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.
My Family of Five in December 2005 consisted of Kristina, my partner and lover. She’d recently turned 37 years along. Eventually we married, and, yes, eventually we divorced. Still friends with my ex-wives, tho, including Gwen. Love them all, I do. I was but 46 myself, over a quarter of a year away from my next birthday. My oldest child, the daughter I had with Gwen, is Morgan Hannah. Morgan now goes by Dylan Blair and uses nonbinary pronouns. Here, however, she’s 11 years along. They will turn 12 about a month before I roll into my 47th year. Next in line is Kate, age 7, who prefers to go by Kathryn these days. She’s Morgan/Dylan’s cousin. Gwen and I chose to adopt Katie when she was a little bitty six weeks old “Baby Cakes.” Talia is Kristina’s daughter and my stepdaughter, altho I helped raise her from birth. She was only 3 years old this Christmas and would turn 4 a few weeks after my next birthday. I feel deep and profound awe whenever I reflect upon the many different lives all of us humans weave in and out among and with one another. I’m grateful for all the good times we shared, and my sadness for any bad times fade away beneath appreciation for what feels truly precious.
Talia with Dot Bass, her step-grandmother and my Mama, on the family farm in Virginia, December 2005. This holiday time was to be their only time being with each other.
After a rambunctious week with my younger brother and his family and a Christmas Day full of jolly fun and big, ol’ happy messes as my Mom looked around at us all with a mix of pride, joy, consternation, bliss, and sadness, we had to get outa the house. Morgan stayed behind to rest, read books, and visit with her same-age cousins, but the rest of us got into a minivan and drove off to Twin Lakes State Park. We needed woods and water, and Twin Lakes was part of heavily forested area of Prince Edward County in South-central Virginia. In my younger days this park was split into two halves, Goodwin Lake State Park and Prince Edward Lake. Long after the schools were desegregated, well, really wasn’t all that long, Whites went to Goodwin Lake and Blacks went to Prince Edward Lake. The parks were finally merged into one, connected with roads and trails, and all swimming relocated to Lake Goodwin. Tho this part occurred soon after I had moved away. I shared some of this convoluted history with my Family of Five, and they could barely comprehend it. Except for Kristina, whose father was a first generation Japanese-American born in a Second World War internment camp in Idaho. His own Japanese father enlisted in the U.S. Army to fight any of the Axis even tho his wife and kids were concentrated with others in remote camps under armed guard where the weather fluctuated between baking hot desert oven temps and subfreezing, winter cold.
Dylan, known as Morgan back in these early years, here at her paternal grandmother’s house on Riverview Farm. She didn’t join us on our trip out to Twin Lakes but stayed behind to be with her grandmother and play with her cousins.
We drove down lonesome country roads and passed farms and fields. Wide open grassy meadows and cornfields plowed under for winter soon turned into woods and then deep forests. I wheeled the minivan thru the state forest and turned into the state park. Explored those old dirt roads. Parked the car up on the hill above Goodwin Lake. Kids pogoed out of the car, jumped and yelled, and brought us all back down into the present moment. The Great Outdoors has a way of making us present. The sorrows of history were forgotten with the past. So much to do right now! Woo HOO! Let’s go, kids!
“Hey, lookit! Let’s walk the beams! C’mon! It’s kinda like gymnastics class, isn’t it?” Kate in blue, Talia in pink, & Dada William in red.
Kate leads the way, but Talia’s catching up!
It is the day after Christmas. Since it’s a Monday, most places are closed. We seem to be the only people there. Altho a few drive up, look around, and drive off without hardly getting out of their vehicles.
Catching up!
Talia, the little dew drop from Heaven, studies the hard, spikey seedpod fruit of Liquidambar styraciflua, the American sweetgum tree.
I called Talia my Li’l Butterfly, but somehow “Talia” became “TaTa.” That nickname in turn morphed into another silly toddler name of endearment, Tater Tot. Her days of being the Sitting Baby Buddha, however, allowed her gifts of quiet observation to flourish as one of her superpowers. Meanwhile, all these sweet gum balls and their trees with the silvery bark and the five-pointed star-shaped leaves brought back Virginia memories of me as a young boy playing with my cousins at the family cabins on the Rappahannock River. We ran barefoot across pine needles and hurt our feet on those pokey-spiked sweet gum balls despite our elders’ scoldings. The tree later became the symbol of Silverwood Circle many years later. Silverwood was cofounded by my first wife, Margaret, our friend Paul, and myself in the local forests near here. Eventually Silverwood grew into one of Virginia’s largest NeoPagan Wiccan groves back in the early to mid-1980s.
Back at it again! This time Daddy jumps aboard and, uh, um, wobbles.
Holding…
Going down to the ground…
Ha! Kathryn the Great stays solid in her stillness.
“I gotta go bad!” “Oh, William! NO!” “But the bathrooms are far away, closed up, & nobody else is here. Wait! Stop! Are you taking pictures? Hey! Stop taking pictures of me!” “Too late, Mr. Bass!”
This is why “Men are Pigs.” Or dogs. Always gotta mark their territory like wolves while giggling like damn idiots.
Oh goodness gracious, you really ARE taking pictures of me, aren’t you? This is ridiculous & embarrassing so I’m kinda chuckling. Truth is nearly everybody peed here in the woods, but no one else gets captured on film. I’m not gonna do that.
Lookit! More sweet gum balls, you guys!
They’re so little!
They’re so many of them, too! I need a bucket cuz I wanna take them all the way back home to Seattle!
William Dudley Bass scampers up a slick ol’ tree over one of the streams flowing into Goodwin Lake. Both of the Twin Lakes formed from damming the headwater streams of the Upper Sandy River in Prince Edward County. The Sandy River drains into the Appomattox River which in turn flows into the James River and thus the Chesapeake Bay of the Atlantic Ocean. There’s old history here, as the Bay itself was formed from a gigantic crater from a terrifying asteroid hit about 35.5 ± 0.3 million years ago. This region of Virginia was part of the Powhatan Confederacy established by Native American tribes and was invaded by English colonialists who along with other European Whites brought over human slaves kidnapped from Sub-Saharan Africa. Indian Wars, the American Revolution, the American Civil War and Reconstruction, and the revolutionary turmoil of the 1950s and 60s, even early to mid 1970s all raged across these lands I grew up in and fled so far from only to realize we’re all on the same damn, bloody ass planet killing ourselves from our collective failure to accept, forgive, and love. Is it too late? Before the next giant asteroid or comet smashes into our world? Before all the ice melts? Before the mushroom clouds rise? It’s never too late, folks. In the meantime, however, I am as shortsighted as any human and love being in the present moment with my lovers and our children outside enjoying Earth’s magnificent biosphere. And so I treasure these precious moments with my loved ones outside on this sunny but chilly Monday the day after Christmas 2005.
Katie Kate Kate goes for it. She is determined, strong-willed, & focused.
Sometimes all one must do is to move from those first little steps into one great leap forward. Taking those initial steps, however, are vital as they demand balance in motion and prepare us for the greater leaps ahead.
Confident. Form. Stillness in fall. Surrender to gravity. But, hey, showing off? Nawww…well, maybe a little bit. For us all, a celebration of pure physical joy!
She lands!
Triumphant! Deep satisfaction.
Our trip to Virginia for Christmas 2005 proved a memorable one. We visited Gwen’s family of origin in Lynchburg, Virginia, as well. Then we went up to Alexandria in Northern Virginia where Kristina’s younger sister was born when her father was stationed there in the U.S. Army with her mom. We drove over the Potomac and toured the historic Federal core of Washington, D.C. Flew back home to Seattle the next day. Spent New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day up in British Columbia, Canada, with a large group of workshop buddies and friends. Crazy times. Learned many lessons. Accept what’s so before seeking to change it. Forgive others and forgive yourself. Love yourself and love those you choose to love regardless of what they do or don’t do. Take a stand. Live the lives we choose to live with intention. Yes, I just love my lovers and love each and every one of my children. Grateful to spend time with them. Especially outside in the Great Outdoors! Woo Hoo!
Our blended family on the Mall outside the United States Capitol Building, the home of Congress. L2R: Front Row: Kate; Middle Row: Morgan (now Dylan), William, Kristina; Top: Talia. It’s a chilly, foggy, and damp day in the broad valley of the Potomac this Thursday the 29th of December 2005. Foto by a glad stranger.
William Dudley Bass
Thursday 15 August 2019
Seattle, Washington
USA
Cascadia
Sol
Resources:
Twin Lakes State Park, Virginia State Parks. https://www.dcr.virginia.gov/state-parks/twin-lakes.
Copyright © 2019 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.