Long Way Home by Bill Barich

of cilantro.
    â€œJalapeños?”
    â€œYes, please.”
    She wrapped it neatly and put it in a paper sack. I had to stay my hand from unwrapping it on the spot. Lunch, my eye. That sandwich probably wouldn’t last until noon.
    Leaving Eden Center, I found U.S. 50 again, a miracle of sorts. The highway rolled by Chantilly and away from that dense orange hazard zone in my atlas. I was traveling through Loudon County now, the fourth-fastest growing in America and also the wealthiest, with a median household income of about $107,000. The heavy hitters often worked for high-tech or Internet-related companies. The county’s motto, “I Byde My Time,” might still apply to the horse farms and vineyards around Leesburg and Bluemont, but the rest of Loudon had been dragged inside the commuter rim.
    Loudon County does still have a few open tracts of land. Near Aldie, I blinked at what appeared to be a fortified compound for gnomes. Several small white houses—the size of outhouses, really—with red corrugated roofs and two square windows like eyes were perched on an almost treeless hillside. A wooden guard tower hovered in the rear, tall enough to grant the little person on duty a 360-degree view of the area.
    This was Pev’s Paintball Park, a forty-eight-acre parcel with fourteen playing fields. Its founder, Mike Peverill, owns the largest chain of “paintball only” stores in the country. On a busy weekend, the park accommodates up to 250 players intent on annihilating each other. Corporate groups sometimes reserve Pev’s as a tool for letting their employees vent their frustrations and resolve their disputes.
    The square-jawed jock in charge of Pev’s shared this with me. He was a recent college grad, bored and biding his time until the next move revealed itself.
    â€œIt’s slow during the week now,” he said. “The kids are back in school.”
    â€œDo you get a lot of children?”
    â€œSure do. They use the park for birthday parties. We do bachelor parties, too. And bachelorettes.”
    Here was a new cultural twist. Apparently a groom-to-be required more than a surfeit of cocktails and a lap dance before he faced the altar. He needed to be shot with a ball of paint.
    Although the nation’s fascination with weaponry has never been mine, I’d be the last to criticize somebody else’s idea of harmless fun. It’s been estimated that five million Americans play paintball every year, after all, and the hobby isn’t cheap. A round at Pev’s costs fifty-four dollars if you rent the gear. When adults take up simulated warfare for pleasure, though, it does suggest their lives may lack adventure.
    There’s no small irony in Pev’s location. It’s just miles from Manassas, where nine hundred young soldiers, some still in their teens, died in 1861 during the First Battle of Bull Run. The battlefield is a national park at present, and though John Steinbeck confessed to being lax about visiting such places in Travels and even put Yellowstone in the same category as Disneyland, he might have felt differently here.
    Nobody was in period costume when I entered the park. No Civil War reenactors were on the prowl, either, and the battlefield had been left largely untouched out of respect for hallowed ground. It’s impossible to walk over that ground without feeling haunted. The ghosts of Bull Run inform every step.
    At Manassas, the tide was supposed to turn in the Union Army’s favor and hasten the war’s end. The troops numbered about thirty-five thousand, mostly ninety-day volunteers who’d heeded Lincoln’s call to action. They’d never been trained for combat, rejoiced in their new uniforms, and idled to pick blackberries as they marched on a crucial railroad junction. If captured, the junction would give General Irvin McDowell the best overland approach to Richmond, the Confederacy’s capital.
    Gangs of