Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, November 9, 1993 TAG: 9311060012
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: Allison Blake
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It's a curling black snake of a highway, a fantastic presence here on this side of Virginia. If it had a gender, I'd call it a young male, daring and twisting and slicing through rough terrain, urging us to burn along as if we were all falling off the mountain, rolling south down endless valleys like the Mississippi River racing south. I-81.
Three weeks ago I crawled into the driver's side of Buster, my trusty old Honda who's taken me all over the country, and bid good-bye to a 3-year-old chapter. A couple of friends stood on the porch of the log hunting lodge on a Chesapeake tributary where I'd lived, and we all cried a little and promised to call. Then I drove out the gravel drive, officially moving away. My fly rod stuck out of the car and I almost broke off the tip rolling up the window, feeling a little funny as I pulled onto Route 50, my old lifeline road, an awful mess of constant construction, and headed west.
It had been several weeks since my new relationship with I-81 had begun, an adventure on a bright summer day. I headed off for promising job interviews in my brother's borrowed Suzuki Sidekick, with its clear new speakers and arrest-me red paint job, a trip to see if there'd be a new beginning. I zipped past the tracter-trailers and smiled at the Luray Caverns signs, markers that have been there since childhood. It was a jaunty ride down the highway.
That was summer. Vacation time. The drive was the first step on the road to a new home.
Now the trek is nearly complete, and I-81 has changed. In one direction it's my commute; in the other, the link to my family and old life.
The leaves peaked my first week here, the evening sky still light, the colors fantastic. I drove to Blacksburg from where I'm staying in Roanoke and watched leaves yellow in the course of three days. The next week, they burnished redder, and then came the usual last-weekend-in-October storm. The mountains are now burgundy. The tree limbs are getting bare.
The road's getting darker. Nights headed back to Roanoke, now that Daylight Savings Time has gone, remind me that winter's coming and I need to find a permanent home. I don't want to play bumper-cars with tractor trailers every night on the mountainous road. I need to find a place here in town.
Once I do that, I can let loose of I-81 as the only familiar path. I'll be home, then, with no hours lost to commuting during the week and no house-hunting mission to gobble the weekend. Life will be less structured, and I'll just sort of sprawl out around here.
See if I can find some new roads.
by CNB