M ANY FREDERICKSBURG-AREA residents take advantage of the proximity of the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Skyline Drive for multiple visits that bring back fond memories.
Donna M. Harbaugh of Colonial Beach grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains and spent summers working at her grandparents' farm, which was on the parkway. "The beauty was breathtaking," she says. "It was hard work, but the air was fresh and clean and life was good," she says.
As a child, Harbaugh's favorite place was Mabry Mill, especially in the fall when there would be big black kettles of apple butter or applesauce bubbling over an outdoor fire. "They would let you take turns stirring the pot," she remembers.
Harbaugh still calls herself a "mountain girl" and loves going back for visits. "You have to experience the Blue Ridge Mountains yourself and then you will understand the magic it has," she says.
Denise Chandler Wood, who lived in Stafford County from 1963 to 1971, says her family's entertainment in those days was not television or movies but monthly trips to the Blue Ridge mountains.
She recalls: "My parents would 'dress up' all four of us girls and then themselves and load us into the 1963 Plymouth Chrysler with fried chicken, potato salad and sweet tea in the wicker picnic basket, and, of course Daddy's 35 mm camera for our ride up the Blue Ridge Parkway."
Wood remembers they would always stop at the roadside stands for apple butter, honey, boiled peanuts, quilts, chenille bedspreads and even velvet paintings of Elvis. They'd pick up a basket of apples to give out on Halloween, and, in the winter, her father would bring out the projector to show slides of their wonderful trips in the mountains.
Elizabeth Swecker-Timmons of Stafford County, who grew up in Charleston, W.Va., has warm memories of adventures on the parkway when she was a child visiting relatives.
"I visited cowboys and Indians and acquired drums and rattles. I referred the them as ya-yas," she says. "I found a magical bottle that held a penny and thought it was worth millions. I thought that everyone shopped for beach towels from a shack on the side of the road, had lollipops the size of a basketball and that 'junk shops' were the most magical place in the world. "I never knew that restaurants existed because peanut butter and jelly and Shasta soda tasted so good at a roadside table on the parkway."
She adds: "I often refer to those magical, carefree days of my childhood so that I remember anything is possible my wish is that in this fast-paced world that we live in every child can continue to experience to magic, beauty and adventure that the parkway has to offer."
As a 16-year-old, Armond Booth of Fredericksburg was part of a Civilian Conservation Corps unit that helped build the stone wall along the Skyline Drive. He remembers a deer got so used to him being there it would eat an apple out of his hand.
"It was the best thing that ever happened to me," he recalls of the experience, saying the $30-a-month paycheck helped support his family. Once, while helping out at Luray Caverns, he earned $50 from a husband who asked him to carry his wife out of the cave when she had breathing difficulties.
Booth, 81, still returns periodically to the Skyline Drive, and sometimes attends CCC alumni reunions.
Eileen Boyd of Fredericksburg recalls a family picnic on the parkway in the early 1950s. She and her sister were dressed in matching slacks outfits and little brimmed hats. The weather was beautiful at first, but the sky clouded over and the temperature dropped. They pulled into a picnic area.
"We were all freezing, so my father attempted to light a fire in the picnic grill using scrap paper and matches," she recalls. "We huddled around a puny flame and jumped up and down for warmth. We ate our sandwiches with chattering teeth, and then it began to rain--a hard, cold pelting rain. Finally, my parents gave up and we all jumped in the car and drove back to Alexandria. I was never much of a picnic fan after that, but I believe that trip made me the Weather Channel devotee I now am."
A different kind of mishap befell the family of Cindy Sale of Woodford on a trip to the Blue Ridge when she was a teenager. Somehow the car keys got locked in the car and "from that point forward, I have always carried two sets of keys when we go on trips," she says.
When she and her husband, Dennis, got married, she says, "there was no decision to make on where to go on a honeymoon. We went to the mountains and stayed in Front Royal." And when their daughter came along, they make a family tradition of going to the mountains every fall to see the leaves.
Steve Brady of Stafford County recalls a sixth-grade class trip on the parkway when the bus stopped at an overlook. He and some classmates decided to have lunch "on the side of the mountain" and one of them managed to fall. "He ended up with two broken legs, a broken arm, some broken ribs and the rest of the year out of school," he says.
Even more memorable, Brady watched a chaperone who was trying to help cartwheel past him down the mountain, grabbing small trees to break his fall. Rescue workers had to save both the student and the chaperone.
The wildlife in the mountains tickled Mary Hein Hathaway of Fredericksburg when she and her sister used to travel the parkway with her grandparents. She recalls one occasion when her grandfather, Ralph Hein, started slowing down the car and she wasn't sure why. "Then we realized these two beautiful little fawns were running alongside our car. It was a beautiful, marvelous sight," she says. "My grandfather stopped completely, and we saw them run into the woods with their mother. For two little girls who had never seen much wildlife other than squirrels and birds, it was quite an experience."
She adds, "My grandfather died in 1993, so I am very grateful that we had such a memorable trip along the Blue Ridge Parkway."
Cyclist Mike Kelly of Spotsylvania County had an even wilder encounter on the Skyline Drive, when a black bear emerged from the brush and into the road in front of him. Kelly slowed down to see what direction the bear would take. "It watched me as it slowly walked to the stone wall on the opposite side of the drive, and then it was gone," he recalls. "To this day, the thought of that bear makes me smile."
Ellen Alden also has a bear story. She had her husband, Scott, were celebrating their anniversary in the Blue Ridge taking an after-dinner walk down to a waterfall, but night was falling and it was difficult to make their way back up the steep incline to the car. As she was catching her breath on a boulder, she heard a noise behind her.
"It sounded like a horse sighing," Alden says. I slowly peeked my head around to see what I thought would be a horse and there only a few feet away was a huge mother bear and two cubs!" She leapt up from the rock in panic and almost chanted "Walk, don't run, walk, don't run, walk, don't run " Suddenly, the hill didn't seem so steep as she and her husband broke into sprints.
"It was then we noticed that either we had outrun the bear, or more likely, she had stayed with her cubs rolling about in some sort of bear belly laugh at these two middle-age, chubby people hauling themselves up this hill."
The mountains can be a romantic place. Susan Rodgers of Fredericksburg remembers when she was 18 and on a trip to the Skyline Drive with her boyfriend, Steven, when he unexpectedly proposed.
"We entered into Skyline Drive on our way to Big Meadows for our camping trip. At the very first overlook he pulled in and popped the question. He was so excited, he couldn't wait," she says. "The ring was sitting in his T-shirt the whole way there."
She's been married a decade now, and she and her husband continue their camping trips to Big Meadows with their young daughter.
Anne and Leon Lysher of King George County took a trip to the parkway to see the autumn leaves. At the time, they were widowed and definitely not dating, Anne Lysher says. "Up on the parkway, fog and rain obscured the sight of the glorious leaves. We were enclosed in a little world of just the two of us. After seven years of being happily married, we bless the year we didn't see the leaves, but did see each other."
It's been 40 years, but Dale Brittle of Bowling Green still vividly remembers spending spring break with three other girls in the Peaks of Otter area of the parkway. The car lights failed, so they spent the first night in the car, then hiked two miles the next day to the ranger station for help. Then at the cabin, they discovered the chimney didn't draw properly and it took several hours to unclog. Rangers stopped by the next day to see how the group was doing.
"They must have thought we were crazy--four college girls spending a weekend in an old cabin with no running water, an undependable car and a smoke-filled room with sleeping bags that lined the floor," Brittle recalls.
Jan Broom of Spotsylvania County and her family gathered in the Blue Ridge for a more somber occasion, to scatter the ashes of daughter Shannon on what would have been her 24th birthday. "As each message was whispered to heaven, Gram, Dad, aunts and cousins released a balloon into the cold mountain air with one of Shannon's bookmarks attached," says Broom. Shannon had penned messages of gratitude on the bookmarks the year before.
One month after the Blue Ridge ceremony, on the anniversary of Shannon's death, Broom opened an e-mail from "Shanna" of Atlantic, who wrote that her father had pulled one of the bookmarks from his crab pot on the Chesapeake Bay.
"Shannon A. Broom will definitely live on through other people by means of this poem," wrote Shanna, who was moved by the bookmark's message. "It certainly makes you realize the little things in life is what matters."
"She will never know how deeply her note touched my heart," says Broom. "That bookmark had found a way to let me know that no message whispered to heaven is ever lost."