What did it mean to be from the Upper Difficult Run Basin?
What does it mean to be from any place? What nurture effects can a space exert on a person’s identity and how do we chart this spiritual terroir?
A PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY PRIMER
We find ourselves in the realm of “psychogeography,” a term largely credited to Guy Debord who offered the neologism as “a study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” Not content to frame his idea with such exacting and scientific trim, Debord immediately hedged his description by offering that psychogeography was subject to “a rather pleasing vagueness.”1
So it is that “psychogeography” is both a concept rich in possibilities and steeped in ambiguity. Many have attempted to fill the paradoxical fold between these two truths. No one has succeed as efficiently as geographers who slotted in behind the broad-stroked whimsy of the Situationalists to offer more concrete descriptions of the links between mind and place.
“Space is socially produced,” offers landscape theorist Christopher Tilley. His work fleshes out the idea that places are interfaces where people and the places they occupy conspire to create identity.
He goes on, “A centre and meaningful space involves specific sets of linkages between the physical space of the non-humanly created world, somatic states of the body, the mental space of cognition and representation and the space of movement, encounter and interaction between persons and between persons and the human and non-human environment.”
In short, Tilley offers, “What space is depends on who is experiencing it and how.”2
Anne Whiston Spirn, a scholar of space, axes, and self, hones in on culture as a framework for containing this productive “experiencing.” In the viral mores, codes, and customs that define self, Spirn excavates an essential link to the places in which these practices prevail.
“Culture is a fabric, the deep context of the natural landscape, the warp against which the weft of human intervention and elaboration weaves a pattern,” says Spirn.
“Landscape context is complex and dynamic, woven of many strands, in multiple dimensions. In landscape, speaking in context demands more than using local materials and imitating forms common to the regional landscape. To speak in context is to distinguish deep and lasting contexts from those that are superficial and fleeting; it is to respond to the rhythms and histories of each and to project those contexts into the future. To guide such contextual expression is the function of the grammar of landscape.”3
Beyond the threshold of Spirn’s cultural context creation, ideas and abstractions become things and actions in a world that archaeologist and place-specialist James Deetz chronicled with his epic In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life.
“Culture is socially transmitted rules for behavior, ways of thinking about and doing things,” Deetz begins with a touch of familiarity. “We inherit our culture from the teachings and examples of our elders and our peers rather than from genes, whether it is the language we speak, the religious beliefs that we subscribe to, or the laws that govern our society. All such behavior is reflected and in subtle and important ways in the manner in which we shape our physical world. Material culture is usually considered to be roughly synonymous with artifacts, the vast universe of objects used by humankind to cope with the physical world. To facilitate social intercourse, and to benefit our state of mind. A somewhat broader definition of material culture is useful in emphasizing how profoundly our world is the product of our thoughts, as that sector of our physical environment that we modify through culturally determined behavior.”4
Deetz’s skilful utilization of the coping concept delaminates the relationship between culture and landform from utopian delusions of a nurturing Gaia producing happy humans. Maybe psychogeography is more a catalog of horrors than a museum of achievements. Either way, mentality and materiality seem to anchor a two-way conduit of formation.
Annie Dillard, whose non-fiction magnum opus Pilgrim at Tinker Creek netted her a Pulitzer Prize for its hyper-local depiction of the topography where humans meet their environment in rural southwest Virginia, would seem to agree with Deetz. Culture writ large on a landscape rich in learned experience is perhaps an elaborate defense mechanism for the things we have endured thanks to the places we occupy.
She has this to say on the topic, “I have to look at the landscape of the blue-green world again. Just think: in all the clean beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death. I have to acknowledge that the sea is a cup of death and the land is a stained altar stone. We the living are survivors huddled on flotsam, living on jetsam. We are escapees. We wake in terror, eat in hunger, sleep with a mouthful of blood.”5
The stained altar stone and the mouthful of blood evoke a psychogeography cast around trauma first and foremost. These lush laments translate across disciplines. Utilizing the more stoic verbiage of the academic geography, Doreen Massey suggests a similar paradigm in a concept of places steeped in processes of “penetrability and vulnerability.”
“What gives a place its specificity is not some long-internalized history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of relations, articulated together at a particular locus. If one moves in from the satellite toward the globe, holding all those networks of social relations and movements and communications in one’s head, then each place can be seen as a particular, unique point of their intersection. The uniqueness of a place, or a locality, in other words is constructed out of particular interactions and mutual articulations of social relations, social processes, experiences and understandings, in a situation of co-presence, but where a large proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are actually constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself, whether that be a street, a region, or even a continent. Instead then, of thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they can be imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relationships and understandings. And this in turn allows a sense of place which is extraverted, which includes a consciousness of its links with the wider world, which integrates in a positive way the global and the local.”6
Translation: the battlefield upon which the struggle for existence and the hard-won medals of culture and identity are won and lost is at once hyper-local and staggeringly broad. This suggests that any psychogeographical study of how one came to see themselves as a product of their landscape must be conducted with the rigor and methodology of a forensic survey of a massive crime scene. There is a springing forth of inductive ideas and customs from the ground beneath our feet and a hail of ballistic influences fired into the landscape from beyond.
To borrow from Tilley, “the experience of space is always shot through with temporalities, as spaces are always created, reproduced and transformed in relation to previously constructed spaces provided and established from the past. Spaces are intimately related to the formation of biographies and social relationships?”7
Yes, but whose biographies and whose relationships? From where and when?
There’s a truism here. One as applicable in the local scale of the Upper Difficult Run Basin as the continent at large. Supposedly simple landscapes—be they geographical or psychological—are not so simple.
BOTTOM LINE: IT’S COMPLEX
Places are complex adaptive systems—dynamics that self-organize around local conditions—achieving a temporary equilibrium only be to be punctuated by bouts of sheer chaos. Bolts emerge from the blue. Whether they’re viral ideas or tangible technologies, these invaders infiltrate and collide existing systems and new places are built from the wreckage of these collisions.
Something fresh emerges. Something most typically human. Adaptive machines capable of thought and deed are empowered to alter their physical world and be altered in turn. These survivors carry innate knowledge and walk, as Emerson said, “as prophecies of the coming age.”
Psychogeography is tricky, because the coping mechanisms with which people narrativize and execute their survival strategies—their behaviors, their identities, their aspirations, and their fears—are never uniform. No two people respond exactly the same way to phenomenon or place. Instead, the fleshy mediation machines caught in a material world that holds inordinate sway over their lives make their way through the world in a spiritual biography that doubles as a spatial codex.
Asking what it means to be from a place is better phrased with still more questions. What forces act upon us? What foundations are available to ground and shelter us? What existing strategies for endurance are at our disposal and what new paths can we adopt to adapt.
To achieve the best marriage of Debord’s “precise laws and specific effects” while accounting for the pleasing vagueness of ever-so-many externalities, our best strategy for reconstructing the psychogeography of the Upper Difficult Run Basin begins beneath our feet.
A LONG, TUMULTUOUS HISTORY
Millions of years of destructive creation encapsulated in numerous Wilson Cycles of supercontinent formation and fracture are the colossal set pieces that frame the soil of Difficult Run. Igneous and metamorphic traces of catastrophic collisions, rifting, and orogeny knit together at the creek’s headwaters where Northern Piedmont Triassic Lowlands (64a) butt up against Piedmont Carolina Slate Belt (45c).8
The Virginia Site and Soil Evaluation Curriculum emphasizes that the Carolina Slate Belt soils forming the underlayment for the Difficult Run hydrology basin are “somewhat less resistant to erosion…and physiography reflects these differences.”9 However minute these differences in erosion-susceptibility may have been initially, two hundred and fifteen million years of precipitation was enough time to extrapolate and exploit this variable into a prominent depression 57.7 square miles in size.10
Today, the soils along the upper reaches of Difficult Run are predominantly loam of the Codorus, Meadowville, Wheaton and Glenelg varieties. The last of which is known for its high susceptibility to erosion. All are prone to flooding.11
Soupy and irresolute, the soils that hosted the roads in northern and western Fairfax County were some of the worst encountered by soldiers during the Civil War. Pvt. Dick Simpson of the 3rd South Carolina occupied the area around Jermantown in early summer of 1861. On July 1, he described the roads as “muddy and slick” and his campsite as a “mud hole.”12
Simpson was not the first to make this observation. Accounts of early highways in the area are invariably tarnished by their overwhelmingly poor and muddy condition.13 The well-established tradition of dismal roads inspired Federal cartographers to give Old Bad Road its name.
In fact, a preliminary Federal reconnaissance map of the area around modern Oakton made by Major W.R. Palmer in October of 1861 reports that “between Vienna and Flint Hill, the road is hilly, uneven, sunk at places from 6 to 8 feet below the adjoining ground, and badly drained.”14
Beginning in colonial times, Difficult Run was established as something of a local backwater—an inaccessible and poorly known mystery space where rough access to markets made for diminished prospects. Socially and geographically, the sunken area was lower than the rest of the county.
Great plantations like Sully and Chantilly sit just above and beyond the belt of depressed micaceous schist from which the valley was ground. Beginning in the mid-18th century, Difficult Run was settled by people who were middling at best. The area was affordable, because it was ill-suited for agriculture.
Nominally, the sandy loam that lined the flood plains of Difficult Run and its tributaries was perfect for the cultivation of tobacco. The cash crop was literally that—a form of currency in which debts, taxes, and commerce were transacted in the dried leaf. Rich harvests made for rich men.
Tobacco was grown here.15 Tenant farmers in Fairfax County were obligated to build “well framed tobacco barns” and rents on properties like those owned by George Mason stipulated payment of 630 pound of “good marketable tobacco.”16 Unfortunately, tobacco quickly depleted the soil of vital nitrogen and potash. In ideal conditions, an ambitious farmer could expect prime tobacco crimes for three to four years. Then the soil would be sour and unproductive.17
Conditions along Difficult Run accelerated soil exhaustion. High heat and humidity augmented soil nitrification and oxidization so that top soil failed to form in fall to prevent critical nutrient erosion in spring.18 More importantly, the soils most susceptible to devastating erosion were found in freshly deforested areas perched on hillsides subject to mass wasting.19 It is no wonder that the Potomac is estimated to carry four hundred pounds of material away from every acre in its watershed each year.20
A late 18th century lifelease executed by John Adams for one hundred and forty acres on Vale Road west of Hunter Mill is instructive. The initial per annum terms were 1000 pounds of tobacco to be paid to the land owner. In the 1840s, the tobacco requirement was struck in favor of thirty two dollars.21
People in Difficult Run worked hard to clear their hilly, heavily forested land, and their struggle was handsomely rewarded for four years at best. After which, the sunken place in which they had chosen to live eroded still deeper, the finest nutrients were tapped from the soil, and all that was left were diminished prospects and hill-shadowed acreage that made for an uneven growing season.
By the 1840s, large swaths of Fairfax County lay abandoned by settlers whose initial frontier mentality had overworked the land and forced them to emigrate westwards.22 The psychology of this moment was grim. If conditions were such that it was easier to undertake the herculean move to Kentucky rather than salvage one’s farm, the situation must have been dire. In Difficult Run, the pre-existing sense of isolation and second class status would have heightened as the land emptied out, crops floundered, and property values plummeted.
The social landscape was exacerbated by the ambient murkiness of the place. Atmospheric conditions along Difficult Run have not changed substantially since pre-history. The area is still to this day prone to dense inversion layers. The forested creek bottoms hold thick fog that follows passing storms or dwells inexplicably for a day at a time while the higher ground on the plateaus near Fairfax and Chantilly remains clear. It is no wonder that few meaningful thoroughfares were cut through the Difficult Run bottoms. Abundant thickets, heavy oaks, and dense air still give the place a feeling reminiscent of a Washington Irving story.
Here spookiness and social standing colluded. Site selection was something of an obsession with Virginia gentry. Locating one’s plantation was a complicated and agonizing process, by which the wealthy were forced to balance certain prerogatives of class and practicality.
As attested to in George William Bagby’s satirical story “The Old Virginia Gentleman,” a true patrician of the Old Dominion would set his manor home a good distance from the main road. An elegant lane lined with woods separated the road—where tramps and commoners were frequent travelers—from a lavish home placed amidst trees.23
Certain compromises were made. The home would necessarily be high-sited to afford a cooling breeze on the veranda and through the windows. So too, the treachery of the road would be kept at a not-too-distant distance. Otherwise, the master of the home could not easily travel to the court house, state capitol, or the all-important commercial hub where his financial interests dovetailed into his social status.
Residents of the Difficult Run basin were not so burdened by these particular psychogeographic negotiations. No one who lived in the watershed had the luxury of these mental gymnastics. Instead, they were subject to site selection decisions made by their well-to-neighbors atop the hills that looked down—literally and figuratively—into dark and misty forests.
This want of agency expressed itself spatially. First and foremost in 1757 when Loudoun County was carved out of Fairfax County. At this initial partition, Difficult Run marked the boundary between the two counties. Until 1797 when the boundary was adjusted to its current limits near today’s Dulles Airport, everyone east of the creek in the valley beat a path to Alexandria and eventually Fairfax Court House to attend to business. Those west of Difficult Run tacked northwest to far off Leesburg.24
These minute distinctions long outlasted the temporary legal boundary. At the time of the Civil War, people of the Difficult Run Valley who lived on the western bank were said to reside in “Dranesville,” while those on the eastern bank were listed as residents of Fairfax.
It was a multipolar existence. One negotiated, built, and administered by wealthy and prominent citizens who envisioned Difficult Run as an insignificant place. Never a destination, always a hindrance, the watershed was traversed at points by major roads out of geographic necessity, not social obligation.
Beginning in 1795, Richard Bland Lee organized and promoted the company that would eventually build and fund the Little River Turnpike connecting Alexandria with the grain belt of Aldie by a route that crossed Difficult Run near today’s Fair Oaks Mall and not coincidentally passed directly in front of Lee’s home at Sully Plantation. The road opened in 1806.25
In 1814 and 1815, a similar company financed the Warrenton Pike connecting lush wheat-producing districts in Fauquier County with Fairfax via Centreville on a trajectory that passed just above the highest headwaters of Difficult Run.26
The Middle Turnpike uniting Leesburg with the grain port of Alexandria began construction in 1818 and opened completely in 1838. Bridging Difficult Run two and a half miles below Hunter’s Mill, the road was another avenue through, not to, the basin.27
Difficult Run was a place “shot through” with the physical trappings of a world built to suit merchants, politicians, and first families elsewhere. Infrastructure tunneled through the place with little consideration or comment for the assemblage of middle and lower class farmers who staved off destitution not far from the wide macadamized thoroughfares that defined their world.
Here the universal indomitability of the human spirit and a certain penchant from pragmatic opportunism rise up to resist the gravity of the affluent world built around Difficult Run. Not content to slip further and further behind, the citizens of the basin leaned in to their isolation and topographic disadvantanges to capitalize on their place apart.
Like a negative image of the plantation world of turnpikes and verandas that sat atop the county hierarchy, intrepid residents went to the very bottoms of the valley and established themselves as millers. Flood-prone creeks became motive power for the processing of local resources like wheat, timber, and wool that followed on the heels of the post-tobacco soil collapse. Better still, minor mill roads only grew in prominence as the vaunted turnpikes fell into disrepair and the burden of tolls encouraged shunpiking.
In the decade before the Civil War, the Alexandria, Loudoun & Hampshire Railroad began operating on a line that stopped at Hunter’s Mill and other points nearby where unclearable and hard to plant land had unwittingly created a well-spring of timber that was very profitable as a European export.28
As late as 1966, when much of the area between the Little River Turnpike and Hunter’s Mill voted overwhelmingly to refuse connection to the county sewer line, an idea of intentional isolation has influenced local identity along upper Difficult Run.29
Substantial initial differences in land quality and disposition destined residents throughout history to a fate of harder labor to achieve a level of prosperity often less than that of their higher neighbors. Still, an opportunistic aspiration has exerted itself at every stage where geographic inadequacies seem most bleak.
A SUNKEN PSYCHE OF PRIDE
Partially raised from the soil and otherwise reactive to forces beyond control, the localized psyche of the Upper Difficult Run Basin features prominent inversions of logic that require equal parts ambition and exertion to sustain itself. A maze of roads set in dense, misty woods and heavy thickets are a far cry from the long, straight turnpike thoroughfares above. These conditions seem to inspire the cultivation of alternative bearings and inventive path making where the want of cardinal directions and quality surfaces inspires a comfort with the uncertainty of swamp and forest alike.
Despite long jags of near-desperation and inopportune collapses in economic standing, there is a pride nestled within this labyrinthine knowledge. Maybe navigating foggy trails encourages a comfort with uncertainty. Maybe living precariously just above hard-scrabble makes breaking with convention in order to survive all the easier.
An analysis of the company rolls of Mosby’s Rangers reveals a broad hodge podge of constituent parts. There was no single place determinant for a good guerrilla. Nonetheless, conditions amidst the twisted, neglected low lands of Difficult Run seemed to put a healthy chip on the shoulder of local boys whose heads were rich with a lifetime’s worth of first-hand knowledge about slipping through rough terrain.