The Dog Went Over the Mountain

by Peter Zheutlin

  About halfway to Shippensburg we came up behind a traditional Amish horse-drawn buggy—high, square, and black with thin, wagon-wheel-like tires. From our vantage point, all I could see of the horse were its hooves trotting along the highway. It gave the illusion of a vehicle that was part wagon and part horse which, I suppose, is literally true, but to me it looked like the hooves were attached directly to the underside of the buggy. The appearance of this ancient form of conveyance on a paved highway was startling, partly because it seemed like we’d been transported back in time in an episode of The Twilight Zone and partly because of my own ignorance. I knew there were Amish communities farther east, near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, but I didn’t realize they were present here in central Pennsylvania, as well. In fact, there are Amish communities sprinkled throughout the Midwest, too.

  What was the proper road etiquette here? Reluctant to pass for fear of startling the horse, I soon had a half dozen cars behind me. When the car directly behind made a move to go around us both, I assumed it was okay to pass. As we did, I caught a glimpse of the couple in the buggy, he in a black suit, black hat, and full beard (no moustache), and she in a simple dress and bonnet.

  This, I thought, will be the reward for traveling the backroads. We’ll see things we’d never see on the Interstate. And here was another community of people, the second of the day, like the Ramapough Indians, living as if in another time in the middle of 21st-century America.

  Over the next few miles we saw several more horse-drawn Amish wagons making their way at a stately 18th-century pace along the roadway. But the quaint charm of it all quickly dissipated when I noticed that one of the horses was clearly in distress, craning its neck left and right and frothing at the mouth as it trotted down the road.

  The simplicity of Amish life has long held appeal for visitors to communities where many Amish live. We imagine the entire town turning out to raise the frame for a neighbor’s barn and community suppers held at long tables in the fields. But things are not always as they seem. Recent years have seen a spate of news stories about Amish communities rife with sexual abuse concealed beneath a code of silence. The Amish are also notorious operators of puppy mills that turn out dogs for profit on a large scale, often in cruel and unsanitary conditions. Seeing this horse, clearly suffering, was disturbing and the image stayed with me throughout the rainy night.

  Without realizing it, we drove right past the hotel in Shippensburg where we were staying because we fell victim to one of the traps that can ensnare you if you rely too much on technology to guide you. I had opened Google Maps and typed in the hotel’s street address on Walnut Bottom Road. Then I had clicked on the first option that popped up. When we arrived it was nothing but an empty field. Perplexed, I double-checked what I’d done. Out hotel was indeed on Walnut Bottom Road—in Shippensburg—but we were on Walnut Bottom Road in a little town of the same name. Not that I hadn’t all my life wanted to see Walnut Bottom, Pennsylvania, but we’d driven ten miles out of our way before finally landing at our hotel, a forlorn Best Western. The room smelled of cigarette smoke, the weather was still gloomy, and it was now dark. Even if it had been a nice evening for a walk there was nothing nearby that would have beckoned. Again I asked myself, can we really do this for six weeks? It was only our second night on the road, and we hadn’t yet reached the point of no return.

  With nothing to do, we got back in the car and drove into downtown Shippensburg, nearly deserted on a Sunday night, and then around the campus of Shippensburg University, where there was also virtually no sign of human life. Within half an hour we were back at the hotel. Albie lay down at the foot of the bed and I wondered: can a dog formulate the thought, “I want to go home”?

  * I am borrowing here from an acquaintance of mine growing up in Paramus, singer-songwriter Dean Friedman. In 1977, Friedman had his biggest hit record with the song “Ariel.” Ariel was about a girl from Paramus and the song opens this way: “Way on the other side of the Hudson/Deep in the bosom of suburbia/I met a young girl she sang mighty fine/Tears on my pillow and Ave Maria/Standing by the water fall in Paramus Park.”

  † Though the origins of this community date back to the 18th century, the term “Jackson Whites” only came into usage in the late 19th century, and like the people themselves the origin of the term is unclear. The most commonly accepted explanation is that it derives from the phrase “jacks and whites,” meaning a mixed population of black former slaves, called “jacks,” and white people.

  ‡ Ben McGrath, “Strangers on the Mountain,” The New Yorker, March 1, 2010.

  THREE

  Oh, Shenandoah*

  When does north become south, or more to the point, when does the North become the South? That was the question I had in mind the next morning. We had a short driving day planned, but one that would take us from Pennsylvania, through short sections of Maryland and West Virginia, and into Virginia. Most Americans would surely consider Pennsylvania a Northern state and Virginia a Southern one, but you can drive from one to the other in under forty-five minutes at their closest points.

  Some might argue that the Mason-Dixon Line, which is also the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland, divides North from South, and there’s a widespread misconception that that’s precisely why the Mason-Dixon Line exists; that it’s a relic of the Civil War. In fact, the line was drawn well before the Civil War, in the 1760s, to settle a land dispute among Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware. Even a sizable chunk of New Jersey lies south of the Mason-Dixon Line, so it’s not a good way to separate the North from the South. Besides, I wasn’t looking so much for a specific geographic point, but something more ephemeral, a cultural signal or a sensation that would make me say, “Aha, now we’re in the South,” much as Dorothy turned to Toto when she landed in Oz and said, “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

  At home, when the dogs get me up between 6:00 and 6:30 A.M., I just want to roll over and go back to sleep. Waking up in a strange motel room, I was just eager to get going. The night couldn’t pass fast enough. At least the car is mine and familiar and once I was behind the wheel I felt I’d regained a little bit of the control and humanity I’d surrendered when we checked into this sad motel in Shippensburg the night before.

  On this, our third day, it was yet again cold, windy, wet, and heavily overcast. Except for some brief sunny breaks the first day in Connecticut, this was the weather hand we’d been dealt, and it wasn’t doing a lot for my mood. I had envisioned long, leisurely walks through springtime flowers, but our walks were brief, businesslike, and uncomfortable.

  We got back on Route 11, a two-lane road that crosses over and under Interstate 81 countless times between Shippensburg and Winchester, Virginia. The two are braided like the caduceus, the traditional symbol of Hermes that features two snakes winding around a staff used as a medical symbol. As we approached the Maryland border there was an auto body shop to the right with a large sign: TODD AUTO BODY: SERVING YOU AND THE LORD. I don’t know what kind of wheels the Lord drives, but this would be the first of countless overt manifestations of Christian religiosity we would see across a large swath of America, mainly in the South, where proclamations of religious faith are commonplace and very public. Not once did we see a public display of any other faith.

  As we drove from Pennsylvania to Virginia we also passed dozens upon dozens of roadside billboards advertising the services of lawyers, car dealers, mortgage brokers, and real estate agents, with some politicians thrown in, each with a mug shot of the person soliciting business, or votes, from passing motorists. This is truly an odd way to drum up customers (or votes), but it must be effective because so many people seemed to think their face, rendered about twenty times life-size on a billboard, would attract business. But, I wondered, how many people have passed a billboard at sixty miles an hour and suddenly said, “Hey, that’s my new lawyer!” or “I should buy a car from that guy, he looks so honest and sincere!” Collectively, if you assembled the pict
ures of all these people and created one image, it would have looked like a casting call for secondary parts in The Sopranos.

  Taking Route 11 instead of the interstate would turn a ninety-minute drive from Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, to Winchester, Virginia, into a three-hour drive, but wasn’t that the point? To slow down and see the country instead of just watching it pass by at seventy-five miles an hour?

  Traveling the backroads here also gave us a chance to have a closer look at West Virginia’s panhandle. Now, I don’t mean to pick on West Virginia. Goodness knows they have enough problems there, from grinding poverty and the nation’s second worst economy and the nation’s worst infrastructure, according to a 2017 analysis by U.S. News and World Report. But the panhandle was a motley collection of moldering trailers, used car dealers (and I do mean used), “gentlemen’s clubs,” discount stores, and trash-strewn yards. Granted, there are surely beautiful country roads in West Virginia; we just weren’t on one. The WELCOME sign we’d passed when we entered the state proclaimed “wild, wonderful West Virginia.” Wild? Yes. Wonderful? Based on an admittedly small sample size, not so much. Almost heaven? Lord, I hope not.

  We were in West Virginia for all of thirty minutes and I was greatly relieved when I saw the WELCOME TO VIRGINIA sign ahead. I informed Albie we were about to cross into Virginia. He was unfazed; the states smelled the same from inside the car. You wouldn’t think an imaginary line separating two states would make any difference, but as soon as we crossed the state line it felt like another world. There was none of the roadside detritus, and everything seemed tidier, less cluttered, prettier.

  Winchester was just ten miles south. I’d been there just a few months before to give a talk at a local book shop called The Book Gallery and decided we’d stop there for a walk. The weather still wasn’t great, but at least it had stopped raining, and downtown Winchester is clean and attractive, with many Colonial era buildings and a pedestrian mall lined with restaurants and shops.

  Albie and I walked into The Book Gallery and Christine, the proprietor who had hosted my talk there a few months earlier, was behind the register. You’d have thought I’d just stepped out for a cup of coffee. She seemed utterly unsurprised to see me. I bought a copy of East of Eden, to fill an inexcusable gap in my Steinbeck reading, and Albie I walked for about an hour in the chilly, dank weather before I was able to convince a local coffee shop to let Albie sit with me inside for a few minutes while I warmed myself with a mocha latte, my coffee drink of choice. Once inside, many of the staff came over to meet Albie. As I’d hoped, he was proving to be a magnet.

  Our destination for the night, Front Royal, was only another twenty miles down Route 522 from Winchester and it wasn’t even noon. Along the way I spotted (and it wasn’t hard) two life-size dinosaurs, a Tyrannosaurus Rex and a Brontosaurus, by the side of the road in front of a store selling rocks and fossils. (Need I say they were replicas?) Immediately recognizing the photographic possibilities—I was documenting the trip in pictures on Instagram—we pulled over. The wind was blowing up a gale and though Albie seemed indifferent to the monstrous creatures behind him (surprising since little squirrels drive him mad), I managed to get a couple of quick shots. There was also a road sign that indicated that Route 522 was, in these parts, designated “The Patsy Cline Highway,” after the country singer, and that’s when I knew we had arrived in the South. I could be wrong, but I bet you could scour every road in New England, and maybe the entire Northeast, and not find a highway named for a country western singer.

  In Front Royal, we found another sign we were in the South—a truck in a parking lot with a bumper sticker that proclaimed, “American by Birth, Southern by the Grace of God,” with the words flanked by American and Confederate flags. That clinched it. We were definitively now in another part of the country. And that’s why, long before we left home, I had the sense that our trip would begin in earnest here. Though I’d been here before, and in the early 1980s lived in Charlottesville for a year, we were no longer in familiar territory. The preliminaries were over.

  Front Royal is the northern terminus of the Skyline Drive, a scenic two-lane road that traces a meandering line for slightly more than one hundred miles through the Shenandoah National Park. In the morning we would continue south through this national treasure.

  For the fourth morning in a row it was cold—a raw and unseasonable thirty-nine degrees—and overcast. The sun felt like a distant cousin you never see, the weather like a broken record. This isn’t what I had in mind at all and it was getting truly frustrating. Weather is the biggest variable in planning any trip or vacation and it can make or break the experience. It affects mood, activity, and even the scenery and few things are more out of our control. Because the weather was limiting the length of our walks together, I really felt badly for Albie. Surely, he’d have been happier at home, a place he knew and was comfortable in, and with two other dogs to play with, than in this little car in bad weather that limited our activity to rushed bathroom breaks. Maybe we’d left too early. Perhaps we should have started in early May. But here we were, and second-guessing wasn’t productive. I comforted myself with the thought that with every mile we’d be farther south and that the weather had to improve and with it would come more physical activity and more opportunity to meet other people and other dogs. There was nothing to do but carry on.

  We hadn’t been listening to the radio or to music the first few days—I was just kind of enjoying the silence—but this morning as we started down the Skyline Drive I put on a James Taylor playlist. I’ve listened to James Taylor nearly every day for almost fifty years now and it never gets old. Since we were heading south I, too, had Carolina in my mind.

  As the road began to climb up into the Blue Ridge Mountains we saw two large deer, the first of many dozen, just lying by the roadway, unfazed by a passing car. They looked like an old couple sitting on their front porch just watching the day go by.

  The seasons seemed to change as the parkway rose and fell. At lower elevations a few trees were showing their spring color, but as we climbed above 3,000 feet the traces of snow we’d seen in the surrounding woods became more of a frosting and there was no sign that the trees up here were ready to abandon their winter hibernation. The temperature dropped into the low thirties. Occasionally, holes opened in the clouds and sent sunlight flooding down onto patches of the valleys and mountain ridges off to the west. It was as if a heavenly spotlight was being aimed at random on the Earth.

  Forty miles south we pulled off into a parking area that provided access to some of the hiking trails that crisscross the national park. We hadn’t seen more than a dozen cars in forty miles and when we got out of the car the only sound was the wind. When it abated for brief periods we stood in utter and complete silence. Even silence is a sound but one we urbanites and suburbanites rarely experience. We could see the valley floor through the bare trees. Since we had climbed another few hundred feet before parking, the temperature had dropped even further. It was late April in Virginia and twenty-seven degrees. As we walked, we met a hiker getting ready to start down one of the trails.

  “I wasn’t ready for this,” he laughed. “But I’m going to do it.” Same here, I thought.

  The Skyline Drive ends just west of Charlottesville, and since we arrived around lunchtime I decided to find a place I’d loved when I lived here in the early 1980s, Crozet Pizza in the little town of Crozet. As I remembered it, Crozet Pizza sat near some railroad tracks next to a gun and ammo store and little else. Now, suburban subdivisions had been carved out of the rolling fields and farmlands, there was a new gas station and minimart across the street, and Crozet Pizza, once a small, rustic little place, had expanded. The gun and ammo store was gone.

  Albie and I walked along some of the surrounding streets. Now that we had descended into the valley spring was very much in evidence. Trees were flowering, there were daffodils and hyacinth in abundance, and I allowed myself to think that perhaps the cold and the gloom w
ere behind us for good.

  For all intents and purposes, as far as the motorist is concerned, the Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Parkway† comprise one, long contiguous two-lane parkway, but the latter is more than four times as long, 469 miles in all. To begin the drive down the Blue Ridge Parkway we retraced our steps back toward Waynesboro where we’d exited Skyline Drive a short time earlier. We planned to spend the night in Roanoke, about 110 miles southwest.

  You could drive from Front Royal, where we began the day, to Roanoke in about three hours on Interstate 81, but the speed limit on both Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Parkway is never greater than forty miles per hour and, especially around some of the more harrowing curves, drops as low as twenty. It would take us nearly ten hours in all, including our stops for lunch and walks, to get from Front Royal to Roanoke.

  Together, the two parkways form a kind of Pacific Coast Highway in the sky. The views in every direction are endless, eagles and hawks soar above, and there were times, especially on the Blue Ridge Parkway, that I felt like I was piloting a small plane rather than driving a car. Skyline Drive felt safer because it’s straighter, and everywhere there are beautiful stone walls that serve as guard rails. I never felt like I might drive clear off and down a mountainside. That wasn’t the case on the Blue Ridge. Not only did it reach elevations in excess of 6,000 feet, it wound through the mountains and over the ridges in what seemed like a never-ending series of curves. If you didn’t pay attention there were ample opportunities to plunge to your death over a precipitous drop.