerable (672-736), known as the historian of England; St. Anselm (1033-1109), Archbishop of Canterbury, who created the famous “ontological argument” for God’s existence.

He played again, then talked about St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), author of many devotional works. St. Hildegard of Binken (1098-1179), he said, was one of the first great women saints, a philosopher and naturalist.  Johannes Trithemius, the German mystic and cryptographer (1462-1516), was considered the most knowledgeable man of his time.

As he walked us through history, he added, “If we reflect more deeply on the human condition, we realize that our happiness, our fulfillment, doesn’t depend on the things of the external world. It depends on our interior being … . As our Lord Jesus Christ said, “The kingdom of God is within.”

He played a composition that summoned dreams of spring, playing with one hand, five fingers flying over the keys. Then he paused and stood, and spoke: “All of you, especially the students here at Belmont Abbey, are invited into this wonderful spirituality—the spirituality of the search for God and love of learning, which in the final analysis is one and the same.”

We joined the crowd, mostly students, on the basilica steps in the bracing autumn air. The kids laughed, chatted, and lined up for hot chocolate, cider, and cookies. The lawns around us glowed in moonlight. The monks filed out of the basilica. We waved goodbye, and headed for the car and the trip home, away from this special, beautiful place.  

November 7, 2022

Inevitably, evil and oppression fail. Justice overcomes and restores, over years, decades, generations. Communities and nations find the way forward.

A dignified statue of two African American high school students stands at the northwest corner of West Washington and North Main Streets in downtown Greenville, S.C. The site is a few feet from the former front of the Woolworth’s department store.

In July 1960 eight students from Greenville’s all-Black Sterling High School tried to order food at the lunch counters at two downtown stores, W.T. Grant and S.H. Kress. The students were asked to leave. The lunch counters shut down, then reopened when they left.

The students followed the example of four Black students who conducted a sit-in at the Woolworth’s in Greensboro, N.C. The lunch counter sit-in tactic spread to several Southern cities and attracted national press coverage.

On August 9 the Sterling students returned to the two stores and to Woolworth’s and were arrested for trespassing, found guilty, and sentenced to either a $100 fine or 30 days in jail. The students appealed, the South Carolina Supreme Court upheld the conviction. In May 1963 the U.S. Supreme Court, deciding multiple similar cases, reversed the South Carolina court decision.

In 1967 Sterling High School caught fire during a student dance in an adjacent building, the school burned to the ground. Questions were raised, but a state investigation found “brittle wires” caused the fire. The 1,200 Sterling students were sent to Beck, another all-Black high school. Students of the two schools attended classes in shifts. In February 1970 the Greenville School Board complied with a court order to desegregate the city’s schools.

The statues at Washington and Main, dedicated November 19, 2006, aren’t conspicuous, actually easy to miss. The spot, called Sterling Square, evokes a solemn sense of goodness—that local South Carolinians resolved to honor the courage of those young people. The local Woolworth’s closed in 1994 and the company disappeared in 1997, eradicated by the hard laws of capitalism.

An inscription on the granite plaque at the base of the statues declares, “during the 1950s and 1960s Sterling students held demonstrations, marches, and rallies that finally integrated the Greenville County library and public accommodations, changed the seating arrangements on city buses, and eliminated the segregated lunch counters at the former Woolworth’s department store at this site.”

Last weekend we paused at Sterling Square and looked at the statues, trying to get a fix on how things we see here now came to be that way. We saw the remains of a couple of the last textile mills in the city, which once called itself “the textile capital of the world.” In the 1880s New England textile producers started shutting down their mills in Manchester and Nashua N.H., Lowell and Lawrence, Mass., and dozens of other places, and came south for cheaper non-union labor. Around 1970 they started heading for Southeast Asia, where they could pay workers even less.

Greenville, in the northwest corner of the state, escaped major Civil War action, although the local carriage company built wagons for the Confederate Army and a gun maker supplied rifles. Six weeks after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, Union troops ransacked the town looking for rebel president Jefferson Davis, who was 300 miles away. Reconstruction brought a struggle over livelihoods, stable lives versus subsistence. Businesses started and survived for a while then shut down, to be replaced by others.

Early Greenville folks went to church. The downtown Episcopal Christ Church dates from 1854, the First Baptist Church from 1858. In 1876 the Catholics got St. Mary’s. But while the city grew, segregation and Jim Crow set in here and throughout the Deep South. A local high school, major highway, bowling alley, and fire department, and lots of other places statewide are named after Wade Hampton III, pre-Civil War slave owner, later Confederate general, and still later governor and senator.

Christian fundamentalist Bob Jones University, which moved here in 1946, lost its IRS tax-exemption because of its Whites-only admissions policy in 1976. In 1982 the Supreme Court ruled against the school. It retained its rule against interracial dating until 2000.

Memories linger. Last February, during Black History Month, the city apologized for a social-media comment by Mayor Knox White, who in a narrative about Greenville’s experience with desegregation in 1970, let it slip that when he was a teenager, “a good number of my friends disappeared. They were sent to another school.” The city communications director dashed off a note: “I take full responsibility for not recognizing how insensitive it is to tell a story about a painful chapter in the lives of African-Americans through the eyes of a White person.”

Sterling High graduates were the first African Americans elected to the State House during Reconstruction. The student body president was the first African American admitted to nearby Furman University. Another was the first Black Superintendent of the Greenville County School District; another Sterling graduate was the first Black woman elected to the City Council.

The Sterling Square statues, “The Spirit of Sterling High,” were created by South Carolina sculptor Maria J. Kirby-Smith. At the dedication, Sterling High’s then-oldest living teacher, 94-year-old Wilfred Walker, who taught masonry, laid a brick in the wall the encloses the statues.

The future matters now, not the past.  Mayor White served as a member of the City Council committee that sponsored the statues. A new restaurant, Bricktops, will be opening in the former Woolworth’s site. On the upper floors is Golden Path Solar, which manufactures solar panels, a high-tech outfit taking advantage of the local go-go business climate, along with BMW, Fluor, General Electric, Michelin, Lockheed Martin, others.

Sterling Square moves this town forward. Meanwhile, the local Chamber of Commerce waves at prospective new businesses with the slogan: “Did you know? South Carolina is a right-to-work state without unions!” Yes, that’s an exclamation point. No unions? Lower pay, fewer benefits! Maybe the future has arrived. Maybe not

October 31, 2022

Today is Halloween. But another scary day was last Monday, the start of the two weeks’ early-voting period here in the Greenville district. We were at our polling site at the Greer Recreation Center, a barn-type structure on a hard-to-find side street.

There, on the morning of day one, eight election workers sat at their computers, awaiting voters. We showed our licenses and received our vote tickets. I studied the ballot. We were electing candidates for 15 offices. Of the 15, only four offered a choice between a Republican and a Democrat: Governor, Secretary of State, U.S. Senator, and Probate Judge. A Democrat, Lisa Ellis, (also representing the Alliance Party) is running against a Republican and a member of the Green Party for Superintendent of Education.

The three Republicans for state office are Henry McMaster, for a second full term as Governor; Tim Scott for U.S. Senate; and William Timmons, our local Congressman. All three are dedicated soldiers in Donald Trump’s army of election deniers. In 2016, as Lieutenant Governor, McMaster gave Trump’s nominating speech at the Republican National Convention. He became governor, succeeding Nikki Haley when she became Ambassador to the United Nations.

As the covid-19 pandemic raged in spring 2020, McMaster reopened South Carolina businesses five days after the state reported its highest number of covid infections. The state’s epidemiologist reported that in June the state experienced a 2,000-percent increase in covid cases since March. McMaster ignored a petition signed by hundreds of South Carolina physicians warning of the pandemic’s spread.

In September he demanded that schools reopen for in-person learning. The South Carolina Education Association blasted the reopening plan, saying it endangered the health of the state’s students and teachers. In December, McMaster and his wife tested positive for covid-19.

In a March 2021 letter to the General Assembly on voter fraud, he wrote that “millions of Americans have legitimate concerns about the integrity of the 2020 election.”

Scott also is seeking a second full term. In 2017 he criticized Trump for his comments following the “Unite the Right” white-extremist rally in Charlottesville. He met with Trump and afterward said the president was “receptive” to listening. Otherwise, he stands with the near-monolithic Trump bloc in the Senate and voted against creation of the commission to investigate the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot.

McMaster’s Democratic opponent, one-term Congressman Joe Cunningham, elected in 2018, tells voters that on his first vote in Congress he opposed Nancy Pelosi for Speaker of the House. He lost his seat in 2020 to Republican Nancy Mace. He’s now campaigning to end the state income tax and legalize marijuana for medical use.

Scott’s opponent, Krystal Matthews, a state senator, has made racially charged comments about her constituents and other Democrats, who have urged her to quit the race. She has no chance, none. But then, no South Carolina Democrat has won statewide office for 15 years.

Timmons, first elected in 2018, is unopposed. In December 2020 he was one of 126 House Republicans to support a lawsuit filed with the Supreme Court objecting to the results of the 2020 Presidential election. The Court declined the case. In January 2021 he voted against certifying Biden’s election. In 2020 his campaign ad used the phrase “endorsed by Donald Trump.”

The Republicans running for Comptroller General, the State House of Representatives, Solicitor for Circuit 13, Auditor, and County Treasurer are unopposed. The Republican candidates for State Treasurer and Agriculture Commissioner face token opposition.

The state last went for a Democrat for President in 1976, when it backed Jimmy Carter. Of the state’s seven Congressional districts, Democrats hold one. South Carolina, like the rest of the South, historically is called “conservative.”

A lifetime ago, “conservativism” could be traced to a political and moral philosophy, defined and defended by formidable European thinkers of the early 20th century: the Germans Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss, and Austrian Fredrich Hayek. Voegelin and Strauss moved to the U.S. and Hayek to Great Britain in the late 1930s to escape Naziism. Their scholarly work broadly focused on the primacy of liberty and religion as foundations of social stability, and over time gave birth to a range of political movements loosely labeled “conservative.”

In the era of Trump, those distinguished names are largely unknown outside university philosophy and economics departments. But in 1953 a Michigan scholar, Russell Kirk, published a groundbreaking history, The Conservative Mind, which traced the roots of conservativism to the 18th century British scholar Edmund Burke. Kirk’s book inspired a generation of thinkers and writers including William F. Buckley Jr., who in 1955 founded National Review magazine, still considered the premier voice of conservatism.

Buckley pushed an erudite, politically savvy brand of conservativism. In the depths of the Cold War he pitched the magazine as stridently anti-Communist. He hired as a senior editor Whittaker Chambers, a Communist spy in the 1930s and author of the powerful memoir Witness, which tells of his Congressional testimony against Alger Hiss, a senior State Department official, who Chambers unmasked as a Soviet double agent.

Buckley used his magazine and his clout to expel racists like Alabama Governor George Wallace, anti-Semites, and other extremists from conservative ranks. He backed Barry Goldwater for President in 1964 and Ronald Reagan in 1980. Reagan still is a demigod to people who call themselves conservative, but the field was getting crowded. Fast forward to 2015, when National Review published a special issue labeled “Against Trump,” calling him a “political opportunist.” Since then the magazine has been hot and cold on Trump and his supporters.

Today, Trump people like McMaster, Scott, and Timmons and nearly all other Republicans, including Christian evangelicals, call themselves “conservative.” They excuse or ignore Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, his theft of classified government documents, support for Confederate sympathizers, sleazy financial deals, slurs on immigrants, ethnic groups, and women, support for white supremacists, and his warm relations with Putin and indifference to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

That’s conservativism today. Then Southerners get pulled in. Buckley, Kirk, Chambers, not to mention Edmund Burke, Voegelin, Strauss, and Hayek, wherever they are, are wondering: how did we get here?

October 24, 2022

The church conundrum is back. Where to go, the parish 10 miles away in the next town, Simpsonville, or the one just three miles away in Taylors? It gets complicated quickly.

A generation ago, Catholics joined the parish within whose boundaries they lived. It never was a hard-and-fast rule, it just seemed that way. Like Protestants, they now go wherever they want, if they go at all.  

People go to church because, as they seek sustenance for faith, they hope they find something sublime: the sense that at the heart of life’s mysteries is something sacred, a presence that lifts spirits, offers peace to the restless heart, solace in moments of pain.

We may be awakened to faith by our parents, a spouse, a good priest or minister; by the unrelenting complexity and trauma of our lives. We may get it from the intellectual currents that underpin belief, from St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, St. Augustine’s Confessions, or The Dark Night of the Soul of the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross.

A Benedictine monk I knew for years said that all men have a contemplative aspect. If we ponder the nature of God (or whether there is one), we can dive deep in theology, to Aquinas’s radical argument: he writes, straining the limits of language and reason, God is pure act of existence—not an abstract idea or sentiment, but the act that forever creates and renews all that is real. If that notion makes us nervous we can steer clear and keep pondering.

Saint Mary Magdalene parish, 10 miles distant, is one of the largest in the state. Prince of Peace, just three miles, is pretty big, too. Both have plenty of parking.   

Protestants pick a church for many reasons: the pastor’s emphasis on Bible study; the tone and content of the services; the music; the fellowship; the convenience, among others. Here in the South many churches have a strong revivalist or evangelical flavor and offer a conversion or “born again” experience. It happens, sometimes with drama. Sometimes it lasts a lifetime, sometimes not.   

The spiritual content of the Catholic Mass is identical everywhere, in any venue or circumstance. The central event of the Mass, the “transubstantiation” of bread and wine as the Body and Blood of Christ, is the same when it’s performed in a hut in Africa, in a one-room frame church in Appalachia, or when the Pope presides at solemn High Mass, speaking in Latin, at Saint Peter’s in Rome.

So why drive 10 miles versus three miles? It’s something else. It must be.

Fewer people go to church than a generation ago, for many reasons. The Roman Catholic Church still struggles with its sex-abuse scandal. Millions stopped going. Same with Protestants. The Southern Baptist Convention, like many Catholic bishops, tried covering up their sex-abuse cases, it didn’t work. Many are suffering the consequences.

The Eastern Rite Catholic denominations ordain married men to the priesthood. The Roman Catholic Church requires celibacy for priests. The current decline in numbers of priests has many causes, but celibacy probably is among them.  

Yet although the Church’s subterfuge and evasions about sexual assaults drove millions away, millions do still go to Mass. So do we. On landing in the Palmetto State we joined Mary Magdalene, meaning a 20-mile round trip on Sunday. Over time, though, we started thinking, why drive 20 miles when Prince of Peace is ten minutes away.

We attended Mass there two years ago, while visiting our daughter and son-in-law. Covid restrictions had relaxed at bit, but Virginia churches were still requiring masks and social distancing. The Prince of Peace service was a viral, or virus, free-for-all, no masks, no distancing, old folks crowding each other, coughing, sneezing. We got out fast.

I sent an email to the pastor. He answered: we’re doing what the bishop asked us, no more. I understood. The bishop (now retired) is an acolyte of the Republican governor, a Trump man, meaning sunny-side up on covid. At some point that year, South Carolina led the nation in covid childhood infections.

Yet a year later we joined Prince of Peace. Apart from the easier drive, I was intrigued by the ages-old liturgy, in which the priest faces away from the congregation, symbolically addressing Christ. It conveyed a powerful sense of the mystery of faith, the traditions of two millennia.

Most Catholic Churches accepted the declarations of the Second Vatican Council, held 1962-1965, which aimed at aggiornamento, a vast updating, or “throwing open the windows” of Catholic doctrine, teaching, and liturgy. Among them: greater dialogue with Protestants, Jews, and Muslims; use of the language of the congregation in place of Latin in the Mass; turning the priest around to face the congregation. It didn’t outlaw the old ways. Pastors were free to go either way.

The pastor of Prince of Peace sticks with the traditional rite. But when the associate pastor, a much older man, said Mass at the nearby Eastern Rite Maronite parish, he faced the congregation. I wondered why. The “traditionalist” pastor, when he said Mass over there, did not.

We try to look past the nuts and bolts, the personality quirks, to find the spiritual sustenance we seek. The older priest gives us that, Sundays and weekdays. Over time, we heard in the traditionalist pastor’s sermons mainly lectures on Church policy and politics, reminders about procedures and processes—do this, don’t do that. Not what we signed up for.

For the past two weeks we drove to Mary Magdalene. On Sunday, the pastor began by saying, “We are gathered here in the presence of Christ.” He told us his 105-year-old father had passed. “He has gone home to Jesus,” he said calmly. He was unable to travel to the funeral. Instead, he would say Mass at 10 PM for seven consecutive nights in his father’s memory.

Because we didn’t get to Prince of Peace, I picked up the weekly bulletin. The pastor’s letter reported on how busy he is. “For the past twelve years … we have done our utmost to accommodate people’s wishes as far as scheduling funerals, baptisms, and weddings … The sheer volume of funerals, baptisms, and weddings now has made what used to mean just a little extra coordination into a bit of a nightmare. … Something has to give.”

His next sentence also is true: “There are not more priests.” Yes. But what “has to give?” I don’t hear that at the other parish. Like everyone else, we need the spiritual message, not crankiness. So we’re looking at all this, again. And once again, it’s complicated.

October 3, 2022

It was nearly freezing at Wintergreen, Va., mid-30s, when we arrived mid-week. As we chugged up the three-mile-long mountain road to our rented place at nearly 3,600 feet of elevation, an adult black bear, probably 300 pounds, raced across the road in front of the van and disappeared into the woods. I jammed on the brake and drew a deep breath. We pushed on.

We settled in, got dinner at the nearly empty restaurant, the only one open of the three on the premises. We then shivered in our sweaters.

The next morning the sun rose gloriously above the mountains, the air was autumn-crisp and clear, we could see through the legendary, delicate blue mist for 100 miles.  Then we watched the hurricane reports as Floridians waited for Ian, far from home or sheltering in darkness.

The mountain resort colony of Wintergreen was nearly deserted, the serious foliage rush had not yet started. The silent majesty of the place and its wild surroundings offers a brief touch of serenity, but the hurricane news 850 miles south assaulted the abiding peace of the Shenandoah. Last Wednesday the National Weather Service radar map showed the storm whirling across central Florida then aiming north.

The sun shone on this eccentric spot on a mountain, a mid-grade ski resort—Vail or Killington it’s not. Wintergreen is a refuge for the affluent and semi-affluent who like some distance from their neighbors and love mountains, forests, and cold. Some of the homes are palatial three-level monsters perched on hillsides and concealed in dense treelines; others are modest, A-frames, Capes, ranches, just off the narrow roads.

We’ve been to the place a few times, the most recent more than two years ago (this blog, Feb. 3, 2020) to find a family vacation rental. We drove the 130 miles down from our Woodbridge place in the morning, then through the maze of Wintergreen roads most of the day. We thought we found a nice place, then trekked home and made the reservation. The pandemic showed up. Covid raged through the spring, we canceled, rescheduled, then canceled again.

The two years since then reacquainted us with sickness, tests, and surgeries. So now, back again to Wintergreen, this time from 400 miles to the south. We came in from the west, 30 exhilarating miles through pretty Fairfield and Vesuvius, then 25 more on the quietly gorgeous Blue Ridge Parkway.

We stepped outside the apartment that morning and gawked at the distant peaks and the wide valley, still splendid in summer green, then got coffee at the main lodge. We sat, just the two of us, in the cavernous, silent lobby. We looked at the rich paneling and stonework. A single clerk manned the front desk, no guests in sight. None of the fashionable shops were open.

We recalled the last visit: the crispness of winter air, the snow-crested mountains, the exotic, colorful outfits of the ski crowd, the happy cacophony of a dozen languages. We leaned over the railing at the lift and watched the skiers race down the slopes, then drove across the mountainside looking for that special spot.

It all seemed frozen in time. The rental unit, the stunning mountain views, the layout and décor of the visitor’s center, and the restaurant menu remained as we remembered them. We looked for a little while for the vacation house we rented twice. We didn’t save the address, but the image of the site lingered in our memories. Memory wasn’t enough.

We drove down into the valley to get lunch, managing the hairpin turns of Wintergreen mountain, taking in the vernal richness of rolling farmland, acres upon acres of corn that backed up to the surrounding Shenandoah. U.S. 151 winds north through the hamlets of Nellysford, Greenfield, and Avon, past vineyards, breweries, and churches to I-64 and Skyline Drive. Closer to sea level, the sun grew warm.

I hiked the Appalachian Trail near our rental. The Wintergreen stretch is narrow and heavily rocky and wound gracefully northwest away from the settlement. I spotted bear scat and paused, listened, and looked around, then leaned against a tree, taking in the magic and mystery of the woods. A through-hiker passed and smiled, we chatted. She moved on, I headed back. The storm was coming.  

We drove the 90 miles up the interstate to Bayse under gathering clouds. The Virginia governor had declared a state of emergency as the dregs of the storm approached, but the sun returned, the sky cleared. We tacked northwest to Mount Jackson then straightaway west on U.S. 263 toward West Virginia. The cornfields fell away, mountain forest closed in again.

We passed through tiny Mount Clifton and cruised through Bayse, an unincorporated place of a few businesses, truck-garden spreads, and hidden residential streets. We paused at Orkney Springs, site of Shrine Mount, a pretty complex of colonial homes converted to a retreat center by the Episcopal Church. The noon sun gleamed off the whitewashed houses, a few Episcopalians strolled about.

Back at Bayse, we walked a rugged mile, panting up steep slopes in that hidden spot just short miles from the West Virginia line and hundreds of miles from our South Carolina neighborhood. The quiet path prompted the questions that oldsters keep asking themselves about the past and the future, how we got here, what’s next, that kind of thing.

Dark clouds appeared, bringing a cold rain. We slogged back, fortified in a small way by closing on the boundaries of wild places. The forest will turn brown and gray and frigid winds will rush in. Winter is coming. We pressed on.