My Day Trip to Harpers Ferry
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I had never stopped in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. My family had always just passed through on the drive south to visit relatives in Virginia, but Harpers Ferry, a small town just past the Maryland line, squeezed up against the bottom of a hill where the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers meet, was always the highlight of trip. The road takes you in a large orbit around the town, crossing the waters, driving along the ankles of the steep, tree covered hills on the opposite shore, and travelling back across the river farther upstream. I swivel my head and peer over the Jersey barriers on the bridge trying to take in all I can each time we pass through. From high up in a quickly moving car, everything looks miniature, as if all the trees and houses and hills were constructed to be a part of a model train set. Uniformly shaped white and red-brick buildings line the handful of streets. Mountains and the church steeple accent the town’s unpretentious skyline.
From the moving car the two rivers appear to be suspended, as motionless as the mountains holding them. Frozen white piles of foam and rooster tails mark the locations of rocks in the river. Depending on the recent rainfall, I would look to see whether the trees on the islands had gotten shorter or the rocks grew. If we were visiting our family for Christmas, twenty-foot tall frozen waterfalls adorned the precipitous rock wall on one side of the highway. On the other side, the water was stone grey, mimicking the overcast sky. During the summer, blues and browns and greens take over the landscape, and I look for rafts, canoes, and fishing poles in the water. The only things moving are cars.
Recently the desire to see things and do things that I have been putting off welled up inside me. I think it has to do with the fact that I’m graduating college in less than a month. A lot of aspects in my life are about to change. I’m afraid of how I will lose some aspects of freedom, but gain others, and how I will have to change my daily routine and how I will probably never see some of these people I have gotten to know over the past four years after graduation.
My girlfriend and I planned a trip to Harpers Ferry, and so we travelled down this familiar road, but instead of following the loop of road back across the river, I took a turn I have never taken before and parked the car. I slammed the door. I felt the breeze, and it wasn’t caused by going 55 miles per hour with the windows down. We hiked up a hill that provides a great view at the top of the town across the river, and the breeze followed us, strengthening as we climbed, making the leaves in the trees whisper louder and louder.
From a car it’s impossible to see the trees blowing or the river flowing. Sitting on the overlook, I can absorb it all. The sun is high in the cloudless sky, and it is reflected white and gold off the swiftly moving water below, like a flowing liquid mirror. Now that I am taking the time to stop and enjoy it, the water flows past me on its journey to the ocean. The rivers frozen in time, that used to paint Harpers Ferry in my mind, have thawed. And that’s OK.
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