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By Root 1057 0

Virginia, looked down-at-the-heels. Where a bustling commercial district must once have been, near the water, was a collection of mostly derelict brick buildings. Worse, this bare and depressed-looking downtown sat isolated from the rest of the community, which was scattered in clumps high on the hills overlooking the industrial river. You could get from river to hill only by car. Nor was the university well situated with respect to the rest of the town, but again on its separate hilltop site that could be approached only by automobile. The college architecture was modern and functional, built obviously with a mind to cost savings above all else. Everyone we came in contact with was friendly and outgoing but openly bewailed the ugliness of the environment. It seemed to lack a certain minimal human appeal or accessibility.

Moving eastward, we came to the next stop on our journey. Front Royal, Virginia, a town about sixty miles from Washington, D. C., was home to Christendom College, another school that offered the prospect of a ready-made social life. Several of our friends had graduated from Christendom, and the names of some of the faculty were familiar to us. But it would have been a rather closed circle because Christendom, like the Franciscan school, was isolated from the surrounding community. In fact, it wasn’t really in Front Royal. It was out in the country, miles away on a twisting back road too narrow for anything but motor travel. Not that anyone in the town appeared to walk anywhere. Aside from a rather nondescript huddle of commercial buildings and a few traffic lights, there was no sign of a true center or of face-to-face human contact.

The college, admittedly, was different. Its architecture was traditional and inviting, the campus intimate and pastoral on bluffs high over the Shenandoah River. However, the isolation from the surrounding community, or what passed for a community, was troubling. Its location again presupposed use of the car as a primary form of transportation, dooming its associates to technological dependency.

It was perhaps poetic justice that, in opting to take a car on this hunt, it led us only to places amenable to cars.

Beyond Virginia the terrain up the coast towards Boston grew ever more expensive and congested. After quickly canvassing a few other places no less problematic, we turned around for home.

Home. Viewed from afar, our residence next door to the Millers took on a new and nostalgic meaning. After comparing it to some of the alternatives, we had to admit it was looking better than when we had left.

The diversion succeeded beyond my expectations. The compass of Mary’s homesickness reversed its arrow.

Nine

A Church Meeting

Perhaps our flight from the Minimites had been too quick, too single-minded—this might explain how little it achieved. Until this point we had been rather ambling, if not aimless, in our daily course of duties. Not a very fruitful route, you would have thought, except that the thing we ultimately sought, leisure, was itself less a movement than a kind of centering. Its motions were slow and imperceptible, like growth, gradually enlarging from the core, quietly drinking in one’s surroundings and commingling with other growing beings, joining together in forms of mutual nourishment. Given what it was, perhaps, the slower you moved, the more you achieved.

This ambling approach did not easily lead to instant end-results. There was no button you could push to get them, no device you could procure to hasten their manufacture. I couldn’t help wondering if the places we visited, though, suffered from this very wish on the part of their inhabitants—to bottle peace and quiet, to package pastoralism. In particular Front Royal, the last haven for Washingtonians fleeing the big city, was devoid of a sense of cohesion or place. As the famous line goes, when we got there, there was no there, there. The sixty-mile-per-hour search for a nice place to live had nipped its possibility in the bud.

One of the great comforts of our present home, on the other