Around two weeks ago, I ended my summer as I always do with a drive from Chautauqua, N.Y. to my family's home in Hillsborough, N.C. The route I choose has the least amount of interstate highway I can get away with, and it's one I choose purposely to drive through towns and see homes and businesses throughout this segment of America. The 543 mile route courses through several small towns in western Pennsylvania, through narrow strips of Maryland and West Virginia, travels through the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, before climbing over the mountains of Afton, V.A. to then follow U.S. 29 through Lynchburg and Danville before the home stretch of N.C. 86 leading to Hillsborough.
Set against the lush and hilly beauty of this natural environment almost all the way down are several alternative examples, if you are looking, at how we choose to live. My route basically avoids major metropolitan areas and their attendant suburbs. North Carolina, like Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Virginia, has a comparatively large number of small towns and villages. And like in North Carolina, along my route one sees places stunning in their obvious small town pride, such as Ridgway, P.A. My wife and I once randomly stopped for dinner in Bedford, P.A., a place neither of us had heard of, and were rewarded with one of the best random restaurant meals we have ever had at 10/09 Kitchen in the middle of another lovely old American downtown. One of our traditional family stops is at Blue Mountain Brewery, where good beer and comfort food are served alongside a gorgeous vista of the sun setting behind majestic Virginia mountains. Pretty homes are seen on hillsides, deep in woods, and I often wonder how those who live in them found them and what motivated them to pick out their particular piece of pastoral heaven.
One also sees towns and homes that have visually, obviously, given up. This is, after all, a trip through America, in all of its splendor and ugliness. The decay is particularly tragic to see against the often beautiful surroundings that frame it. Smashed old farmhouses, abandoned industrial depots, gas stations and minimarts just barely holding on to life. Poverty in cities is largely avoided through routes around or over it. Its concentration out of sight and out of mind. Traveling through America off of the interstates one cannot help but see poverty in all its grim material pathology. Like most poverty, it is not actively combated often enough, merely acknowledged on the busy way from one place to another place.
These small places, however, are places where one can choose to live and make a difference quickly. "Our Towns," the recent work of James and Deborah Fallows, largely chronicles energy being poured into renewing our local communities in America by those who live in them. While many have turned away from the snarling hopelessness of national politics, the Americans that the Fallows find are often much more optimistic and practical about improving their immediate environs. Overall, my overwhelming feeling on these long drives is one of serenity and gratitude for the grace we are shown in the natural world we have been given, and more often than not I am impressed with how the residents of the places I drive through have complimented the beauty of their surroundings. Those dark spots on the road one can imagine being improved, if not en masse, then one site at a time, matching a human abode with the perfection of its surroundings. I have driven through many sections of this country over my years, and it never disappoints in providing wonder. You just have to take your eyes off the road a bit.
