by Jeanne Drevas
It’s coming to the end of my time here. It’s now or never. I steer low rental car aiming for the Hazel River, so near where my home and studio used to sit. I’ve already scraped the under carriage a few times on potholes and high crowns of driveways. I’m not going to go as far as what I think of now as ground zero, where my house used to sit. There is only new grass and a recently constructed home. I’m not going to go quite that far. Once was enough.
My black car is covered in dust from all the gravel roads I have traversed, the open windows accepting leaves that are falling fast in this autumn air. Surrounding me, the air glows from the yellow of tulip poplar and maple and a hundred other hazes of gold. I inhale my history as I steer slowly along Woodard Road, the back road from Sperryville to where my property existed. I’m aiming for a slow contemplative walk up the Hazel into the Shenandoah National Park. Each driveway or house I pass has a story for me: first the hillside overlooking Sperryville and the Blue Ridge Mountains where a man tried to sell off two-acre plots. No, said the zoning people, no you cannot do this to Rappahannock County. I then dive down into a hollow and find the hidden gravel path to a tiny cottage one has to access by foot bridge over a tiny stream. Two people lived there who never fought as they told me, but they split up any way. Then two places so well known to my eyes but I’ve never seen inhabited. I struggle to discern the old caboose perched on the edge of a small pond that has been sitting there before I ever entered Rappahannock County 65 years ago. Being metal it still stands. Could I somehow revamp it, reside in it on another small edge of paradise?
I pass the diminutive cottage of a woman, a healer? who told me to drink a half cup of olive oil to flush out my gall bladder, to relieve the pain she thought was gall stones. But it was the hurt I carried by the one abuser in my life. The olive oil didn’t work. Getting rid of him worked. Bouncing along I go by the faded white low rambler where a young painter and his father lived, the mother having been hacked to death by her son in a psychotic fit. He’s still a great painter, still roaming around. No more mother to set him off.
An odd three-story skinny abode faces a shallow lake where I caught frogs to inhabit my new pond up at my house. The couple there combined into a weirdness I stayed away from. Maybe capture my frogs elsewhere.
Climbing the washboard road, I pass the sign that says, “Workspace for Choreographers”, wood with forged metal work surrounding it, surely done by Nol, our blacksmith now sadly taken from our midst. Memories flood from all the time I spent up at her big mirror lined dance studio, me one of her subjects she tried to herd like cats in a ballet.
Hidden up the next driveway is a small house where a lumpy man cowered inside while a contingent of us firefighters cleared away his debris from the one and only approaching forest fire to occur in my time out here.
Reaching the top of the hill on the left is a leaf strewn driveway where an artist and his wife, an artist I knew well, had lived. They moved away and when he died of cancer, she died with him. I have a colored pencil drawing of nests and feathers he titled “Jeanne’s Nest.”
Then past a couple, whose home is hidden way back in, but they or maybe the new owners have a lovely one-story extra home further on a bit. A small pond separates me from it. I love it. I know it is simple in there.
Onward is an old two-story white farmhouse settled in a small field where a woman kept trying to become an artist. Just start I kept saying. I turn right at the fork, past what used to be a cidery and dulcimer aficionado who has moved his enterprise to the old mill in Sperryville.
Now I’m getting close to my destination, but there are more memories around each winding bend. The cleared spot where in the spring after the forest fire, the morel mushrooms had a field day and so did we. Up and down past a tiny house set right on the road, such a closed in place, where a young potter has taken hold. Then onto a rambling place called Witch Hazel where lived the mayor of the all-woman town council that presided over the town of Little Washington in the 50’s. The Life magazine picture proves it.
On the other side of the dusty road is Manahoac Lane where in the past, I would walk past my neighbors’ where I made my front door home on my way to the trail up the Hazel. They are long gone, but I watched the new tenants, her becoming an ordained minister and he devising medical machines that could detect all sorts of chemical warfare. I would continue walking past the tiny cottage where, in its miniscule recesses a woman artist created huge papier-mâché masks and produced wild hippie extravaganzas utilizing a whole contingent of like-minded folk. I would then descend down the driveway past the Manahoac Lane sign and cross a little bridge that goes over the Hazel.
Since I’m driving my rental at the moment, I cross that little bridge and park my car alongside the Hazel. Across the road is a rather large flat area where the man who sold my father his cabin and me my land used to live. It was the site of a Manahoac Indian encampment, many stone tools and pots would rise up from the wet ground after a heavy rain.
I open both doors and pee in this slightly protected spot, reflecting on the time I cut off a protruding white pine root the insides of which I carved out, carefully sanded to perfection and inserted acorns, creating a wooden geode. I get stoned, as is my wont on my walks and wander up Hungry Horse Lane where I encounter the home to another soul now lost, he so injured by PTSD when he helped at the 9/11 Pentagon Bombing. Carl and I had the presence of mind to ask him up to our home soon after, this act soothing but not quite enough. Further is the dark red home of a new tenant who I just happened to meet at a local café this time out here. Connection. And finally, the steep drive up to where an asshole used to live, terrorizing his wife and shooting off his gun at all hours of the night. I would hear his shots even the mile away at my house, the blasts echoing off the steep walls of the hollow.
Now I’m in the Park, the Hazel bouncing over ancient lichen covered metamorphic rocks. These mountains used to be taller than the Rockies, but now, each stone is a billion-year-old testament that eroded to create the 100-mile wide plain that leads to the Atlantic Ocean. The tears begin, my grieving starts big, and too my gratefulness for my young life where I carved a life. I hold nothing back. NO humans will come along to witness. The creek catches the light from the sun traveling two fingers above the steep ridge. I am put in my place in this universe, a tiny floating amoeba stumbling her way up the leaf strewn trail. I must spend much of my time looking down to discern hidden rocks and roots, but the glow amasses around me, the babble of brook fills my ears among the crunch of dried leaves. I recognize what is above me by what is below, the curve of brown sycamore leaves large enough to hold a salad, and iron wood, maple, sassafras and an oval leaf I should know but don’t. I know all the spring ephemerals are hiding, the trilliums and such.
I catch myself holding my breath, holding my history as I slowly climb up the Hazel. I want this to last forever, but I know my aching feet will say I can only go to the first crossing of the creek. Reaching the steppingstones I sit on the edge and take off my shoes to plunge my aches into the cold clear water that rushes over them. Could I just become an aging animal that has no other recourse but to crouch on this ancient rock, paws resting underneath its depleted body, knowing full well that it is time to let go, to accept the dappling sun one last afternoon, smell the dry duff, feel the coursing water. Just let go of the grip on precious and debilitating life. Hikers the next morning would find a human body, but not a human spirit. The human left the day before, that spirit bounding into the universe. The animal remains, parts of her reaching for the sun, some recoiling from the cold bruising water. Perhaps the animal fell into the stream only to die from hypothermia the night before, its glacial remains leaking its microorganisms that make up her body downstream. Other cells are holding on not ready to depart, other organisms finding foothold on their new host body.
The lowering sun sets behind the ridge, but still reflects golden off the opposite tree line, telling this wounded being that it is time, once again to pull her aching feet out of these assuaging waters so much better at healing than an ice pack, but maybe not quite as good as treading the tides of the Pacific Ocean where this animal currently lives, but has migrated to her yearly infusion of the Piedmont of Virginia, to this very moment of immersion.
I pull out my feet, dry them as best I can with my socks, then struggle to pull them, dampened, over my still clammy feet and enclose them in my hiker shoes. Curled on the rock, I cautiously, painfully, turn, and lift myself to standing. I know I will not be back here for another year, maybe not even that. Will I be wheelchair bound this time 2025? My hopes are far better, an image of Edna, my van waiting for me back at the trail head, my little home on wheels, the one I hope to drive from Oregon next year. I hobble down the trail, my feet a bit numbed, but there is no solution to my tendonitis but staying off my feet, there is no solution but the animal saying it’s close to its time on earth.
I must again watch the trail closely, but the glow continues to surround me. I’d so love to have this fall offering forever, but earth says it is starting its rest into winter. It is telling me to rest too. How can I rest when there are so many memories to unearth. I reach my car, drive just a bit further and park next to the house the used to be the home of that old moonshiner, the one who kept propositioning me when I was in my twenties. Now a recovering alcoholic lives here, a long-time friend of Carl’s and mine. He is home! We sit on his porch drinking water watching the still sunny treetops on the ridge across. I am so grateful for this human interaction, catching up, but must move on, for I have one more person to visit. Driving a half mile, I turn left to cross the culvert over the Hazel where my father’s cabin resides, now encased as a sort of museum of the olden days by a larger home, owned by people I met only once, but I knew the previous ones well, all of us thinking we’d grow old together. That is not turned out as we dreamed. He has died and she moved near her daughter in Atlanta. I made an extensive clay back splash for them for their kitchen, the seasons of Rappahannock, painted with under glaze, really a huge surge for a medium not meant for such detail such as the bear cubs on a tree, the trilliums, Old Rag Mountain looming on the larger panel behind the stove. My goal is not to knock on their door but to continue up to Lyt’s, my closest neighbor when House was alive. I see his jeep in the carport and his silhouette. I can tell he does not know what this low black car is doing driving up his gravel track. I park up above his home and through the thinning trees can see the top of the new house built where my studio once stood. I turn away from the demise and greet Lyt, who has come around the corner of the house, sees it is me, beams his rotten and near toothless smile at me. I knew him when we were both young and strong and toothful.
We sit on his screened in porch, more water, this time in a mason jar. We speak not of that fateful night when he witnessed the burning of my house, he who could see the flames from his front door, he who probably called the fire department in the first place. I don’t ask him. No, we talk of the future, of possibly meeting down in South Carolina, on the tidal coast, us in our kayaks, me with Edna, writing, painting, be wholly within ourselves, holding onto each other’s company until one of us wants to part, touching an edge of paradise only meant to be found alone. My whole history of House lies 100 yards away, through deep forest. I will not go back up there now. Onward, isn’t that the way forward?
Jeanne Drevas in her own words ~ Why did I leave my homeland? I’m not the only one who has done so. I like to say I did it for my man, but that’s an easy answer. This estrangement has forced me to dig deep into my resources, to find there’s someone to love in there, someone whole against the sky. On a more informative stream, I was a sculptor (house builder, too) and dancer, now a writer and mover. I also have a van, which houses me as I learn the land of Oregon. I am finishing up my book “Handmaking My House.”