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.

May 27, 2024

In September 1973 I was on leave after a yearlong tour on Okinawa with the Marine Corps. I drove from my folks’ home in New Jersey out to Madison, Wisc., to visit a friend who then was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin.

As I walked across the campus to meet him, I ran into a group protesting the school’s use of non-union lettuce in the dining hall. Some of them, I could see, clearly were not students. They noticed my Marine Corps haircut, impossible to miss in that crowd, and opened fire with barrages of curses. “Fascist!” was one of the milder ones. I said nothing and hurried past, quick-time.

Fifty-one years have passed. And now, on Memorial Day, I wonder about those people. What have they been thinking all these years? Then I move on from the thought, as if it didn’t matter. But it does matter.

So many Memorial Days have passed, burying the rancor of the 1960s and early 1970s. Since Vietnam America’s men and women under arms remained on call: Lebanon, where 241 Marines died in the 1983 terrorist bombing, Iraq 1991, Afghanistan 2001, Iraq again in 2003, then still Afghanistan.

War never ends, which is why Memorial Day matters. Americans willing to fight for their country keep making that ultimate sacrifice, right now, in places many civilians can’t find on a map: Niger, Syria, the Gulf of Aden. Americans guard the free world.

It is a day for solemnity. At Quantico National Cemetery and at dozens of other sacred places, families gather. Veterans march forward carrying the Stars and Stripes and their ancient unit streamers. All rise. At Quantico the local Marine band plays the national anthem. A senior Marine officer, following tradition, cites the litany of great battles: Gettysburg, Antietam, Belleau Wood, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Normandy, Bastogne, Khe Sanh, Hue, Fallujah. The list could go on.

The climactic moment is the silent one, when a bugler pipes a solo “Taps.” Marines raise their weapons and fire the ages-old salvo in salute to those interred at that sacred place, and all such places.

Through American history some 1,064,000 American servicemen and women have given their lives, from the Revolution to the present, including combat and non-combat deaths, but not including 290,000 Confederate deaths during the Civil War. In 1917 for the first time, Americans fought in Europe. Twenty-three years later the country began to recognize its new role, defined by FDR nearly a year before Pearl Harbor as the “arsenal of democracy.”

In the decades since 1945 America stepped up further. The U.S led the establishment of NATO in 1949. Through the Cold War and even while Vietnam burned hot, thousands of U.S soldiers waited in Europe for a Soviet attack. Now Europe is again at the brink, with Ukraine in a death struggle against Russia, which under Putin has reincarnated the USSR.

The nation moved to an all-volunteer force in January 1973 when the draft was ended. Today America’s active-duty armed forces stand at 1.2 million. Another 766,000 serve in reserve components.

That may not be enough. Korea is a powder keg. The Peoples’ Republic of China, the PRC, is threatening Taiwan. Japan, Australia, and other Pacific allies are on edge. Army teams are operating in Central Africa. In the Middle East, the Navy and Air Force are trading fire with terrorists. War never ends.

The U.S. Navy today counts 296 deployable ships. In 2016 it said it needed 355. This past March it increased the number required to 381. Under a best-case scenario, the 381 goal won’t be reached until 2042.

Good people can debate the services’ roles and the numbers of personnel needed to fulfill their missions. They can dispute the rightness of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and question the scope of the America’s role in the world. That is already happening. Senior leaders can trade theories about the right number of Navy ships and types of ships.

What does not change is the ideal of service, the calling of the American under arms, and with it, the honoring of the immortal ones who have given their lives in the jungles, on the beaches, and across the deserts of the world.

At the cemeteries, service personnel and volunteers have placed American flags at each grave. Following the ceremonies, autos line up to pass through. Family members place flowers and mementoes before their loved one’s headstone or marker. They may stand or kneel for a while. Fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters who lie at rest are remembered and honored. That is the way it should be, and must be, on Memorial Day.

May 20, 2024

The first and second battles of Bull Run, in July 1861 and August 1862 respectively, both Confederate victories, sums up the important history of what is now Prince William County, Virginia. Two White men were lynched in Manassas in 1892, adding an unsavory note, and a departure from the epidemic of lynchings of Black men throughout the South.

From there on, Prince William puttered to late last century, when it earned its reputation as a practical place for working people to lay their heads, including thousands of active-duty military personnel. The county is bracketed with sites of respect, Manassas National Battlefield in the west and Quantico National Cemetery in the south.

To accommodate commuters, subdivisions spread like Levittowns in the 1950s to where the place is today. To carry them to work, I-95 went through decades of ugly renovation, the high-occupancy vehicle or HOV system was invented, the Virginia Railway Express line went in from the north to Manassas and Fredericksburg.

Now, at our old Prince William home and up and down the street, the dandelions and clover are blooming and spreading. The row of camellias we planted are engulfed by vines. The hostas are dwarfed by clusters of invasive greenery. The backyard lawn merges with a tangle of waist-high weeds.

The East Lake Ridge subdivision, on a bright May afternoon, shows the thick vernal growth of spring. Lawns are lush but slightly scruffy, thanks to last week’s heavy rain. Here and there landscaping crews ride their mowers or wave their gas-powered weedwhackers, creating an ungodly whine.

The county has an exhausted look to it. The main thoroughfares are clogged with commuters. A massive, multi-story healthcare facility has risen in Woodbridge, the vast parking lot already paved. It’s a workday, no pedestrians stroll the sidewalks. Some lucky folks work remotely, but moms now are commuting to offices or to retail or restaurant jobs, homes are mostly empty.

The grasping reach of the city has stretched, almost greedily, to 60, maybe 70 miles in every direction, and with it the gridlock and the commercial support system, all lit by neon at least a half-day. Columns of autos line up at every traffic signal, old restaurants now deal in fast food, established autocare centers have evolved as stop-and-go quick market/pump outlets.

We went to the old church, the few people we recognized looked just like us, weathered by the last three years. Maybe they wondered where we’ve been, what we’ve been doing.

Four years ago the place was changing in strange ways, more lawns overgrown, more unfamiliar autos lining the curbs, black mold showing through shingles on more roofs, more unfamiliar pedestrians. Longevity creates staleness, weariness, indifference. The neighborhood was long in the tooth, like us.

The ferocity of sprawl presses in on these half-dozen streets of fifty-year-old residences. The steady, steadfast tenor of suburban existence, maybe always a delusion, now teeters on the quiet chaos of neglect. Our former next-door neighbor, or maybe his successor, has erected a small house in the backyard hard against the property line to accommodate renters, once a zoning violation, now unnoticed by the county.

Vast economic and social pressures are descending on these places with brute force. Human life is flowing to the outlying and farther-outlying, once-rural environs, bulldozing forests to throw up more civilization, more subdivisions, more roads, malls, offices, schools. Transformation is relentless, at the pace of the financing and the availability of construction crews.

Thousands have escaped, others still are escaping down the congested interstates to southern places. Those who stay adapt to the six-lane avenues that once were two-lane roads. Old U.S. Route 1 south of Woodbridge, once a trail along Potomac River swamps, now passes miles of Macmansions and condos. On Old Bridge Road in Lake Ridge a historic marker, “Woodbridge Airport,” recognizes the airstrip built in 1961 and operated until 1987. The marker notes it closed because of “encroaching suburban development.”

The site is now a strip mall backing up to acres of townhomes. The strip mall is the usual: a Gold’s Gym, a supermarket, a Chinese restaurant, and so on.

The suburbs that encroached are being encroached upon, the term doesn’t fit what they have become, beehive-like midget cities that form webs, links to cities, Arlington, Alexandria, Springfield, where highrises have been piled for decades, and farther out to Fredericksburg, Luray, Strasburg.

The locals may be as shell-shocked as their visitors by the gridlock, the bulldozing, the metastasizing overnight retail, a half-dozen counties recreating themselves. But they bear up. This is home, reshaped by bleak economics, but still home. Rushed conversations, since everything is rushed, may touch on relocating somewhere quieter, but the work is here, the jobs are here.

Forty years ago the place was a frontier, the old-timers laugh when they talk about it. No traffic-choked Prince William Parkway, Woodbridge to I-66, no HOV lanes, no massive windowless data centers. Reagan was president, pushing for growth, fast growth, crazy growth here and everywhere. The place started exploding when the parents of today’s children were children themselves.

Still, the parklands are green, the churches mostly well-attended, the schools are considered pretty good. NOVA kids, most or many of them, go off to college. Some hang around for community college and local jobs. They and their parents are out there on I-95, inching forward, growing up, talking about getting away.