Long Way Home by Bill Barich Page B

winter. They won’t go bad until spring.”
    â€œI’ll be happy if they last until Kansas.”
    â€œWhat’ll you do in Kansas?”
    I told her about Steinbeck and my trip.
    â€œI’m envious,” she laughed. “I’m a terrible traveler. Not like my daughter. She’s got the travel bug. She insisted on going to college clear across the country in California at Humboldt State.”
    Humboldt State is in the redwood country of the northern coast, where marijuana, not apples, is the cash crop. Liz flew to San Francisco once and rented a car to visit the college, but she was too chicken to take Highway 1 along the coast, even though she wanted to see the Pacific. She feared she’d be so mesmerized she’d drive right off a cliff.
    â€œWhere does your daughter go when she travels?”
    â€œAll over. She’ll go anywhere. I like to follow her in my atlas.”
    A Mexican rode by on a tractor and waved. I walked into the orchard to inspect the trees. They were old and gnarled, and some branches trailed almost to the ground, drawn down by so many apples ripe for the picking.
    I hadn’t been wrong about the Flint Hill area. It represented an offshoot of the New World born in California in the 1960s. The locals bred goats for milk and cheese, and grew lavender and medicinal herbs. Their veggies were strictly organic. They raised purebred Clun Forest sheep and Scottish Highland cattle. Their Yorkshire pigs ate fescue grass, and were fed no hormones or antibiotics.
    Teachers advertised classes in weaving, ceramics, and yoga. Massages and acupuncture treatments were widely available. No doubt a cultivar of Humboldt’s potent skunk had also found a purchase in the Blue Ridge foothills.
    A man could live here, I thought. For an evening out, you’d drive to nearby Washington, a five-block-by-two-block grid laid out in 1749. The surveyor was George Washington, age seventeen. The town was the first of the country’s twenty-eight Washingtons, a plaque certified.
    Dinner at the Inn at Little Washington? Well, maybe not. The fixed price on Saturday night was $178 before you chose some wine from the 2,400-bottle cellar. For a surcharge of $450, you could sit at a table in the kitchen and watch the chef prepare carpaccio of herb-crusted baby lamb with Caesar salad ice cream. Even falling into bed could be painful when a room with a full bath cost $505. The inn catered to silver-haired patricians and fat-cat lobbyists on a weekend escape from D.C., I suspected.
    Sperryville was more humble. An artsy-craftsy town on the Thornton River, it acted as a gateway to Shenandoah National Park. The summer high season had just ended, and the leaf peepers of autumn had yet to show, so the streets were quiet and the river barely a rill.
    The Sperryville Country Store, an ordinary grocery by its exterior, fooled me. Inside I found Manchego cheese from Spain, imported Belgian ale, multigrain bread from a resident bakery, and thick strip steaks properly aged. I’d stumbled on a backwoods version of Dean & DeLuca.
    The man at the cash register, in Bermudas and an apron, appeared to be the owner, so I complimented him on his stock and mentioned all the Obama signs I’d seen since Warrenton.
    â€œIs that a fact?” he asked archly, turning his back.
    â€œI gather you’re not the one who put them up.”
    â€œNo, I’m just an old southern boy at heart.”
    â€œThat says it all.”
    â€œI guess it does.”
    THE DAY SLIPPED away from me in the lovely confines of Flint Hill and Sperryville. It was too late for even a short hike at Shenandoah National Park before dark, so I went southeast to Culpeper instead, realizing that I hadn’t yet seen a single roadside attraction, not one papier-mâché dinosaur or petting zoo. Hitchhikers also were missing from the traditional equation, all those hobos, bindlestiffs, and minstrel vagabonds of legend.
    Culpeper