The long and winding road - again

And so to Roanoke.

The sadness of leaving Richmond is exacerbated as we pass through the sadder section of the city across the James River. The road out of town is lined with vacant and derelict properties, with businesses and houses boarded up and rubbish scattered about. “Corner boys”, like those we have seen in shows like The Wire, loiter at intersections. The few businesses still functioning have great iron grilles on the windows. Only the tattoo parlours seems to thrive. The few ministries offering God as a solution look bleak out here. God for the Godforsaken. It is frighteningly sad and ugly. For a long way.

We stop at traffic lights and a handsome African American guy leaps from the median strip to knock on the car window. He is snappily dressed in a blue suit with a bright orange tie and pocket handkerchief. He is smiling broadly. He seems to be handing out religious texts in exchange for cash. I don’t find out. Bruce won’t open the window. Not here, he says. No way.

The sign that the world is picking up appears in the form of second hand car dealerships and laundromats. We progress past Dollar Stores and drab little shopping strips, cash-loans offices, more lacklustre little mini malls. A blooming crepe myrtle defies the depression of it all, beaming bright pink from the sidelines.

Finally, finally, the road seems to open up. We are entering the outer burbs and things become more salubrious. Oh, look, there is a shiny, beflagged old Model T Ford on the road. Good grief. The driver is talking on his cellphone. What a killer anachronism. We laugh.

Now the advertising signs spruik Edible Arrangements, Heritage Antiques, Sun Tanning, All Age Learning. There are gateways to posh housing developments and lakefront communities. Here are the big name stores and the flash new car yards. An immense US flag waves over the Honda franchise. Be patriotic, buy Japanese. We laugh.

Humming through the countryside we pass old settlements with wonderful names: Winterpuck, Skinquarter, Winterham, Truxillo, Cotton Town.

Laura Ingraham is on the radio. She’s a right-wing jock and she is revving up the hatred for Hillary and oozing praise for Trump. It spins the brain listening to the vehement venom she ekes out of the true patriots who ring in to express their Christian rage at Hillary’s sins. Oh, what a weird political situation surrounds us.

We turn her off and gaze at roadside pine forests. These are taller and thinner pines than ones we have seen before. And, look, corn fields. My beloved American corn fields. But these are at the other end of their life. They are turning brown. The accompanying soy fields are green, however, vividly so in contrast.

We pass Amelia where Robert E. Lee found his precious Confederate supplies trashed by the Union.

There’s Tobaccoville with no tobacco - supplies trashed by a dramatic cultural revolution. Fields which once grew lush-leaved Virginia tobacco now grow stringy weeds. In some, the forest is beginning to revegetate.

We hum over open road. It looks like a lovely striped ribbon ahead of us, undulating over a softly rolling vista. Bruce talks of Lee’s retreat across this land, with Grant in hot pursuit during the Civil War in the 1860s. We try to imagine those ragged, weary foot soldiers, the thousands and thousands of them covering the landscape en masse.

Ah, and there are hints of autumn on the landscape. Crepe myrtles at the end of the bloom. Yellowing leaves on elms and oaks.

We take the road to Farmville.

Rough pastures. Mini storage out in the fields. Why is so much mini storage out in the middle of the nowhere? Why is there so much mini storage? We pass the turnoff to Saylor’s Creek, another site of a terrible Civil War battle. We are not going there today. We are, however, heading for Appomattox which visit already I have described.

Our immediate view is Trump signs. Huge ones. Trump Pence.

And, over the bridge Lee failed to burn to slow Grant’s hot pursuit, past the sign for Noah’s Last Stop Petting Zoo, and we are in darling Farmville, a civilized town famous for the marvellous Longwood University which began in 1834 as Farmville Female Institute for Women and which only became co-ed in the 1970s.

Bruce’s Aunt Libby lives here and is Emeritus Professor of History at Longwood. Ironically, for the 26 years she taught at this former place of women’s learning, she was the only female history professor. We pause and visit Aunt Libby’s beautiful house, checking it out so we can report on it when we see her soon on the farm in north Georgia. This classic old Victorian house was built in 1904 but its grand old oak tree is much older. It was here when the Civil War troops went by. Right now Longwood is revving up for the vice presidential candidates’ debate as part of the 2016 US election. This is very big deal indeed for Longwood and Farmville.

Farmville also is famous for the breathtakingly immense Green Front furniture and carpet empire which fills the town’s old tobacco warehouses and ships all across the USA. I’d love to go for a meander but it spans six vast buildings and we are not here to shop. We are just stopping for lunch. The town is quiet but the lovely main-street cafe is bustling with life. We devour lovely salads and excellent, proper espresso coffee. The cafe is full of character, particularly a rest room which opens right into the centre of the dining room. Makes one a bit self-conscious but we travellers, when the bladder calls, are grateful for a clean rest room wherever - and in the USA, they are plentiful. Unlike Australia. The miserly and inhospitable loo situation in Australia is a black mark against our culture.

Not long out of Farmville, we’re on Route 64 amid the usual walls of trees when we drive over a rise to behold a great rolling vista topped by a backdrop of blue mountains. We’ve reached the Blue Ridge Mountains. Glorious.

And onwards we hum, over Beaver Creek. This must be the hundredth Beaver Creek we’ve crossed. And the millionth Beaver something. Country people are really fond of naming things after the beaver. Really fond.

Clouds are gathering as we drive past Lynchburg and yet more Trump/Pence signs. Those glorious mountains peek out from between the trees here and there, softly blue on the horizon, topped with fluffy backlit clouds.

More cornfields, dry and ragged. More bright green soy crops. And now a really huge mountain materialises, pointy like a volcano with shrugs of cottonwool clouds around its shoulders. We’re in western Virginia.

Trump/Pence, Trump/Pence.

A roadside hoarding reads: Got mice? Adopt a barn cat.

Now the mountains are looming all around us. Salubrious houses sit smugly back from the road beyond vast expanses of neatly-mown lawns. This is the country of obsessive lawn-mowing. It’s a national OCD, keeping the grass cut.

More traffic now. Trucks. Oh and a goods train over there. Long. It goes on for ever. There is so much to be transported in this busy country.

And, circled by these mighty Blue Ridge mountains, we find our way into Roanoke.