Day 15...on the Jefferson Davis Highway

Day 15…Today was a short day…less than 300 miles from Fayetteville, NC, to Charlottesville, VA.  I drove the Jefferson Davis Highway today so the music will be appropriate… Dixie

I left Fayetteville and my friends Steve and Liz around mid-morning and hit the road for Charlottesville, VA, where my in-laws reside.  I stayed off the interstate and went on two lane country roads for the most part.  I saw more tobacco growing and lots of bean fields and fields of grass.  Since I took the slow roads I had plenty of time to think and wonder about things.

 

 

I noticed a lot of abandoned homes on old farms with their decrepit barns and myriad ramshackle tobacco drying sheds.  One house in particular got me to thinking.  What were the people like who lived there?  What did they think?  What were their dreams?  To what did they aspire beyond growing tobacco, milking the cows, and constantly making and mending on the farm?  My upbringing simply does not provide me with the background to imagine such a life.  Did fathers, tired from a day in the fields, read to their kids by lantern light?  Who checked to make sure there were no copperhead snakes in the outhouse at night?

Highway 15 is the Jefferson Davis Highway and there are many, many historical markers along the road and in the small towns.  I read about signers of the Declaration of Independence who lived here, civil war skirmishes that happened along the road, the Civilian Conservation Corps projects, and Native American tribes who once lived here.  So much history!  It’s difficult for me to wrap my brain around all the lives that were lived in North Carolina and Virginia and what it must have been like.

 

I thought about what it must have been like to be a soldier in the civil war walking (or if cavalry, riding) through the countryside.  The woods I see today appear to be near impassable and the countless streams, rivers, and boggy swamps would have made for agonizingly slow going.  Add in the mosquitos, ticks, chiggers, biting flies and gnats and the simple soldier’s daily life must have been more than miserable.  Heck, let’s don’t forget the heat, humidity, camp food, unfiltered water and a SERIOUS lack of toilet paper and deodorant.  “War is hell” takes on a whole new meaning.

Traffic along highway 15 was light and it could have easily felt like a Sunday.  A warm, lazy, summer day.  I did get stuck behind a tractor for a few minutes on a narrow part of the road…but it wasn’t bad.  I got to see a doe and two spotted fawns stroll across the highway in front of me…I was the only traffic at that time and they took their time in clearing off the road.

 

 

There were area where the kudzu made a seemingly impenetrable wall of green covering ground, shrubs, and trees alike to steal all the sunlight it could.  I can’t say I like kudzu too much. 

I arrived in Charlottesville pretty much on time and found my way to my wife’s sister and brother-in-law’s house.  John and Ruth live in a very nice house in the historic district within easy walking distance of the downtown walking mall.  Ruth set me up with a glass of wine in the back yard until John came home.   He’d stopped by and picked up my father-in-law, Steve, at his senior living facility.  We all enjoyed talking in the cool of the afternoon in the yard and then had a great dinner outdoors on the deck.

Tomorrow will be a non-travel day for me to do laundry and rest my mind and body after 14 days of riding.