Category: Animals, General

It’s Labor Day weekend and some friends of ours have rented a cabin in Shenandoah and so a group of us are heading there to get out of DC for the long weekend. We meet Friday night after work to stock up on drinking water, and food for the BBQ and then we drive through the undulating roads of rural Virginia. As we drive, the street lighting gets dimmer and sparser and the woods on either side of the road gets thicker. The highways turn into roads and then lanes, the towns into hamlets, gliding past with few signs of life: Warrenton, Sperryville, Banco, Syria (yes, Syria, Virginia). As we lurch up a steep wooded incline, we come to a fork in the lane with a metal gate on the right – the entrance to the cabin road. Just past the gate is as far as cars can go so we get out, load ourselves up with the stuff and trudge along an unlit path. A few hundred meters on in the darkness, the path opens up to a wet, unkempt lawn sloping upwards in front of us and a large dark structure looms ahead in the clearing. We have arrived at Meadows cabin.

A hundred years ago, this mountainous, wooded wilderness in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains was cultivated agricultural land, inhabited by homesteaders who farmed the hillsides, worked the apple orchards and fished in the stream for trout. The 1930s brought drought and the Great Depression followed by a newfound zeal for creating national parks. Unable to cope in the face of poor harvests and devastation to the economy, many families drifted away. When the area was designated as a national park soon after, many of those that had remained were encouraged, and in some cases forced, to leave, and the woodland was allowed to slowly encroach and reclaim the abandoned communities to the wilderness. However, some of the rustic cabins that dot the hillsides were preserved. The Shenandoah national park is, after all, part of the legendary Appalachian Trail, the long and ancient thoroughfare first blazed by Native Americans that winds its way from the Southern reaches of the mountain range in Georgia all the way up to Maine. Each stretch of the route has its own authority charged with maintaining the trail, and so it fell to the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club (PATC) to take charge of the cabins and turn them into home stays for weekend hikers, some open to the public, others only to members of the Club. Meadow’s cabin seems typical of those on offer. A two-storey structure built, we are informed, by one Edgar Meadows in 1913 as a home in which he would go on to raise five children. As accommodation it is unashamedly primitive. While there are electric lighting and plug sockets, water must be fetched from a spring in the woods and the toilet is a spider-ridden outhouse over a pit latrine. Beneath the stilts that support the cabin are pieces of tree trunk that are to be chopped for firewood to stoke the ugly, black stove in the kitchen. It is a beautiful, quaint and simple getaway spot.

We fumble around in the quiet night to get ourselves set up. The key had been mailed to our friends (members of PATC) a few weeks previously along with instructions. We must find the switch to turn on the electricity and then set up the beds with tough, dusty mattresses that are stored in a rat-proof cage. The attic room, where most of the bunks are lined up, is hot and musky. Going up the stairs you have to duck your head to avoid the wooden beams and when it starts to rain, the drumming sound on the tin roof is satisfying.

The next morning the sky is grey and the air is damp as we breakfast on the porch, taking turns to go down to the stream to “shower”. Even though it’s threatening to rain, we are determined to climb the Old Rag trail today. It is a fifteen-minute drive to the start of the trail. Loaded up with cereal bars, bananas, trail-mix and Gatorade, we tramp along a wooded path to where it starts its ascent, winding around sharp, pale-grey rocks. At that point a friendly, overweight middle-aged guy comes up to us. He explains that his son is an Eagle Scout and needs volunteers for his project. He’s making improvements to a lodge that the mountain-rescue teams use and needs people to carry building materials up the mountain. Only a couple of us have ever even heard of the Eagle Scouts but we agree to help anyway, and before too long, I’m laboring away at the back end of a huge sheet of plywood, trying to keep my balance as we scrabble our way uphill. I always think that it’s hiker etiquette to say “hi” to people going in the other direction, but only about half the people I pass respond with eye contact. It’s a long climb before we reach the rangers’ station where we dutifully drop off our burdens and chat a while to the mountain-rescue team.

The view from the Old Rag peak is spectacular. When we finally reach the summit of the trail, we eagerly scramble up on top of huge white boulders, keen to get to the highest point possible. A wide expanse of chilly autumn mist is spread out in front of us, shrouding an emptiness through which we can see rolling hills covered by trees. The plant-cover is interrupted only by more rocks like the ones we are standing on; almost comically square, they remind me of illustrations from the Flintstones.

That evening back at the cabin we chop wood for the evening’s campfire. It is the first time that I’ve ever chopped firewood. The axe is heavier and more wedge-shaped than I had imagined. One of the guys we are there with grew up in rural Virginia and shows us the correct technique. He swings the tool around his body and up behind his head. There is an instant where the weight of the axe seems to hold him motionless at an unnatural angle, before it slams down and splits the trunk along the grain.

Before too long we have the fire started and we’re cooking steaks and sausages, passing around the whisky bottle, and strumming the guitars. This is bear country, and each of us is aware that the smell of food might attract the hungry giants. Bear-awareness propaganda is all over the cabin. A poorly written notice on the wall, rife with punctuation errors tells of how one group found a bear cub in a tree and started photographing it. “They were extremely lucky! NEVER, get between a bear and it’s cub,” reads one piece of advice. On the bookshelf we find a deck of cards with “bear-safety facts” which we turn into a game of trivia. One of the more bizarre pearls of wisdom in the deck claims that you can protect yourself from the animals using a “portable electric-fence”. We joke about the bears, but I must admit that, sitting by the fire in that patch of grass surrounded by untold tracts of woodland, my senses were sharpened by wariness, attuned to every noise and movement that I could perceive coming from the darkness.

The following day some of the others decide to hike one of the other routes, but Liane and I stay at the cabin to make the most of the clear skies and peaceful surroundings. Late in the afternoon, the sky clouds over and it starts to rain heavily. When the others come back from their hike, damp and tired we head into Syria for dinner. The town of Syria is little more than a few buildings arranged around a junction: A convenience store, a flower nursery, a few houses and Grave’s Mountain Lodge, a “family-owned and -operated rustic mountain retreat”, where we go to eat. It is a large, long wooden building set among a large plot of paddocks and stables where the guests can ride horses. We seat ourselves among the Lodge’s guests on a long table in a wide dining hall. The paraphernalia on the wall seems to have three themes: Apples, trout and bears (including the stuffed one in the entranceway. The buffet apparently offers local food from the area, but I find it sickeningly sweet, and for once am unable to clear my plate. The tables are communal and a lone middle-aged woman comes to sit with us. She tells us that she has been coming to that spot several times a year for the past 20 years – a true Shendoah devotee.

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About the Author: lianecar