Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, July 8, 1993                   TAG: 9307080285
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: FINCASTLE                                LENGTH: Long

THEIR VACATION IS NO DAY AT THE BEACH, BUT THAT'S HOW THEY LIKE IT

Come the big Fourth of July weekend, the Cahoon family was ready at last to set off on vacation.

Dad settled into the driver's seat, squinting at the traffic clogging the road up ahead. Mom was in the back, the better to keep an eye on the kids.

Not that they were any trouble.

Why, the Cahoons had been looking forward to this trip for so long that even the mules were cooperative.

Mules?

You weren't expecting a Mazda were you?

For the Cahoons, the family wagon isn't of the station-wagon variety; it's the real thing - a farm wagon that Mac Cahoon fashioned himself out of scrap metal and lumber. And the Cahoons' idea of a vacation away from their Botetourt County beef-cattle farm is to hitch up their homemade wagon to the family mules, Jim and Queen, and strike off across the countryside.

"We don't go to the beach with the heat," says Vicki Cahoon, bouncing along on the bale of straw that serves as her seat. "We ride here in the heat."

And what a ride it is, a five-day excursion that this year meanders from New Castle to Buchanan, mostly along back roads so obscure that you can travel for hours without encountering a soul - or an automobile.

"Some people say it sounds like fun," Vicki Cahoon says. "Others say it's not for me. The people who've never done it before say it sounds like fun."

Certainly it's fun enough for the 100 or so people accompanying the Cahoons on their holiday.

This is a modern-day wagon train: Several times a year, horse lovers in Western Virginia saddle up their horses - and, in some cases, hitch up their wagons - and set out to re-create wagon trains of old.

Sometimes, it's just a weekend excursion. For the folks in the Craig County Horsemen's Association, it's a weeklong adventure, and this is the seventh year the wagon train has creaked and clip-clopped through the countryside.

For most, it's a trail ride, an excuse to take off work and do nothing but ride horses all week with others who like to do the same. "It's hard to get out and ride," says Dennis Craft, a carpenter from Fincastle. "You can ride on your land, but here you can get out with a group and ride all week, put some miles on your horse, and take a vacation."

For others, it's a chance to ride in the breezy comfort of a horse-drawn, or in the Cahoons' case, a mule-drawn, wagon. "You notice a lot of things traveling this way you don't notice from a car," Mac Cahoon says.

Such as?

The little things, mostly.

"You notice houses off through the woods you hadn't seen before," Vicki Cahoon says. "Or certain kinds of bushes and animals. It makes you appreciate what the pioneers went through, it really does."

In more ways than one.

Whole families go along on these wagon trains, sometimes from the very beginning. "The wagon goes through stages," Vicki Cahoon says. "Sometimes, when women are pregnant, it's a maternity wagon. Then the next year, it's a nursery wagon."

This must be an off year in the wagon train's fertility cycle, because now there are no infants in sight - just Mac and Vicki Cahoon, their children, Andrew and Sarah, who spent most of the trip on horseback, and some family friends.

"It's just like a reunion," says Doug Persinger, a round-faced painter from New Castle who goes by the nickname "Moon."

Technically speaking, these wagons aren't like the prairie schooners that rolled west a century or more ago - unless, of course, the pioneers had access to the same blue tarp that the Cahoons used to fashion a sunroof for their wagon.

Instead, on this wagon train there's a motley assortment of styles and shapes, from fancy surreys with fringe on top to the "poor man's wagon" that Covington blacksmith Willie Graham fashioned from a junk car rusting in his yard.

"It wasn't fit for anything but junk," he explains. "I just took it and put it together. I don't know how to explain it."

But he does know one thing: "It's the only way to go."

At the end of the hottest day of the year so far, Tracy Haynes lounges in his lawn chair in the middle of Bradshaw Branch and lets the brown creek water wash the trail dust from his toes.

He runs a restaurant, the Silver Dollar, in Covington, but right now, his more important job seems to be president of the Craig County Horsemen's Association. The group is less about horse people from Craig than people who ride horses in Craig, whose empty valleys and rugged beauty make it prime trail-riding country.

Haynes can even become philosophical about it all.

"When you're out on a horse, you're not thinking about anything," he says. "You're in a totally different personality. You don't think about work. There's just a sense of being yourself. You get out, let your mind run free, no worries."

Not even the thunderstorms that blow up out of nowhere on sultry summer afternoons. On Monday, the wagon train's first day out this year, the riders were soaked by a torrential downpour as they wound their way over Caldwell Mountain.

"One rider turned around and asked me, `Where would you rather be?'" Haynes recalls. "It was pouring down rain. But nobody hurried, nobody worried around the rain, everybody kept going. Usually it hurts if you have to stay out in the rain, but when it comes to riding horses in the rain, nobody cares."

Haynes pauses for a moment, and the only sound in the world seems to be the gurgle of the creek.

"Just to sit in this cold creek makes it pretty good, too," he says.

At trail's end each afternoon, the riders pitch camp in a field along the way, some sleeping beneath the stars, others seeking more luxurious accommodations. At least two families this year have brought along makeshift campers fashioned from surplus school buses, proudly reconditioned and outfitted with bunks and gas grills and portable toilets.

Some nights, there's live bluegrass music; other nights, a disc jockey spinning records for a barn dance - not for any cultural significance, but simply because that's usually the closest outbuilding juiced with electricity.

Between his wagon and his bus/camper, Harvey Reynolds, a Westvaco paper-mill worker from Covington, boasts that he's ridden on these wagon trains "ever since they started."

Why?

He can't imagine why anyone would even ask such a dumb question.

Down in the creek, his 8-year-old daughter, Laura, is tossing a beach ball back and forth with Graham, the maker of the "poor man's wagon." The stream is barely deep enough to wet their feet, but the water's cold and fast, and on a hot July day, the splashes feel as good here as those at any beach.

"Enjoyment," Reynolds finally says. "You fellas from the big city don't know what enjoyment is."