Charlottesville: The End of the Trip (For Now)

First let me say that while I’ve been enjoying gorgeous days in the late-summer sunshine in Charlottesville, I’ve been watching the news like everyone else, and my thoughts go out to the several parts of the world reeling from natural disasters: Houston, Hurricane Irma in Florida and the Carribean, the earthquake in southern Mexico.  I feel like my little Miata has been playing dodgeball on the globe with a season of catastrophe.

But I’m about to stop dodging for a while.  Tomorrow begins my week-long novel-writing retreat in Sterling, Viriginia; after that I’ll be driving up to Connecticut to settle in at the old family place with my brother for a month or so.  As I pause here in Charlottesville it’s been slowly dawning on me that my trip as such is over—at least the bloggable portion of it.

So the blog may be coming to a halt, at least for a while.  Among the handful of friends and family who consitute its readership I suspect a certain curiosity about the writers’ retreat, at least equal to my own, so I may append some notes on that experience, but even there what was meant to be a travel blog will have half-crossed the line into something else.  On the other hand I’m clearly still “travelling,” and won’t be home to Seattle for another two and half months, and among that handful I’m aware of a default reference to this blog to keep track of where I am and whether I’m still alive.  So the long and short of it is, that I have no idea what to do with this blog.  I believe you can continue to watch this space—but at your own risk.

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In the meantime I’ve been here in Charlottesville, my last pure travel destination, for all four of the days I allotted to it.  What have I been up to?  Well, er, the truth is—ahem—I’ve been mostly sleeping.

The Airbnb I booked revealed itself to be a complete little basement apartment in an elderly family’s house half-hidden behind a runaway sunflower garden on a quiet hillside street outside town.  I greeted it as the ideal space to work on fixing up the ending of my novel, but after a few attempts I discovered it to be even more ideal as a place to stare at the walls.  I’ve been on essentially a month-long sprint from Zipolite to get here, through predatory cops, express-mail rendezvous and stomach troubles, and for the next leg I’ll need to use gears that Pepin doesn’t possess.  I needed a break.  The apartment has a kitchen, and the first night I stocked up on groceries, and I’ve just been—reacclimating.

In the process, however, I’ve fallen in love with Charlottesville.  The downtown center consists of a wide brick-walk pedestrian mall full of inviting restaurants, coffeehouses, bookstores (I counted at least three), toy stores and other eclectic shops; it’s been a splendid place to stroll and to sit with coffee—and, at The Pie Chest coffeehouse, fabulous pie.

Around the mall the city is happily lost in a dream of 18th Century Federalist architecture whose white pillars and stately red-brick facades don’t disturb the smooth black roads and modern infrastructure that swish 21st Century cars around it easily.  The second center of the town’s small ellipse consists of the University of Virginia, through which I drove on the way in and whose Jeffersonian buildings framed in the downward flutter of Fall’s first brown leaves vie for prettiness with the surrounding green mountains.

As to its late association with Nazism, my impression is that Charlottesville is mounting an appalled and concerted campiagn to reverse-associate itself with tolerance and love.  Little blue posters of “C-Ville” with a heart are in every shop window, and the signage from the municipal scale to the toystore chalkboard all sound the same theme.

Of course, ordinary people always choose love.  It doesn’t withstand a world whose leaders don’t.

Speaking of leaders, since I was in Jefferson-land I did revisit Monticello, some seventeen years after my first pilgrimage there.  In this case my experience was somewhat dampened.  In my absence the ticket price had gone up to $28.00 (from what I don’t remember), presumably to support the handsome new museum and multi-shuttle-bus system that have sprouted up on the grounds.  Monticello has now become a guided “experience,” where the crowds are grouped together at 15-minute intervals and ushered quickly through the house, and where even outdoors at one’s liberty a panoply of educational signage underscores every view. 

Many of the views indeed include new construction, like the demonstration slave cabin and the underground passages.  I overheard that Monticello gets half a million visitors a year, which of course requires a functioning through-put of people but at the same time reveals the big money underlying the supposedly non-profit industry of historical “reconstruction.”  Monticello is now run by something called “The Mountaintop Project,” whose signage took pains to point out that the process of “reconstructing” the site has been ongoing for a hundred years; methinks they protest too much.  Methinks also that the house was somewhat different; though I don’t necessarily trust my old memories through the veil of misty worship, I don’t remember Jefferson having so many religious paintings on the walls.

Still, the old house is as handsome as it always was.