Table of Contents Views and Mechanics Publisher's Note Editor's Note Review of Language and Mind Review of This Is My Best Review of Lost in the Void Crossword (Solution Posted in September. Printable version in pdf format of journal.) May/Jun Crossword Solution Creative Nonfiction Puttin' on My Pearls By Cathryn Braswell My Dinner with Gacy By Andy Martello Mysteries of the Shenandoah Valley By Casey Clabough Getting Lucky By Dale Purvis Poetry Your Mind and You Are Our Sargasso Sea By Lita Sorensen Midsummer By Lita Sorensen Windows By Lita Sorensen Simple Man By B.K. Birch The View from Here By Mary Hudock The Dinner Party By Ruth Mark Fiction It's in the Stars By Linda Gallant Potts An Intimate Evening with Papa By Lance Garrison Ballard The Prank By Terri L. Knight A Pocketful of Starflakes By Leslie Wolter Cover Art Photography by Seth Brown About the Contributors © 2006, River Walk Journal and respective authors and artists. All rights reserved. Do not use or reproduce without permission. River Walk Journal, Inc. Board of Directors Chairman - Elizabeth Ross Vice Chairman - Joseph Koch Secretary/Treasurer - Geri Stock-Ross Editorial Director - Patti Kurtz, DA Literacy Director - Bill Mausteller Policy Director - PA State Rep. Jess Stairs Advisory Board Chairman - Patti Kurtz, DA Asst. Chairman - Dan Lachenman, PhD Samuel Hazo Christopher Leland Edwin Yoder Joseph Bathanti Journal Staff Publisher - Elizabeth Ross Editor-In-Chief - Joseph Koch Sen. Fiction Editor - Patti Kurtz Sen. Poetry Editor - Neeldhara Misra Sen. Creative Nonfiction Editor - Brenda Coxe Contributing Editor - Robert Dittman Publicity Director (PA) - Geri Stock-Ross For information about submissions, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/submission.html. Questions about promotions, subscribers' services, and advertising should be sent to publisher@riverwalkjournal.org. River Walk Journal, Inc. is a non-profit corporation run entirely by volunteers. For information about volunteer opportunities and internships, visit http://www.volunteermatch.org/results/org_detail.jsp?orgid=58479.

Mysteries of the Shenandoah Valley: Following the Warrior's Path By Casey Clabough During the summer of 2004 I performed nearly six hundred miles of hiking, following secondary roads along a route hugging the western slope of the Blue Ridge Mountains and descending into the Holston River Valley (from western Maryland to eastern Tennessee) that was once called Athowominee or "the Warrior’s Path." At one time it connected the nations of the Iroquois in the northeast and the Cherokee in the south, and was used by the first European settlers to enter and settle what was then considered the frontier. My own German ancestors had followed the path from the Catoctin Mountain area of Maryland to the Smoky Mountains at the end of the eighteenth century and I resolved to make the same trip, comparing that portion of contemporary eastern Appalachia against the accounts of early explorers. A project that has taught me much, the book tells the story of the natural and cultural development of that region and connects those historical variables to the cultural and environmental realities that exist in the area now–the ongoing relevance of a region fundamental to the history of the United States and most individual Americans. What follows is an excerpt from my journey which covers the area between Harrisonburg and Natural Bridge. On the road once more, in my own time, in the midst of this journey of the now, I enter the town of Harrisonburg, founded as Rocktown during the hard winter year of 1779, resting on land originally owned by Thomas Harrison, a successful local innkeeper along Athowominee. In Harrisonburg I am struck most notably by the startlingly new, slick visage of James Madison University, a place I have visited before but hardly recognize, many of the buildings possessing the bright appearance of having recently risen, scrubbed and shining, out of the Valley floor. Though the campus seems mostly abandoned, I spot a cell phone here and there, pressed against the dreamy young, blank face of a student, globally connected but appearing more or less oblivious to the immediate surroundings–a slow-walking, unconscious, preoccupied catalyst of the future. Often I have noted that places where the young are massed, irrespective of environment and structures, generally bear the peculiar atmosphere of the generation at hand, though the nature of that hazy ambience varies slightly from place to place and significantly from culture to culture. I recall, for instance, walking only a few years ago with the woman I had just married through the narrow streets of the Latin Quarter, south of the Seine, in Paris on a May day that felt like the middle of summer, and being struck not only by the youth of the faces around me but the light they bore in looking at each other, the numerous art galleries that dotted the avenues, or perhaps something else I could not quite see, being perhaps too much in love, or a little too American, or generally overenamored with French champagne and the intoxication of my own youth. Try as I might, and memory is always uncertain, I can not remember anyone trudging along, eyes fixed on the ground, with a piece of plastic pressed to their head. In this era of apparent telenecessity I do not own a cellular phone, generally viewing them as yet another new and needless way to be distracted, bothered, kept from more valuable things. But I realize too that this kind of opinion may very well relegate me to the ever-changing category of cultural relic, like the people who still insist on using typewriters, the once-new mechanical innovations of decades past, for their writing. Technological advances, the ever more speedy forerunners of historical change, have always favored the young, regardless of education or anything else. The pale boy who can’t or won’t pass algebra or pen a clear sentence, “writes” the ingenious computer virus that crashes his highschool’s website and enables him to place a funny-looking digital cigarette in his principal’s mouth on the school webpage. Like the evasive learning of the late Roman thinker Boethius, the root of his abilities and the process of his education remain a mystery. Just as Hypatia and her Alexandrian students held their secrets close since they believed they would only be misunderstood by the lower classes, so the accomplished young technos of the computer age masterfully ride the fluid tide of information technology, conversant with each other but concealing from the larger population the peculiar underpinnings of what many of them consider an elite art. The area south of Harrisonburg’s downtown constitutes a continuous strip mall–a kind of small-scale urban sprawl of horns, stop lights, and concrete–punctuated, just outside the city limits, by a labyrinthine Sysco building–a massive structure both of and outside of Harrisonburg, seeming to exist, at once, in as well as against the nature of this place. That the region of Virginia once known as its bread basket should house a branch of North America’s largest processed food corporation, based somewhere in Texas, strikes me as a development both logical and ironic. Perhaps the Valley’s distinguished agricultural history and ongoing productivity partially explain the company’s presence, though the fresh crops of the area, long delightful to the Valley’s people and animals, are now treated, frozen, and packaged–sent to other parts of the globe, or perhaps returned, in the wake of their processing, to the very homes of the people who grew them: locals purchasing food–now old, vitamin-deficient, preserved with chemicals–harvested from the very fields that surround them. Dwelling upon this state of things does not lead me to lament the departure of a more locally-based agriculture, for Harrisonburg’s farmer’s market thrives and the pervasive demand for natural foods across North America has led increasing numbers of growers in the Valley to sever ties with national food corporations and the chemical-laced practices of industrial farming. Better, in general, not to mourn vanishing phenomena since it is always possible they may return again, history come full circle, its tenets new in guise and terminology only. Recognizing this intermittent process, it is easier to forgive and embrace whatever it is the things and places around us are becoming–what they are–for better or for worse; helpful too in reminding ourselves from time to time that even where we live we are never really at home, but rather, as Montaigne said, “Always beyond. Fear, desire, hope, project us toward the future and steal from us the feeling and consideration of what is, to busy us with what will be, even when we shall no longer be.” These musings, as all eventually do, give way to the moment, the life and event at hand: the crossing of North River, which wells up out of the mountains to the west, not far from the West Virginia border. Unable to see either mountain chain, east or west, I feel the land lowered, pressed against me, a condensing of feeling and vision. Having left the Burketown area, I reach Naked Creek, where, hot and tired yet again, sweat-drenched shirt chafing me about the back and shoulders, I take the waters’ name for a sign and resolve to change clothes. Up the stream, away from the road–solitary among trees, water, and birdsong–I lie nude in a place where the current runs shallow over sand and flat stones, sky a hazy blue above me, framed unevenly by green on either side, the creekside treetops creating a wavy boundary to the canvas of the heavens. Once, while walking along the Isar River on a warm spring afternoon in Munich, I unexpectedly encountered a party of nude sunbathers, stretched out silent, apparently oblivious to me, eyes fixed on the firmament, trancelike. Alone here, tired and cool, water curving around me in the shape of my body, sky and stream are enough, holding my vision: in this moment, all I need. Drying myself on the sandy bank, my eyes are drawn down from the heavens to the waters, attracted by the peculiar hypnosis of liquid movement: of liquid itself. When light hits it right, it is hard not to gaze at water, much in the way the camper stares into the fire or the farmer dwells upon his hearth, each drowsy and reflective in the wake of his labors. It may have been my overheated condition and the confusion of fatigue, but to me the current of Naked Creek had felt as though it bore strange waters, flowing as it does from Seawright Springs and Wise Hill–peculiarly-named local places glimpsed on a map, unseen by me: water-giving mysteries of the Valley. Fixated on the enigma of water, Rome’s second king, Numa, was said to have gazed for hours into a favorite fountain, from which he claimed to gain the measure of wisdom necessary to bring about successful reform in his fledgling nation. Later, people whispered that it was with the water nymph Egeria that he held council and from whom he received his groundbreaking knowledge and innovations. It is a pursuit of idle wonder to imagine if, after a long afternoon or morning of watery watching, an instant finally arrived when the king truly believed some godlike murmur had issued forth, somewhere beyond his reflection, from the quiet lapping of the pool; or did he merely claim to hear such utterance in a calculated effort to deflect the risk-laden decision-making for his growing nation away from himself–radical policy softened and made gentle through the customary invocation of religious legend? In my own experience, most people will think you brilliant or wise only if you tell them what they already know or intuitively feel–something that may be somewhat new to them, but also vaguely and comfortably familiar. Real innovation usually succeeds only in invoking fear and hostility. As the scientist Albert Einstein famously observed, “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” Here, looking over the waters of Naked Creek, now fully clothed, I like to think of Numa emerging from his chambers after long hours of water gazing–of searching for a nymph, the unlikeliest of answers, in a watery image of himself. The idea of abstract reflection, image and identity shared and offered back to one another, exists in more visceral terms throughout this part of the Valley. Rockingham County, for example, is home to more than one Naked Creek, the other lying away to the northeast, emptying into the Shenandoah at Verbena, on the other side of Massanutten Mountain, where the peak closely resembles Gibraltar. And names here, as in other parts of the Valley, echo both locally and globally, two nearby hills carrying the unlikely designations of Betsey Bell and Mary, dedicated for mounds of like appearance in Ireland’s County Tyrone. This particular case of transplanted naming is significant for its insinuation of an early Irish influence in this section of the Valley, here at Verona, where I cross Middlecreek and the signs of development pick up amid the outskirts of what was originally called Fort Staunton, an outpost and village named for the wife of Virginia governor William Gooch. It was to a site nearby that John Lewis, father of Andrew Lewis, the noted surveyor and French-Indian War officer, led a group of families sometime in the early 1730s after fleeing Ireland in the wake of having killed his landlord, Lord Clonmithgairn, in a property dispute. Here, Lewis’s company began laying the groundwork for the town that eventually would come to be known as Staunton. The Indian presence in the Valley was much stronger in the 1730s than it would be just a decade later and the Lewis settlers found themselves in frequent amiable and, as yet, unsoured contact with the Shawnee, which, among other things, gave rise to a unique romance of sorts between the daughter of John Lewis, Alice, and Omayah, the son of a Shawnee chief. The pair were fond of walking together and it pleased him to make her crowns of laurel and flowers, which she collected as keepsakes and wore whenever they were together. Alice, whom Omayah called White Dove, was especially delighted when he presented her with a fawn he had tamed. White Dove’s family viewed her friendship with Omayah as harmless and a positive factor in their favorable relations with the Shawnee, however when Omayah publicly asked for her hand in marriage both her family and the settlers were shocked, and John Lewis forbade the union, shortly after which Omayah and a party of braves spirited Alice away into the countryside. Recovered through peaceful means a few weeks later in a limestone cave, White Dove was reunited with her family, and though she was still forbidden to marry Omayah it is said that they continued to see each other frequently and remained close friends for many years–a small anecdote of hope, an island or mirage, amid the dominant themes of hate and violence that would come to define the tragic epic of settlers and Indians over the course of the next two centuries. Leaving Staunton, having just glimpsed my journey’s first mall–its bland heaped concrete and meandering traffic aligning it closely with most any other mall–I am cheered, just above Shenandoah Valley Cooperative Electric, by an open and unique view of the Blue Ridge, a prospect from which one may take in its directional shift from a relatively straight north-south bearing to one that curves southeast. Traveling in Virginia in the late 1780s, an Italian naturalist from Milan named Count Luigi Castiglioni described Staunton as “situated in the middle of the pretty plain that . . . lies between the Blue Mountains and the Alleghanies,” an observation that causes me to wonder if this particular vantage point, along this road–already ancient in Castiglioni’s time–may have aided in formulating the Count’s positive impression of the Valley floor. It goes without saying that our view of the mountains is shaped by the position, real and temporal, from which we contemplate them. Count Castiglioni had come upon Staunton having journeyed slowly from Charlottesville, some forty miles to the southeast, where the valley-mountain network is much smaller, more intimate, the hills gradual, less abrupt, the land more rolling. By contrast, the views from Staunton are grand, vast stretches of the miles-distant Blue Ridge and Appalachian ranges glimpsed from the center of the great low-lying Valley. Yet, the smaller natural places to the east are not without their legacies of magic and mystery. Departing Charlottesville, Count Castiglioni would have glimpsed, to the south, a small chain of wild and dreary hills, an eastern offshoot of the Blue Ridge, known as the Ragged Mountains, the hollows and ridges of which remain home to many strange stories. It is among these coves and rises that day-hiking students from the University of Virginia occasionally have been known to lose their bearings amid the curious mist of the Blue Ridge in summer; and it is in these same hills that a weird nineteenth century tale unfolds: of a poor deluded apothecary who mistook a venomous vermicular sangsue for a leech, prescribing the creature in his art with fatal results. Even now there are cryptic species that remain hidden from taxonomists because of their close similarities to known ones, chamaeleons without intention. Such phenomena remind us that it is not difficult to mistake what we see. Peering too closely at some things only serves to push us further away, especially when our points of reference become mixed up, sometimes to the point of vanishing altogether. The poet Randall Jarrell wrote, “I hold in my own hands, in happiness, Nothing: the nothing for which there’s no reward.” On a whim, I had once followed a jeep trail over Newcomb Mountain, a humble peak of the Ragged Mountains, but no strange mist encompassed me and, though I frequently wandered from the path, half hoping, I never lost myself–the hills left no impression, I emerged as I had entered. There are many such places I feel that way about, nowhere places–to be in them is to be anywhere–present evasive and history blurring herself to the gaze, teasing us to move on and look upon other things, as if to say, “Since forever, there is nothing of interest here.” Of course, all such places have their stories, though some speak to us less readily than others, wrapping themselves in a shroud, partially obscuring what Edgar Allan Poe might call their brief “epoch in the night of time,” unfolding beneath the dark of the moon. South of the Greenville area, Ragged Mountains receding far to the northeast, is the old Providence church built around 1750, resting place of Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the reaper; and, three quarters of an uneventful day’s march beyond, one proceeds up a long hill and into the old part of the village of Fairfield, on the other side of which rests the grave of John McDowell, killed along with ten other colonial militiamen during a needless confrontation with a southward bound party of Iroquois warriors at a place called Balcony Falls, miles to the southeast, in December 1742–considered by some the first significant military battle between settlers and Indians in North America. Weighing vaguely all the tragic European-Indian conflicts that would follow in its wake, I find it difficult here not to dwell upon the nature of McDowell’s ambivalent inaugural run-in with the Iroquois. As the writer H.P. Lovecraft noted, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” Though Europeans and North American Indians had been interacting periodically for over a century, they continued to understand or know each other very little. Even today, not much is known about the various Indian cultures that existed on the continent around the time of European arrival, for they were oral societies whose original tales and languages are now almost hopelessly mangled and corrupted–merged and tangled with each other: lost. As much as early settlers feared what they considered savage about the Indians, they were also bothered and occasionally seduced by the free and comparatively untroubled manner in which they led their lives and embraced their surroundings. Accompanying John Lederer on his last expedition into the Valley in 1670 was the Englishman Colonel Catlet, who left Lederer after a time to live among a tribe along the Rappahannock River; and, far to the north, Puritan settlers evinced a manically religious fear of turning savage, going Indian, or succumbing to the ways of the “dark man of the forest,” as the devil was sometimes called–he who played inaudibly the strange siren tune that lured young Puritans to the intimate confines of dense bracken or the more open frolics of the maypole. This general lack of understanding among the European groups who would eventually become Americans persists even in the modern era. As late as 1972, Valley historian Alvin Dohme summed up the Indian reaction to European encroachment as follows: “In the classic reaction of all original inhabitants, since time immemorial, who were threatened with eviction or total extinction, the savages began to turn aloof and sullen.” For Dohme the Indians in their resistance seemed somehow to have constituted something less than human, yet what human would not turn defensive at the prospect of personal and societal annihilation? Questions remain too regarding the nature of the 1742 engagement between the traveling party of Iroquois and McDowell’s men, little having been offered as to its cause beyond the fact that the southward bound Indians may have overstayed their welcome in the area and possibly slaughtered a settler’s hog or two. In any case, at some point county lieutenant James Patton ordered McDowell to raise a militia for the purpose of expelling the Indians from the neighborhood. When the contingent of settlers overtook the Iroquois the ambiguous skirmish ensued which cost McDowell his life, as well as the lives of ten other settlers and several Iroquois–the first of many such corpse-ridden conflicts, the particular causes of which are now long forgotten. I find it ever more difficult to remember, to reason, as my journey continues, thoughts as indistinct, yet familiar, as the shades of my ancestors, hovering somewhere ahead of me, on the horizon to the south, while the body’s communications remain clear, direct–sharpness of joint pain, dull throb of swelling, the persistent sweat of late summer. The road is deserted, white and scorching, motionless in heat. John Smith, an adventurer who traveled great distances and orchestrated problems of his own, albeit on a much smaller scale than McDowell, with the Indians of his acquaintance–the Pamunkey tribe in the eastern portion of the Virginia colony–said of the region’s weather, “The sommer is hot as Spain, the winter colde as in France or England. The heat of sommer is in June, Julie, and August, but commonly the coole Breeses asswage the vehemencie of the heat.” Though Smith’s perceptive international weather comparison remains largely accurate, it is not entirely true on this particular windless day, the heat that pummels my head and rises from the road conspiring to dull and blur my thoughts, turning them as hazy and as still as the air, motionless amid the motion of the body. Before descending into a bottom several miles north of Lexington, there is a memorable view of mountains, slightly below and to the east of which once stood a log cabin in which Sam Houston was born in 1793. He would have been but a boy, perhaps playing in the yard, when my own ancestors wandered through, one more family of settlers moving southwest along the road he would one day follow to the lands of the Cherokee, whom he would live among extensively before destiny summoned him further west. It is also in this vicinity that the Shenandoah Valley, my companion for so many miles and days, finally gives way to hills, the great fertile trough taken at last by mountains. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to say precisely where this transition occurs, the topography shifting so gradually, a slow narrowing of the Valley, fields and pastures now swelling atop rises whereas before the land they rested upon was flat or rolling–a shift so slow that it exists suddenly behind me, already past, ridges and hollows before me, the Valley now but a memory. This dissipation of the Valley into hills is shortly followed by my arrival at the mountain town of Lexington. In 1789 André Michaux had described the place as “a little town which maintains rather sustained trading with the settlements along the western Rivers.” At that time, the little mountain village, so different in its rocky topography from the Valley towns through which I have traveled, had been known as Lexington only for a year, the new designation derived from an important colonial military victory far to the north more than a decade earlier. The area had taken a strong interest in the American Revolution, sending over a hundred barrels of flour to Boston after the city’s port was closed and going to severe lengths to preserve local order while the war continued: in the wake of the frigid winter of 1780 one man and two women received multiple lashes at the whipping post for various acts of theft. Before the village was renamed Lexington it had been known as Gilbert Campbell’s Ford, a small gathering of cabins near the Maury River. The humble school that would one day come to be known as Washington and Lee University was west of the town at the time and, passing along the outskirts of its modern campus now, flanked on the other side of Route 11 by Virginia Military Institute, I determine that the former institution is the only one I have passed thus far that would have been in existence when my ancestors made their journey. It was called Washington Academy then, a tribute to George Washington’s support of the institution–his desire to “promote the Literature in this rising Empire”–and had already been in existence for almost half a century, though it would be razed to the ground by fire in 1803. Once rebuilt, Professor Farnum would gaze out toward the mountains from an upper window of the main campus building in 1805 and exclaim in admiration, “If this scene were set down in the middle of Europe, the whole continent would flock to see it.” Today, with many of its undergraduates drawn from fine preparatory institutions and affluent families, Washington and Lee is a prosperous private college, the eighteenth century circumstances of which likely would horrify and ultimately break all but a few of its current students. Breakfast back then consisted solely of bread and coffee, supper of bread and milk–only at lunch did the student receive meat. As local historian Henry Boley explained, “High living in a literary institution was considered highly undesirable; it was costly, it injured the health, it obfuscated the intellect and induced habits of sensual indulgence.” So the stoic undergraduate student, not unlike the initiate of some monastic order, imbibed his bread and water, read his Greek, and contemplated the surrounding mountains, crowned in their haze of blue light. Living a vastly different existence from the sternly administered, though ultimately advantaged, students of Washington Academy, there dwelt in the hills near Lexington an unusual group of people: an ambiguous collection of European, Indian, and African-descended individuals, many of them fugitives and interlopers, known as “the brown people.” This loose community constituted one of a number of remote, culturally mixed societies called “maroon colonies”–small, sometimes nomadic, coteries that presented a dimension of vague uneasiness to the commissars of the rigid slave-based economy of old eastern Virginia. In the summer of 1721 Governor Spotswood had worried that if escaped slaves reached the Blue Ridge “it may be hard to apprehd ’em, & if they shou’d encrease there, it might prove of ill consequence to ye Peace of this Colony.” Spotswood’s concerns eventually would be realized on a small scale, though such villages proved little threat to the colony as a whole, their primary objective being to escape notice and shun the risks of death, jail, or (re)enslavement. While the students of Washington Academy, many of them members of the owner class from whom several of the mountain refugees had fled, contemplated the liberal arts, groups like the brown people scraped out their mountainside existence as best they could–evading detection, squatters on land they did not own, yet masters of themselves. Passing through the narrow shady passes among the hills south of Lexington, it is easy to perceive how deep hollows make for ideal places to hide, the topography severely limiting the perceptions of unfriendly seekers, so long as one remains mostly silent and builds his fires with smokeless wood. At the bottom of one such cove, an ideal place to make oneself scarce, I cool my feet in Buffalo Creek, absorbing the deep quiet of the wooded bottom, where one may listen long to stream and leaf, the gradual oncoming whoosh of the occasional automobile muffled considerably by a conspiracy of dense foliage and abrupt landscape. The writer Julian Green noted what many of us have felt intuitively in such places: “What Nature says is unintelligible to those who are not fond of silence. Be it ever so loud, Nature’s voice cannot be heard unless you listen close.” When one is genuinely watchful and silent, not so much concentrating as forgetting about concentration, the vagaries of life fall away and the mind dissolves without a sound. Coming to such a place and listening for a time, it is not unusual to discover that something inaudible has been waiting for you, revealing itself only on the other side of a long stretch of voiceless quiet. Poe wrote that “there is a twofold Silence–sea and shore–body and soul,” the one a natural companion to the lone soul, the other a strange empty shadow “that haunteth the lone regions where hath trod no foot of man.” Walking alone amid these hollows, the forlorn hiding places of others, following physically in the footsteps of millions, my path, the journey of a single soul, shares in this two-fold silence: the isolated human shell presses on, while the stowaway being within, mindful of where it is being led, treads its own unpeopled void, both of this world and not. I make a gradual ascent toward Fancy Hill, where the ground breaks open into clover and orchard grass, rolling beneath the hooves of the glossy-maned horses who frequent the area, the top boards of the long wooden fences square and ungnawed, a sign of the animals’ contentment within the bounds of their pastures: rich, fertilized fields with fine barns and stables where the bountiful grain pours forth for them, morning and evening. Somewhere between Fancy Hill and the minor tourist destination of Natural Bridge such pastoral scenes of groomed animals and nature begin to give way to man’s made over artificial images of them, the initial manifestation of this shift taking the form of the Holy Cow, a large, lifeless bovine figure which stands as a kind of ridiculous sentinel before a long defunct amusement park, another failed venue from the heyday of Route 11. This forlorn divine cow, guardian of nothing, is complemented, closer to Natural Bridge, by an imitation Stone Henge, constructed on a hillside overlooking a cow pasture and the highway, mutely suggesting that one wonder of the world is not enough for the area. But then Americans are constantly turning their uniquely beautiful natural sites, impressive enough if left alone, into something perceived to be better, the stunning seashore or lakeside complimented with theme condos, malls, and movie theaters until nature, the original basis for the arrival of all these things, becomes itself a minor sideshow and we find ourselves unfortunate travelers or vacationers in one more unremarkable sprawled, developed area: the once pastoral weekend getaway having become something many of us would prefer to get away from. The area of Natural Bridge does not appear overly built up, but it does guard assiduously ita renowned natural feature, the local economic boon, for which it is named. Although Route 11 passes over Natural Bridge, or rather is built onto and into it, a network of roadside vision-blocking barricades–strategically placed signs, fences, and walls–make it nearly impossible to know that you are actually passing over the geological oddity, channeling those interested in viewing the feature to a gaudy carnivalesque fee area. Having looked upon Natural Bridge before and vaguely irritated by the censorship of the tourist industry, I am very nearly compelled to move on without taking it in. Upon further reflection, however, having paused in the shade to remove my pack and drink some water, I begin to believe that viewing Natural Bridge is somehow essential to this journey, since it constitutes a memorable perspective beheld by so many who followed Athowominee, perhaps even my ancestors. After additional water and shade, mind cooled and made pliable, I decide at last it is something I must see. At the busy information desk a female employee wearing heavy make-up eyes me uncertainly, put off probably by my filthy appearance and strong body odor, before asking me whether I have learned of Natural Bridge from a brochure, roadside sign, computer, television, or other propagandic medium. I inform her that I had wanted to see it ever since reading about it in a highly entertaining book called Notes on the State of Virginia, a title she’d not heard of but that delighted her since she seemed to believe it constituted a recent book and thus a new marketing medium for the area. Still somewhat vexed by the tactics of the local tourist industry, I choose not to correct her erroneous assumption. Any vague ill-feeling, however, falls away when I follow a short crowded path down to Cedar Creek and am finally able to look upon the natural wonder itself: the great arch of rock, a massive accident of architecture, over two hundred feet tall and nearly one hundred wide, surrounded by the tired green of late summer–trees that tower below it and small weeds and bushes clinging precariously to its sheer face. All around me, I overhear adults reciting to each other the blandly familiar tourist lines of admiration or disappointment, whereas the children, often the truest appraisers of something’s intrinsic value, voice a genuine enthusiasm, shouting and pointing at particular rocks and features. Yet, however much modern tourists, and there are a lot of them here today, may gape at the feature’s startling appearance, its historical importance to humans was practical rather than aesthetic. As Thomas Jefferson observed, the bridge “affords a public and commodious passage over a valley, which cannot be crossed elsewhere for a considerable distance.” Animals and Early North American humans recognized the bridge’s geographical value and utilized it, making it part of the Athowominee route long before Europeans came to admire the formation in the abstract and bestow upon it the title “wonder of the world.” Unlike the more leisurely travelers who would follow in their wake, early colonial settlers who crossed the bridge, bound for indistinct destinations in the far southwest, viewed the passage more in the manner of the Indians. Mindful of the trials and dangers of muddy, eroded thoroughfares, travelers constantly prayed for dry weather and good roads. A stream easily fordable at the end of a rainless August week could easily swell to become treacherous after a day or two of steady rain. High and dry, constructed of hard rock, Natural Bridge most notably constituted a firm, dependable stretch of road. Rain is approaching on this August day of my own time, announced by the steady arrival of thickening clouds from the southwest and an oppressive humidity–a heavy, expectant stillness. There is something out of the ordinary, something peculiarly elemental, in watching such clouds roll slowly over a unique manifestation of nature like Natural Bridge–an archetypal human awareness of symmetry between earth and the heavens, hidden and unfelt in most places, that is strangely powerful here. Glancing away from the bridge, down toward my upper right arm, I watch the first stains of rain appear on my sleeve before I can feel any drops on my skin or see them in the air. This brief overture of precipitation is followed, in a manner of seconds, by a hard downpour that sends my fellow sightseers scurrying, children and more cumbersome companions in tow, for their family vans and sports utility vehicles. In the midst of the stampede, a balding, obese middle-aged man in a bright orange and purple bermuda shirt stumbles to his knees before me, fumbling his camera, as if he had just hurried a little too quickly out of some particularly ill-considered travel brochure. He retrieves his camera, rises stiffly, and hurries on, flashing at me the false grin of the uncomfortable good-natured American tourist who finds himself standing reluctantly, face to face, camera in hand, before a weird naked figure carved into the wall of some foreign cave or tomb. I stand where I am, getting wet, happy to have Natural Bridge to myself, trying to ignore the modern footpaths and trash cans, visualizing it, as best I can, as an unpeopled place. When I weary of peering at the bridge, my gaze falls to the stream flowing beneath it, Cedar Creek, ancient maker of the arch. I have always enjoyed dark warm days with steady rain, if for no other reason than to watch where the water goes or tries to: the how and why of drainage, which, in a sense, is water’s way of telling an ongoing story. It is interesting to imagine this tale, if in fact we can, on a grand epic scale as well, as if pouring over a vast topographical map or looking down upon the earth from the window of an airplane. The roads we can see are ignored in favor of the contours of terrain, for water is the great shaper, hydraulics cutting into rock or, in the process of freezing and thawing, cracking it. What is displaced is carried downstream toward the ocean, an ongoing process that seems to us the slow laborious work of shaping or reshaping continents, yet one that was in progress long before we arrived and will continue beyond our departure, mountains gradually reduced to hills and plains, awaiting the tectonic disturbances that will raise them again. Natural Bridge is yet another character–labeled special by the collective, symmetrical geometric preferences of humans–in water’s long tale of erosion and formation, the destructive and creative chance and irrationality of which speaks to a place, though we may be loath to admit it, in each of us. It is akin to the same impulse which directs me to have a poncho but not put it on, or to take it off when it begins to rain harder–to get wet anyway, without logic or reason–a gesture that nonetheless usually leads to something new: assumption without inference. And it seems right, fortunate, devoid of logic, to have water as my single companion in the presence of Natural Bridge: to stand here wet, gazing upon this monument of water, in the lone company of its creator.