The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
The holiday that changed me ‘Mum collected coal every night’
David Baldacci reflects on the childhood road trip that inspired his celebrated book Wish You Well Take a chance and travel without your partner for your next trip. A holiday alone will be far more rewarding, says Chris Moss
It was the summer of 1976. I’d just turned 16 and was about to start my sophomore year when my dad Rudolph suggested one last road trip for the summer. My mum, Joyce, said she wanted to visit her old homestead in the remote Virginia mountains on Ramsey’s Ridge that my grandfather had built. She hadn’t been back since just after I was born.
All I knew was that mum had a hard life there. She was the youngest of 10 kids and many of them had already moved out. Because her parents had a difficult relationship, she and her favourite sister Sydney were often left alone in this isolated farmhouse from the ages of seven and eight. Apparently, when dad was courting mum, he would carry a pistol because of the bears and cougars. It was so remote, it wasn’t like you could call the police if you had a problem. I had visions of the unnerving movie Deliverance, with city folk encountering wild mountain men, fearing for their lives, and the tinkling of banjos.
Despite that, I was looking forward to leaving the city. It had been a rough couple of months. My dad had been working for a trucking firm, which was bought by the mob from New Jersey who sold everything and eventually laid him off. It was a shock. Along with my older brother and sister, we were now a family of five living off my mum’s salary from a phone company.
We all piled into dad’s 1974 Buick as long as a boat and drove for the “short” trip that was seven hours long. When we finally got to the mountain, it was all hairpin turns, no guard rails and steep drops like in the Italian Alps. My dad couldn’t handle the driving so my mum took over. She was fearless.
All of a sudden there was a commotion and we ground to a halt. I gingerly popped my head up. Coming steaming towards us on this single track was a huge backhoe, driven at speed by a nutty guy with six kids swinging off it, like it was a playset. Mum rolled down the window to yell at him; he yelled back. As I peeked through the window, I asked “Mum, who is that?” She replied nonchalantly: “Oh, that’s your uncle Garcy.”
She got out of the car and he jumped down off the hoe and they chatted, but there was no warmth. She later told me he was a coalminer who still lived on the mountain in a cinderblock trailer on a farm, with his wife and 21 children.
Eventually, we got to the old farmhouse. Except for my uncle Garcy, all the family had moved to nearby states because unless you were a coalminer, there wasn’t a whole lot to do. Nobody had lived in the house since the early 1960s, so it had almost been reclaimed by the land. There was a tree in the front room, and debris everywhere, along with snakes and other undesirables. The fancy red and gold wallpaper had survived, along with the pot-bellied stove and stack to the ceiling.
Mum showed us the bedroom she shared with Sydney, the remnants of the kitchen and, as we walked around the vast property, the falling down barn with the basketball hoop made from an actual basket and the river that ran behind it. Down a half-mile path was the old family coal mine, which was for their personal cooking and heating. One of mum’s jobs when she was little was to take her bucket and collect coal every night. That image has always stayed with me.
I was struck by how remote it was, the opposite of our neighbourhood in Richmond. Here, there was a stillness in the air, birdsong and the faint hum of farm machinery in the distance. Mum told us stories of Walter Bundy, their family doctor, arriving by mule if he needed to be called, especially for all of their home births. But over the years, mum learnt how to deal with any bumps, scraps and upsets stoically in their mountain way.
I could see why she’d had to be so self-reliant and independent. You couldn’t just pop down to the shops or service station. She could fix cars, shoot vermin, grow and cook vegetables from a young age. Near the end of her life, she told me how many times she came close to dying on that mountain and how she never wanted that to happen to her kids, which is why she was glad to escape to the city.
It was that trip, and my mum’s tales, that inspired my novel Wish You Well. The great-grandmother, Louisa Mae, and granddaughter, Lou, were based on my mum and grandmother, and I modelled George Davis after my uncle Garcy, who lived into his 80s despite his black lung from coal mining.
That trip changed my life; it gave me a greater appreciation of the hardships my mum had to go through and how she wanted things to be better for us. I certainly didn’t take things for granted any more afterwards. As told to Sarah Ewing h Going solo: ice creams should never be shared
The end of lockdown will find most people desperate to go on the holiday of their dreams. No compromises. No half measures. No bothersome budgeting. But there’s one bit of baggage you should leave at home. No, not your collection of masks. Not the radio with its endless bad news. Not even the laptop that’s been your social life, workplace, shopping channel and secret friend this past year and a bit.
I’m talking about your partner. Paul Theroux’s quote on how to travel well – “Travel on the ground. Travel alone when possible.
Keep notes. That’s it.” – is as apt now as it was when only a few rich people got to do long-haul and luxury.
Solo travel always means increased openness and vulnerability, and therefore overall friendliness. That’s an emotional positive. But there are cerebral gains, too. When you are alone, you have heightened awareness of your environment. Take hiking. Do it as a couple and the main sound of “nature” is liable to be your partner’s new waterproof trousers, making that swishing, silky sound hour after hour as they do their best to frighten skylarks. Pointless chit-chat, the key raw material of longterm spousal communication, is also going to frighten off the chiffchaffs.
In cities, being alone means choosing whatever museum, gallery, bar, restaurant or walking route you fancy. It means a cheaper room in a hotel but a bigger bed. It means not having to eat with the person you’ve spent the whole day with – not to mention the night before – and then having to make conversation without even the most basic opening gambits: How are you? (I know.) What have you been up to? (I was up to it, too.) How are you feeling? (Yes, me too.)
It is not an act of love to travel with your closest one.
It is not an act of love to travel with your closest one. It is carried out like a duty
It is just a “norm” of the modern age, carried out rather like a duty. But a holiday isn’t the same as taking out the bins or managing the bills or talking to the kids about sensitive issues. Those all need to be shared; travel is best unshared.
Travel is currently subject to restrictions. See Page 3.