Taking my Seattle, Washington family to romp about old haunts from my youth at Twin Lakes State Park in rural Virginia, on the day after Christmas,
Monday 26 December 2005
Hey Hey Hey lookit us FLY! Kate & her Dad goofin’ off. Foto by Kristina.
Our family of five liked to play outside in nature’s Great Outdoors. We still do, altho we aren’t quite a family of five any longer. We had flown out to Virginia, the five of us, to celebrate Christmas with my Family of Origin. Especially my Mom. She lived alone as my Dad had died a little over a year earlier on the 1st of December 2004. Strange thing was the First was also the 3rd Anniversary of my relationship with Kristina. Mama lived on to pass on my brother’s birthday in November of 2006. This time, however, she was very much alive, her cancer in remission, and she couldn’t wait to see us. My brother, Joe, and his family lived down the road from our mother. My sister, Beth, with her new husband and little daughter, had moved all the way from Arizona to the family farm to be near Mama. This day, however, just the four of us out in these Virginia woods. As our intertwining journeys of life played out, tho, this trip was the last one we would ever make back to my old Virginia homeplace as a Family of Five.
We somehow thought we would always be together other than the kids growing up and out. Such ideas seem a wee bit silly nowadays as we look back across the warping, moving fabrics of spacetime and timespace. I grew up in the 1960s and 70s on a family farm anchored in the dairy industry. Riverview Farm was located in Piedmont hills & gully country. It sprawled along the edges of the Sandy River drainage of Prince Edward County. The farm sat between the little country village of Rice to the East, Green Bay towards the South, and the town of Farmville towards the West. This place was home for me. It’s where I grew up playing in the woods and fields and swamps of my farm boy childhood. The area is haunted, forever, by the ghosts of slavery, Civil War and Reconstruction, racism and sexism and class warfare, religious intolerance, and the revolutionary turmoil of the 1950s and 60s. Many of those who lived there lived in denial of their own damn history. So I had to get outa there! But, where?
After a few spectacular adventures West of the Mississippi River, I knew the American West was where I must go and live my life. It was sad to depart my family of origins, and I did so anyway. My parents felt incredibly sad, the guilt ate at me, yet I felt compelled to follow my own heart and play my own drum. Made many mistakes along the way, still do, and, well, as you must surely know, life is a flippin’ mess sometimes. Most of the time I love it. Ended up in Seattle. Started out goin’ to California by way of Wyoming, but fell in love with Gwen from Virginia and ended up with her in Seattle, Washington instead of Alaska. Yeah, wanted to keep going north as far as I could get, but she refused. We headed back to Virginia, then North Carolina, paddled rivers and backpacked around the nation, finally returning to our beloved Pacific Northwest in January of 1992.
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