MAY 2, THURSDAY

INTERSTATE IN ADVANCE

Today Susie, Todd and I were going to leave early and drive to Charlottesville to the memorial service for Craig Chippendale’s (Mary’s husband) mother, Joyce Chippendale. But Mary had to work remotely from Charlottesville in a Friday interview meeting that started at 3 a.m. (9 Geneva time) and lasted all day. So we didn’t go.

I stayed in my house for the second day, only going down to get the mail. I was still in limbo, still trying to place myself in Swannanoa.

So what I am going to wonder about here is something that happened on Friday on our trip.

Every time I come back to the United States from Europe I am overwhelmed at first by American sprawl and highway banality. Recently I have been marveling at the solidity and the uniformity of German houses, built to last forever and how carefully the Germans manage their farmland and forests with very tight zoning which they don’t even thing of as zoning. They manage their cities and countryside in a way that seems right to everyone and is unquestioned. Once when Elke and Heinrich were showing their son Christian around Winsen where he lived as a boy they pointed out a house and yard piled with auto parts and other machinery being raided for parts. This house would have been right at home on the main street of Swannanoa, but Elke was horrified. The owner must have had a thick skin because the pressure on him to conform must have been enormous.

On our trip on Friday were were on Interstate 81 for the first three hours but in Roanoke we decided to take the scenic back road to Charlottesville. The highway we chose was mile after mile of strip malls, junkyards, fast food chains and behind these were cookie cutter developments with every building just alike. This depressed Susie and Todd who live in the middle of a 60 acres of forest and it depressed me. On and on it went. It was not that every building looked tasteless. Some looked as if they had been designed to be attractive. But since anyone could build in any way that they liked the edge of the road looked like a hodge pudge of buildings just plopped down randomly. I am sure that the chain store—McDonalds, Burger King, Tastee Freeze, Shell, Exxon, Rite Aid, CVS—were placed very carefully where statistically they would get the most customers but without any concern about what was on either side of them. In Celle almost all the stores were fachwerk buildings from the 1600’s, permanent. Along the Virginia highway the buildings all looked like cardboard buildings intended to last twenty years and then be abandoned and bulldozed. So while the buildings along the highway looked so flimsy that a strong wind would flatten them, European buildings seem to be planned for hundreds of years.

But the odd thing was that that was only for the first fifty miles out of Roanoke, and then the scenic highway we had chosen became a scenic highway. I am sure that somewhere there were strip malls but we didn’t see them. We drove through forests and then we began to pass through large white fenced horse farms with wide pastures and then when we got near Charlottesville we passed Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home and plantation and Highlands the home of another founding father James Monroe. We had shifted, at least on this highway, from the freedom to do anything you please, to the insistence that everything be in good taste with the big houses being those of the wealthy. When we got to Joyce’s gated community where we were question every time we went through the gate we were in a different America. And downtown Palmyra with its beautiful town square where the United Methodist church and the memorial service would be is beautiful. Instead of a chain store there is a clock store filled with every kind of clock and no parking lot.

In Asheville, the town I live next to, in contrast to Swannanoa, there is careful zoning. There are mains roads lined with strip malls, particularly Patton Avenue, and there are big box stores like Best Buy and the Asheville Mall. But the banality of these stores is confined to certain areas of town. In the downtown shopping center there are few chain stores and almost all the stores are in older buildings built in the early 1900’s.

I think that as Americans we are split between personal freedom to do anything and the desire to do some things together for the common good. But I will wonder about this later.