The Porch at Old Rag

By Bill Rooney

Since the floor was fixed, we don’t see the little snake heads anymore. They used to rise up like miniature periscopes through holes in the rotting edges of the ancient boards, apparently curious about the clumping sounds above their haven under the old porch. Garter and black snakes mostly, they were conversation pieces and part of the ambience. But the central feature of the porch is the grouping of wooden rocking chairs donated to the Old Rag Mountain Sportsman’s Club by one of the members. In all but the bitterest weather, those chairs are the unofficial gathering place for those who pay their pittance dues and reserve time at the “The Club” – a spartan farmhouse built at the turn of the century and later used to house a few of the people moved out of the Blue Ridge Mountains when Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park was established in the late 1920s and early ’30s.

The weathered but solid old building regales its visitors with reminders of an earlier age. Heat is generated by a wonderful stone fireplace – its mantel artfully inscribed, “The friends of our friends are our friends” – and by a cast-iron wood-burning stove in the kitchen.

To cool off on the dog days, you strip down as far as you dare and bring fans. Or you can walk a couple-hundred yards and splash around in one of two laughing little streams that tumble clear and cool out of Shenandoah Park.

Gotta go? Sorry, unless you’re up to parking your butt on what used to be called a thunder mug in one of the four upstairs bedrooms, you’ll have to head out back to “the facility” – another icon of The Club. A one-holer complete with coffee cans to keep the mice out of the TP, it’s a place with its own little window on the mountains – and an uncanny ability to open a window to the inner self. Best of all, you don’t even have to flush.

Oh, there’s running water inside the clubhouse – all of it cold and flowing from a single spigot into an ancient sink. But it’s the best water you’ll ever taste, running gravity-driven through a 2-inch line embedded in an old wine barrel set deep in a welling spring a quarter-mile up the mountain.

What are the attractions? Well, you can wake up refreshed on a bright spring or fall morning, brew up some hairy-chested coffee, lace your hiking shoes and walk to the trail up Old Rag Mountain, one of the best climbs in the area. Or grab a fly rod or a spinning rod and try for trout – native and stocked – in any number of trout streams. When autumn turns the forest russet and gold, ruffed grouse announce their mating-season ardor by drumming, and whitetail bucks rub new-grown antlers on saplings all up and down the hollows.

The perspective from the porch is a sensory delight. Each year we comment on the growth of the dawn redwood planted in the front yard in tribute to Thelma Reed, known to all as Pete. We lost Pete not long ago at the age of 96. The feisty little lady was the widow of one of the earliest club members, a national fly-casting champion. The dawn redwood isn’t supposed to grow well in Virginia. And we humans aren’t supposed to survive into our tenth decade. So much for generalities.

On a moonless late-spring night, my sidekick Sam, a Labrador and the finest nonhuman creature in all the civilized world, prowls the property, visible only as movement blacker than the rest of the night. Finding the perimeter safe and secure, and marking it just to make sure, he returns to the porch to lie at our feet and snore and fart. Outside, hundreds of fireflies light their lamps against the outline of the trees, seeming to compete with the constellations burning in the clear mountain air.

Summer is prime time for a rods-and-cones walk. Here’s how to do it:

After nightfall, take any group of urban-suburbanites (families with children are prime candidates), find a road/trail/path where there are no manmade lights, and, well, just walk. Oh, yes – no flashlights (except one for the leader, who must not use it until the outcries become truly unbearable). When’s the last time you exposed yourself to darkness for more than 30 seconds? Given a bit of time, eyes adjust and the night seems less threatening. Don’t let the screaming bother you.
The porch is a place to rediscover smells – honeysuckle and wood smoke, the wonderful moldering odor of the forest floor, morning coffee, hiking sweat. And to hear real sounds – birdsong and katydids, pines whispering conspiratorially to a light wind, the baying of a hound hot on a track, the kuk-kuk-kuk of a wild turkey, soft human voices with no need to compete with a television.

The metronomic thump of the rocker’s curved feet on the floorboards of the old porch seems somehow to evoke echoes ... and old stories no less enjoyable in the tenth retelling.

The rhythm of the rocker inevitably makes a man ruminate about the big stuff in his life – the things that drive him, the things he fears, the mistakes he regrets, the people he cherishes. And herein lies the intrinsic value of the porch at Old Rag. In this century-old place in these million-year-old mountains, there is permanence and peace. And there is a sense – an awareness you can almost touch – of what human life means, of its essential elements, and of who it is that oversees the life force that makes us who we are.

We are in church here on the porch at Old Rag. No priest or minister or rabbi delivers a homily, but we are spoken to nonetheless. The voice is often a whisper, something inside that affirms us or calms us or warns us or perhaps gently prods us in a direction we may or may not want to go. The voice is as real and as honest as any we will ever hear. It is truth, and we ignore it at our peril.

The porch be with you.

Bill Rooney joined OWAA in 1975. Formerly a resident of northern Virginia, Rooney and his wife, Rita, now reside in Buena Vista, Va.

Up and around Old Rag Mountain

This easterly extension of the northern section of Shenandoah National Park provides one of the most varied and popular hikes in the state of Virginia.

How to get there:

From Roanoke take I-81 north to Staunton, then I-64 east to Charlottesville, state highway 29 north to Madison and highway 231 north to Rt. 600 west, which takes you to the hikers’ parking lot before dead-ending. The hike, which features some rock scrambling, is a 7.2-mile blue-blazed loop that climbs a fairly strenuous 2,380 feet along the Ridge Trail to the 3,291-foot summit then descends along the Saddle Trail and the Weakley Hollow fire road. Hikers older than 16 pay a daily fee to access the trail.

In that area of the park, you can camp or rent motel units and cabins, but make reservations in advance (call 540-999-3500). For more comfortable accommodations, you have two choices that lie right on the shoulders of Old Rag. The first is Graves Mountain Lodge (call 540-923-4231), a magnet for bluegrass lovers on the banks of the Rose River. You can try for trout in the Rose, and home-cooked meals are served family-style at long tables. The other is the Presidential Retreat, an ornate old farmhouse B&B available through the famous Inn at Little Washington in the town of Washington, Va. (Call 540-675-3800.) If you like being pampered and oil gushes from your backyard, you can rent the house for $1,100 to $1,400 per night. Other options are B&Bs and motels in Madison, not far away, or around Charlottesville, a 40-minute drive.

An excellent reference for hiking in Virginia’s high country is Highroad Guide to the Virginia Mountains by Deane and Garvey Winegar. – Bill Rooney