My wife and I are on the way to Virginia, driving northward on a bumpy two-lane highway. We have a long way left to drive.
I have spent the morning riding through Tennessee, tailgating a beat up Chevy with a license plate that reads: “Virginia is for lovers.”
I’ve been staring at these four words for nearly two hours. And the slogan has started to aggravate me. What a corny phrase. I wonder what yahoo came up with that one.
Then we cross the state line into Virgina.
All of a sudden I am driving through steep green hillsides that look like they belong in Scotland. Every two minutes I pass a rural scene so arresting that I have to pull over to see if it’s real.
The mountainsides are quilted in uniform grass, dotted with trees, and the cattle are grazing. Every wildwood barn, vacant schoolhouse, dilapidated RV, and abandoned water heater is swallowed in kudzu.
“Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?” my wife asks.
No. I have not.
This is my first
visit to the rural parts of Virginia and nobody prepared me for what it would look like. In fact, I feel silly trying to describe to you all that I’m seeing.
The pavement carries us into valleys that slice through the Middle of Nowhere. We take horseshoe curves that shoot us into highlands, grasslands, forestlands, and farmland.
The farther we drive, the more churches we see. We see a new chapel every seven feet. Sometimes closer than that. There are so many churches in the state of Virginia, Bill Gaither could run for governor.
And old homes. I’ve never seen so many American farmhouses. Many of these homesteads sit on gracious cliffs. Other houses have as many as two, three, or four axles.
I pass a cow bathing herself in a craggy mountain stream, she’s looking at me. I pass a man plowing a field…