About

I fold my hands to this site that I sense that I am, asking,
“What is this burning in my eyes?”

-Fugazi

It’s all now you see.
Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow
and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.

-Faulkner

The Project:

2020 was a rough year for me. Maybe you can relate. I took up running to bleed some of the cortisol off my brain before it ate my hippocampus. With good conditioning and a preternatural recollection for the woodland paths I used to ride on my bike as a kid, I laced together a route from Fox Mill Road to Ox Hill and back across Difficult Run, Waples Mill Road, and Vale.

Familiar places gain strange and new contexts when you ditch your car and run through them instead. Neighborhoods fit together in ways you didn’t understand before. Creeks become useful cut throughs and friendly thoroughfares when you’re on foot and out of breath. What felt like a labyrinth for most of my childhood began to feel more intuitive.

At the same time and probably not coincidentally, I began to harbor questions without easy answers. What were those big ditches looming in the creek bottom along Fox Mill Road? Where did that abandoned road cut once lead? Who were the people buried in the Vale Methodist Cemetery? How could it be that John Mosby was everywhere else in Fairfax County, but not here?

The heft of the unanswered eventually outweighed what historical information I was able to beg, borrow, and steal from books and neighbors.

The Name:

Old Bad Road was the ad hoc place name bestowed upon a section of trail cut in 1845 to unite Hunter Mill Road in Oakton, Virginia, with West Ox Road in Fairfax, Virginia. Known today as Vale Road, the Army of the Potomac issued maps identifying the route as “Old Bad Road” beginning with the McDowell map of 1862.

I spent a chunk of my childhood living adjacent to the once and former Old Bad Road. Here, place-specific knowledge related to the Civil War is rare. “Old Bad Road” simultaneously harkens back to earlier iterations of a popular modern thoroughfare that still utilizes its historic trace and hints at the culture of obscurity, misdirection, and poor maintenance that veils important Civil War narratives in Northern Virginia.

Thanks:

Chris Barbuschak at the Virginia Room of the Fairfax County Library. Samantha Brice, Georgia Brown and Heather Bollinger at the Fairfax Court House Historic Records Center. Chip Galloway at Fairfax County GIS and Mapping Services. Aimee D. Wells at the Fairfax County Park Authority’s Office for Archaeology and Collections. Stephen Golobic at Colvin Run Mill. Quattro Hubbard and Jason Kramer at the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Robert F. O’Neill, Trish Strat, Don Hakenson, and Ed Wenzel–local historians of immense talent and dedication whose shoulders I am too accustomed to standing on. Jennifer Goetz, Jason Hampel, Sarah Waple, Jonathan Waple, and Carol Waple. Charlie Grymes at Virginia Places for his tireless dedication to our shared heritage in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Debbie Robison, Gibran Parvez, Ron Baumgarten, Michael F. Johnson, William Page Johnson, II., Greg Weaver, and Jim Lewis, whose work continues to inspire and dedicate. William F. Deverell at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West and Sam Sweet at the All Night Menu.

Soundtrack:

I have exhausted my ability to consider the Civil War in the context of Randy Edelman’s Gettysburg soundtrack, fife and drum music, or anything by The Band. In the same way Shelby Foote kept a photo of Robert Johnson on his desk, I’m looking for different ways to listen. See below.

The Author:

I was born in the woods south of Gooding’s Tavern on what was once the Ravensworth Plantation. In 1993, we moved to a neighborhood named after a Confederate general sited along a highway named after two other Confederate generals on what was once the old Ashton land grant.

The house sat on the fringe of a massive development on approximately the same phase line Fitz Lee and the 5th Virginia Cavalry occupied in the early evening of September 1, 1862. During the fall and winter, we would routinely hear gunshots from Old Man Hunter–a grizzled long-time resident of the Difficult Run neighborhood who enjoyed grandfathered hunting privileges. Suburbia disgusted him to a point that he would relish field dressing his kills on the clothesline next to Waples Mill Road. I remember the year he left the severed rear hoof hanging for weeks.

We eventually moved into the Vale District of Carter’s old Piney Ridge Tract, where we lived while I attended middle school on the once and former Daniel Janney holdings in Chantilly and graduated from the high school located on Charles Sutton’s old farm.

I hope that’s cryptic enough.

My Work:

As an award winning writer/researcher, my work has appeared in the LA Times, SF Chronicle, Deadspin, Salon, LA Weekly, and more.

I created the SKID ROW READER, an experimental textbook for homeless adult literacy education featuring work from Michael Lesy, Patricia Nelson-Limerick, David Shields, Randy Blythe, Liz Goldwyn, Erik Davis, Daniel Levitin, Sam Sweet, Larry Harnisch and more.

Once a known specialist in Los Angeles history, Virginia has always captured some measure of my attention and my creative energies. Here’s some of the fun:

Other Ways to Squander Time: