Honor and Glory: Lexington & Rockbridge County, Virginia: Sweet Virginia Breeze

By Ian McDuff

This is an entry – which I volunteered for, very late in the game – in the Slash Across America challenge. Carry me back to Ol’ Virginny….

This is not really a songfic, but it does have a soundtrack: Sweet Virginia Breeze, Robbin Thompson / Steve Bassett.

Partly, it was because they’d been through, in the blazing glory of autumn, once, on the Blue Ridge Parkway. They’d stopped, pretty much on the border of Rockbridge County and Amherst County, at an overlook just south of Route 60, above the Indian Gap Trail, and looked out from the crest of the Blue Ridge across Buena Vista and the river and Lexington, across the broad rolling fields of the Great Valley, the Shenandoah Valley, to House Mountain and the Alleghenies, all aflame with autumn leaf and crisp air and ripe grainfields. And their hearts had turned over within them for sheer joy and awe.

Partly, it was because their friend and mentor the Major was a VMI man through and through, who – though a son of the Tidewater – never ceased to tell of Rockbridge and its beauties.

Partly, too, it was because a pure accident of logistics made it a convenient place to meet up with Nicky and D.

Partly, and this was the official reason for the side-trip, it was because Tyler was still serious about law school, and while the law school at Washington & Lee wasn’t precisely known for entertainment law, it was one of the best old-shoe, upper-crust, wealthy and well-bred law schools in the country.

Mostly, though, it was because it was a perfect Virginia springtime, and the Virginia Horse Center was just outside of Lexington on Route 39, and, well, wild horses couldn’t have dragged Lance – Josh’s James, whom he would indulge and pamper at the drop of a hat, and throw the hat himself – wild horses couldn’t keep James Lance Bass away from that.

So to the Virginia Horse Center they went, on a day when the Rockbridge Hunt was sponsoring a hell-for-leather point to point and someone else was sponsoring carriage-driving and there was a dressage competition. And the dogwoods were in bloom and the mountain laurel spread its tempera tints upon the hills and the sky was a robin’s-egg blue, and all around them was courtesy and polite disinterest in their celebrity and a rich aroma of old money and older breeding, and they fell in love with this elegant corner of the ancient Dominion all over again.

That evening, they drove to the Natural Bridge Hotel, James wearing his ultra-prep blazer and flannels as if born to them, and met Nick and Howie for dinner. The idea probably emerged early, even before the peanut soup was finished, and by the time they were done with the Smithfield ham and the spoonbread and the corn pudding, it was no longer subject to question. D had had no good reason to say no when Nicky turned on him the full force of his puppy-eyes routine and asked why couldn’t they stay a few days, and Josh couldn’t possibly have quenched the spark that kindled in James’s eyes when Nick raised the subject, and, well, there they were, then.

They arose the next morning in an inn across from the Courthouse in Lexington, a building among buildings that were all older than the nation itself, and stuffed themselves on ham and eggs and biscuits, and wandered down the steep street and back up a hill to the grey stone Episcopal Church named for R. E. Lee. It was springtime and the earth and air were warm, whilst a cooling sweet breeze caused the new greenery of leaves to whisper and sigh, and the colleges were quiet and the tourists not yet there in force. The four walked the W&L Colonnade, their steps quiet on brick walkways worn down by two centuries of students, and marveled at the rightness of the white pillars, red brick, and emerald lawn, a fugue of line and color that caused Nick to scrabble for a sketchpad and C to think of harmonies. Not for nothing had the British poet and novelist John Cowper Powys called this the loveliest campus in America.

They walked with a sense of rightness and reverence down the sloping lawn from Washington Hall to the Chapel, and entered its dim, cool interior. To either side of the podium and lectern, the men whose names the University bore looked back at them, Washington its endower and namesake from his Charles Willson Peale portrait, Lee its president and rescuer from the canvas painted by Theodore Pine. D and Nick and Josh slowed their steps, and fell motionless, as Lance mounted the podium and passed to the apse of the Chapel and stood silent for a long, long time. Before him in the apse was Valentine’s marble masterwork, the recumbent statue of Lee asleep upon the field of battle; above him hung the General’s battle flags. Josh could vaguely imagine a little of what was flowing through James’s Southern soul at this moment: there were ancestors of Roy’s, after all, who had followed Wheat and Taylor from Louisiana to serve under Stonewall Jackson in what became the II Corps of Lee’s immortal Army of Northern Virginia. But this was special to James in a way it could not quite be to the rest of them, and Josh was content to let his love have this moment. It was right and proper, just as it was right and proper that he could hear to one side the quiet skritch of Nick’s pencil on his sketchpad, capturing this shard of time.

James stirred, and looked about him, and the rest joined him for a moment there, Josh’s hand brushing discreetly against his, and then the four of them descended into the crypt where generations of Lees slept until the Last Day, and the adjacent museum where they lost themselves in the portraits and heirlooms of the Washington-Custis-Lee dynasty.

They returned, blinking in the sudden sunlight, to the Virginia breeze, and walked on to the adjoining VMI campus, its barracks and parade ground trim and orderly and disciplined in the morning light, and Nick sketched and Howie took photos and Josh hummed a new melody that the breeze had whispered to him. James, for his part, stood at gaze, looking at the statues of George C. Marshall and the Mighty Stonewall, and at the latter’s maxim carved on the Barracks archway: You may be whatever you resolve to be.

Josh noticed how in that moment his James’s spine straightened and his head snapped up, with resolution.

Having discharged their debt to history, though, the four found their mood changing after lunch. Nick was just-not-quite-whining about water, and D and Josh exchanged a grin when James got all staff-officer with the maps and commenced plotting their afternoon.

Soon, they found themselves taking the long and winding road to Goshen Pass (Nick closed his eyes on a few curves, while Howie and Josh tried to stop exclaiming about the view, for fear that James would decide to look, too, thus taking his eyes off the road); and by half past one, they had parked the SUV and offloaded the requisite inner tubes and cooler.

Down the Maury River, over riffles and ruffs of water running gin-clear over smoothed rock, they floated in the sun, now placidly and slow, now with exhilarating speed over a mini-fall or a patch of just-barely-white water, all the way down to the broad water meadows of Rockbridge Baths, where Taylor Branch and Hays Creek, redoubled by its recent confluence with Walker Creek, meet and swell the Maury under Bunkin Mountain.

And there, of course, they learned the lesson learnt by thousands of tubing enthusiasts before them, that it is a long slog back up the mountain road to the point upstream where they had begun. Josh and James went back for the car, whilst Nick and D disposed of their cans and deflated the tubes and bought each other things in the country store, trying not to be too obviously lovers.

When they reached the SUV at last, James and Josh collapsed in the seats, giggling at their own folly. It was the giggling that did it, as their friends and their bandmates had long since recognized and become resigned to. It invariably led, as it led now, to amorousness. With one accord, blessing the tinted windows, they crawled into the back, and stretched themselves into a writhing knot of desire, a sixty-nining that owed its furious urgency not to any consideration of time or to any concern over D and Nicky back at the crossroads (whom they had in fact wholly forgotten), but solely to their desperate need to feel and taste and savor one another after a day of seeing one another wet and all but naked to the sun and breeze. Neither lasted long.

Still, it had been a delay sufficient to arouse D’s suspicions (and not only his suspicions), and when they clambered into their belated ride there at Rockbridge Baths, D was already smirking. He burst into peals of laughter when Nick wrinkled his nose, caught the redolence of sex in the air, and called them ‘selfish fuckers.’

‘Fine,’ James said. ‘It’s y’all’s turn, just try not to overdo it on these roads.’ That shut Nick up, he having seen the roads on the way out, but it didn’t faze Howie. As they trundled out of Rockbridge Baths on the scenic road to Alone Mill, Murat, and thence back into Lexington from the opposite direction from that in which they’d set out, Howie shucked Nick’s swim trunks off with the ease of long practice. ‘Eyes front,’ he smiled, ‘and no peeking in the rearview mirror, Bass.’

‘Rear view,’ James snorted, but after that he and Josh held their peace, turning the CD player up slightly to give D some privacy. Not that it did much good: the only time Nick was louder than when he was getting rimmed – which occupied the first twenty minutes at least – was when he was getting thoroughly and avidly fucked, which took them clear past Effinger.

‘You missed some pretty country,’ Josh commented.

‘Who cares,’ Nick gasped, as he lolled in D’s arms, sated and glowing.

‘Okay,’ James said, peaceably. ‘But when we take that avenue-of-trees, straight-out-of-a-Jag-commercial jaunt between Bustleburg, Brownsburg, and Fairfield tomorrow, you’re driving.’

‘I wanted to see that,’ Josh pouted.

‘You’ll see it on the way back when we retrace it,’ James promised. ‘But I intend us to be pleasantly worn out before we hit Fairfield.’

‘What’s in Fairfield?’ Nick asked.

‘Antiques,’ D crowed.

Nicky and C exchanged glances.

‘Oh, shit, there goes the budget.’

‘This is a big county, with lots of back roads,’ James said, warningly.

‘Yeah,’ D said. ‘So. If you want to drive ’em – or be driven on ’em –’

‘Antiques are good,’ their boys chorused. ‘We love antiques.’

D grinned at James in the rearview mirror. ‘Thought so,’ he smiled, breezily.

END