Historyland Highway

I wrote the story in my mind in the big bed, after the alarm went off. I thought I would recline for a moment and compose my thoughts.

It was an elegant story and I think you would have liked it. I completed it, and then thought perhaps I should open my eyes. I decided that losing an hour of sleep in the morning was not so bad, if it helped my powers of concentration.

By the time I finally was able to peel myself out, look out the window at the car whose lights were blinking and horn tooting in the high-rise parking structure across the street from the Norfolk Marriott, make the tiny pot of complementary coffee, search the radio dial up and down for the BBC, failing, and start the computer, the story was gone.

I thought it might have something to do with the cream Cadillac I rented at the airport yesterday, equipped with the XM satellite radio and the alarming message on the dash that I should check the tire pressure.

Or maybe it was the metaphor of the bridges; the cab ride to the Ronald Reagan National snarled in an impenetrable mess as someone had ordered two lanes closed for some vital work, and the consequent horror of traffic as I fled the city, southbound on I-95, and my decision to bail off the big road at Highway 3, the Historyland Highway that cuts the peninsula of the Northern Neck of Virginia Southeast, peeling away the centuries of America to the beginning.

The strip malls and stoplights are sprawling from the highway, and from the bedroom community of Fredericksburg, but it is not very long until the road opens up in broad fields, greening with the first touch of Spring, the buds on the trees just opening.

Robert ”King” Carter once owned nearly all of this lovely peninsula, and he is interred in a stone sarcophagus outside the Christ Church he caused to have built, and was finished by his sons in 1735, three years after his death.

The King owned 300,000 acres, composed of 48 separate plantations on the Northern Neck. He also caused the building of the road that would become the Historyland Highway, straight for the most part, and down the middle of the peninsula to expand the lines of communication between his holdings.

I started to pick up speed after the sign that directed me to the battlefields of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, where Lee divided his forces in the face of the enemy, and the confused Federals let him get away with it.

Bobby Lee knew this place well. He was born just off Route 3 at Stratford Hall. The Estate was built at the time King Carter was dying by Robert Lee, who owned 16,000 acres, and founded the Ohio Company to open up the lands to the west.

The estate fell into the hands of Revolutionary War hero Harry ”Light Horse” Lee, Bobbie’s father, and then out of it again. Heroes do not necessarily make good businessmen. When the family left the place, young Bob ran back to his bedroom and gazed up at the iron backing to his fireplace and said goodbye to the cherubs that fly still in bas relief on the back.

I showed them to my own boys, years ago, but I don’t know if they remember.

George Washington was born just up the road, and George’s mother just down it, and in some places the long straight roads still go back to great houses that front on the River, as God intended.

I crossed the Rappahannock River south of Kilmanrock and onto the Middle Neck to cross the York River at Gloucester. The windows on the Caddy were open, and the radio played classical music, and urban anger, and the opening day of the American League.

The Tigers beat the Royals, 11-2, as I crossed the broad blue waters where the French Fleet has stood to seaward, and descended into Yorktown, where the fortifications built by General Cornwallis still stand, and the victory obelisk pierces the center of the village.

Past the Victory Center and the battlefield the traffic became progressively more irritating, onto the Interstate to cross under the water at Hampton Roads, where the CSS Virginia battled the USS Monitor to a spectacular and inconclusive draw.

And there, at the approaches to the tunnel, the bookend was complete. Traffic stopped. Time came to a standstill. From the viaduct I could see the gray ships at pier side at the naval Base at Norfolk. The Caddy told me again to check my tire pressure.

There was nothing I could do. I turned up the radio and looked out the window. It was amazing how the climate can change with just a couple hundred miles, or a couple hundred years, from Washington.

Same traffic jam, though. I remember always what my Mom told me years ago. ”Never live on the other side of a bridge from where you work.”

I think that applies to tunnel, too.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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