Story by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net

The pastor was tired of hearing all the Woe is me! talk that had been making its way around his congregation.

“The people who have the hardest time dealing with a crisis are Christians,” he said, leading into a series of tales from the Bible and contemporary life involving people who had considered themselves to be religious to a fault, until they faced one calamity or another and then lost their faith.

Shane Lam has a different perspective on calamities and what they’re supposed to do to one’s faith.

***

“Did you go to Wilson?” Lam asked me about a minute after introducing himself as the pastor at Revolution Church. I’d had a feeling a moment earlier that we’d met somewhere before, too. His question jogged my memory. “You’re … Shane Lam?” I said, not really asking for verification, but more incredulous, than anything else.

The impromptu meeting had been set up by a friend, Kathie Kincheloe, who had mentioned to me a few weeks before that she had been attending Revolution for several months, and then told me about the pastor and his interesting background, which involved drug and alcohol use and abuse and other stories that she didn’t go into with details. I told her that I’d driven by the church a few times and noticed the sign, and that I’d wondered if the church was anything like the Revolution Church that had been set up by Jay Bakker, the prodigal son of the infamous Jim Bakker of “The PTL Club” fame, which had been bringing about a revolution in religion by reaching out to the disaffected, holding Sunday-morning services in bars and welcoming gays and lesbians and leather-clad bikers and the rest.

It turns out that there is no direct affiliation between Bakker’s church and Lam’s church on North Delphine in the Basic City section of Waynesboro, though there are a lot of similarities in what the two churches do, and in the life stories of their founders. The Shane Lam that I knew in high school - we’re both graduates of Wilson Memorial High School, Class of 1990 - was just as Kincheloe had advertised, if not more so. And as he told me, his life got even more out of control after high school. He enlisted in the National Guard and then the United States Navy because he thought the structure would help him clean himself up, “but all it did was make things worse,” he said. “I became a really bad alcoholic in the Navy. It was part of the culture. It was accepted.” Back home after his tour was up, “My life just completely, utterly went out of control, in every way that you can think of. I was 22 years old, and I just didn’t know if I was going to make it. And not just if I’d make it in society. I didn’t know if I’d make it another year living. I was surrounded by people who were involved in everything you could think of - from drugs to dealing to every bad element that you can think of in this town.”

He ended up in rehab, “even though I’d been in rehab before, and it had done me no good,” he said. But this time, through David Wilkerson’s Teen Challenge Ministries, something clicked. “I went there on Oct. 1, by Oct. 10, I was sitting there in a service, and I gave my life back to God,” Lam said. “He just got a hold of me, and I could sense Him, sense His voice, hear Him. I went up to the front of the church, and I said, God, look, I will give my life to You. Whatever I’m worth, if I’m worth anything, I’m giving myself to you.”

In a flash, Lam saw his life laid out before him. “They laid hands on me, and they prayed, and instantaneously, I saw myself standing on a platform, in my mind’s eye, speaking to people, hundreds of people, thousands of people,” Lam said. “And I got mad. I got really, really angry. Because all these guys were talking about their experiences with God, with hands touching them, and I went back to my seat, and I was angry. I said to God when I sat down, I can’t stay clean, I can’t manage my life. It’s a mess. Everything I try fails. And I try to give my life to you, and you show me this vision of me leading people? I can’t even lead myself!”

Lam said he has realized since that he had needed to go through what he had gone through in school, in the military, to do what he was supposed to do with his life. “There are just some people that need to be. Not to prove who you are, but to be,” Lam said. “The sense that He gave me that day was, you’ve been radical in everything that you do. I’m the most aggressive person in everything I do. I’m the most aggressive basketball player you’ll see on the court. I was the most aggressive person in the military. In the war games, I was the dude that was infiltrating the camp. Everything about me was that way. So He just gave me a sense. Shane, you just can’t be that guy who just goes to church on Sunday. You can’t be the guy who just changes your life. It won’t work. I’m going to help you change your life so you can change everything around you.”

***

And so it was that Shane Lam ended up in college. “This is me we’re talking about here, Chris. You remember me in school,” Lam said to me, and I do remember him. He had been a year ahead of me at the start, and I remember taking a couple of math classes with him in which I had served as something of a tutor to him, if you can call letting him look over my homework answers and do whatever he did with him after seeing what I’d put down tutoring. He quit school the year that he was supposed to graduate, then worked his tail off to graduate the next year. It was this guy who not only earned his college degree, but was a campus leader who took an assignment pastoring a small Baptist church not long after getting his diploma, then started another small church on the side before making the big move back to the place where it had all almost ended a few years before.

“I didn’t want to come back here. I never thought I’d be back here,” Lam said. “The Bible says that a prophet is not without honor except in his hometown. But when I’d come back home to see my family, I’d drive by that building on Delphine and say to myself, We could do something special there.”

The building on Delphine that he was referring to was an old Foursquare Gospel church that had essentially become a flophouse. “The only room that was being used for ministry was the sanctuary,” Lam said. “The rest of the rooms were just being rented out by the owner, and you could literally see a cloud of darkness. I don’t want to be superspiritual. But you could sense that it was death. Police were in and out of there, raiding the place at any given time.”

This is the home today to Revolution Church. Lam and a group of volunteers began holding services there last year about a year before Lam had thought he would be ready to begin building a small congregation in Waynesboro. “It started with me, my wife, and another couple, four of us, and just grew from there,” Lam said. The group grew every Sunday morning, reaching out to “the lost sheep, people who love God, but hate church,” Lam said. “They love God, but they’ve been hurt by the politics and the organization and the stuff that just happens in churches,” Lam said. “I’ve been part of megachurches down South with five, ten, fifteen thousand people. So He started speaking to me. It’s become for the ministry a situation where people come and sit in the pews and give and sustain the ministry. He said to me, I don’t want you to do that, Shane. He said, I want you to build something that the ministry is for the people.”

I saw how that vision has become reality firsthand on the Sunday that I visited in May. Lam apologized to me when I walked over to shake his hand. “The bikers aren’t here today. They’re out visiting another church. So it won’t be quite as rowdy as usual,” he said, smiling. The pews were still almost full without them. I counted 48 people in attendance at the service, which was itself lively, spiritual. The first hour - of two - featured a series of praise songs that resembled more what I hear on my favorite alternative-rock station on XM than what I’ve ever heard before in a church. And people were actually jumping up and down to the beat to a couple of the songs. And I don’t know that describing it that way relates just how it felt to me. You’ve seen fans at Virginia Tech football games jumping rhythmically to Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” before kickoff. That’s what it was like. Except at church.

“The appeal to this type of church is just the realness of it, the rawness of it. Rather than there just being all these facades and faces. People acting a certain way because it’s Sunday morning. You just come as you are. You don’t have to act like somebody you’re not. You can just be yourself,” church member Luis Pluguez said.

“Not everybody is going to be drawn to our church. People who were raised in church all their life is not going to typically feel comfortable with a service like ours, because it’s not the norm. But for people who haven’t been in a church and don’t know what it’s supposed to be like, it’s their first taste of it, and they like it. They can accept it,” Pluguez said.

“We definitely have to wake up early in the morning. Get some coffee, get the vocal chords stretched out so we can hit those notes,” Pluguez said.

“The vision is a church where the broken people are celebrated, uplifted and empowered. The purpose is all about the people. Broken people,” Lam said, before introducing me to Tinker Campbell, a 46-year-old Staunton man who first made his way through the doors at Revolution in January at the urging of two close friends. “I was sitting at home getting ready to go to Virginia Beach to shoot somebody over a bad debt,” Campbell told me matter of factly. “God done it. Through a friend, God through a friend, He told me He knew a better place for me. He told me He knew a better way for me and a better place for me. And that was Revolution Church.”

Campbell is now a leader in the church’s motorcycle ministry and its Alcoholics and Addicts for Christ program that meets on Monday nights. “Every Sunday, if I’m not doing something with the motorcycle ministry, I’m in the church,” Campbell said. “I do everything for God. And God says for me to reach out to other people. A lot of my friends who see me now and knew me before, they still have a problem understanding me. But the more they see me, the easier it gets. My mission is to win souls to Jesus. And Shane keeps me guided in the right direction, with God’s guidance.”

Lam knows what Campbell is going through when it comes to the friends issue. “I had a parishioner the other day come and tell me, I’ve heard all this stuff about you, Pastor, and I told this person who was telling me all these things about you, No, there’s no way that’s true about my pastor,” Lam said. “I looked that person right in the eye, and I said, I don’t know what that person said, but I’m just going to tell you, it’s probably safe to say that every bit of it is true. I don’t know what they said, but every bit of it is true. I have made so many mistakes, had so many failures. But I am not that man. The Bible says, You are a new creation. I’m not that man. I’m not my mistakes. A person who is divorced, they’re not a divorcee. We label people by their mistakes.”

“I am who I am because of my mistakes,” Lam said.

After a pause, Lam said, “I’ll admit it, I was skeptical about starting here. But God told me, Shane, the only way this is going to work is if you’re willing to scream your failures from the mountaintops as much as your successes.”

***

I would be misleading you if I reported that Revolution is a group of bikers over here and a group of addicts back there, and that’s it. People from a variety of backgrounds make up the congregation. I ran into a woman I know who heads up the preschool across the street from my office, a church preschool, incidentally. Kincheloe, for her part, is solidly middle-class.

“We do also reach people who are not in that place of being lost, but they want to be a part of a church that’s doing something,” Lam said. “So if you come in, if somebody comes in to visit, I’m in a suit and tie. I look like a businessman. And around me, up at the front, the most vocal people, they’re in leather. They roll in on their Harleys, and they’re in chaps and leather. You’ve got that group, you’ve got the group over here that’s dressed up, you’ve got another group that’s in blue jeans and T-shirts. That’s what Revolution is to us.”

Which prompted my last question. Why Revolution?

“We need to have a revolution in our personal lives,” Lam said. “As Americans, we’re destroying ourselves emotionally. This epidemic of depression - you know, our moms and dads didn’t deal with this. Sure, there were people who were depressed. But today, it seems like everybody’s depressed. I think it’s because we’re hopeless, we don’t have a purpose to live for. We’d hear our mothers and grandmothers when we were younger, and they had dreams. You take away people’s dreams, and they have nothing to live for, and they get depressed.

“We need a personal revolution. We also need a spiritual revolution and a social revolution. That’s the way I define it. And revolutions are done at the grassroots. People who have a cause. Every great movement in America started with a revolution. Martin Luther King Jr. started a revolution. He put his life at risk, and he put himself out there,” Lam said.

Lam exhorts his flock to put themselves out there. “We will have failed if all we do is come here every Sunday, and nobody on that side of town,” he said in his sermon, pointing west, toward the more affluent West End, “knows that we’re here.” Later, talking with me, he expounded upon what he was trying to impart there.

“We want to do something about the addiction to crystal meth,” Lam said. “I hear people talk about it, complain about it. But there’s not many people saying, Let’s do something about it. We have to ship our kids and young adults off to other places because we’re not equipped to handle it. It’s our community problem. It’s not somebody else’s. We’re going to have a full-blown residential program where they come in, and they spend a month or two in an intensive, Christ-based program. And we’re going to do something here to address our child-care needs. We have a crisis in child care in this community. And we have a crisis afterschool. The afterschool hours are the most dangerous hours in America for kids who don’t have a parent at home to guide them.

“We need to get involved. We can’t just keep to ourselves here and hope that everything is better one day. We have to make it happen,” Lam said.

“We need to get this city to understand that you can’t abandon people. For this ministry to be effective, it has to be able to effect change. And that’s the first thing I want us to do,” Lam said.

New Dominion Magazine editor Chris Graham presents “A Revolution in Waynesboro,” featuring an inside look at Revolution Church in Waynesboro.

Show Length: 7:48

Story by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net

I don’t remember the year, but I remember the map. It might have been something from the Central Shenandoah Planning District Commission, it might have been something that the three local community planners had come up with on their own, whatever. The important thing was what it had us looking like. Basically the urban metropolis of the future would begin somewhere around the top of Afton Mountain and continue out to the west toward Churchville along U.S. 250, cresting to the north in Verona along U.S. 11 and diving south to the farthest reaches of Stuarts Draft on U.S. 340.

I’m guessing that we were supposed to be scared by the prospects, because that was my reaction when I saw it there in front of me on the big board at the public meeting that I was attending that night. You wouldn’t know us from Northern Virginia if this ever comes to pass, I told myself more than once as I stared at the map.

It doesn’t have to be, of course, that it ever will come to pass the way the planners envisioned.

“We’ll certainly have more people,” said Nancy Sorrells, who represents the Riverheads District on the Augusta County Board of Supervisors, the first guinea pig for my experiment that had me asking a variety of local-leader types a simple question with no real right answer, What does Greater Augusta look like in 2025?

“Hopefully we’ll have retained many of the things that make life in this area so special. Which is very friendly communities that are livable communities, that are walkable, that you don’t have to get into a car to drive across the county to go to the doctor’s office or to the grocery store, that you still know your neighbors, and that you still have open spaces, and that we’ve retained the beauty of what’s here. We’ve got that vision. It’s down there. It’s in our comprehensive plan,” Sorrells said.

My view on that is clouded with cynicism, I know, but being a cynic has gotten me this far. Anyway, I don’t have the faith in comprehensive plans that Sorrells does. I want to, I really do, but to me there’s a reality that comprehensive plans can be adapted every five years, and since there are elections every four years, it doesn’t take much to see that a change in mindset at the polls can lead to a change in approach down at the community-development office.

And I’m saying this, and I’m someone who broke with Sorrells two years ago on the controversial megasite issue that could have ended with the county landing a new Toyota plant that surely would have changed life in Greater Augusta as we know it. I agreed then with the likes of Tracy Pyles that the Toyota plant would have been a good thing for the area, and I agree with Pyles now that the Toyota effect, if we can call it that, could end up pushing development in a big way in the future.

“Now we’re in a situation where we will be far less persnickety in who comes. Because people are seeing the value of having a manufacturing base,” said Pyles, who represents the Pastures District on the board of supervisors. Unifi, which closed its Staunton operations this spring, doesn’t just hurt affect the 146 people who lost their jobs as a result of the move, Pyles pointed out. “It hurts the Hajocas who were selling them piping. It hurts the electric contractors who were helping them. It hurts the water and sewer fees that Staunton was receiving. It is a ripple effect that goes throughout the economy. And it’s not going to be long before the building-supply houses are closing because we don’t have the construction industry that we once had. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, until we start shoring up our manufacturing, we will be very receptive,” Pyles said.

Too receptive, I worry. Which brings me back to the reason that I’m writing this story in the first place. I’m asking the question, What does Greater Augusta look like in 2025, and all I can think about is that planning map from several years ago that has us looking like Loudoun County. Dave Metz, a longtime member of the Staunton City Council, thinks I’m wishing for something not to happen that has already happened. “The county is truly, in my opinion, a suburban county already. It’s preposterous to think that Augusta County thinks of itself as a sleepy little county,” Metz said to me as we had lunch in Downtown Staunton one nice spring day in May.

Metz is the former owner of Taylor Rental, and his business had him out in the county several days a month. “And I’d be driving somewhere that I hadn’t been for a year or two, and I’d say to myself, Where are all of these houses coming from?” Metz said.

“The county is going to have to take a really hard-nosed look at their comprehensive plan, and where they say agriculture, they have to mean agriculture, and we’re not even going to think about rezoning for housing or industrial. Instead of just this willy-nilly, Well, maybe this would be alright if it was industrial. You have to look at the big picture sometimes and say, We want to force development in this area, because then we can provide the services for it,” Metz said.

Which brings us to the issue of how the cities will look in 2025. Metz sees Staunton dealing with more of the growth pressures that have defined the last 10 years in the Queen City. “The real question that comes up to us is, Can we provide, in a competitive nature, can we provide the quality of life that people are looking for?” Metz said. “Can we provide the arts? It’s so critical that we are able to attract people, because when people get to be my own age, my primary concern is not my tax rate, it’s, What can I do in my spare time to enjoy retirement? And virtually every community outside the major areas is going to be competing against each other in terms of, How do you attract the baby boomers when they retire? And not just in terms of the initial, but in chapter four, when they’re in a nursing home, and they need skilled care?
“What I see as the major question is, How do we compete against other places to provide that quality of life? And we have to recognize that the arts and theater and health care and schools are important,” Metz said.

I would argue that Staunton has developed a good reputation in those areas relative to the situation in my hometown, Waynesboro, which has an economy apparently based on manufacturing that is just about done as far as any kind of appreciable manufacturing base is concerned, which has a school system that is struggling to keep pace with its regional peers and has been asked consistently in recent years to try to do more with less, which has a downtown that has been left for dead for 20 years even as residents and entrepreneurs have made efforts to breathe life into it at different stages in time.

I’m going to be positive now. Because for far too long, Waynesboro has looked at itself and been overwhelmed by its problems. One day we will wake up and realize that problems viewed another way are actually opportunities to do something right. Lorie Smith, are you with me? What do see in Waynesboro in 2025?

“A vibrant city. One that is absolutely nurtured from the East End to the West End of town. One that is comprehensive in nature in terms of development. Taking advantage of our river, taking advantage of the Blue Ridge Parkway. And also making sure that we’re nurturing the commercial and industrial sector of our community. I just see a well-rounded community that’s well-supported, has a healthy tax base and a bright future,” said Smith, a member of Waynesboro City Council and former chair of the Waynesboro School Board.

It’s going to take some work to get there, of course. Just as it is going to take some work in Staunton for city leaders there to balance meeting the needs of its aging population with the needs of the young families who want good schools and cultural and economic opportunities for themselves and their children. And it is going to take some work in Augusta County to balance the pressures that county leaders are facing relative to residential and industrial development with the pressure to maintain whatever rural feel the county has left.

We can do it, if we want to. Or we can be that urban metropolis of the future. The choice is ours.

Compiled by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net

The canvas was clean. The answers to my questions would paint the picture.

What will the Greater Augusta area look like in 2025?

I asked several local leaders to weigh in on the topic. As you will see, the conversations were open and honest.

Augusta County
Nancy Sorrells, Riverheads District Supervisor, Augusta County Board of Supervisors

Q: What will Augusta County look like in 2025?

A: “If we can make our comprehensive plans work, I think we’ll certainly have many more people. But hopefully we’ll have retained many of the things that make life in this area so special. Which are very friendly communities that are livable communities, that are walkable, that you don’t have to get into a car to drive across the county to go to the doctor’s office or to the grocery store, that you still know your neighbors, and that you still have open spaces, and that we’ve retained the beauty of what’s here.”

Q: Will growth put more pressure on the county to provide more fire, rescue and law-enforcement services?
“The state gives us money for every 1,500 people to hire an additional law-enforcement person. So if you have 1,500 people in a well-designed, nice subdivision-type of community, maybe one deputy can do that. But if you have 1,500 people, and you scatter them through the great geographical vastness of the North River District or the Riverheads District, one deputy isn’t going to cut it. You’re going to need to hire more than one deputy to run the roads and go to all those different places.

“The same with fire and rescue. If you have more and more houses way out in the outlying areas, the smaller volunteer fire departments and rescue squads aren’t going to be able to serve that growing population in the way that they expect and deserve to be served.

“We are holding tightly to our tax rate, but someplace down the road it’s going to have to go up.

“You can have fire-service districts. Draw a line around a new subdivision, it’s a planned community, and maybe they get two more cents on their real-estate tax to help provide for those needs that they’re going to have. Or, and they do this in different parts of Virginia, a sewer district - say the village of Greenville needs to be served by sewer, and they will sooner or later, by 2025 they will, because they have these very small lots that have been there for 200 years, and if your septic field fails, there’s nowhere else to put a new septic line, so they’re going to have to be served by sewer, or else they’re going to have to dump raw sewage into the South River. Traditionally we’ve thought of sewer as a way to encourage increased development, but in this case you want the sewer not to encourage more growth, but to better serve the growth that’s there.
“Eventually there will be pressure to go from a sheriff’s department to a police force.”
Tracy Pyles, Pastures District Supervisor, Augusta County Board of Supervisors

Q: What will Augusta County look like in 2025?

A: “The population here hasn’t grown as fiercely as one might think. We’re hardly in a high-growth range. If you look back, we were 54,000 in 1990, and we’re roughly 70,000 now. We’ve grown quite a bit while Waynesboro and Staunton have been stagnant. You put it all together, we have a reasonable rate of growth. You want to have some growth, and the area as a whole has a 1 percent increase per year, something like that, one, one and a half. So you project ahead 15 years, you can project that the population will increase 20 percent compounded from now to then, and if we’re at about 112,000 population total now, in 2025, 130,000 is kind of a number I’d think about.
“The rest of that can be nestled easily within the Staunton-to-Waynesboro-to-Lyndhurst-Stuarts Draft area. It’ll be a concentration in those areas. We have to make the connections to water and sewer both available and reasonable in costs, and we’re having some problems doing that because of issues with the Chesapeake Bay Act and that sort of thing. But I think land costs will continue to rise, so it should be enough to offset people going into the rural area.

“I just see us being more tightly compacted in the Fishersville area and the Waynesboro suburbs, if you will, and Stuarts Draft. But I think the overall rural character of Augusta County won’t change. Just those limited parts of it.”

Q: Will growth put more pressure on the county to provide more fire, rescue and law-enforcement services?
A: “I don’t see a lot of changes in how we do fire. I think that works very well. Volunteers, for the most part, are willing and able to do it. And with the professionals that we have backing them up, I think that does OK. I don’t volunteers, as constituted now, will be in place in 2025. Where right now we have largely a volunteer organization, supplemented to a degree by paid professionals, by 2025 we’ll have professional organizations supplemented with volunteers. How does that impact costs? To an extent, we’ll have to have adopted revenue recovery so some of the costs will be spread into medical insurance and that sort of thing. There will be some increases in costs, but we spend quite a bit for volunteers now, and we’re going to have to redirect that toward professionals. I see it costing another few cents on the tax rate to make that work.
“That’s being driven by a lot of things. The demands of the state on our volunteers - they’ve tried to make it where it’s closer to a doctor in the ambulance and treatment form the get-go instead of what they call load-and-go, where you go there, and what you’re trying to do is get them to the professionals as quick as you can, trying to do first aid and that sort of thing. But as that has changed, it’s putting more and more on the people, so we’re losing our volunteers. The fewer volunteers, the greater the load on people. The demands are increasing with the amount of people that we have in our population, so I just see that as something that’s going to have to change.
“I can see us having a combination sheriff’s department/police department. I think eventually we’ll have an Albemarle County or Fairfax County, where there’s one law-enforcement agency for the three localities. I think that would bring cost savings and get some redundancies out. I think we should have a service authority that handles Staunton and Waynesboro. We’ve got triplication there. We’re so intermixed now that we buy water from Staunton, and we sell sewage services to them. It’s very confusing to developers, and it ends up costing them.

“I’m going to be pushing the regional EOC thing. The budget problems are going to drive people who are not receptive to change - it will drive people who have to look at things differently to think differently. We can use this budget crunch that Waynesboro has and Staunton has to say, Come on, guys, you turned your eyes from us two years ago, we need to get on with this thing and save the money.”

Staunton

Dave Metz, Vice Mayor

Q: What will Staunton look like in 2025?

A: “My vision that I see most of all for the area is the fact that we’re seeing an exodus from the major cities. Quality of life is so important. And I think with this area being in such proximity to Washington and New York, I think you’re going to see people who are saying that they need to get out of a more hectic life and into more quality of life coming here.
“The real question that comes up to us is, Can we provide, in a competitive nature, can we provide the quality of life that people are looking for? Can we provide the arts? It’s so critical that we are able to attract people, because when people get to be my own age, my primary concern is not my tax rate, it’s, What can I do in my spare time to enjoy retirement? And virtually every community outside the major areas is going to be competing against each other in terms of, How do you attract the baby boomers when they retire? And not just in terms of the initial, but in chapter four, when they’re in a nursing home, and they need skilled care?
“What I see as the major question is, How do we compete against other places to provide that quality of life? We have to recognize that the arts and theater and health care and schools are important. We have to have kids around. We need to hear the sound of playgrounds. And we need to attract high-tech jobs. And you can’t attract high-tech jobs if you don’t have kids.”

Q: How will the region develop in the intervening 17 years?

A: “I see the corridor between Staunton and Waynesboro as being a vital economic engine. Because of the proximity of the hospital down there. We’re going to have to realize that that’s going to require urban services. People are not going to accept a 58-cent tax rate and expect a 30-minute response from the police or fire department. That’s impossible in today’s environment. There’s going to have to be a way for us to share revenue and share expenses to provide for these heavily urban areas that are going to need a higher level of services.

“The county is truly, in my opinion, a suburban county already. It’s preposterous to think that Augusta County thinks of itself as a sleepy little county. I used to do a lot of tents in Augusta County. I use to drive out in the middle of nowhere and put up these tents. And I’d come back years later to do an event somewhere in that area, and I’d say, Where are all of these houses coming from? The county is going to have to take a really hard-nosed look at their comprehensive plan, and where they say agriculture, they have to mean agriculture, and we’re not even going to think about rezoning for housing or industrial. Instead of just this willy-nilly, Well, maybe this would be alright if it was industrial. You have to look at the big picture sometimes and say, We want to force development in this area, because then we can provide the services for it.

“Too many times, Augusta County is looking at the obsession with the 58-cent tax rate, and that translates to disparities with the cities, because the cities are providing higher levels of services.”

Waynesboro

Lorie Smith, Ward D Representative, Waynesboro City Council

Q: What will Waynesboro look like in 2025?

“A vibrant city. One that is absolutely nurtured from the East End to the West End of town. One that is comprehensive in nature in terms of development. Taking advantage of our river, taking advantage of the Blue Ridge Parkway. And also making sure that we’re nurturing the commercial and industrial sector of our community. I just see a well-rounded community that’s well-supported, has a healthy tax base and a bright future.”

Q: What will the city economy look like in 2025?

A: “We are struggling competitively to put the right deals on the table. And we know that we’re competing with foreign countries for industrial growth. Some of the industry that we currently have, there’s competition for their outsourcing. So we know that we’re competing already here in Waynesboro. What we need to do, in my opinion, moving out 10 to 20 years, and that work has to start right now, is looking at how we can broaden that base, looking at light-industrial-based businesses, technology-oriented businesses, businesses that we view are going to have some long-term sustainability in our culture and our environment.

“Certainly Invista, I think that they are reaching a point that they’re struggling to be competitive with China and with other countries. We’ve got to understand, like we did five, 10 years, that when we have all of our eggs in the basket of DuPont years ago, that’s where the city went broke and basically relied on its tax base. So the broadening of our tax base with our retail and commercial sector has certainly enabled us to have a little bit more confidence moving forward that we are expanding our tax base. We have to be absolutely vigilant about trying to protect the base that we have, but understanding that it is a completely different environment.”

Q: Will South River and stormwater-related flooding be issues in Waynesboro in 2025?

A: “In 2025, I don’t think flooding is going to be on the radar screen for council in terms of things that we need to be doing. Hopefully by 2025 we’ll be doing preventive maintenance only. Obviously moving forward we need to be moving on the stormwater, which I have concerns about with the current program that we have. But understanding the nature of what we need to do downtown around the South River, there are certainly remedies that go along with our companion pieces to development, and we can achieve those things. It’s going to take strong political will. It’s going to take this community getting behind conceptually ideas that we need to address. And it’s going to take a lot of all these pieces coming together. Can we do it? Absolutely we can do it. But it is going to be a communitywide undertaking, where we’re going to have to rely on the very strong leadership of our city council, and we’re going to have to rely heavily on public-private partnerships. But flooding can be addressed.”

Story by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net

Apples had once grown there by the bushel, but by the time John Higgs had settled back onto the family farm in Barren Ridge, it had been overgrown for years. Not that it mattered to Higgs one bit that he had several years of work out ahead of him to turn the old apple orchard into a vineyard.

“Being from a fruit-growing family, apples and grapes are not that dissimilar. You do the same things. It was in my blood,” said Higgs, who moved his wife, Shelby, to the family farm just a short crow’s flight from the world-famous Andre Viette Nursery to make a go at the wine business.

And by all accounts, the effort is paying off. Last month, Higgs’ Barren Ridge Vineyards won a gold medal at the Virginia State Fair Wine Competition for its 2007 Viognier. Not bad for a startup in an industry in Virginia dominated by winemakers who date back to the days of the Old Dominion’s first famous vintner, a fellow by the name of Jefferson.

“The Valley really hasn’t established itself as a wine region yet, but I think we will,” Higgs told me after a tour of his vineyard, which has six acres with grapes on the vine already and another four acres that are slated for growing beginning next year.

“We have a better climate. I’m at 1,400 feet. That’s at least 500 feet higher than on the other side of the mountain. It tends to make for cooler days, cooler nights. It tends to make the grapes better. We have good limestone and shale soils. To me, we should be able to produce world-class wines,” Higgs said.

“Hey, it’s either that those 72 on the other side of the mountain are idiots, or that they have something figured out, and there’s no sense for the mountains to serve as a barrier,” Higgs said.

Just up the road a piece from Barren Ridge in the heart of Augusta County is another up-and-comer in the nascent Shenandoah Valley wine industry, Cross Keys Vineyards in Rockingham County. Like Barren Ridge, the vineyard at Cross Keys opened to the public in the spring, though Cross Keys Vineyards has a little bit of history on its sister vineyards in Augusta County. Owners Bob and Nikoo Bakhtiar planted the first grape vines at Cross Keys in 2002 and marked their first local harvest in 2005. Cross Keys produced its inaugural homegrown wine in 2006 and now has 25 acres under vine, with plans to grow to 40 acres in the next couple of years.

“Slow and steady,” said vineyards manager Mark Parsons of the growth plans at Cross Keys, which produced 1,500 cases of wine last year and is on track to produce 3,700 cases this year.

The focus at this point in the development of the business is on “selling experience,” Parsons told me on a recent visit to Cross Keys Vineyards. “When people come in for a tasting, I want them to learn about the culture. I want them to learn how we do what we do. I want them to be able to experience everything there is to our wines.”

The wine experience is a key driver to the $300 million-a-year wine industry in Virginia. Believe it or not, Virginia was named last year as one of the top five new wine travel destinations in the world by Travel and Leisure magazine, joining Italy, Spain, Chile and New Zealand. Which you have to consider impressive when you think about how the entire industry was comprised of a handful of vineyards and all of six wineries as recently as 30 years ago.

The growth in Virginia is more impressive when you factor in that the wine business isn’t exactly among the easier businesses to get into. It can cost as much as $17,000 an acre to establish a vineyard, according to Tony Wolf, the state viticulturist at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.

“Ninety-nine percent of the people who approach me have an interest in wine, and the interest in grape-growing, I would say, is a natural horticultural extension of the interest in wine,” Wolf said. Most who express an interest in getting in the business, like Higgs, own property that they think might be suitable for the development of a vineyard, Wolf said. Not everybody starts out wanting to own a winery, “though it’s probably something that’s in the back of the mind of most people who take the first step with the vineyard,” Wolf said. “And once they start exploring the numbers, the costs and the returns, most people realize that for a small vineyard, one can make more money selling wine than you can ever make selling grapes, just due to the value-added nature of wine,” Wolf said.

Wolf tells those who approach him about starting a vineyard that they need to look at having at least 10 acres in production to count on being able to turn a consistent profit. And he also counsels patience - because the wine business is not something that one is going to be able to see immediate profit from.

“A lot of people get into it for the romance of it. We got into because my wife was a teacher, and I was in the Navy, had been in it 27 years, and we spent a lot of time apart. We got into it because we liked drinking wine, and we wanted to do something where we’d end up spending a lot of time together as opposed to apart,” said Rock Stephens, an Eastern Shore vineyard owner who is the president of the Virginia Vineyards Association.

“We got exactly what we wanted. We spent a lot of time looking at the monetary aspect of it and how much time it would take to make money, we never realized it would take three times the amount of time that we thought it would,” Stephens said.

Higgs, whose Valley winery produced 1,000 cases of wine last fall, and now has an award to tell the world about to boot, is already seeing something of a return on his investment, though he’s careful not to want to rush things for the sake of short-term gain that could put the long-term viability of the operation at question.

“I don’t want to get much bigger than maybe 5,000 cases a year. You can sacrifice quality for quantity, and I don’t want us to do that,” Higgs said.

It’s quality that will draw wine fans to our new Valley vineyards, after all.

“I think our wines, and I know I’m prejudiced, now, but our wines are superior to a lot of the warm-weather wines that tend to be overalcoholic and oversweet and just not as interesting. I think we’re making some good wines in the Valley, and some interesting wines,” Higgs said.

“I’m a wine snob, so I’m hard to please. But our wines here are good. And I think people will agree,” Parsons said.

New Dominion Magazine editor Chris Graham presents “Vineyards in the Valley” - a webcast featuring interviews with Barren Ridge Vineyards owner John Higgs and Cross Keys Vineyards general manager Mark Parsons.

Show Length: 9:05

Story by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net

Jerry Carter had this wild idea.

If you know Jerry Carter, you know I need to be a lot more specific than that.

“So Dad says, Hey, you guys want to go down to Covington? And we’re thinking, Where the heck is Covington?” said his older daughter, Sabrina.

“And then three hours later, We’re driving down to Covington,” her sister, Rebecca, chimed in.

“We went there, we get a hat. This guy sold him his hat off his head. Dad wanted a hat, so the guy sells Dad a hat,” Sabrina said.

“Dad’s been doing this his whole life. I’ve got to go to every ACC basketball arena. I’ve got to go to every Major League baseball stadium. I’m going to take (older brother) Chris to every stadium in the Northwest League,” Sabrina said.

“So when we heard it, we’re like, Yeah, we’re in,” Rebecca said.

And when Rebecca Carter said We’re in, she meant for the long haul. Rebecca, a rising second-year student at the University of Virginia, and Jerry, a Luray-based delivery-company owner, went to a baseball game in 11 different Valley League parks in 11 nights to start the 2008 summer season, and that was just to get things moving. The Carters are calling their summer adventure Around the Valley in 60 Days, and they’re inviting fans to take their lead and see as much good amateur baseball as they can before the curtain is closed on the ‘08 campaign.

“Last night I got asked at least a half-dozen times, What are you trying to accomplish?” Jerry Carter told me on opening night in Waynesboro last month.

He had also been at opening night in Harrisonburg the night before, and had seen 14 Turks fans who had been on hand for that one join him the next night in the River City.

“I said, The teams work really hard to promote themselves. But nobody is promoting the league. We need people to talk about what we’re talking about. That’s the one thing that I’m trying to do,” said Carter, who maintains a blog (aroundthevalleyin60days.blogspot.com) to chronicle his adventures up and down the Valley League.

No, check that - the blog is there to celebrate Valley League baseball in general and the people who make it possible in particular.

“This was supposed to be a night off. These people were looking forward to a night off. They worked eight hours, maybe 10, and what are they going to do tonight? They’re going to make sure that you and I have a good time,” Carter said to me at our second Around the Valley get-together, at a Harrisonburg-Staunton game at John Moxie Memorial Stadium in the Queen City on Night #10 of 11 of his season-opening run.

“Those are my heroes. Those are my all-stars. If I could have my own all-star team, when the kids go to Covington, all the volunteers would be there with them,” Carter said. “If they’re making $40,000, you’re saying, Hey, that’s part of the job. But they went to church that morning, that got up, they go out there, they run the grill, they do whatever. That’s the story that I’m trying to tell.”

So it’s not really about getting fans to go to all 11 Valley League parks. Carter has been realistic about that from the get-go.

“The biggest question we’ve been faced with the whole time is, What will you consider a success? I said, Everybody’s going to judge this differently. I’m going to judge this by, How many people have a card, and it’s half-full. Because that’s who I’m after,” Carter said. “The people who are hard-core fans, they’re already going to all the parks. They’re already doing this. I’m just giving them a chance to be celebrated for it. I’m going after the fan who might only go to one game or two games. If I can get them to go to six, then I’ve accomplished something.”

Carter pitched the idea for the promotion to the league last year after that fateful trip with his daughters to Covington. He admits that it was a much better idea when gas was still in the area of $2.25 a gallon than it is now with gas at the $4-a-gallon mark.

“I can’t ask people to drive to Covington or Haymarket with gas at $4 a gallon. But that was never the intent anyway,” Carter said.

Team owners, by and large, understand well the intent behind what Carter is trying to do.

“I think Jerry has undertaken a project that is going to be beneficial in the long run for our league. And he’s doing it at his own expense. He’s not getting a dime for it,” Staunton Braves co-owner Boyd Snyder said.

“Some people said, Where’s the angle? There’s got to be an angle somewhere,” Waynesboro Generals owner Jim Critzer said. “I don’t think there is an angle. He just loves the game, and he loves the Valley League. He’s doing this to support the league as a whole.

“Each team, whether they have a winning record this year or not, should be a winner because of Around the Valley in 60 Days,” Critzer said.

“The promotion has been wonderful to the league. The exposure that it’s gotten through you, through Mike Shickman (at WSVA), this has been a real shot in the arm,” Harrisonburg Turks co-owner Teresa Wease said.

“I think it’s great for the league because it will reach people who maybe go to one or two places, and now maybe some will go to more of them, maybe all of them. And they’ll see how diversified the league is in terms of fields and communities and the way they play and everything,” Valley League commissioner Dave Biery said.

“It will add some league fans, where there are just team fans now. There will be league fans, and that will help us in promoting the league. I think it will help all the teams in the league,” Biery said.

And if it’s helping Carter add another notch on his adventure belt, hey, everybody’s a winner.

“It’s been three times the fun that I thought it would be. We knew going in that it would be an adventure. Working the hours that we work, it’s a little bit tougher. But we’ve been everywhere,” Carter said.

“I never could have imagined the people that we’ve met along the way. It’s a situation where we’ve met somebody at every park. The owners have been great every place that we’ve went. The fans have been great. I couldn’t have asked for anything more,” Carter said.

Story by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net

If you’re familiar with the name John Leonard, then you’re really in the Valley League Know.

Leonard, 38, is All Things Valley League, literally. The Eastern Mennonite High School English and journalism teacher by trade turns into a daily sports blogger in the late spring and summer at allthingsvalleyleague.typepad.com - with reports on the hitters and pitchers of the day, updates on how former Valley League stars are doing in the minors and the bigs, feature stories on players and coaches and game reports and diaries from the press box.

It’s a labor of love for Leonard, who isn’t paid for his work and doesn’t even accept advertising on his website. “I just really enjoy player development,” said Leonard, a 1993 Eastern Mennonite University grad who played baseball and basketball in college.

Here’s how much he enjoys the development end of things - he has his own JUGS gun that he takes with him to the park to add the element of how hard pitchers are throwing to his game reports.

The site is geared more toward baseball geeks like me than the average fan. Influenced by the Moneyball theories of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane and Boston Red Sox GM Theo Epstein, Leonard reports the offensive statistics of everyday players with a standard line giving their batting average, on-base percentage and on-base percentage plus slugging.

“You have to think that way. That’s where baseball is,” Leonard said.

The hardcore fans seem to appreciate it, as do a growing number of league insiders, including media-relations director Kevin Warner, who made sure that Leonard is among those who receive All-Valley ballots, and Harrisonburg Turks co-owner Bob Wease, who said he reads All Things Valley League “every other day.”
“Ninety-nine percent of what I hear back is very positive. Fans appreciate what I’m doing. And parents like being able to go to one place and see how their son might be doing,” Leonard said.

Column by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net

It was the toughest thing that I’ve ever had to do.

I turned the corner from the living room to the deck attached to the back of the house of my friends and campaign supporters Mary McDermott and Bill Jongeward on Election Night, and all I could think was, This is the end of the world. About 100 people who had volunteered on my city-council campaign in one capacity or the other had gathered for what was supposed to be my victory celebration, and we thought it was all but a foregone conclusion. Even ardent supporters of my chief opponent had been telling me in the days leading up to Election Day that they were thinking that I was a shoo-in, and the response at the polls all Tuesday long was, I had thought, anyway, overwhelmingly positive.

Which made our stinging defeat that much harder to bear. We were beaten by a two-to-one margin. Thumped. Taken out behind the woodshed. It wasn’t even close.

So when I walked out onto the deck to what sounded like wild applause, it was all I could do to keep myself from breaking down in front of everybody. Because as far as I was concerned, I hadn’t earned that applause. Obviously I had done something wrong to have run what everybody said had been “the perfect campaign” only to lose and lose big time.

I did what came naturally. I fell on my sword.

“I’m sorry. I feel like I’ve let everybody down,” I said, holding my head as high as I could.

***

I soon realized - OK, it wasn’t soon; unless soon is a few weeks - that it wasn’t the end of the world. I’d lost an election. So what? Like I’m the only person to ever lose an election. Right?

That’s when I got this crazy idea. I’d talk with some people that I know who’d also lost elections, and ask them how they got through it. People like Mark Warner, who lost his first race back in 1996 when he ran for the U.S. Senate against John Warner, and refers to his loss to the other Warner in ‘96 as “the race where I got my silver medal.” Creigh Deeds got his silver medal in 2005 with his so-close-they-had-to-do-a-recount loss in his run for attorney general against Bob McDonnell. In the end, Deeds was 323 votes short out of about 2 million votes cast statewide.

“Some people said, Would it have been easier to lose by 40,000 votes? I don’t think so. I’m proud of every daggone vote I got,” said Deeds, a Bath County state senator who is running for the 2009 Democratic Party gubernatorial nomination.

That didn’t make it any easier to swallow the taste of defeat for Deeds. “It’s kind of like you’re a kid on the playground, and the bully picks on you, and hits you in the stomach, and you fall down. You’re hurting physically, your feelings are hurt, you’re embarrassed, because everybody on the playground, including the pretty little girl, saw you get hit and fall down, your diaphragm stops working, you can’t breathe, and you have two choices. And one of them is not a choice. One of them is to die - to lie on the ground and pretend the world has gone away. And of course it doesn’t go away. The other is to pick yourself up, straighten yourself out, and walk on, and get stronger, and get smarter,” Deeds said.

For Tracy Pyles, a longtime member of the Augusta County Board of Supervisors, who lost to Chris Saxman in his bid in 2001 to win the 20th District seat in the House of Delegates, the hardest part to falling short was “feeling like I’d let everybody down.”

“A lot of people worked very hard for me. And asking people to work was one thing. It’s tough for me asking people to work just to begin with. I don’t think people ought to waste time helping me out, but I couldn’t do it on my own. So asking people to work, and then putting in hours and trying for me and taking it to heart, and letting them down - that was the worst part,” Pyles said.

Staunton City Council member Bruce Elder, who also lost to Saxman, in 2005, in the 20th House District, had similar feelings - but Elder, echoing Pyles, echoing Deeds, echoing my own thoughts, said he wouldn’t trade the experience from that campaign for anything in the world.

“Running for election put me in touch with so many places and so many wonderful people that it was a terrific experience for me. I really enjoyed it,” Elder said. “As much hard work as it was, I enjoyed the experience of talking to people about any number of different subjects that sometimes I had never given any consideration to. I’ve always had a passion for history, and I learned a lot of local history in traveling around and talking to folks and visiting farms and small towns and so forth and meeting with people in their work environment.

“It gave me a new appreciation of the Valley we live in. It also gave me an appreciation of some of the challenges that we face together.”

Elder must have gotten something positive from ‘05. He ran for city council the next spring, against the advice of at least one fellow local pol. “I sat down with (former city councilman) Dick Robinson, and he asked me that very question. He said, Are you ready to put yourself through that again? And I told him, Sometimes you learn a heckuva lot more losing than you do winning. There are folks out there who have never lost, and having not lost, they haven’t had that humbling experience that comes with that, and that learning experience that comes with losing,” Elder said.

Deeds, too, obviously, since he’s running for governor, wasn’t scared off from running for statewide office again in ‘09 by what happened in ‘05.

“There were seeds in this campaign in that defeat,” Deeds said. “I still have some embers in the ash of that campaign that I was able to blow on and rekindle into a fire. But frankly the real seeds of this campaign were there before 2005. That was just a speed bump for me. That 2005 campaign was just a speed bump.”

***

It was something else that Deeds had to say about the subject that will stick with me forever.

“Losing an election is not the end of the world. It’s certainly not the worst thing that’s ever happened in my life. There’s lots of people in this world who have to go through things a whole lot worse than that. If losing an election is the worst thing that I have to go through in my life, I’ll have been lucky. And I can tell you right now, it’s not the worst thing,” Deeds said.

He definitely has that right. The sun came up in Waynesboro for me the next morning, and the next, and the next. I’ve gotten back in the routine of running a small business and balancing that with the hundred other things that keep me occupied on a daily basis. I’ve even added to them with my new role as chair of the Waynesboro Democratic Committee.

I went that route because, like Creigh Deeds, like Mark Warner, like Tracy Pyles, like Bruce Elder, I’m in this for the long haul.

Being a writer, an analogy popped into my head not long after my loss that will eternally define where I stand on this. The analogy involves bungee jumping, which I’ve never done. But I can imagine that the rush that comes from bungee jumping is in large part fueled by the fear of what might happen if something goes wrong. I mean, if the thing was 100 percent foolproof, and there was absolutely no chance that something could go wrong, it would be a pointless exercise, wouldn’t it?
Well, I’ve never jumped off a bridge with a bungee cord attached to my feet; but I now know exactly what it feels like. And I ain’t scared of it anymore.

Story by Elizabeth Geris

After the game of pacing between the folding tables and washing machines at the local laundromat finally reached its amusement threshold, I spotted a magazine table boasting a relatively recent Newsweek. Within minutes I was knee-deep in a story about Family Tree DNA, a Houston, Texas,-based company that will mail customers cheek swab kits, and in return for their DNA scrapings, will scientifically identify their ethnicity, mail them personalized certificates assuring the reliability of the results, and offer regularly updated, password-protected web pages devoted to the customers’ genetic info, all within a matter of a few weeks.

Generally speaking, there are two basic tests. One tests the Y-chromosome on male customers only, shedding light on their male paternal ancestors; and another option tests the mitochondrial DNA of both male and female customers, providing clues to the origin of their maternal-side women relatives. More specific tests and refinements are also available virtually at any time desired, as all genetic material is housed solely for the customers’ personal use for a period of 25 years.

Now, maybe to some of you, merely asking Grandma for stories of the old country or even looking in the mirror is enough to answer your ethnic heritage questions; that is, if you have any to begin with. To me, however, it’s not that easy. By the time I started to wonder about my ancestry, all four of my grandparents had passed on, and only one left behind even a photograph. Studying my own features in the mirror only offered a few hints about my general, catchall European origin, and even my last name hasn’t shed much light on my cultural past; after all, can you say that you have ever met a “Geris?” Better yet, can you pronounce “Geris?” Neither can the majority of others, although several friends and passing acquaintances have offered some merciful guesses to both questions. As the months passed on following my remarkable visit to an ordinary laundromat, the option of handing over the burden of my ethnic mystery to a bunch of geneticists in Texas became an unlikely source of exhilaration.

Although I have since discovered a portion of my cultural history though general test findings, some questions present themselves as I await the results of sharper refinements presently on order: Why can’t I, and thousands of other European-American Family Tree DNA customers, as well as traditional genealogists, be satisfied with identifying ethnically with our birth country? Why must we refer to ourselves as hyphenated Americans, instead of just, well, Americans?

“We all came from somewhere and this is inescapable once you start interviewing your relatives … who often still speak in an accented version of English,” said Bennett Greenspan via e-mail, president and CEO of Family Tree DNA. Not to come as a surprise, Greenspan further illuminated that “this is universally loved, but because genealogy is a Western sport, we have a huge customer base of English, Irish, and Scottish folks, and we have a very extensive client base of Eastern European Jews as well.”

Staunton resident Janie Sherman’s personal motivation to map the family tree struck more as a smart slap than a long, nagging hunger. “It was after I was 40. You’re raising your kids, you’re working on your career, and you’re so busy at that time, and then suddenly you think, Oh, where did I really come from?” said the German-, Irish-, and English-American Sherman. With a rather ironic starting point, Sherman’s genealogic research got some legs, so to speak. “The mailman was my favorite person, because I would send off for a death certificate; death certificates are my favorite documents, because they have so much information,” Sherman said. A former English major with a teaching degree, Sherman, who is recently published and holding 15 years of experience as certified genealogist under her belt, guides other family historians across the globe when she’s not hunting the few stray missing pieces to her own historical puzzle. Sherman also helps locals who want to be more ethnically self-informed. Her annual four-week genealogical workshop held at the Staunton Public Library is coming up again in July.

“One thing that I advise also in my class is … to contact the oldest person in their family and call them and start asking questions about genealogy, and I don’t mean just about dates, I mean about stories, because that is the most interesting part about genealogy,” Sherman said. I began to hope that my mother’s ability to remember some family history had improved, owing to recent discoveries shared with her by her aunt. After all, there was my maternal great-grandmother Lucinda, whose dirty blond chignon, round eyes, and slight sweet smile had been preserved in a black and white 8-inch-by-10-inch photo on a dresser in my mother’s home for years. So, after explaining to my mom that Family Tree DNA placed Lucinda’s origins back to Central Europe instead of Ireland like we all thought, the response Mom had to the news surprised us both: She suddenly remembered some ancestors who owned a pen factory in Germany.

Perhaps now, I can place the responsibility of my blond hair on my mother’s side, but my blue eyes came from my father, whose wacky genetic markers are still being investigated by the unlucky geneticists in Texas on whom I have inflicted this task. However, I have discovered that it’s not my physical traits that particularly intrigue me, nor is it even the possibility of discovering a long-ago war-hero ancestor – what I am really looking for in a hyphenated title is a sense of ethnic community and belonging that I apparently have not tapped into with the other hyphenated title as plain-old American. Although I can now look back and smile on all the Christmas dinners in my childhood that always included sauerkraut salad and German chocolate cake, the jury is still out on the Gerises. Moreover, when I hear my husband’s siblings jovially rib one another about the assumed personality quirks associated with their Italian-Polish ancestry, I wince in envy at my lack of such a complete family history. I long for the day when I can officially identify with and laugh at all of my own ethnic peculiarities, and with what is shaping up to be quite a varied cultural identity running through my genes, just think of the wealth of idiosyncrasies I can start blaming on four whole countries!

Nevertheless, sometimes DNA tests such as the one I have under further investigation at the lab can yield a response of “unknown origin.” The possibility that my cultural heritage may only show a partial picture is an inevitability that I must acknowledge, but is that really so bad? I started to think that maybe I should take a cue from Sherman, whose own personal genealogic journey sparked more interest in the role her ancestors filled in the founding of America, rather than in the nationality that those same ancestors changed in favor of calling themselves simply Americans. “I was really just so interested in American … you know the founders of America, my ancestors who were there at the time of the founding of our country.”

I started to notice that my tendency to look back on the ancestors from the mother countries stopped short of looking forward to their arrival on the shores of the United States. Why the hesitance? After all, I do live in an altogether different country that, although relatively young, arguably has many personality traits and icons (good and bad) deemed uniquely American, and I do happen to love the beautiful landscape, varying seasons, cuisine, and abundance of Southern friendliness found in Virginia – my home state residing in my home country of, you guessed it, America. More so, perhaps a person’s genealogic journey can also double as a good opportunity to form a holistic identity – not just the, say, German, but also the identity of an American, a Virginian, a night owl, a worrywart, a Gen-X’er, and whatever else a person wants to call herself. In all fairness, there is a sense of community found in any group we can think of; as long as we embrace and own these titles we can be sure there is at least one other person out there who can relate. Two can be a great start to a community, or even an army, as far as I’m concerned.