13 July 2009
 
King Carter


(Robert “King” Carter’s Tomb, Christ Church, White Flint, VA)
 
My man Deng Xiaoping once famously observed that it doesn't matter if a cat is black or white so long as it catches mice. I was thinking about that as I looked at Heckle and Jeckle, the two feral felines who permit me to occupy Refuge Farm with them.
 
They are both black, with traces of white on their mittens. They are savage beasts, and creatures of the land and outbuildings.
 
Of course, they only catch the mice if they are hungry, and I had just driven the Bluesmobile 113 miles up the King’s Highway from White Flint in Virginia’s Northern Neck to feed them.
 
They looked at me with feigned disinterest.
 
The automatic feeder has five pie-shaped sections in the dispenser tray, and each day at noon, the batteries operate permit a timer to operate a motor and rotate the tray under an aperture that provides access to the day’s allotted food.
 
One is always under the aperture, so that gives them access to dry food as I put it on the floor of the garage. There are four days of food remaining before the motor grinds and delivers to them an empty bowl.
 
I can only imagine what the scene was like the first time. Heckle and jeckel has become attuned to the sound of the motor, just as house-cats respond to the sound of the can-opener. As working cats, however, they took our their range on the machine when I was a day late in visiting the property last week, and they cuffed the machine across the garage and into the substantial tires of the World’s Fastest Production Pickup Truck, and knocked the batteries right out of it.
 
Food is important to them, and I have taken that onboard. Water is vital, of course, and perhaps more necessary, but I have a big gallon jug that sits upside down in a dispenser, and seems to be adequate for more days than the dispenser. Plus, there is water on the property, though it is seasonal in nature.
It is plentiful when it rains, as it has lately, but is limited to the well and two narrow runs.
 
Not like the magnificent Rappahannock or the placid James that flow down to join the majestic Potomac and feed the mighty Chesapeake. On my way to feed the cats, to keep them healthy enough to kill the mice, I started at the mouth of the Rappahannock, where the river is broad enough to be a great flowing lake.
 
For luck, I touched the tomb of Robert “King” Carter in the peaceful yard of the handsome chapel he commissioned with his own money, to worship in the way he saw fit.
 
I am going to tell you a little about a very special place this week, and it is worth taking it a little slowly, if you don’t mind, since the pace of life there works to a different beat.
 
The story of the place is about water, and it is in no small measure about King Carter.
 
The road I drove is the trace he had hacked into the tangled wilderness that he tamed, and clear-cut, and on which he grew the tobacco that eventually funded the war that made some of us free. It also burned out the soil and left the Northern Neck to fall back into a sort of suspended animation as tobacco, and later cotton, roared west, jumping the Shenandoah and Mississippi and Missouri rivers.
 
King Carter’s plantation system, and the labor that was its underpinning, also made inevitable a war that would make everyone free, at least in theory.
 
Take a little trip with me this week down the King’s highway. It is not named for some George in England. It is named for the King of the Northern Neck.

It is where America's history began, and I don't mean any disrespect to the Pilgrim Fathers, those dour lemon-faced puritans. In Virginia, we had some style before they got on their ships in Plymouth.

King Carter.
 
Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com