Bald
For 2023, I’m writing responses to the 52 Ancestors in 52 Days prompts provided by Amy Johnson Crow on her ”Generations Café” website and Facebook page.
In trying to find something to write about for this week’s challenge, I feared I was going to come up dry for the first time in the 18 months I’ve been writing to the weekly “52 Ancestors” prompts. I looked back through the family pictures in my possession, and all of the men seem to have kept their hair! Most of them got a little thin on top as they aged, but I couldn’t find anyone who would be referred to as “Bald.” So I decided I had to get creative. I began to think of the non-literal ways we use the term “Bald,” and I remembered the name of the brewery behind my sister’s house in the western part of Virginia. It’s called “Bald Top Brewery,” and that set me on the path of trying to figure out if there were any mountains called “Bald” or “Baldy” or “Baldtop” that had any relevance to my family’s history. The map below is the result of my research.
Over the years, I’ve spent a fair amount of time on Skyline Drive. When I was growing up in Northern Virginia, the northern terminus of the scenic highway, in Front Royal, Virginia, was a little over 60 miles to the west of our house in Falls Church. In the days before the Interstate highway system, this drive could take as long as two hours. I remember my Dad getting us all up early in the morning so we could drive to the first campground on Skyline Drive. I think it was called Dickey Ridge. My father took everything he needed to make us breakfast in the campground – charcoal to build a fire in the available grills, a cast-iron skillet, bacon, eggs, bread, butter, and juice, along with all necessary utensils. I don’t remember ever eating anything that tasted as good as those breakfasts on the mountain – although the fact that I had been up for over two hours and hadn’t eaten anything may have influenced my perception of the quality of the food.
Tim and I lived in Charlottesville, Virginia, for the three years he was in law school at the University of Virginia. We didn’t have any time (or money) to do a lot of recreational things, but we were only about 30 minutes from Skyline Drive, and once in a while we drove up to the mountains and did a little hiking.
In the 1970s my parents bought a small vacation home in Greene County, Virginia, just north of Charlottesville. They spent weekends there and joined the local golf club. As they approached retirement, they began to spend more time there and soon decided to build a retirement home in nearby Madison County. They moved there in the middle of the 1980s and lived there for the rest of their lives. My father died in 2001 and my mother died in 2012, never losing their affection for their “house on the hill.” My sister and her husband lived with my mother for six years after my father died, and part of the family deal was that they would inherit the house when Mom died. They still live there.
Be patient. I’m getting to my point.
As the maps above show you, Baldface Mountain Overlook is just west of Madison. Thisis what the mountains look like from the back deck of the house. You can’t see Baldface Mountain Overlook from here, but you can see the mountains between Madison and Skyline Drive. Oddly, I can’t find a mountain called “Baldface Mountain” that would give a reason for this name.
There is a historical reason why my parents had an affinity for the mountains. They met and married in Tucson, Arizona – which is surrounded by mountains. This map shows the mountain ranges around Tucson:
My parents talked often about the day trips their families took to the mountains – in particular, Mt. Lemmon in the Santa Catalina Mountains. You can’t drive anywhere in Tucson without being aware of the mountains. My sister and I visited our Aunt Mary – Mom’s sister – in Tucson in 2017. Here’s a picture I took of the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson.
You can’t really compare the mountains around Tucson with the Blue Ridge Mountains. Mt. Lemmon reaches over 9,000 feet in altitude; the highest peak along Skyline Drive is Hawksbill Mountain, which tops out at 3,600 feet. I remember one time when my mother’s brother TC and his family came to visit us in Virginia. They drove into our driveway after making their way across the country. TC, who never met a joke he didn’t like, commented that he wasn’t sure he was on the right road; the directions Mom had sent him mentioned what he needed to do when he got to the mountains, and he said hadn’t gotten to the mountains yet. And by the way, all of the mountains around Tucson look “bald” to me – they’re too high to have the foliage that covers the Blue Ridge Mountains.
I asked Mom one time if she missed living in Tucson and seeing the mountains all the time. She seemed kind of uncertain about why I would even ask the question. It wasn’t until I began to do family history research (after Mom died, unfortunately) that I realized how little time my parents had actually spent in the mountains of Arizona. My father’s family had moved to Tucson from Illinois in 1936, and Mom’s family had come from southeast Texas only a few years earlier in 1931. Mom and Dad married in Tucson in 1940, and by 1946 they had moved across the country to northern Virginia.
I got the feeling that they spent the first couple of years in Virginia assuming that they would probably move back to Arizona someday. My mother’s family – her father, siblings, cousins, nieces, nephews – stayed in Tucson, as did most of my Dad’s family. But my Dad began to build a career in the civil service in Washington. my mother began her banking career, and before too long we had settled into the booming region around DC. My brother moved away from Virginia as soon as he finished college and never moved back. My sister moved to North Carolina (near the mountains) and seemed ready to stay there until she and her husband moved back to help take care of Mom. I’m the only one who has stayed in Virginia – after attending William and Mary and then moving to Charlottesville with Tim for three years, we moved back to Northern Virginia, where we raised our kids from 1973 through 1997. Then we moved back to Williamsburg and have lived here ever since.
No mountains around here. But who can object to a little “mountain music?”
I lived in the Rocky Mountains for 10 years at 9,100' and I never did understand what was so wonderful about it. The winters were cold; the wind blew like fury, and nothing much grew in the decomposed granite we lived on. I've always known I was a mid-Atlantic Coast person and glad to be here.