Blue Ridge Country - November/December 2013 - 39

Jeremy begins his sniffing and sensing in one direction, Neil in
another, and I wait for some kind of sign that we’ve followed the
right path, from God or someone. Within a minute, Jeremy delivers.
He points to the three native stones directly in the middle of the
path, camouflaged by the woods, weather-beaten by time.
The stones are tall and rectangular like proper carved obelisks,
three-sided with perfectly formed corners as if chiseled into shape,
seemingly too perfect to have come from nature. No names are
engraved, as in so many of these overgrown and out-of-sight family
plots, where the folks who buried their loved ones in the backyard
or in the corn field or next to the church knew who was interred and
assumed each generation would pass the knowledge forward so that
the whereabouts of the family dead, like the family bible, would
never be lost.
In the 1800s, or in 1900, or anytime through the 1920s and ‘30s
when these lands held homes, no one could have ever imagined that
their family burial grounds, their homes and farms and gardens and
mills, would be sold into the hands of strangers, people who didn’t
know the family stories or the names, and never would, and for
generations to come could do nothing but stand by and watch these
sacred places be overtaken by the wild, no matter how much they
revered them.
That, the three of us know, is exactly why we are here. 
Sue Eisenfeld is a writer in Arlington, Va. Her first book, a hiking
journey through the history of the lost communities of Shenandoah
National Park (and which includes a version of this essay), will be
published by the University of Nebraska Press in fall, 2014.

This chestnut fence post
pre-dates Shenandoah
National Park.

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Blue Ridge Country - November/December 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Blue Ridge Country - November/December 2013
