Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, June 1, 1993 TAG: 9305290048
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: Robert Freis
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES LENGTH: Medium
So I did. Go west, that is - for the first time in my life, barely in time to still qualify as a young man.
I've been out here for about three weeks. Even though I'll soon return home, it's been an enlightening trip and likely to stay with me for a long time.
My itinerary has put me in the hands and households of old friends, all Roanoke natives whose roots run deep in Virginia soil.
Yet, for various reasons, they've yanked up those roots and made the journey across the continent to begin anew - new lives, new jobs, new terrain.
Take my friend Norv, for example. Back in the late 1970s, he decided he'd had it with the East Coast and his probation officer. Like the pioneers and their Conestoga wagons, he piled his dog and everything else that would fit in a Volkswagen bug and drove to Oregon.
Fifteen years later, he's still there and he's not coming back.
Norv's a great guy: red-headed, hearty, full of enthusiasm and insight. He's a carpenter who hasn't lost his courtly Southern manner, although the no-frills Annie Oakleys he dates can't understand why he insists on holding doors for them.
He likes his new home in Eugene, Ore., because, like Roanoke, it's not too big, and it's green and comfortably surrounded by mountains.
My other friends also brought vestiges of home with them. There are pictures of relatives and maps of home on the walls.
Here, at my friend's condo in LA, is a doorstop that once was a metal water-meter cover in Blacksburg until she appropriated it for her own use.
Perhaps these keepsakes offer security and a sense of connection to their old lives back in Virginia. I suppose it helps them through the challenges they face in a new land.
I consider them to be courageous people. I don't have the fortitude to pull up stakes and leave my home. I wouldn't even be out here visiting if they weren't here.
You see, it's not just the physical distance across the continent that's so imposing. Coming out here is a very personal journey, too, and you must face up to being a stranger in a strange land.
My Western friends have had the guts to define themselves, to take stock, discard the old, accept the new and move forward. Their pioneering spirit extends inward.
All of us, at some point in our lives, dream of such a journey. Yet how many are willing to accept the uncertainty, the hardship and the privation?
For the faint of heart, security soon gives way to yearning and the inevitable question: What if . . . ?
Then it's time to circle the wagons.
I know someone who is undertaking a physical and spiritual pilgrimage on the East Coast. She's my friend and colleague, Melissa DeVaughn, who's hiking her way north along the Appalachian Trail.
For Melissa, I'm bringing home two souvenirs: one film canister of water from the Pacific Ocean, and another filled with earth from the Pacific Crest Trail, the Appalachian Trail's western counterpart.
I'm going to mail them to her and she's free to mix them together into some sort of potion, an elixir of new journeys to come. Melissa's never been out west, but I'll bet some day she makes the trip.
She understands, as my Western friends do, as the pioneers did, that you have to be willing to risk and change and adapt - without sacrificing where you came from - if you want to see new horizons.
That's what I've realized from my trip. That's what going west, and growing with the country, is all about.
Robert Freis, a New River Valley bureau reporter, is vacationing on the West Coast.
by CNB