Yesterday, driving back from Pennsylvania to North Carolina after three days of filming a course on music for Classical Academic Press, Hank and I found ourselves inordinately captivated by the landscape. As we sailed through the stately hills and valleys of the Appalachian region I thought of the contrast between these silent, majestic mountains and the busyness that May brings to many families.
After all, it’s travel time. People are scurrying off to graduations, packing up to relocate their households once the school year ends, and gearing up for summer trips, sessions at camp, or study programs abroad. Throw in Mother’s Day, birthdays, and weddings, and it’s a busy time.
My busiest period is about to begin too. A week from today I’ll land in Croatia for the first of my 2019 tours with Smithsonian Journeys. This initial voyage offers a brilliant itinerary through the jewels of the Adriatic (Split, Hvar, Dubrovnik) beginning in the beguiling city of Zagreb with time also in Slovenia.
Next will come a tour based out of Berlin. Then comes a multi-generational “family” sail down the Rhine, followed by an August stay in Switzerland. After that comes an intense September tour called “Old World Europe” through Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, and the Czech Republic, followed by an October river voyage from Amsterdam to Budapest and the year’s final trip through the frosty, endearing Christmas markets along the Rhine.
Phew, that’s a lot of traveling. No matter how many times I do this, I barely believe it. Me? Traveling this much? Me, a gal who grew up going absolutely nowhere? No vacations, no family trips to the beach or lake. Nowhere.
We stayed home because of the never-ending demands of my father’s work as a photo-finisher, back in the days when black-and-white film was king, taking pictures was a luxury, and folks carefully parsed out each of the 12 shots on a roll of film. Developing that film was labor- and equipment-intensive. It didn’t happen by pushing a button on a laptop computer.
But the reality was, my dad didn’t want to go anywhere. He was born in a lush “holler” outside of Bluefield, West Virginia. The coal mines shaped his early life. Then the family moved to Roanoke, Virginia, where his father became a successful contractor.
But the Depression washed it all away. In his teens, he and his two sisters were packed up and taken north to find work. It may sound exciting to think of small-town teens heading off to the glamour of New York City, but, in reality, the experience was more harrowing than thrilling.
Work was available “up north,” but not easy work. The stories from that period still make my ears prickle. Yet, by 1937, my father had saved enough to return to Roanoke and start the Williamson Road Photo Shop. Often I’ve wanted to share stories with you about growing up at his heels and learning the process of manually developing pictures once I was tall enough to operate the (in retrospect dangerous) gas dryer, negative cutters, and myriad of other, now antiquated equipment.
I’ll say only that he chose this work because, to him, photography was magic! From a blank sheet of paper, the right chemicals could draw images that appeared, dot by dot, streak by streak. He never lost his fascination with the process.
The draft for World War II forced travel on him one more time while he served in different war-time film departments. After that, he rarely left Roanoke again. He had no use for travel. Why would anyone want to leave a place as beautiful as the Shenandoah Valley?
Now, he loved hearing stories about the whirl of travel I had begun to do: my research work in Leningrad, my years living in Germany, and my new life in Texas once I became a professor at Southern Methodist University. But hearing about it was enough.
Then, one warm May day in 1997 when I was visiting Roanoke, he took me up to the cemetery where his mother, father, and only brother (who had died at 12 of lockjaw) were laid to rest. He pointed to the plots he had purchased decades ago for him, my mother, my brother and me, plus our prospective spouses and children. (He was a planner!)
He told me to turn around slowly and take in the setting. Of course I’d been there before, as he was faithful about bringing flowers on appropriate occasions. But this time was different.
“Look,” he said, “You can see the mountains from every spot here.” Indeed, a ring of Blue Ridge Mountains sparkled around the knoll in every direction. “That’s why I chose this place,” he said with pride. Then he looked directly at me and said, quietly: “Now listen, honey. When I’m gone, I don’t want you to be sad for me, because I’m going to be looking at these mountains forever.”
He died less than a year later, dropping dead of a heart attack while alone in the very house his father had built for our family in 1950. As devastating as his death was for us, it was precisely the departure he hoped for: sudden, and not drawn out by debilitating illness (as my mother’s would be). Rather, it was, as he liked to say, “boom!” He’d apparently sat down in the living room for his customary cup of coffee after supper, about to peel an apple and watch the news.
While my grief could not be staunched, there was an immediate, ongoing comfort from the words he said that day—this blessing he gave me from the very spot where he planned to feast his eyes eternally on the mountains. My father was not a systematically religious man. Still, there’s no doubt that a fitting epitaph for him would be these words from Psalm 121:
I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help:
My help cometh from the LORD, which made heaven and earth.
These memories flooded me as we drove back yesterday through the verdure of the Appalachians. Particularly as I soon embark upon all these trips, I was grateful for another chance to be wrapped in the Shenandoah Valley and drink in the Blue Ridge Mountains, sinking as they do every evening into a dusty blue shimmer as emerald valleys pull back into the shadows of night and columns of grey, blue, and lavender drift west across the sky, chasing the retreating sun.
Beauty is wherever we are. Some of us may be showered with opportunities to discover beauty in new places. But others (like my father) will choose, wisely and happily, to stay and drink at the fountains of beauty that caressed them from childhood until their last breath on this earth.
What a beautiful tribute to your loving and creative father — and to your beloved hometown. I share your affection for the Blue Ridge Mountains, and I eagerly drink in the spectacular views every time I get back to Roanoke. Thank you for sharing your memories with your readers. Keep them coming!