Along The Shadow Line: A Road Trip through History and Memory on the Old Confederate Border

By H. V. Traywick, Jr.

H.V. TRAYWICK JR. IS A VIRGINIAN—the real thing. He is a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute with a history degree from the University of Richmond and is now retired from long service as a tugboat captain on Chesapeake Bay.
This, his most recent book, is a meditation on his frequent long drives along the shadowy line of the Union/Confederate border from Virginia to Kansas. He has made the journey in fulfilment of kinship responsibility.

ALONG THE SHADOW LINE is an interesting reflection on the American past and present as seen by a Southerner well steeped in our history. The account is spatial, temporal, historical, and spiritual. It is a heritage American's view of our disintegrating and alien society and the price the South has paid for belonging to that society.

In earlier memoirs Traywick covered his time as an officer in Vietnam (Road Gang: A Memoir of Engineering Service in Vietnam) and his period of questing and traveling afterward (Starlight on the Rails: A Vietnam Veteran's Long Road Home). Traywick's previous books include The Empire of Owls, The Virginia Iliad, A Southern Soldier Boy, The Monumental Truth, Of Apostates and Scapegoats, and The Woke Revolution, among others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SHOTWELL PUBLISHING
• Release date: Feb 29, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224555833

Book preview

I .

VIRGINIA

Oh, Shenandoah, I’m bound to leave you,

Away, you rolling river

Oh, Shenandoah, I’m bound to leave you,

Away, I’m bound away, across the wide Missouri.

I WAS SADDENED AND DISTRESSED TO HEAR the news of Terry’s passing. Terry was an accomplished and highly respected CPA in Kansas who had seemed to be in perfect health. Many times he rode the famous Triple Bypass bike marathon, 135 miles through the highest mountain passes in Colorado, completed two Ironman competitions, and literally hundreds of running marathons, setting a standard of excellence for all of us, so the news came as a shock. But against Mary’s earnest remonstrations, he had insisted on taking the Covid shots and boosters for the sake of his clients, although he already had natural immunity. Complications immediately ensued, with the loss of the use of his legs, heart issues, and blindness. Local medical facilities were a travesty, and he was sent home with pneumonia and a high fever. Again, in the hospital and suffering on a ventilator, he departed this earth and its travails. Mary’s lawyer said trying to sue for medical neglect and malpractice would bankrupt her, so she was left alone with anger, devastation, and a fifty-acre dog rescue ranch to manage.

When I heard the news, I drove back out there to see if I could help her settle the estate and do whatever I could. It was a long way from our grandparents’ front yard, running barefooted through the lush bluegrass in the endless summers, or building little twig houses between the roots of the great oaks for our little glass animals, or picking the little flowers we called blueys that grew in the grass, or catching lightning bugs in the balmy evenings, or raking paths in the fall leaves. But things run in cycles, and as The Preacher says,

All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.

— Ecclesiastes 1:7

So I saddled up and left Richmond, bound west. My route would take me parallel to an old line of demarcation on the maps of history that marked the northern frontier of the old Southern Confederacy, a shadow-line today that roughly runs from the Chesapeake Bay, up the Potomac, across the mountains, down the Ohio, across the Mississippi, and up the Missouri to Kansas. My travels — with my rambling observations, thoughts on history, and memories recorded along the way — would be along Interstate 64 from Virginia, through West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois to St. Louis, and from there through Missouri to Kansas on I-70.

Leaving home, I first crossed to the north side of the James River on the Powhite Parkway Bridge. There is a Powhite Creek nearby, which gives the bridge its name. The creek itself, I suppose, got its name from Po’ Whites who had lived along it back in the day. I can only imagine if a like Black pejorative were given as the name of a bridge. Newscasters would be clutching their pearls, politicians would be proclaiming their outrage across the airwaves, and race hustlers would be in their glory as a pandemic of apoplexy and rioting swept the