One of the evocative sounds of America is the train. That long loud blast followed by a deep rumble as the train slowly thunders along. There’s a train line near where we are staying. At night the sound starts slowly, a faint suggestion of some strange nightmarish animal approaching from somewhere in the distance. Then the full roar of the horn fills the room as the goods train trundles by, full of coal. And these trains are long: Gethin counted 68 trucks on the first train we saw on the way here from Roanoke.
But it’s unusual to have a train line nearby. If train lines once connected the US as a continental nation, the US is now the land of the automobile – and the plane. The delightful Virginian suburb we are staying doesn’t have pavements. The expectation is that you drive, not walk. And if you don’t drive? Well…
The car continues to change and shape life round here. Shopping Malls on the edge of town fed by cars have drawn shops from the heart of the town. The T220 road now splits between with a bypass loop that avoids the town of Martinsville and a business’s T220 on the edge of town full of restaurants, fast food joints and other businesses – and adverts crying out to the passing trade. But the bypass loop means that big companies don’t have to come into Martinsville.
Driving for me is beginning to be a pleasure once again, as I grow used to driving on the left hand side of the car. The roads have taken us up into the Blue Ridge mountains and two State Parks – Fairy Stone Park and Hanging Rock in North Carolina earlier today. Where we had a picnic… Gethin was reading the so-called legend of Fairy Stone – fairies told about the death of Christ when he died, weeping and their tears forming the cross like stones from which the Park gets his name – when he abruptly said, ‘This is just a made up story’. He’s happy with myths and legends that tell deeper truths – but saw through this one as mere sentimentality. Well done, my son! (Mind you at the Visitor Centre at Hanging Rock today when Father Roy showed Gwynfor two fox pelts to stroke, he gently asked, ‘Are they sleeping?’ Gethin quickly replied with the crushing honestly of an older brother, ‘No. They’re dead.’)
There are deeper meanings here in Virginia just below the surface. It is a changing landscape shaped by people living out each day. There are many churches scattered across this landscape that are part of this ongoing story, with wayside pulpits that proclaim their sense of God and Gospel. They often seem more unyielding than the hills. But the hills themselves speak of change, it’s just the much slower rate of geological change across millennia: these mountains were once as mighty as the Rockies, now a plucky three year old can walk to the top of one. And yet. Somewhere here there is a story which embraces our changing present with a perspective that speaks the grace of eternity. The land around us, physical and human, hints at this deeper truth for me.
The beauty of the Fall invites us to pay attention to the changing rhythm of the year in this landscape. And maybe just sit on a rock in the middle of nowhere pausing and wondering in the midst of such abundance.
pilgrimvicar 