Godspeed

On Saturday morning, we bid farewell to my Dad, Gilbert Gray, laying him to rest with military honors and a small group of family and friends at a small country cemetery near Lacey Springs, Virginia.



My father was born in the hills of Page County, Virginia on August 24th of 1940 and grew up in Pine Grove, where his family lived life in a manner long since vanished from all but the poorest and most remote parts of this country.

Dad grew up running through the Blue Ridge Mountains with his brothers and half brothers and sisters and other country kids; playing on the grounds of Camp Hoover on the Skyline Drive, where my grandfather had become a journeyman mason and built many of the stone walls that stand to this day.



He attended tiny Page County Elementary school; after his parents separated, he went to live with his mother in White Post outside Winchester, Virginia and graduated from Clarke County High School.

When not in school, the family spent their days tending the garden, picking morels, cherries, raspberries and blackberries in the summer and spring, helping to make apple butter and cider, chasing down the hogs that ran wild in the woods and helping with the butchering and canning in the fall, hunting rabbit and turkey and deer to help fill the family's larder in a time when poor folks didn't really know they were poor.



After graduation, Dad left the hills of Kite Hollow and Page County to work in Washington, DC, where my grandfather had once worked with other CCC trainees to build the Memorial Bridge, one of the last bridges built with brick and mortar as well as concrete.



In Washington, Dad met my mother, Joyce Gray, a daughter of New Hampshire, where she had grown up on a 240 acre dairy farm after being adopted from unimaginable poverty. 

Dad won fair lady's heart, joined the Air Force, and they were wed in Texas. I was born in a military hospital in Spain on June 21st of 1963.

Proud new father and wide-eyed son in Cadiz, Spain

We came back to the States, where my sister Diana was born in Chickapee, Massachusetts.


Dad was stationed at Loring AFB in Maine and was part of NORAD's DEW development team, making flights to and over the Arctic Circle.





When Dad left the Air Force, we moved to Virginia, where Dad worked as a maintenance superintendent while pursuing a college education. After completing his degree, my Dad went to work for the school system back in Page County, where he had grown up, inspiring other country kids to dream beyond the limits of poverty and to reach for lives their grandparents could only dream of. During this time, we moved out of Neff Trailer Park and onto land near Keezletown, VA.



The four of us were still living out of a trailer with an addition built on for my parents' bedroom and a small sewing room where my mom made many of our clothes, when not working as a receptionist and secretary at Packaging Corporation of America in Harrisonburg, VA.



In order to move his family out of the trailer and into a home, Dad started his own electrical contracting business, and I went to work at age 11, spending weekends and summer vacations wiring residences which were springing up around the nearby Spotswood Country Club and helping renovate older homes in and around Harrisonburg and Rockingham County.


What few vacations we took were spent visiting with my Mom's family in New Hampshire and exploring the mountains and seashores of New England, wandering through the Smithsonian and museums of Washington, DC or visiting the Wright Brothers monument, learning to surf and beachcombing on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

I had hiked most of the Appalachian trail in Virginia before I had my learner's permit. With several schoolmates and my friend Kris Kline, I discovered the underground wonders of the karstlands in VA and WV.


My dad went on to work for Ashland Construction as a superintendent, building CVS Pharmacies, Rite-Aid, Food Lion and Wal-Mart stores and shopping centers all over the East Coast. He consistently brought in contracts ahead of schedule, under budget and with few or no customer complaints.


Dad finally fulfilled the dream that had taken him into the Air Force and got his pilot's license, after which he became a member of the Shenandoah Valley REACT group, a local volunteer search and rescue operation. From there, he moved on to the Civil Air Patrol and was commander of the Shenandoah Valley Senior Squadron, as well as a member of several surrounding CAP groups. He spent weeks searching for a group of lost hunters in Hungry Mother State Park, among other missions, and after the bodies and plane were discovered, remained in contact with the families of the crash victims.


Dad loved to fly and another of his dreams was to attend the fly-in at Oshkosh, WI. He finally realized that hope with the help of his longtime friend John Scott, a crusty USMC veteran of the Korean War. John and Dad spent many happy hours aloft above the mountains and valleys of Virginia, and I was privileged to accompany them and to fly with Dad on many occasions, including the time he flew me over Seneca Rocks and Smoke Hole in appreciation of my love of climbing and knowledge of how much time I spent on the cliffs of both locations.






Dad was always a friend of my friends, as wild and woolly a bunch as they may have been, and he was a Southern gentleman in every way to my girlfriends and to my high school sweetheart and first wife, Deena Carper. When Deena and I split after three years, Dad offered a lot of good advice and was there for me in every way. He never became bitter with Deena, recognizing from his own past that people change and grow and make mistakes along the way that cannot be fixed.


On my twenty-first birthday, Dad allowed me to fill the yard with my friends, while  Patrick Donegan, Jon Helbraun, Danny Teter, and Thomas Kent rocked the house to the tunes of Lynyrd Skynyrd, Motley Crue, Metallica and the Allman Brothers.


As I roamed America in the years that followed, Dad delighted in my adventures and often sent or deposited funds unasked. Without his inspiration and support, I would not have had the opportunity to explore Yosemite, Red Rocks, Las Vegas, Hueco Tanks, the Needles of California, Tuolumne, Sedona or Mt. Lemmon.

When I returned from my adventures, Dad invariably recruited me for work based on 3 decades of experience as an electrician, carpenter and equipment operator. Some of my fondest memories are times spent on the jobsite with Dad and the evenings we spent eating take-out and sipping cold brews in the hotel after a hard day on the job.


When I met my wife Cindy in Franklin, WV in 2008, I was living in Smoke Hole Canyon, where my parents both enjoyed joining us for hikes along the river. Dad loved sycamores and blackberries, and anyone who has been to the canyon knows there are plenty of both to be found along the banks of the South Branch of the Potomac.


Dad was instrumental in helping me self-publish my Climber's Guide to Smoke Hole Canyon in 2010, and in getting copies mailed out to buyers while my wife and I were volunteering and working as campground hosts and maintenance staff in Arizona and Colorado. He hand delivered copies to volunteers working on trails at Reed's Creek and fielded questions from climbers and buyers alike.


In 2012, Dad was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Due to his uncomplaining, stoic nature, the cancer had spread much further through his body than at first hoped. Cindy and I got the news in Boulder Creek, near Canyon Lake, on the Apache Trail in Arizona, and headed home in the spring of 2013.

The Gypsies reunite with the Grays in Scottsville, VA, March, 2013

In August of that year, our first grandchild, Shelby Grace Turner, was born. My parents set aside their own troubles and were as proud as anyone could have been of their first great-grandchild. Since then, Shelby has acquired two sisters, Emmalyn and Madaline, and both were sources of great joy and comfort to my Dad as his own health deteriorated.

In the winter of 2018 and spring of 2019, Dad began to question the wisdom of continuing with the experimental trials to battle his cancer. After a single chemo treatment, he said "What will be, will be" and discontinued all treatment.

In late April, his doctor revealed that the cancer which had spread to his bones had also entered his liver. He was given three to five months.


We joined my parents and good family friend Paul Quillen for a final trip to the Outer Banks in May, staying at Oregon Inlet for a week, drinking Cuba Libre's and eating barbecue, reminiscing and laughing and sharing time.


On Friday, June 21st, I spent the morning of my 56th birthday setting up medicine dosage schedules and assembling a hospital bed for Dad in my parent's living room, from which he could look through the window across the Shenandoah Valley to the Blue Ridge where it borders West Virginia.


On Tuesday morning, after days and nights during which my wife and myself traded shifts with my mother and my sister, talked to dad and sang hymns and old Creedence Clearwater tunes and prayed with my brother in law Marty Breeden, my father fell into a deep sleep.


On Wednesday morning, just after 9 o'clock, my father drew his last breath and set out "to join the innumerable caravan that wends its way from dawn to dusk".


Despite the disagreements and misunderstandings that plagued our relationship throughout his life, my father remains one of my greatest icons and inspirations, mentor, teacher, and friend. I know that the hole his departure left will diminish in the glow of the good memories and appreciation of his support and love.


But I will always miss his hearty laugh and his warm hugs, his unique perspective on being southern and an American.


Thank you, Dad.


Godspeed.

With my parents, Joyce and Gil, at the Lambert Hilltop Park Volunteer Center in Cherry Grove, WV

 

Blue Ridge Shadows

I am a boy of 4 or 5, standing in the cold morning air of the Blue Ridge, dressed in my Sunday best. Beside me, my sister Diana squints into the frosty sunlight as my mother, Joyce, a slim, nervous woman from New Hampshire, with dark hair and a wonderful smile, peers through the horn-rimmed glasses that were stylish at the time and holds her daughter gently but firmly in place.

My father is Gilbert, Jr., a slender man still in his twenties whose face is too serious by far for the laughter it owns. Braced against a great black car, a Packard, I think, his shoulders are square, the hair above his well-shaped ears a thick golden frost, still shorn in tight military buzz from recent service with just a touch of rise to a flat-top in front, a short wave front of individuality. He is holding my hand, limiting me to small arc of movement I have explored endlessly until the moment in which the picture is taken.

There is wood smoke in the air, the rank smell of livestock and the green of a nearby garden, still thriving below the frost thanks to dozens of carefully-placed milk jugs and a half-dozen feed sacks. Cats mill around the back door, unmolested by the short, fat mongrel dog, Poochie, dark as a sausage and just as round. Chickens scratch and cluck at the red and yellow soil through patches of blackberries and rank mountain grass, fearless and too feral for hawks, serpents, cats or hound, as if aware of their eventual date with an axe and frying pan.

Beyond the white-painted wood and screen door voices mix with laughter and the clatter of plates and pans as a shifting breeze carries the smell of cigarette smoke, coffee, scrapple, bacon and eggs, onions and potatoes frying in the lard of sausage freshly made from hogs which have grown to maturity in the hog wallow behind the cinderblock garage, beyond which the mountain drops down in a steep tangle of cedars, greenbrier, locust trees wrapped in honeysuckle, goat’s head thorns waiting for unwary feet in the poor soil that gives way to a boulder field.

Above, the Blue Ridge Mountains rise away in a shadowed mass of hardwoods, sprinkled with ancient cedars and groves of pine, bone white sycamores, catalpa and sumac adding their bright colors, fox grapes draping the trees shadowing forest floors covered by pine needles, skunk cabbage and the ever present poison ivy. Deer move through meadows bounded by autumn olive and mountain laurel, sometimes bear and bobcats and the rumor of a ‘painter’ or panther, something forest biologists deny with all their might despite persistent rumors.

Skunks and possum and raccoons inhabit the forest, garter snakes slipping through the leaves,  vicious copperheads and rattlers “big as your arm”, black snakes scaled like dragons chasing wood mice, moles and chipmunks, squirrels leaping madly through the high canopy, scolding the robins, sparrows and finches that hopped and flew through the branches, jays gossiping loudly as crows and blackbirds fight their age-old duels against the deep blue skies, buzzards riding thermals toward the clouds, transformed in their grace from scavengers to aerodynamic wonders. A red-tailed hawk screamed from somewhere, challenging the world, and locusts begin to sing in the rising warmth.

My grandfather’s land is perched high on a ridge in Kite Hollow, and across the steep narrow defile, through the towering sycamores, a grown-up might glimpse the trailer of my uncle, Philip. In the distance, the mountains roll down, hiding the valley surrounding the tiny, distant town of Stanley rising abruptly into the twisting mountain folds that are home to the Skyline Drive, once the hunting trails of the Seneca and other northern tribes.

Trash is taken to the boulder field on a regular basis, often burned, leaving the stench of charred plastic and paper, the reek of the hog lot and the faint undertone of rotting food hanging over this beautiful vista in a miasmic cloud.

The stench is the smell of Progress; at one time, ‘trash’ consisted mostly of cracked cups, broken plates and jars and broken wooden furniture that would burn. Food was not thrown away in a family that had known the hunger of the Depression; leftovers became new meals, and what few scraps were created went to the hogs, the legion of cats, and Poochie. Waste is not a plague among people who reuse jelly jars as glasses, whose food is grown or shot within sight of home, who catch their fish from rivers and streams within walking distance.

Society has moved away from simple containers to a world of petrochemicals and plastic, creating barren forests and toxic streams that require constant stocking, mountains of trash which will last forever. When one considers the vast quantities of household and industrial waste which are transported into these places and buried by contractors who profit from pollution, the small transgressions of an impoverished generation seem miniscule by comparison.

When even the burned debris piles up in ‘the dump’, someone with a machine is called in to push the berm of melted glass and unburnable debris further down the hill, although this has not been done in some time. Local legend holds that there is a bulldozer operator still on his machine somewhere in one of the numerous unstable talus fields that dot the steep mountains of the Blue Ridge, taken down by overconfidence and stupidity, buried alive.

As a child, I recall being briefly convinced that the talus field in the story was the one behind Granddaddy’s hog lot and that the ritual burning was to cover up the smell.

It was hard for me to understand the reasons behind the dump, hard to understand my father’s embarrassment for the place and life in which he had grown up, for the necessity that created the short arc between the hillside garden and smoke house filled with hams and bacon to the trash-strewn mountainside

Down the hill, out of the fall line of both the unstable boulder field and the spreading delta of trash, well out of sight of the family homeplace, live my great uncles, Shirley and Dick. Once, long ago in the era of great promises known as the New Deal, this generation of Grays had joined the masons who every day climbed down into the Potomac, trusting in great coffer dams to hold back the mighty waters of the Potomac and the Chesapeake Bay as they mixed mud and laid the millions of bricks that formed the foundations and soaring columns of the Memorial Bridge, an architectural triumph of function and beauty that became a landmark in Washington, D. C.

It is often the fate of those whose hands create great marvels to be forgotten, too often to live in obscure poverty. Although one of the greatest cities on earth lay less than three hours away, actually within sight of the highest peaks of the Skyline Drive, there was a vast disparity between what folks in the hollows of the mountain considered ‘well off’ and the Capitol’s bloated, self-serving definitions of that condition.

Different worlds.

At the time, I did not understand poverty, did not yet understand history, and had no concept of how it had shaped the cultures of the Appalachian Mountains for better and for worse, and created a mythical place called Appalachia, “a place about which more is known that is not true than any other place in the world”, and a population that is still the most unrecognized minority in America.

Although there had been many storms and oceans of passage in a life so short, for the most part, the world was still a bright parade of days and dreams; I knew only that these were my relatives and this was where he meant when my father said “Home”.

I could not understand why going there made him so happy and being there, so sad.

My grandmother is revealed as the door opens with a rusty squeal of hinges and the musical twang of the spring; she waves away a passing June bug and calls out to us.

“Y’all come eat!”

Hilda is a short, round woman, with red cheeks and a wide smile of bad teeth, thick strong arms and hands, bright eyes and a wicked laugh that can turn nasty or sink to a loving chuckle at a moment’s notice. Whether company comes at break of day or middle of the night, Hilda is always ready with a pot of coffee and a plate of food, and no one is turned away from her table hungry. Her grey-streaked hair is pulled back and she mops sweat from her neck with a damp cloth as she talks softly to the milling cats, promising them treats as Poochie waddles past, into the cooler kitchen, in search of scraps.

My grandfather is a great, stooping bear of a man with a face that I see more every day as I look into the mirror, although mine carries none of the incredible weariness that comes from being born and raised, then starting a family of your own, looking for work in the grinding poverty and lack of opportunity in the wake of the Depression. Perhaps it is because of those years that he is always ready to smile, and his eyes, netted in folds and creases, twinkle as his mouth fights against a grin.

Granddaddy is not a saint, by any means; he talks rough and he smokes Pall Malls and he has a past with parts he’d rather not talk about, like anyone who has lived through hard times. But he is one of the deepest loves of my childhood, a figure and a force that has shaped all our lives for generations.

Standing, looking back, I believe that whatever harm folks think he might have done in the world, he surely did a lot of good, as well, building monuments, working like a titan for every dime he earned.  

Now he snatches me up, freeing me from my father’s firm grip and his rough stubble of beard scratches at me as he hugs me close, smiling and laughing gently as I giggle and squirm, his lips against my face, the smell of his aftershave and tobacco a cachet that is love. His rough workman’s hands tousle my hair and he puts me down, says something to my father about ‘growing like a weed’, and turns to reach for my sister, who stretches eager arms and laughs as he swings her around into another hug and kiss, then hands her back to my mother, whom he calls ‘pretty as a spring day’. She blushes and smiles, a shy Madonna revealed, moves toward the house.

“Come on, Gilbert!” Hilda calls. “Don’t let it get cold!”

“Well,” Granddaddy’s voice is the rasp of a lifetime smoker. “I reckon we’d best git t’the kitchen, a-fore Hilda takes a switch to us.”

“Road kill?” my dad asks, despite having spent the previous day among the folks cutting up butchered hogs, grinding sausage and pressing out lard.

“Gil!” My mother’s voice is scandalized despite having heard this joke a hundred times.

“Reckon we can rustle some up in you’ve a hankerin’.”

“Well, as long as it has Hilda’s tomato gravy on it, I guess we can eat it.”

Hilda’s gravy, liberally sprinkled with black pepper and the occasional flake of wood ash, is legendary in the household, and deservedly so.

“Don’t get none o’ that gravy on your head, boy.” Granddaddy says and winks at me. “Your tongue’ll slap your brains out tryin’ to git it!”

I laugh because it is an old joke, one of the best, and because it is so good to see my father smile. My sister laughs because everyone else is laughing, a high, pure sound of joy.

My mother shakes her head, a grin breaking through the disapproval.

Together, we walk down an ancient path into morning, dappled in the shadows of the Blue Ridge.