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 with a red belly Ford. I see children playing tag in a hayfield. What year is this?
I pull into a pasture. I park on a trampled dirt path. My wife and I jump out to look around. Before us are hills. Miles and miles of them.
This part of Virginia is so big, so untouched, so spacious, so green, that I feel like a gnat lost on God’s front lawn.
I’m going to level with you. I am a middle-aged man. I haven’t been to many places in this world. Certainly, I’ve had a good life. I’ve sipped beer on Cape San Blas. I have shaken hands with a Ronnie Milsap impersonator in Branson, Missouri. I have seen the sunset over Talladega Superspeedway.
But I have never—not in my life—seen anything like old Virginny.
Behind us are acres of wildflowers spilling down a mountainside, avalanching into valleys, becoming a rainbow of crippling hayfever that makes my eyes water and my nose fill with snot.
And there are no cars. For nearly an hour on this empty highway I don’t see a single vehicle.
Each mile we travel, the cliffs get taller. The clumps of forest and greenbrier grow so thick it feels like we’re driving through a house salad. Pretty soon, I realize we are totally lost. I have no idea where we are.
So I stop at a country gas station. It’s your basic one-pump establishment. No overhang. No card machine.
The dinging bell above the door rings when I enter. A cashier sits behind the counter, wearing a surgical mask and reading a “Prevention” magazine.
She doesn’t even glance up. She says, “You must need directions.”
“How’d you know?” I say.
She half smiles. “Nobody’s GPS works up here. And we ain’t got cell service, neither.” She points out the window. “That’s why we still have payphones.”
Then the woman gives me directions, if you can call them that. Because what she really does is describe local landmarks by shape and color so that her directions sound more like:
“Turn left at the barn with the Red Man billboard; turn right at the lumber mill; left at the broke down school bus; when you see the Church of Christ, slow down because deputies love to grease out-of-towners…”
It is as though I have stumbled into 1947.
I don’t want to get melodramatic, but for a brief moment, I am in a world that has disappeared. A simple era where there is no coronavirus, no unemployment, and nobody is arguing about little paper masks. There are only hills.
A guy could get used to this.
We are driving again. I follow the lady’s directions to the letter. Eventually I am about to cross the state line again and enter West Virginia. But before I do, I pull over one last time.
I stand in tall grass beside a wire fence. The crickets swell like they’re singing a finale. A breeze blows. I see a few horses. I hear a distant tractor. And I feel the sunlight on my bald spot.
I close my eyes and replay what I’ve just seen. Because this can’t exist. Can it? An America like this doesn’t truly exist. If it did, why wouldn’t they write about it in newspapers? Why isn’t this discussed on talk radio, or shown on 24-hour news channels? Why don’t you ever see anything good on TV?
This must be an elaborate hallucination. It has to be. Nothing can be this magnificent.
But when I open my eyes it’s still here. Every acre of it. Just as clean and crisp as the day it came out of the oven. And there are simply no two ways about it.
Virginia is for lovers.
11 comments
stephen e acree - February 15, 2024 1:28 pm
Yes it is. And Cape San Blas is beautiful, too. We took our kids there many summers…. and now the oldest lives in Virginia.
Julie Hall - February 15, 2024 1:52 pm
This made me want to visit Virginia. What beautiful descriptions. Thank you, Sir.
Dee Thompson - February 15, 2024 4:17 pm
I grew up visiting my cousins in Roanoke and not appreciating the beauty of Virginia, but now I would see it. Thanks for reminding me.
Arthur Frymyer - February 15, 2024 4:32 pm
I was born in Lynchburg. Not the bourbon Lynchburg in Tennessee. The one in old Virginny with Jerry Falwell and Fleet enemas. I guess that’s fitting for someone who is completely full of crap and can’t seem to expel it. Funny how the Universe always finds a way.
First time finding your blog. Love your style! Write on!
Dan-O - February 15, 2024 7:52 pm
Dude….when your wife asks “have you ever seen anything so beautiful”, your answer is and should always be “only you, babe…only you.” I shouldn’t have to tell you that…
UH1H CE - February 16, 2024 1:52 am
Every time I drive visitors home from the airport between May and September, they always remark about how green it is here in the Old Dominion.
Ken Newton - February 17, 2024 9:43 pm
You can exaggerate all you have seen in Virginia by biking the 17 mile Creeper Trail from Abingdon to Damascus Virginia
Laurie Kathryn Gibbons - February 17, 2024 11:48 pm
We drove through Virginia last summer, and I was equally amazed and in awe!!
Bill Moore - March 8, 2024 4:16 am
A million years ago we lived in Alexandria, Virginia for just over a year. We liked it so much that we had our son Eli there. And since my Singaporean wife was preparing to take her America citizen’s test, we spent a lot of time combining study and tourism. We drove all over the place and, best of all, we took the Metro. Despite what we had been told in Texas, the Metro was not a communist plot designed to steal democracy and harm our great Mother, General Motors. But what it was was magical. We could get off at a stop, walk awhile, read plaques, take tours, and think, “Damn this is beautiful. I’m SO glad I don’t have to mow it!”, and then hop back on and get home in about 15 minutes. And nobody ever tried to kill us. It was amazing. The must surprising things about Virginia were a) it is right next to Washington Gosh Darn D.C. and b) even though it was the darling of the Confederacy, it was WAY THE HECK north of most of the Union. Somehow, my history teachers in Norman, Oklahoma never mentioned that. We might still be in Virginia, instead of retired in New Zealand, except for the fact that I was a small fish journalist back then, and I was never in a million years going to make enough money to live in a nice house that boasted rolling Virginia greenery and min juleps. I’m glad you and Jamie got to drive through Ginny. But, listen, if you decide to live there, you’ll need to write a best seller every other week. That may be possible, judging by your recent production levels, but be warned.
Paula Pizarro - March 9, 2024 9:30 am
I will never forget flying in to Roanoke, Virginia and seeing the big cross on the hill. Then, driving to Lynchburg, and being awed by the natural beauty. God’s country. I am always amazed by the lovely small towns and rural areas across the country. Driving the back roads, like our parents did when we were kids on vacation, we see the real America. Bless you, Sean, for your beautiful writing and helping us to see it in our minds and imagination.
Shawn Wood - April 3, 2024 4:34 am
Wonderful and delightful description of my beloved birthplace cuz…..
I always tell everyone who’s not from here (me being one of the only true Virginia natives born here 67 years ago…they’re mostly transplants working for the government or military) that Virginia has everything you’d want in a place to live…the beautiful (and second oldest mountains on the planet) Blue Ridge and Appalachian mountains…Shenandoah mountains and river, the beautiful Potomac, James and Rappahannock Rivers…Chesapeake Bay…beaches galore tons of natural wonders and more history than any of the original 13 colonies…
In fact Sean our ancestors (Seaton family) first came to the new country in 1609 in Stafford County Virginia….that’s right!… even before the Mayflower and Jamestown.
Both our roots run deep in Kansas and she is a close second to my beloved ❤️ Virginia and West Virginia where my fathers side is from and equally as majestic and stunningly beautiful….
Virginia…. it is for Lovers
Your great Uncle Ray Seetin and his wife Lucille left their farm life in Lawrence and Baldwin Kansas and migrated to Washington during the dust bowl and tail end of the great depression and then onto working as civil servants at the Pentagon during and decades longer after WWII ended