by Matt Weiland
We turn back from a good quarter of a mile out on this ruin and survey the shore. There, parked on the hillside, 500 yards to our left, we see an SUV that had passed us earlier. And there down below, also 500 yards over, two small figures quietly standing in awed silence beside Robert Smithson’s perfect, sublime Spiral Jetty.
Oh. I once knew a Swedish piano student at Juilliard who spent his first six weeks in New York thinking that Americans were a bunch of delusional blowhards before he understood that the Statue of Liberty that was underwhelming him daily was a one-tenth-size replica on top of a carpet store on the West Side of Manhattan.
There have, in the past, been years-long stretches when the jetty was submerged and largely invisible, but the water level has gone down, leaving in its place a hard-packed, blinding white tundra of salt. The gyre of ebony basalt couldn’t be more beautifully visible, a black curl as pristinely contrasted on the salt sheet as a hair on a bar of soap. We are able to walk over and all around the 1,500-foot work on the surface of the lake, hard as solid ground in places, pleasingly slushy in others. In the distance, the roseate glow of the salt-loving algae makes a pink ribbon on the horizon. Smithson had likened the lake to a red Martian sea. The boulders of the spiral exposed to the windward side of the lake have taken on a tufted rime of salt, covered in small blunted protrusions; a stubby, thick fringe of sausage curls that make the rock resemble a line of sleeping lambs. Unyielding mineral rendered suckling-sweet. Like at the Golden Spike, the wind is a constant, cleansing hum on the ears.
The other couple move silently about the jetty, taking long-exposure close-up photos of rock, puddle, and the super-saturated lake’s crystalline progress that has built up in places to a cubic zirconium size and brilliance. They don’t say a word to Wyatt or me or to one another during the entire time we are there, although they occasionally bestow on us the almost drowsy half-smile of the devotional pilgrim. The notion of pilgrimage was central to Smithson’s vision of the work’s impact. He chose Rozel Point because of its remoteness. As for the jetty’s shape—a snapshot in stone of an unfurling galaxy—it spoke to his interest in notions of entropy. “I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day,” he wrote. “Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal. … Nature is never finished.”
Nor are we. All around us are odd bits of industrial detritus—a barely standing, low concrete structure where we left the car, the decoy jetty we mistook for the real thing—remnants of human effort, spinning out in ever-wider circles. Smithson saw it all as “evidence of a succession of man-made systems mired in abandoned hopes.” Smithson is right about everything except for that penultimate word, “abandoned.” Maybe it’s the unwavering brown that greets the eye, or the parching airborne salt one can taste on the breeze that jump-starts some atavistic impulse to defy such inhospitality and to shape this intractable land to our will. Aspiration may be the only thing that has not pulled up stakes here. The pioneers who founded Zion are long dead. The dust that was once those railroad barons has little need of the personal fortunes they amassed, but hope remains as green and tender as a lily stem. Even Smithson himself, devotee of atomizing dissipation, dead in a plane crash before the age of forty and gone from this earth for over thirty years, constructed what might as well be a diorama of this unyielding faith. Newly emerged from decades of underwater obscurity, it is now visible from space.
VERMONT
CAPITAL Montpelier
ENTERED UNION 1791 (14th)
ORIGIN OF NAME From the French vert mont, meaning “green mountain”
NICKNAME Green Mountain State
MOTTO “Vermont, Freedom and Unity”
RESIDENTS Vermonter
U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 1
STATE BIRD hermitthrush
STATE FLOWER red clover
STATE TREE sugarmaple
STATE SONG “These Green Mountains”
LAND AREA 9,250 sq. mi.
GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Washington Co., 3 mi. E of Roxbury
POPULATION 623,050
WHITE 96.8%
BLACK 0.5%
AMERICAN INDIAN 0.4%
ASIAN 0.9%
HISPANIC/LATINO 0.9%
UNDER 18 24.2%
65 AND OVER 12.7%
MEDIAN AGE 37.7
VIRGINIA
CAPITAL Richmond
ENTERED UNION 1788 (10th)
ORIGIN OF NAME In honor of Elizabeth, the “Virgin Queen” of England
NICKNAMES The Old Dominion or Mother of Presidents
MOTTO Sic semper tyrannis (“Thus always to tyrants”)
RESIDENTS Virginian
U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 11
STATE BIRD cardinal
STATE FLOWER American dogwood
STATE TREE dogwood
STATE SONG none
LAND AREA 39,594 sq. mi.
GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Buckingham Co., 5 mi. SW of Buckingham
POPULATION 7,567,465
WHITE 72.3%
BLACK 19.6%
AMERICAN INDIAN 0.3%
ASIAN 3.7%
HISPANIC/LATINO 4.7%
UNDER 18 24.6%
65 AND OVER 11.2%
MEDIAN AGE 35.7
VIRGINIA
Tony Horwitz
In fourth grade at Waterford Elementary, my son’s teacher came up with a creative assignment called Hotel Virginia. Each student had to research a figure from state history and build a shoebox diorama of that person’s room. From the contents, parents would guess whom the rooms belonged to when they toured Hotel Virginia on Parent-Teacher night.
I arrived to find the boxes stacked in rows, a cardboard catacomb. My son’s held a pistol, a rebel flag, and other miniature effects of John Mosby, the elusive Confederate guerrilla known as the “Gray Ghost.” Two rooms were draped in the bloody uniforms of Rebs who didn’t get away, Jeb Stuart and Stonewall Jackson. Fur and beads filled other boxes, for Opechancanough, the Indian chief shot in the back at Jamestown, and his niece, Pocahontas, kidnapped by the English and killed by disease at twenty. A black raven adorned the room of Edgar Allan Poe, nevermore at forty. One chamber was done up like the log inn where Meriwether Lewis shot himself in the head, three years after crossing the continent with Clark.
When I told the teacher her students seemed morbidly inclined, she laughed and said, “At this age, kids don’t care about the Declaration of Independence. All they want to know is, ‘What was the body count?’” If that’s so, then Virginia is a fourth-grader’s paradise. Having lived in six states and toured the other forty-four, I’ve never seen one so steeped in gore. Nor is there another that clings to its dark history so insistently. Hotel Colorado or Hotel Arizona I imagine as sunny, uncluttered places. Hotel Virginia, inescapably, is a charnel house.
Much about Virginia has changed since the WPA published A Guide to the Old Dominion in 1940. “Our people,” the governor observed in an opening letter, with evident pride, are “largely of Anglo-Saxon blood.” Highlights of the state’s calendar included “Anniversary of the death of General Robert E. Lee” and “National Tobacco Festival and Pageant.” Two thirds of Virginia’s 2.5 million inhabitants were rural, and most of those were poor, grossing less than $600 a year. Quite a contrast to today, when the population is three times as large, median household income is $51,000 (well above the national average), and almost a third of Virginians are clustered in the high-tech and largely Latino and Asian suburbs of Washington, D.C.
But one line on the second page of the WPA Guide seemed instantly familiar. “There is a deliberate cult of the past,” it reads. “Virginians are Shintoists under the skin.”
I first became aware of this fifteen years ago, when my wife and I settled in a village the WPA Guide described as “dozing between low hills that roll down to meadows along a lazy creek.” Waterford, population 200, seemed a good place to rot after years of nomadic reporting from history-haunted lands like Bos
nia, Sudan, and Iraq.
Then, as soon as we’d moved in, Disney announced plans to build a theme park thirty miles away, beside the Manassas battlefield, where the South scored a surprise rout at the start of the Civil War. Disney’s “imagineers” concocted rides and pyrotechnics that would, they claimed, do for history what textbooks and school trips never could. “The idea is to walk out of Disney’s America with a smile on your face,” the park’s manager explained. “It is going to be fun with a capital F.” Disney’s chairman, Michael Eisner, contrasted this delight to the un-imagineered history he’d ingested as a child, while being “dragged” to the region’s sites. “It was,” he said, “the worst weekend of my life.”
Like the over-confident Union Army that marched on Manassas in 1861, Disney misjudged its foes. The theme park was howled out of the state amidst cries it would desecrate “hallowed ground.” Never mind that Manassas had long since been sullied by smog and exurban sprawl. The matter was spiritual. For Virginia, custodian of American history’s holiest places, ceding an inch of sacred ground to vulgarians from California would be like Saudi Arabia surrendering Mecca and Medina to pork-eating infidels.
Not long after Disney retreated, I set off from Waterford, at the northern tip of Virginia’s tricorn, to tour the state’s Civil War sites. Most lie close to Interstate 95, which enters Virginia at the Potomac River and runs through Fredericksburg, Richmond, and Petersburg before crossing into the piney woods of North Carolina. Speeding south from Washington, I noticed something odd. Not until I’d driven fifty miles through Virginia and reached the Rappahannock River did I arrive at the state Welcome Center. Most states plant their tourist facilities right at the state border, and Virginia observes this protocol at all its interstate entry points—except this one.
It’s a small but telling bit of symbolism: an internal border post, guarding the state’s heartland from the breakaway region of Northern Virginia. Like so much about Virginia, this separation is mired in bloody history. For much of the Civil War, the Rappahannock was the conflict’s eastern front, a crooked line between vast armies encamped on opposing banks. Four of the War’s bloodiest battles were fought by the river, almost within cannon shot of the Welcome Center.
Most of Virginia above the Rappahannock was occupied territory, and in the view of many state residents, it remains so today. Northern Virginia, once the proud name of Robert E. Lee’s army, has become a pejorative, denoting a soulless expanse of malls, subdivisions, federal bureaucracy, and liberal politics—the invading edge of BosWash. Below the Rappahannock, accents broaden, the pace slows, the landscape turns rural and the people more religious and conservative. Waitresses address you as “honey” while pouring from pitchers of sweetened iced tea. Grits appear on the menu. Welcome to Virginia. Welcome to the South.
Turning off I-95 at the Rappahannock, I went to see the spot where Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson was shot from his horse while chasing retreating Yankees at Chancellorsville. In 1921, a Marine Corps general named Smedley D. Butler was conducting military exercises in the area when a local told him that Stonewall’s arm lay buried on a nearby farm. “Bosh,” Butler declared. “I will take a squad of marines and dig up that spot to prove you wrong!”
He did—and found a bone, which he promptly reburied beneath a bronze plaque. The plaque is gone but I found a simple headstone in the middle of a field: “Arm of Stonewall Jackson, May 3 1863.” That’s the date of the limb’s amputation. The rest of the Confederate hero died a week later, at a cottage now known as the Stonewall Jackson Shrine. After a funeral procession so prolonged that his badly embalmed body began to decompose, Jackson was buried in the Shenandoah Valley town of Lexington, where he’d taught artillery tactics and natural philosophy at the Virginia Military Institute.
The story gets more macabre, as it always does in Virginia. Stonewall’s mount on the night of his mortal wounding, Little Sorrel, outlived its master by twenty-three years and became a Southern icon, paraded at county fairs and Confederate fetes. Upon its death, a taxidermist mounted the gelding’s hide on a plaster of Paris frame. Little Sorrel’s skeleton did service in biology classes at VMI.
Then, in 1997, the Institute decided to inter the horse’s 147-year-old bones. I went to the “funeral” in Lexington, a pretty town nestled between mountains. Confederate-clad pallbearers lowered a walnut coffin into the VMI parade ground, and women in period mourning attire showered the casket with clods of dirt scooped from the battlefields where Little Sorrel rode. Musket volleys were fired, tears shed, carrot wreaths laid. Then the mourners filed off to pay their respects to Little Sorrel’s tattered hide, still on exhibit at VMI’s museum, and also to Robert E. Lee’s warhorse, Traveller, buried nearby after its own long period of public display.
One reason Virginians can’t leave their bones alone is that there are so many of them. Half or more of the Civil War’s 620,000 dead perished in Virginia; the toll in the state’s camps, prisons, hospitals, and battles is at best a guess, because most of the fallen were unaccounted for. In the spring of 1864, when Grant launched an offensive across the Rappahannock that cost the Union 65,000 casualties in seven weeks, soldiers kept stumbling on the decayed bodies of men killed there the year before. Bones still turn up from time to time. Of the state’s countless Confederate monuments, the most apt may be one in Rappahannock County, erected in memory of the “Deathless Dead.”
But Virginia, for all its Civil War carnage, shouldn’t be viewed only in ambrotype. It was a necropolis from the start. The territory first called Virginia was a royal grant from Elizabeth I to Walter Raleigh, a retainer who repaid the favor by naming his domain in honor of the Virgin Queen. This is the rare shard of state history that’s since been dishonored, in favor of the tourist slogan “Virginia Is for Lovers,” which first appeared in an issue of Modern Bride.
In any event, Raleigh dispatched a party to colonize Virginia, including a young scholar, Thomas Hariot, who wrote that natives “are notably preserved in health, and know not many grievous diseases.” Hariot attributed this to the Indians’ use of tobacco, a habit he adopted until dying of cancer. However, Hariot also noticed that soon after the English arrived, Indians “began to die very fast, and many in a short space.” Natives thought the English were “shooting invisible bullets into them,” which was essentially the case. The virgin wilderness of American imagination was a land cleared of its native inhabitants by successive waves of epidemic disease.
Raleigh’s colonists didn’t fare well, either. When the first group at Roanoke Island failed, Sir Walter sent another, in 1587. The colony’s leader quickly sailed home for more supplies, leaving behind 115 settlers, including the first English child born in America, Virginia Dare. They were never seen or heard from by the English again, having vanished into lore: the “lost colonists” of Roanoke.
In 1607, when the English tried to colonize Virginia again, at swampy Jamestown, the story came close to repeating itself. Of the 105 original colonists, two thirds died within a few months, mostly from starvation and disease. Thousands more colonists followed, only to succumb at a similar rate. The English called this “seasoning.” Settlers landed, fell ill, and if they recovered, became “seasoned” to their new surrounds. A staggering 80 percent didn’t. “Virginia,” observes historian Edmund Morgan, “was absorbing England’s surplus laborers mainly by killing them.”
The colony survived by exporting tobacco (more death, but that’s another story) and Jamestown was abandoned for better ground. It became a ghost settlement, and later, the site of a Confederate bulwark. Until recently, there wasn’t much to see there, except monuments to John Smith and Pocahontas. Then, digging beneath the Civil War breastworks, archaeologists found remnants of the English fort. Much of it was floored with shallow graves and human remains, not all of them undisturbed. During a long winter known as the Starving Time, when all but sixty of Jamestown’s five hundred settlers died, colonist George Percy wrote: “Nothing was spared to maintain life and to do
those things which seem incredible, as to dig up dead corpses out of graves and to eat them.” History: fun with a capital F!
Among the more exuberantly absurd ideas for Disney’s America was one offered by the park’s creative director: “We want to make you feel what it was like to be a slave.” He didn’t elaborate, but some glimpse of that experience is readily available near Jamestown. In 1619, a year before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, “20 and odd Negroes” were unloaded from a ship at the mouth of the James River and sold to the colony in exchange for food. Though little else is known of the “Black Mayflower” and its cargo, African slaves soon became the labor force on the great tobacco plantations that sprang up along the James.
The most famous of these is Berkeley Plantation, a Georgian pile with a boxwood garden and lawns rolling down to the river. Hostesses in wide skirts now give tours of Berkeley’s “manor house” and tell of its fine furnishings and famous inhabitants, most notably Benjamin Harrison V, one-time governor of Virginia, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and a man extolled in the plantation’s literature as “the perfected product of the aristocracy devoted to producing the superior individual.”
A small item in Berkeley’s basement museum gives a darker portrait. It’s a 1791 inventory of Harrison’s 110 slaves, each identified by a first name or moniker such as “Old Nanny.” Precise monetary values are recorded beside every name, and a third bookkeeping column is headed “remarks,” often just a single word: “crippled,” “worthless,” “infirm.” An “Old boye” of sixty-two is described as “mad” and valued at zero. His owner, who died in 1791 of corpulence and gout, passed Old boye and Old Nanny to his heirs, one of them his son, William Henry Harrison, who became America’s ninth president after campaigning as a humble “log cabin” candidate.