Free Long Way Home by Bill Barich Page A

likely he’d be swayed by the Campaign for Change.

S HENANDOAH NATIONAL PARK would have provoked John Steinbeck’s dismay. An industrial-strength giant, the park encompasses two hundred thousand acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and generates millions in tourist dollars every year. A great many visitors never leave their cars except to use a restroom, admire a view, or purchase a souvenir, and the main roads can be as choked as the New Jersey Turnpike.
    With more time and better gear, I’d have escaped for a night into the eighty thousand acres designated as wilderness, but I only had my sleeping bag and a cheap tent I’d grabbed on the fly in Culpeper, too flimsy for any challenging camping.
    Lewis Mountain, set aside for African Americans when Shenandoah was still segregated—a system of apartheid that lasted, rather incredibly, until 1950—is the most rustic of the four developed campgrounds. I reserved a site there and joined the motorcade on Skyline Drive, a road that runs for 105 miles along the crest of the Blue Ridge between the Shenandoah River Valley and the green hills of the Piedmont.
    The motorcade moved at a funereal pace. At every turnout, somebody had braked to photograph a scenic vista that seemed about to wilt from overexposure. “One goes, not so much to see but to tell afterward,” Steinbeck rightly commented. Here stood nature, reduced to a postcard image, and I cursed the traffic and thought, as I often did on the trip, that Americans had become a docile, sheeplike breed.
    Unable to contain my displeasure, I ditched Skyline Drive for Hawksbill Mountain, another top draw, and hiked up a rocky, moderately steep trail to the summit at forty-one hundred feet, the park’s highest point. Below lay the turbid Shenandoah River, where redbreast sunfish and black bass were dying from pollution just like the oysters and crabs of the Chesapeake, although not as rapidly.
    There’d be no singing of “Oh, Shenandoah” that afternoon. My Pete Seeger moment had come and gone. Instead I chatted with a man prowling the summit, who held a gadget new to me.
    â€œIt’s a GPS Ranger,” he told me. “It shows you what you’re looking at.”
    â€œYou’re looking at the mountains and the valley.”
    He grinned. “You’re kidding, right?”
    â€œRight.”
    â€œIt’s more the background stuff. How Hawksbill came into being. The geology of it.” He handed it over for inspection. “There’s videos and music.”
    â€œIs it expensive?”
    â€œIt must be, store-bought. But I rented mine for ten dollars at the Byrd Center, Mile 51.”
    â€œEver heard of Thoreau?” I asked, recalling my recent reading of Emerson.
    â€œSure have. He wrote Walden .”
    â€œThoreau could study a tree and judge how tall it was without any instrument except his eyes. Same with a mountain.”
    He seemed skeptical. “No lie?”
    â€œNope, I’m being serious.”
    Americans used to travel to beautiful spots to get away from it all, but they bring it all with them now. The campers at Lewis Mountain had transformed it into a suburb complete with patio furniture, Weber grills, stereos, and battery-powered DVD players. One old boy had even dragged up his recliner and sat in the shade of an RV awning, regally dispensing peanuts to gray squirrels.
    I decided against putting up my tent, too intimidated to wrestle with it in front of the spectators. Some had already popped open their first beer of the day, and they’d be delighted to watch a floor show starring a greenhorn from New York acting like a Webelo desperate for a merit badge. Instead I retreated to Lewis Mountain Cabins, where fortunately they had a vacancy.
    The cabin was okay. It was just fine, in fact, secluded from Skyline Drive and enclosed by the woods, with shake shingles outside and knotty pine paneling within. One could protest the absence of