Charlotte to Luray

I spent Veterans Day weekend in the Shenandoah Valley in the woods along the river with a friend from the Marines who lives about 200 yards from the banks of the South Fork, where it gets dim at 3pm in the shadow of the stretch of Massanutten Mountain that runs between Strickler’s Knob and Kennedy Peak. It’s an annual tradition to catch up with and remember ourselves, and typical of what you’d think. Strong coffee, cheap yellow beer, belly laughing. Woodsmoke getting into all the things, the trade for sunscreen and beach sand.

This year had all that, but everything about the world just beyond the river and woods was different. Usually heading to the valley feels like getting away from it all. This time it felt like going into the belly of it all.

The drive from Charlotte to Luray is often a fantastic event. Leaving flattish land behind to climb into the Blue Ridge, winding past enclosed towns with strange names. Galax. Dugspur. Fagg. I once noted that Solitude is in the shade of Purgatory Mountain and I remember to ponder that every time I pass by.

Usually it’s beautiful but early November is a dice roll and this time I was a week too late. The colors had already been past their peak, but a couple unseasonable 80-degree days toasted up and blew away what remained of the show. Nothing left in the canopy but faded brown, dull burnt orange, and blackening reds thinning away from the pale grey of trunks and limbs beneath. The dirty rusted greens of the occasional pines standing out like they’re carrying things. They’re not.

Without the show or the cover of warmer season, what’s also laid bare is the poverty. The scrap of it all. Outside the college towns of Blacksburg or Radford or the tourism offered by places like Natural Bridge and some of the caverns, there is little else or nothing at all. There is some forestry work and some work if you can pour concrete or drill for wells, but otherwise the only places I see newer vehicles are in the parking lots at the power companies. Keeping the lights on seems like the only truly steady opportunity there is, and the best work to be had if you can get it.

Beyond that it’s nothing but survival. Decaying homes surrounded by shells of things. Barns falling in upon themselves, capless silos with trees growing out. Empty main streets with Dollar Generals on the corner. Trump signs decorate all of it. You see them everywhere until the sun goes down.

The stars at night are amazing. I can see constellations I don’t get to see on any other weekend. The stillness is amazing too. There is nothing else like experiencing a place in its stillness. You don’t hear its occupants anymore, you hear its expanse. You feel its scape.

In Page County, if you sit quietly beneath the stars on one of several approaches to Luray, the stillness is such that you can literally hear the sheriff’s drones buzz overhead. They are not guarding a border. They are not monitoring fentanyl traffic. They are not looking for weed farms. They are surveillance for property crime, because these people cannibalize each other. They are their only remaining resource.

All of this is to say I have never seen poverty celebrate itself on behalf of the successes of billionaires before. It is just so strange to behold.

For maybe 10 miles on the drive up through the mountains I was stuck in the left lane behind a Boar’s Head truck. It tried to pass a string of three slower trucks but didn’t make it happen during a straightaway, and then the mountains took its speed away, leaving me boxed in and staring at the boar logo. From that stretch, if I could have turned right and driven 190 miles or so I would have arrived in Jarratt, VA, where a factory closed because of a listeria outbreak. The company refused to follow the most basic food safety precautions because that was cheap to do, and some 530 people in a town of 600 lost their jobs and their stability. Permanently. A town not unlike Galax. Or Fancy Gap. Or Draper. Or New Market.

These people claim to have won and that things will be great again, that they’ll be safe from crime and prosperous. But what help or prosperity do they think is coming? Nobody knows or exactly says.