the Great Roads, and a Sunken Lane

US 30 is one of the Great Roads, stretching from the boardwalk of Atlantic City to to the mouth of the Columbia River in the west. I drive eastward, the towns ever closer together, the buildings now often in the old Federal style of the early 1800's.

Mansfield, Ohio, about halfway across the state: the first Hill. But I am too busy to admire it, for the road has of a sudden become urban, crowded, and under construction. To my mind, this town of Mansfield marks the uttermost edge of the Midwest; I am entering the Rust Belt, the old industrial heartland centered on Cleveland and Pittsburgh. At Wooster, I leave US 30, dropping south on US 250 through Amish country, and on down a bit of Interstate 79 to the Ohio River, Parkersburg, and US 50. This is another of the Great Roads, from Ocean City and Assateague Island on the Maryland coast through the District of Columbia and westwards, eventually reaching Sacramento, California. I drive it through the forest-clad mountains of West Virginia as far as Clarksburg. Discouraged by traffic and construction (much of it truck traffic obviously related to the fracking industry, about which I will not here write), I turn north again, to Morgantown and Interstate 68.

Few people know the western part of Maryland, tucked between the Potomac River and the Mason-Dixon Line, a land of mountains and long fertile valleys. After two hours of white-knuckle high speed traffic on the Interstates, I look forward to the Maryland Welcome Center, just across the state line from West Virginia. It is early, still two hours until sunset, but seeing that the center is permanently closed due to state budget cuts, I worry about finding a place to lay my head further east. There have been other rest area closings on my journey, all of them appearing to be for lack of money, and the areas that are open have deferred a lot of maintenance.

Here, the rest area remains open; it is just the welcome center building that is boarded up. I stop for the day, claiming a picnic table up the hill behind the parking lot, looking out over the lake and river far below, the mountain ridges hazy and blue, three of them visible from here, one behind the other, all covered with forest. The hot afternoon settles into evening, the storm clouds that have trailed me for two days piling high in the west. I write, and eat a picnic supper. I begin Evensong, watching a curtain of rain approach in the valley. The rain comes while I am saying the Collects, driving me undercover into the Toyota. It proves to be a brief, intense squall; behind it, the clouds scatter, with the promise of a clear evening and a fine cool breeze.

I settle in for the night, listening to a CD of some of my own work, piano improvisations, and looking out over the mountains until they disappear in the darkness. A few stars appear in the sky.

July 8 - Wednesday

The rain returned after midnight, this time steady, settling in for a long stay. At dawn, the valley was entirely shrouded in mist, invisible.

Today is a short travel day, less than two hundred miles. But the temptation to Not Pray is present, as ever: Get Going!!!! Don't waste time here; you have miles to go. Matins is long enough, but the Litany as well?

Yes, the Litany; it is Wednesday.

As always, once I begin the Office, sitting in the Toyota with the rain drumming on the roof, it proves worthwhile. I find this to be more generally true, applying to any endeavor that takes a bit of effort – practicing, exercise, household chores. Starting is often the hardest part.

Matins and Litany completed, breakfast eaten, shaved and cleaned up in the rest area bathroom, I roll out, ending a fifteen-hour stay in this place.

No wonder my wife refuses to travel with me.

10:30 am – Sideling Hill, Maryland, on I-68.
This parallels US 40, the old National Road. It was a child of that most visionary of presidents, Mr. Jefferson. He obtained Congressional authorization for this road, which runs from Baltimore and points east across the Alleghenies to Indianapolis and St. Louis, fulfilling Jefferson's vision of a link between the Thirteen States and the new Louisiana Purchase.

The interstate climbs through an impressive man-made gap in the hill (there is a good photograph in the Wikipedia link), with a rest area near the top. Again, the exhibit center is permanently closed due to a “$280 million budget reduction package.” But the pedestrian bridge across the highway remains. I hike across to the westbound side, where the empty exhibit center remains, gradually crumbling from neglect, for there is something which I must revisit. There it is, down at the end of the parking lot, entirely ignored by the other travellers: the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial for the State of Maryland. It is a large native stone with a plaque, under some shade trees with a black POW/MIA flag and a magnificent view of the valley eastward, noting that this highway, Interstate 68, is dedicated to these Veterans.

It was here, in Vietnam, that we got seriously off-track. Our role in the Second World War, in which both of my parents served, was just, insofar as we can judge such things, and more just perhaps than we knew at the time, for the immensity of what the Nazis were up to did not become clear until the end. And Korea – it seemed equally just, for we were standing alongside a small country struggling to be free and find its own way in the world (as South Korea has in the years since). At first, Vietnam appeared to be another Korea. But it proved more complicated than that.

The Vietnam War ended with the fall of Saigon in 1975, forty years ago. The remaining veterans are old now, and will soon be gone (and I with them, for I am at the very tail end of that generation, the last birth-year of the draft lottery). But so long as I live, I will not forget.


I cannot pass so near without a stop at another place of memory: the Antietam Battlefield. I wrote of it here, on the anniversary of that fearsome day.

Today, I walk the Sunken Road, which was the center of the Confederate line. For a place that is so large in its significance to American history, its small size was surprising. It is an old farm lane sunk down under years of wagon traffic about six or seven feet below the neighboring fields, with a rail fence at the top, similar to an old county road on my farm, and hardly more than one or two hundred yards long. On September 17, 1862, the division of D. H. Hill, between 2000 and 2500 men, many of whom had already suffered from heavy fighting on the left flank of the army that morning, faced a frontal assault by some ten to twelve thousand Federals, all of them fresh and ready for battle.

After a terrible three-hour struggle, the Federals managed to gain a foothold at one end of the lane. From there they poured fire down the lane, breaking the Confederate position. Photographs such as this one, a few days later, showed the bodies of the Confederate soldiers “stacked like cordwood” in the lane. “We were shooting them like sheep in a pen,” one of the New York soldiers later wrote.

On this one day, more American soldiers fell than in the Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War combined.

A middle-aged woman who had been working as a clerk in the U.S. Patent Office, Clara Barton, had just the previous month gained permission to serve as a nurse on the front lines, where women had previously not been allowed. She was there at Antietam that day, and the events and suffering of that time started her on a path that led to the founding of the American Red Cross in 1881. That struggle involved her in arguments against those who maintained that such an organization was not needed because the United States “would never again face a calamity like the Civil War.” She knew better.

July 9-11

My mission for the week is a visit with my sister and her husband in suburban Maryland. I will say little of these days; they were quiet, and a renewal of such family ties as I have.

I had intended a visit to my cousins. All but one of them live within a ten-mile radius in southern West Virginia, an area that also includes my farm. A funeral scheduled for July 18 has lopped two days from the vacation, so I will see neither farm nor cousins.

But there is one other visit in West Virginia that I am not going to cancel.
(to be continued)