Vienna Walk

I found myself in Vienna last Friday. Not Vienna, Austria (though that would have been nice) but Vienna, Virginia, which is 20 minutes from my house, a place I often pass through on my way to somewhere else.

There is a strange disconnect to walk along streets one usually drives, sort of like flipping a video from regular play into slow-mo. 

There is the house on the corner lot with its split-rail fence and funky upstairs addition — but instead of zipping by it I can see the details, the little upstairs deck with its wrought-iron tables and unmatched chairs.

There are streets whose names elude me at 35 miles per hour: Garrett and Malcolm and Holmes. Solid middle-class names, though their neighborhoods are ones made pricey by their (mostly) large lots and desirable location within walking distance of Metro (back when that mattered). 

I ambled along Center and Lawyers, past Salsbury Spring, which was the only source of water for the area during the drought of 1930. I saw the place with new eyes after learning that, felt a little more connected to this place I (almost) call home. 

Chesapeake Steamboats

One of the reason I love to travel is that it opens up worlds you'd never know if you didn't leave home. It's not just seeing the sights and meeting the people. It's imbibing the history and culture.

Things like the Chesapeake steamboat culture, for instance, which flourished from the 19th century into the 20th.  Boats plied the rivers, creeks and inlets of this watery world, picking up tobacco, produce, seafood — and people — and taking them to Baltimore or Norfolk. Neighbors would gather at the wharf when the boats made their return trip to retrieve the tools, lumber or lace they'd ordered from the big city.

Steamboats served as buses, ambulances, bars (you could get a drink on one during Prohibition) — and stages. The musical "Showboat" was based on an Edna Ferber story she wrote after spending time on the James Adams Floating Theater, which mostly plied the Chesapeake.  These floating stages might be the only live entertainment a family could count on all year long. It was a big deal when the Floating Theater came to town.

Chesapeake steamboats — until this afternoon, I never knew they existed.

(This is the pilots cabin from the steamer Potomac, which is being restored in the Irvington Steamboat Museum.)

Rain and Memory

Thunderstorms belong to the afternoon. The buildup of heat and humidity, the pressure and then the release.

This morning was an anomaly. Cracks of thunder before 6 a.m. Copper pawing at the door, wanting to get to his safe spot in the basement. Driving to the bus in a downpour and seeking high ground to park the car.

Here's where local memory comes in handy. The lot I use now was once flooded, cars submerged. Unsuspecting commuters had done just what I did today, raced up and parked and caught the bus. But on that day storm drains were clogged and rain fell several inches an hour.

When I pulled in this morning I noticed another driver who'd done the same — bypassed the closer, lower spots. I guess he remembers, too.

Visiting the Past

I've lately spent a few hours in the cool, quiet recesses of the Smithsonian Archives. While this conjures up images of dusty stacks, in reality the building is new, open and sunny. Researchers sit in a glass walled room where archivists can keep a watchful eye. No pens, no purses, no coats or scarves. We stow our belongings in lockers and bring only pencils, paper, laptops and cameras.

What emerges is time and space for the quiet pursuit. The here-and-now drops away; the long-since-past emerges. It's a nice place to spend some time, the long-since-past. I read about the 1918 flu and Model Ts and old roads on the prairie, two tire tracks amid waving grass. It was a place where you could buy an acre of land in Falls Church for $125 and build a house in ten days.

I leave the archives with my mind spinning. Once I walk out of that glass room, I'm not in the past anymore. But I'm not quite in the present either.

History Lesson

"Do you want to hold it?" asked Jim Lewis, our tour guide. "You might need both hands."

And with that he passed me a 12-pound cannonball that, yes, was easier to hold with two hands than with one.

Lewis is a member of the Hunter Mill Defense League, which sounds like some sort of retro radical 60s organization but is actually a group of citizens formed to protect and defend the lovely, historic and oft-threatened (by development and widening) Hunter Mill Road.

Lewis and colleagues have bushwacked their way through the rolling hills of western Fairfax County, discovering old road beds, abandoned millraces and confederate earthworks, cannonballs and former camp sites. Now they're sharing their knowledge through lectures, booklets and the occasional tour.

Yesterday's four-hour jaunt delivered more information and ideas than I could possibly capture in a single post.  Like the cannonball, it was a lot to handle. It gave me a plethora of ways to see this land I live in. A place of history and of depth. 



(Jim Lewis and cannonball near the Confederate earthworks he found in the woods behind his backyard.)

Water and the Bridge

As I learn more about the land around me, I find myself gawking out car windows, craning my neck as I cross bridges, counting houses after I pass a hidden lane.

Is that where the old road veers off into the woods? Is this where, as late as 1970, cars forged the creek?

I'm testing the waters here, seeing if history can stand in for that bone-deep knowledge of a place that comes from growing up there. My hunch is that it won't; my hope is that it will.

For doesn't this, like so many conundrums (conundra?) depend upon whether you listen to head or heart? You can make a list of pros and cons, but in the end your rational self is taking orders from that fast-moving water down below.

Our thoughts are the bridge; our feelings are the water.

I put my money on the water.

A Palpable Past

In thinking about place, and what binds people to it, I ponder the beauty of the landscape, the scale of roads and buildings, and the people, of course, always the people.

And then there is history. Not one's own family history, but a learned body of knowledge, something you can pick up from books and conversations, from paying close attention to the woods you walk through.

On Saturday I met two men who have mapped the forgotten roads of our area. They started with two places, an old house in Vienna and the site of a mill a few miles away, and they charted the road that ran between the two. This is only one of their projects. They have also helped to move an old school, protect an old road and add historical markers to our neighborhood.

For them, the past is palpable. And because of them, it is more real for all of us.

Family Stories

Betty Leet Bell is my Dad's first cousin, which makes her my second cousin, or my first cousin once removed. One thing she is without question is a genealogist. She has spent years researching the births, deaths, marriages and deeds of those who can no longer tell their own stories.

Yesterday we went to visit Betty and she told us about a cousin who danced in the dream sequence of the movie "Carousel," a great-grandmother (above) who died of the measles after giving birth to her tenth child, and another relative whose pet was a talking crow.

One of Betty's stories concerned two store-front lots in Lexington. When she was researching the ancestors on her mother's side, she learned that in the 1790s her great-great grandfather bought these two parcels of land for a hatter's shop.

A couple years later, when Betty was researching her father's side of the family, she learned that these were the exact same lots that her dad purchased in the 1930s when he was looking for a place to build his furniture store. One hundred and forty years (and several intervening owners) separated these purchases. It was one of those historical coincidences that Betty says is not that uncommon when she's digging into the past.

Maybe it was just the commercial potential of these lots that spoke — generations apart — to these two very different men. Or maybe there was something about that spot, the way it looked in the morning light, or smelled after a good, hard rain; maybe there was something about that place that spoke to each of them.

A House, A Photograph, A Story

Today I'm in Lexington, about to go for a walk in a neighborhood that is not my own but which has meaning for me because my parents live here. In class the other night we talked about whether you can know a place without knowing its history. The consensus, if there was one, was that a place is shaped by its history, but you don't necessarily have to know that history in order to be shaped by that place.

This house was where my Great Aunt Sally died more than 80 years ago. We drove by the house the last time I was in Lexington and Dad told the story of going with his father to his Aunt Sally's wake in this house when he was a little boy. Dad also spoke about a racetrack across the street from the house, a track that preceded Keeneland, Lexington's current track. I couldn't resist taking a few photos of the house. It is quite different from all the other houses on the block. It looks like a castle.

A few weeks after my last visit to Kentucky there was an article in the Lexington Herald-Leader about this very house. It was home to Courtney Mathews, an African-American horse trainer who probably trained 1902 Kentucky Derby winner Alan-a-Dale. Mathew's funeral was held 13 years later in the same house where my Aunt Sally's took place. It's a house that may soon be named to the National Register of Historic Places. The same house I photographed on a muggy June day 71 years later.

I guess this shows which side I take in a discussion on history and place.

Once Upon a Meadow

Sometimes when I'm walking through the suburbs I ponder street names. Our neighborhood has a faux English theme: Folkstone, Treadwell. You half expect to be strolling through the Cotswolds — but of course you are not.

Close by are roads with names like Flat Meadow, Hay Meadow, Cross Creek and Still Pond. These belong to the neighborhood called Franklin Farm. The farm is gone, the creek is but a shadow of its former self and the meadow is a narrow strip of land hemmed by houses. The ponds are so still (that is, stagnant) that this summer they were renovated, if that's something you can do to a pond. The trees around them were felled so daylight could freshen them up.

The small dairy farms that still dotted our landscape half a century ago are gone now. We grow families here now. But in my walks through the woods and fields, I like to pretend. The place names make it easier.

Local History

When my dad was a boy, he snuck out one night to hear Ella Fitzgerald at a dance club a few blocks from his house. It was a black jazz club; whites were allowed only upstairs at the bar. My dad was 12 at the time, so he wasn’t allowed in it all. But he remembers standing outside and listening to Ella, and a few months ago, he looked for the building. Here it is, a shadow of its former self, but still standing. While we were looking around the property, the owner pulled up in his truck and told us that before it was a jazz club, the oldest part of the building was a steam-powered hemp factory.

You can love a place without knowing much about it, but if you know about a place, if you learn its past and its stories, how can you not be attached?