Days 2 & 3 - May 21 & 22 - Shenandoah National Park

Before this blog post is over I’ll get around to the subject of fly fishing, but as I often do, I’ll come at it askew.  First I want to say something about Virginia, home of Shenandoah National Park, in which Camelot (my Northstar truck camper) has been parked for the last couple of nights and will remain for another couple of nights.  But I’ll have to come to the subject of Virginia in a roundabout way also.

My father, Eldred, is the eleventh and youngest child  of his father, John, who was the eleventh and youngest child of his father, who was the eleventh and youngest child of his father, whose name was Isaac.  I’m the youngest child of my father, but only the second one.  Our family is an example of how U.S. population trends changed during the twentieth century.  In times past, rural families, which constituted a much greater portion of the population than they do today, tended to have large families.  Each family had to create its own little economy and it needed workers to do that.  That’s not typically the case today, although folks like the Gosselins (8 kids) and the Duggars (19 kids!) have found modern ways to capitalize on having lots of children.  But I digress.

Isaac Wolfe (or Wolf) was born at the turn of the 19^th century in Virginia, in 1802, so we only have to look back a few generations in our line of the family and we’re in the infancy of the United States.  We don’t know who Isaac’s father was, or if he was born in America or immigrated from Europe.  If the latter, he probably came from Germany, or possibly from England. Wolfe is a English spelling of the name, but most likely it was transformed from the original Wolf, which is the typical German spelling.  I’ve seen many places in the Shenandoah Valley named “Wolf” – for example, “Wolf Gap,” which is a minor pass on the front range of the Allegheny mountains leading from Virginia into West Virginia.  It’s not far from Columbia Furnace, which saw its heyday in the Civil War as a manufacturer of cannon and shot.  Legend has it that Wolf Gap was named for a fellow called Isaac Wolf.  It’s unlikely he was my great-great grandfather, but who knows?  It’s fun to contemplate the possibility.

Over the course of the 19^th century Isaac and his youngest sons and their youngest sons gradually migrated south through Tennessee, eventually settling in northern Mississippi.    The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island are iconic symbols of the great European immigration wave of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, obscuring the fact that earlier in the history of the U.S., Virginia, not New York, was immigration central on the eastern seaboard.  Virginia has a relatively small land mass and that land is mostly marginal for agriculture, so when the younger sons of the first generations of land-owners and recent immigrants came of age, their prospects for staying in Virginia were poor.  Consequently, they migrated west in great hordes, first into Kentucky and Ohio and Tennessee, and soon into points further south and west.  The song "O Shenandoah" is a melancholy reminder of the mass exodus from Virginia  that did so much to shape how America looks today.  The interpretation of the song by Sissel, which is conveniently available on YouTube with captioned lyrics, is one of my favorite interpretations:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1EG_4IBzbA

By the turn of the 20th century, Isaac's grandson and my grandfather, John, was a sharecropper in northern Mississippi, married to Daisy, who already had two children from a previous marriage.  My father grew up with his sprawling family in the Mississippi Delta, picking cotton for a quarter a day, or so he used to tell my brother and me.  His childhood spanned the Great Depression, an era when a ripe watermelon or a slice of pig from the smokehouse were the closest things to luxuries he could reasonably hope to enjoy.  At a tender age he married my mother, Topsy, sired my brother, Dave, and promptly went into the Army to serve in the European theatre during World War II.  When he was discharged he obtained his high school equivalency certificate.  Against all odds he was able to use those experiences and his meager education to build a lucrative career as an executive with a prominent international farm equipment manufacturer.  A remarkable story, though not entirely uncommon in its time.  Tom Brokaw wrote a book about my father’s peer group called “the Greatest Generation.”  That title is not hyperbole, it’s a fact.

My respect for my father has grown by leaps and bounds.  As a boy,  I took it for granted that my life would be comfortable and my education would be supported.  When my father gave me advice, I usually either resented it or was simply bored with it.  One thing he recommended was to get a good job with a good employer and stick it out through thick and thin.  I had no such intention during my youth, but the advice must have stuck in the back of mind because I eventually followed it.  Things turned out just as he intimated they would.  I realize now what I should have understood all along, that the sacrifices my father made for his family and his country and his employer were enormous.  Everything he achieved, he earned.  To this day, as he struggles with declining health and performs the utmost acts of devotion for my mother, his quiet strength remains intact.  I love my father.  I’m just sorry that I didn’t always show it.

Those are things I’ve been thinking about since I’ve been in Virginia, land of my forefathers.

Oh, and I also went fly fishing.  Yesterday I hiked down from the crest of the Blue Ridge to the Robinson River.  As I reported in my last blog post, the streams are running high, and even in the tumbling headwaters of this small river there was a powerful flow.  I crossed numerous rivulets coming down the trail.  Sometimes I couldn’t tell the difference between the trail and a rivulet, since in fact they were one and the same.  I wasn’t too optimistic about my prospects for catching fish.  Therefore it was a thrill to hook a gorgeous little brook trout in the very first pool I paused to fish in.  He was no match for my short (6’ 10”) Scott “Murray Mountain Rod," a Mr. Rapidan bead-head nymph fly, and my consummate skill as a small stream fisherman.  Here’s a picture of the brookie:

He's diminutive, yes, but actually bigger than the average southern brook trout.  Brookies are the only trout native to America's east coast.  Finding and catching them is not an easy task these days.  But on this day in this place, everything made sense – more scrambling to small, scenic pools of clear mountain water, more feisty brook trout, sunshine filtered through a lacy green canopy, dancing yellow butterflies, a fawn grazing only yards away, a wild turkey, and a shot of Glenlivet from a flask engraved with “Once and Future Fly Fisherman” (gifts from Eric and Jeff – thank you!).  In sum, it was perfect!

To top off Day 2, I made a nice campfire and grilled a T-bone, which I relished with a fire-baked potato, broccoli slaw and a glass of French sauvignon blanc.  The sun went down, the stars came out, and I sat by the diminishing fire for a long time, thinking about my father.  God bless him.

I had to move from one campground to another on Day 3, a Sunday, because the first campground was only open for the weekend.  Because of the move and my desire not to compete with the weekend crowds, I decided to spend most of the day tooling around on my bike, reading and writing.  Early in the evening I met my new campground neighbors from Connecticut - father Steve, daughter Courtney, son Cameron and friend C.J.  They kindly offered me a chair so I could sit by their fire and chat until darkness fell.  When I told them I was making it a point to meet new people along my route, Courtney said, "I'm sure you'll meet plenty of people more colorful than us."  To which I replied, "Maybe you're more colorful than you think."  They weren't sure whether to take that as a compliment, but it was. A frequent theme in the writings of 19th-century transcendalist Ralph Waldo Emerson is that we're all more colorful than we think we are.  Steve works in the financial services industry now, but has the aire of an ex-hippie, which he may or may not have actually been.  He must have given his kids, who are now college-aged, a more liberal upbringing than I had, because they were surprisingly eager to sample my Glenlivet right under their dad's nose.  So was Dad, who has Scottish blood appropriate for drinking Glenlivet.  Steve is originally from Nova Scotia, and informed me of something that should have been obvious to me years ago but wasn't:  Nova Scotia means New Scotland.  Duh.  In any case, the Scottish/Connecticut clan and I enjoyed a very pleasant evening and I discovered the truth in something Steinbeck reported in "Travels with Charley" - a good method of making friends on the road is to ply them with whiskey.