The Summer of ‘23
So, after a decades-long absence, I have moved from Charlottesville back to Harrisonburg in the Shenandoah Valley. Merely sixty miles apart, yet the Blue Ridge Mountains rise in between, and there is a world of difference. I left Harrisonburg thirty-three years ago. It feels like a homecoming.
Charlottesville is a mecca for rich people. It is surrounded by multi-million-dollar estates discreetly sequestered in the Albemarle County countryside, estates that trace their roots back to the days of slavery. It is a haven for the aristocrats of America and their attendant bourgeois. It was never an optimal place for me; I am a proletariat to the bone.
Harrisonburg is a workingman’s town. It’s the seat of Rockingham County, which is a preeminent agricultural hub for milk, eggs, and poultry. As you enter the county on the old highway, US Route 11, formerly known as the Valley Pike, you pass a weathered bronze statue of a turkey on a concrete pedestal with an equally weathered bronze plaque proclaiming Rockingham County as the “Turkey Capitol of the World.”
Parallel to Route 11, running a mile or two to the east, is Interstate 81, carrying gazillions of tons of truck traffic annually, one of the most heavily travelled routes on the Eastern Seaboard. At the I-81 interchange on the eastern side of town are acres and acres of chain restaurants — Olive Garden, Chick-Fil-A, Outback Steakhouse, Texas Roadhouse, Buffalo Wild Wings, Wood Grill Buffet, Panera, etc. — remoras circling big box stores like Lowes, Walmart, Target, and Costco. If you squint your eyes, it looks like one giant parking lot. You could be anywhere in the US.
However, to the west of town is a completely different story — miles and miles of rolling hills and immaculate Mennonite farms. Astonishingly, to this day it remains the definition of bucolic.
When I first came here, way back in 1972, Harrisonburg was a tiny, sleepy backwater with a courthouse, some churches, and a small teacher’s college for women. The Interstate was still a work in progress. Somehow I hooked up with a Mennonite girl named Jenny Rohrer, and on summer evenings we would grab a blanket and a bottle of wine (yup), and head out into the countryside to find a cornfield where we could walk down to the river.
* * *
That was a long time ago. Today Harrisonburg retains its quaint blend of rednecks, farmers, and country lawyers, but there has been a huge influx of young folks. The tiny teacher’s college has transformed into a major university with over 20,000 students, many of whom stay here after they graduate. Meanwhile, there has also been an influx of international immigrants, with support from the Mennonite community. This formerly white-bread town is now among the most ethnically diverse jurisdictions in Virginia. The last census reported that over a quarter of Harrisonburg households speak something other and English. In the grocery stores you can hear Swahili and Serbian.
* * *
Last winter I bought a sturdy, wood-frame, two-story slice of Americana, built in 1918 and listed on the deed as a “farmhouse.” It was renovated in 2006 (coincidentally, by a long-time friend and jack-of-all-trades, who flipped it the following year) and as I was sniffing around for a dwelling another long-time friend who works in real estate alerted me that it was again on the market. When the ink had dried I got it for about $100,000 less than anything comparable in C’ville. The hardwood floors creak if you tread heavily, and Casey needed to get a little creative with the plumbing, but that’s just fine with me. This is the first house that I’ve owned.
My abode is on the north side of town, a few blocks from the Court Square. On the opposite side of town is another world. James Madison University sprawls to the south and spills to the east across the Interstate, spawning large apartment complexes and tract after tract of freshly minted student housing, fast-food restaurants, and convenience stores. However, nestled between the university and the old downtown, you’ll find tree-lined streets and stately homes built by prosperous businessmen in the early 1900s and now occupied by professors and JMU administrators. The best real estate in town.
Meanwhile, over here on the north end, this previously disregarded neighborhood of modest, middle-class homes from the 1920s is currently experiencing a renaissance. Young professionals who have been struggling with the runaway housing market have discovered these quiet streets. Ditto for the influx of immigrants. Newcomers have moved in next door to the old-timers who grew up here. I am certainly neither a young professional nor an immigrant, but they are okay with me. And I can identify to some degree with the old-timers.
Suddenly it seems that the north end is the place to be. I’m only a block away from Magpie, a hipster brunch joint in a converted automobile-tire showroom — an oddly angular building wedged between Liberty Street and the railroad tracks. There are waiting lines on weekends. Across Gay Street from Magpie is a former warehouse that now hosts a bookstore, a florist, artisan shops, a wine bar, and an event space. Around the corner and across the tracks is an imposing, four-story, 55,000 square-foot brick edifice — the City Produce Exchange. Built in 1911, it has been repurposed into upscale condominiums. It is also home to the Local Chop House, which is regarded by JMU students as THE restaurant to take their rich parents. Across Liberty Street from Magpie and almost in my backyard is Sage Bird Cidery in a converted garage. A block to the south, on Wolfe Street, through an overgrown alley, is Restless Moons Brewery in a converted car wash.
By happenstance I am also only a few blocks away from the Little Grill, a legendary local bistro. I worked there many moons ago, during its resurrection from a dying greasy spoon on the wrong side of town into a uniquely funky eatery, catering to folks of all stripes — hippies, winos, social misfits, misunderstood geniuses, and even sorority girls — while doubling as a late-night venue for impromptu music and drunken poetry. Sometimes the owner, Bobby Driver, would take off his smudged apron, break out his National Steel Guitar, and school everyone present in the delta blues. After all these years, I was pleased to find the Grill still going strong. Precious few restaurants stay in business this long.
Speaking of venerable beaneries, I should mention that down on Liberty Street just a stone’s throw from my back door is the L&S Diner. This is a 1950-era, railcar-style luncheonette — stools and a counter, no booths — a place where farmers and good-old-boys sip on coffee while doing their best to flirt with gum-chewing waitresses. The L&S has been serving up bacon and eggs, fried chicken, and gossip next to the tracks since the Pleistocene. “If this is Wednesday, this must be meatloaf.”
I’m just a short stroll to downtown. Every Saturday from early spring through late fall the city hosts a farmers’ market, a cornucopia held in a spacious, newly constructed, open-air pavilion situated behind the old public school that was built of native limestone in 1879, and now the home of the city government offices. On Wednesday evenings during the summer there is live music. And beer. Furthermore, on the first Friday of every month there is an art crawl throughout the city. With wine.
And, for better or worse, I’m within stumbling distance to watering holes such as Clementine’s, Jimmy Madison’s, The Capitol Ale House, and The Golden Pony. In former incarnations, these buildings were haunts of mine. Places where I worked, places where I bellied-up to the bar. A long time ago.
* * *
Collicello Street runs along an otherwise inconspicuous ridge that trends north-south, and this orientation allows butterscotch-daylight to pour in through my windows in the morning and the evening. Additionally, my modest abode has two things that I’ve lacked for the last twenty-five years — a front porch where I can sit when the thunderstorms roll, and a spare room for guests. Speaking of thunderstorms, mi casa has a standing-seam metal roof, the kind where raindrops dance and create a soothing sound at night.
On quiet evenings I can hear the carillons of the stately churches surrounding the Court Square — tall, imposing sanctuaries built of stone. (Not many fancy churches up here on the poor side of town, just a few repurposed cinder-block commercial buildings, and no bells.) Deep into the stillness of the night, when the wind direction and air temperature are just right, I can hear the hourly chimes from the courthouse.
Meanwhile, mornings in the neighborhood can be downright noisy. Take, for example, last Thursday.
In the darkness just before dawn, the garbage truck renders its customary racket as it moves down the alleys. I roll over in bed and drift away. I waken again, this time to the sounds of the children across the street shrieking with excitement as they scramble for the school bus. Their father yells at them, “Watch for traffic!” I get up and go downstairs. I’m making breakfast when a fire engine from the station on Mason Street blasts up Rock Street, sirens blaring, on their way to some dire situation on the northwest side of town.
Truth be told, I don’t mind the noise. To me, these are the sounds of humanity. People cooperating for the common good.
* * *
I drift back to the waning days of summer, shortly after I found my way back here.
I’m sitting on my patio. From my vantage along this side of the ridge, the view of the sky can be metaphysical. Some evenings, as I gaze off to the east, I sense the clouds sneaking up behind me from the west where our weather prevails from — clouds gathering, forming and re-forming overhead, like Proteus, breaking waves on an atmospheric ocean, tumbling high into the heavens before they cascade and hasten toward the far horizon, thirty miles distant to the east, climbing up to skirt around the southern promontory of Massanutten Peak before slamming up against the flank of the Blue Ridge. On some evenings such majestic tableaus resonant like a Beethoven symphony.
The breeze ruffles the branches of the big shade-tree at the edge of the yard. It’s a Kentucky coffee-bean tree, native, but rare. The cicadas begin their insistent chorus, swelling to a crescendo, but they are soon drowned out by the rumbling of a massive diesel engine.
It is the Norfolk Southern, horn blaring, roaring, bellowing, rumbling.
My back yard extends to an abandoned alley, and on the far side the land drops sharply to the level of the railroad tracks. From my perch the tracks are right there, although obscured behind a pair of weedy trees and the roof of an old building.
The horn blares like dissonant howls of the delta blues.
Almost as a counterpoint, the crossing alarm sounds DING-DONG.
DING-DONG.
DING-DONG.
Spellbound, I wander down the alley to the crossing on Rock Street. Right here.
I am overwhelmed. And a little bit terrified.
Only an arm-length away, titanic machines rumble past, gargantuan mechanized monsters, shoulder-to-shoulder, moving with unwavering purpose. Remorseless.
The procession slams on the brakes. The massive rail-cars tremble and crash deafeningly. I shudder down to the bone. The caravan is pushing and pulling, back and forth, as it disgorges its burden.
I stand there, transfixed. The hopper cars slowly roll past, wheels grinding, their tarnished metal sides having become a canvas for indecipherable graffiti. Inconsequential markings from inconsequential humans in moments of inconsequential inspiration under inconsequential circumstances.
Inconsequential.
Like you and me.
Like the handprints on the cave walls of Altamira.
I walk back up the alley to my house. I pour a glass of wine and sit on my front porch. I hear the shouts of the children playing hide-and go-seek in the evening after dinner. It takes me back. Far back. I can almost hear the ice cream truck.