The Shenandoah Shuffle
by T. Edward Nickens

Highway 11, Virginia

This is how they came: buffalo moving to distant pastures, Cherokee following the Warrior’s Path, Scotch-Irish and German settlers on the Great Wagon Road from Pennsylvania, flooding the South. Stonewall Jackson made the trip, chasing bluecoats. Philip Sheridan—the original Burning Man—chased Jackson’s ghost. All their tracks and trails are buried beneath Virginia’s old Valley Turnpike, beneath U.S. Highway 11 that threads the Shenandoah Valley like Interstate 81’s old-maid aunt.
Down here, far below the ramparts of the Blue Ridge Escarpment, below the bulwark of Massanutten Mountain and Stony Man and Old Rag, the road flows along the valley floor like spilled mercury. It hugs hillsides in tight S curves, tunnels through tiny towns where antebellum homes crowd the roadsides, then dashes through farm country in long stretches of razor-straight blacktop.

Highway 11 runs from New Orleans to New York’s Canadian border, but it’s the Virginian stretch from Winchester to Roanoke that I like to cruise. My first stop is at the Wayside Inn, in Middletown, a stagecoach stop on the Great Wagon Road that opened in 1797. Pretty swanky environs, but I’m not here for the canopy beds. I drain a bowl of traditional Virginia peanut soup as a sort of cleansing agent for the soul, a preparation for taking in the sights and sounds of one of the South’s hallowed places.

Then I bolt south, past the 1824 Union Church in Mount Jackson, where dozens of Civil War soldiers penned messages on the plaster walls while healing up from grapeshot and minnie ball. I was there in 1992, when workers first uncovered the penciled scribblings. At New Market, I walk the Field of Lost Shoes, where 257 young cadets from Virginia Military Institute fought Yankee troops on a recently plowed wheat field so muddy it sucked the shoes from the young boys’ feet. Maybe I’ll take in Endless Caverns and Natural Bridge, rubbernecking spots since back in Jefferson’s day. Or better yet, hit Professor Cline’s Dinosaur Kingdom, a funky roadside attraction where giant fiberglass reptiles battle Civil War soldiers, or Foamhenge, a massive model of the ancient rock sculpture that is decidedly less, um, spiritual than the original. Lighten up, I say. Not every Highway 11 road-trip moment has to be a history lesson.

But eventually, I’ll wind up on some bend in the Shenandoah River, or some trickle of trout water that flows down from the folded, fractured fabric of the Alleghenies, with a fly rod in hand. Eventually, I’ll want to do more than read history markers and gawk. Most of the time I’ll have a fistful of Murray’s Heavy Hellgrammites in hand, which I picked up from Murray’s Fly Shop (also known as Murray’s People’s Drug Store) in Edinburg, about four feet off of Highway 11. Most of the time I don’t have enough time, because I dawdled too long at the Southern Kitchen or some covered bridge or apple orchard. But I’ll have enough daylight to hump a few miles into brook trout water, or paddle a few miles to a smallmouth hole too far downriver for the road anglers to harass. Just enough daylight, most likely, to glance up at the late sun slanting purple-blue onto the face of Massanutten Mountain and think that this is surely the most serene spot in the world.

Stonewall aside, I won’t be the first.