Living in Virginia: Our Nature Walk to Target

One thing that Google can ruin for you is the mystery of the woods. How, for example, would the Blair Witch Project have worked if the characters had had iPhones? As my Dad pointed out, since it took place in Maryland, they could have just walked ten miles in one direction and exhausted the hypotenuse of any wooded area in that state, but an instant birds-eye image plus satellite-sourced globally-positioned directions for how to get out? We don't have iPhones, but after three days and a lengthy Sunday visit from a Comcast guy, we did manage to get wifi in our new house.

Dan and I just moved to a cabin about eight miles north of Charlottesville, VA, near the virtual and physical "community" of Forest Lakes. Mainly, this seems to be a housing development and a Nextdoor website, but that's what often stands in for the more ineffable forms of community these days, particularly for the affluent. We are living in the same cabin I lived in my third year in grad school, and one thing I valued about it, besides its seclusion in the woods despite proximity to town, was the trails in the woods right behind the house for convenient, idyllic (light) exercise. I knew there was a housing development not far beyond the woods on my landlords' property, but in my year of living here I never went there, partly because why go there? and mainly because I wanted to feel that the woods were vaster, denser, and even more dangerous than they were, that getting lost was possible. Dan did not seem to have that orientation, because the first thing he did was to Google Map the trails behind the cabin and create a route by which we walked through them to cross a small stream to the housing complex, walk through it to a shopping center, cross 29 and end up at Target.

So we did it, equipped with backpacks to carry the cat food, kitty litter and groceries we planned to buy at Target, and not wearing the stylish workout clothes that we quickly realized are the uniform of people off in the day in and around Forest Lakes. The part of the trip that went through the woods was mercilessly short. Before ten minutes were out, we were climbing up a little hill to the housing complex and passing through its maze of streets named nonsense combinations of real but unrelated nouns like "Waterhill" and "Valleycross" and lined with pumpkin lanterns to indicate who would be offering candy on Halloween (most of them...second trip?). Pacing the housing complex was the longest and weirdest part of the to and fro journeys, and several women we passed (though for as many houses as we walked by we saw very few, perhaps five, people total) were inspired to say hello to us in a high, paranoid tone that seemed to indicate surveillance and (passive) aggression. Wearing our sweats, crappy sneakers, and backpacks, we must have looked like the contemporary suburban answer to the hobo.

After passing the swim and tennis club, two fast food restaurants, a bank and the entrance to a Food Lion, we got to 29, a divided highway (General Lee Highway) that's pretty busy as the main route into and out of Charlottesville. Here's where Dan lost his nerve, suggesting that we cross at a light where there would be no crosswalk anyway because people don't walk here. You're immediately suspicious to everyone if you do, so you might was well lean into it. What would Lee have done? The right move seemed to be to "dash" across 29, which was pretty easy, and then to climb up Target's landscaping to the back of the store, which conspicuously does not have an entrance. In fact it has several doors warning "no entrance." Once we were on the sidewalk again, I found out that we were not alone: three men with sacks and old sneakers were climbing up too, and I wondered, did these men also dash across 29? Are they also modern-day vagrants?

Actually they were Target's landscapers, but they seemed mildly inspired by our presence in Target's hindquarters, even if they had not figured out the details of how we came to be there, which would be a hard thing to guess. I've personally never met anyone with ideas like Dan's, so how could they guess his reasoning? I can barely figure it out even now. Inside, we cut about the most eccentric figures probably ever seen in the Hollymead Target at an hour on Monday indisputably owned by the affluent white stay-at-home mother. Buying 31 pounds of cat supplies did not seem to diminish this impression.

After that long walk with the strange interactions, the dashing across a highway, and the heavy backpacks, it was nice to have wild-caught tuna sandwiches with arugula and white wine and watch Columbo streaming before our first Charlottesville Bernie meeting that afternoon. The woods were emptied of a great deal of their mystery, but that was a tenuous mystery from the beginning, and the mysteries of suburbia are robust and I think only on the ascent.