Open Pavement

Last week I ran an errand that involved driving home via the commuting route I used to take B.C. (Before Covid). I came down Nutley, turned left on Old Courthouse then left again on Route 123 before taking a right on Hunter Mill then the rest of the way home.

There were almost no cars on the road, as you might expect, and as eerie as it was, the commuting self in me (homo commutus?) rejoiced. Here, finally, was something we all crave around here, something rare and precious — open pavement.

As these weeks of quarantine give way to something more ominous — weeks (months?) of uncertain re-openings, re-closings and second-guessings, I think back on those empty roads I saw last week. They were broad, they were empty, they were beautiful. But as we all know ... they can't last.

(An almost-empty road in Colorado. It's harder to find pictures of empty roads around here.)

Last Drive to Vienna?

It's a gray day (not like this photo), flecks of rain on the pavement, when I rush out the door. I grab the newspaper, jump in the car, buckle up -- and I'm gone. There's the familiar route down Fox Mill to Vale to Hunter Mill.

I know every curve and hill of these western Fairfax lanes. I know where the school buses stop, the garbage trucks too. It's 17 minutes of twists and turns that make me feel as if I've come down the mountain. And in fact, the route once took hours instead of minutes.

But today's trip was different — though I was three-quarters of the way there when I realized it:  The next time I take public transportation downtown I will most likely be riding the Silver Line. I will be leaving from Reston, not Vienna. I will drive different roads — or maybe not drive at all.

I can still ride the Orange Line, of course; no one will stop me. But will I want to when the Wiehle Station is half as far from home?

It was a poignant moment, even at 6:20 a.m.

Tunnel of Trees

In the great cycle of seasons, topics announce themselves with some regularity. Every year at this time (if not earlier), I notice the steady progression of leaf and bough, how the trees on one side of the road lean in, reach over and touch the trees on the other side.

The result of this mutual growth and attraction is a tunnel of trees, surely one of nature's most subtly beautiful offerings.

Why is it so magical? I think about this when I'm driving down Fox Mill or Vale or (when in Kentucky) Pisgah Pike outside Lexington.

Do the lofty boughs remind me of a cathedral? Or is the appeal from the coziness, the impenetrability, of a cavern built of leaf and shade?

There's no explanation, of course. It's beauty plain and simple.
 


Photo: © All Rights Reserved
by tom8yours

Flow

This morning a choice: Turn left or right out of the park-and-ride lot on my way home to write.

Turn left and I wait twice. Turn right and I drive farther —but without stopping.

I turned right.

It's about movement. Flow.

It's about that in so many ways.

Curved and Straight

A walk yesterday along the mall was a study in shapes. The National Museum of the American Indian loomed before me, its curved stone walls a link to the mesas and pueblos of our native past.

Beside it was a straight sidewalk, the stricture into which the native past was placed. We, the inhabitants of the 21st century, we live with them both.

Closest to the surface is the straight line, the crossroads, the grid. But underneath its order are the curved paths of our past. The deer trails and the wagon train trails, the old roads that wound among hills and ridges.

I walked yesterday along the straight path, but I kept my eyes trained on the curves.


Photo: visitingdc.com

Country Roads

Yesterday, on my way to Kentucky, I drove along the Robert C. Byrd Appalachian Highway System as the late senator was lying in state at the capitol in Charleston. As I listened to eulogies on the radio, I zoomed along Route 33, Route 55, gorgeous curving two-lane roads and even the occasional stretch of four-lane pavement, roads to nowhere it might seem to outsiders, but not to West Virginians, of course. To them, the roads were proof their senator cared about them, that their state mattered. To generations of West Virginians, these roads are the way out of cloistered communities, a way out into the world beyond. But yesterday, they were a way back in.