Editor's Note: Vic is traveling, and his notes from the road will be sporadic through the next fortnight. The staff at Socotra LLC regrets the inconvenience, but believes it is better than "greatest hits," which everyone hates.
28 April 2007
Snake Hill Road
I just got back from Loudoun County's horse country, where I was living the American Dream: I am thinking of re-inventing myself. I think I might change from urban dweller to country gentleman. I'm not on, of course, and never could be. I was an officer, by act of Congress, for a long time, but the “officer and gentleman” bit was of another generation.
It was definitely not part of the job description.
Still, I was looking for property that might suit a more relaxed pace, and slowly begin the great transition from the city to country life.
The way of work these days is strange. The Company has outsourced its big office complexes to small sub-contractors, and reaped the savings. The contractors are us, the employees. It sounds great, the idea of basing yourself out of your own home. Imagine the savings in time and boost to productivity if you can cut a couple hours commuting out of the day. There is a downside, though.
Like snow days, or bad weather. Being snowed in means that you are trapped in the office. And look around the house. If you do not like your coworkers, you still have to look at them in the mirror. And work and home-life seem to blend together in a single stream that is quite disconcerting and not altogether pleasant.
Anyhow, if the working-at-home thing is real (and I have my doubts, still) it would seem reasonable that you could locate your home office to just about anywhere you want. For the Washington Area, the horse and hunt country starts just an hour to the west, and the Shenandoah Valley beckons just beyond.
It is not that I dislike life in Big Pink. It is the ultimate in turn-key living. If it were not for the houseplants, I could leave for a year and if the mortgage continued to be paid, no one would either notice or care.
The hunt country is disconcertingly beautiful, and filled with people who have either re-invented themselves, or have so much money that they have no need to. The Realtor I worked with was a likely Irishman, here in the States for more than a decade. He thinks the green hills and lanes are as pretty as Limerick, and he has several jobs to support himself in the style to which he would like to become accustomed.
When he is not selling real estate, he is the master of the Middleburg Hunt, which as I understand it is a pack of wealthy mounted people who thunder across the fields and fences chasing the life out of Foxes behind the baying hounds.
I have no intention of doing such a thing, though I imagine if there is a way to stand around the back of my car and drink outdoors that might be fun.
That is another of the kind of people out in hunt country; the ones who wear the tweedy hunting clothes and drink near their cars. There are honest folks, too; who actually work. But the way of work in the country is to find a niche skill that slices off a bit of the money floating down from the big estates or the wannabees like me who are flooding west from the city and overwhelming the life they would like have.
I looked at a lot of options that don't make sense. I spent the day driving around with the mad Irishman looking at old and new structures, vacant land and turn-key multi-million dollar estates I could not afford on my most self-delusional day.
As the sun lowered toward the Blue Ridge, I was saturated by possibilities, and the prospect of rushing back toward Thoroughfare Gap at breakneck speed filled me with dread. That was the whole point of this adventure in possibilities. I decided to stay in the country rather than hitting the traffic at Manassas and gesturing wildly at my fellow motorists the rest of the way into Arlington.
The nature of region is that there is not a Motel Six on any of the country lanes. Nor is there fast food. The locals are united on that front, even if they are fractious on others. Every house has a placard protesting the new high-capacity electrical transmission lines that the rapacious Dominion Power Company wants to run through the most picturesque portions of the County in order to serve the growing needs of the City.
The roads are in appalling condition, and it is by design. If they are not bad enough to break the axels of the people who live there, things are fine. Keeps the riff-raff out.
I asked my Irishman for a recommendation on a Bed and Breakfast, thinking it might be a treat. He mentioned a few, but said the one on Snake Hill was probably the nicest, and there might be an off-season rate available.
I called the place on my web-enabled PDA phone, and it was true. There was a suite available, and I could have it for a single night. They preferred more, but my limited needs suited them better than leaving it empty.
I left my Irishman near his office in town, near the monument to the soldiers who died there, protecting Bobbie Lee's flank on the march north to Gettysburg. I could tell he was sad I had not jumped on one of the big properties, and thus guaranteed his summer would be a comfortable one. He was an optimist, though, and there were more dreams to look at on the morrow.
The B&B was north of town on a road that narrowed to a single lane across Goose Creek. Climbing up the steep lane to The Goodstone Inn made me realize it was not what I had imagined. I drove up the lane at the off Snake Hill Road and parked in the gravel circle near the ivy-covered ruin of the second-to-last manor house that had occupied the hill. The façade had been converted into the rustic entrance into the marble swimming pool.
I parked the car and the manager met me in the lobby of a sprawling structure of what had once been a rich man's stable. There was no check-in desk; Julie directed me to a couch, waved at the pastries and tea service set up on the table and told me she would take care of everything.
She did, with brisk and friendly efficiency.
The brochure on the low table in front of the couch informed me that the Inn was actually, "one of the World's Finest Luxury Small Hotels." High on a bluff above the creek, it had been created on the former estate of financier Frederick Marburg, one of the New York Robber Barons who came down with the Mellons and their ilk to re-work the old Colonial-era plantations into fantasy horse-and-hunt properties.
You would not think that anyone could afford to acquire the property or maintain the staff to run the places, but apparently there are billionaires among us. I once popped out of a dirt road and onto the fringe of the Mellon private airport, suitable to service a kingdom. Many of the big places are still out there, while others have been broken up into manageable bites, or converted to other purposes.
Julie returned after a decent interval, and I was shown to the completely re-modeled hayloft in the old stable building that now features rich hardwood floors and a personal spa at the end of the suite.
According to the informational card in the menu in the intimate dining room, the original estate was settled at the time of the French and Indian Wars, when this bluff was on the edge of darkness and savagery. The Leith family dwelt there through the Civil War, and contributed three sons to the Confederacy, two who rode with John Singleton Moseby, and one with J.E.B. Stewart.
I assume the family lived in the genteel poverty that pervaded the upper South after the war, and the property passed in 1915 to a Mr. Goodwin, who founded a large commercial dairy on the property, and erected a new grand manor house.
That enterprise lasted only a quarter century, and came to an end, presumably with the ravages of the Great Depression, and the death of the master. The great house burned, and the acreage and stone facade of the manor house passed into the hands of Mr. Marburg, New York financier to the Harriman Rail Trust, who threw up a grand house of his own and joined the Hunt Society. The family used the estate during the season, and intermittantly as a refuge from the City in the fall and winter.
That life lasted to the end of the colonial age out there, slowing at the end of it, in 1998. Now it is a hotel and working farm, where your eggs-to-order at breakfast were harvested that morning. It rained that night, and with the windows open to the cool breeze and the smell of wet earth I could hear the cows lowing.
The country life. The cattle sounded just like one of the ring-tones on my PDA. I was a little freaked, until I figured it out.
I was afraid it was the office calling, and they might think I was getting away.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
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