Chapter Thirty-One: A Last Drive Through Valley Forge
My mother’s house in Wayne was located but a short drive from Valley Forge National Park, and on summer evenings I would chauffer my mother and my daughters over to the park to watch the deer romp across the pastures where once George Washington and his army had encamped through a terrible winter. I always thought that George would be surprised—and I hope pleased—that the fields on which his troops suffered were now populated in the summers by white collar workers on lunch breaks and couples canoodling beside their picnic blankets near the areas where the Revolutionary War soldiers nearly froze their breeches off.
Valley Forge was also a place where I took the girls for a bike ride, amused that they were winded by the small hills we pedaled up and down, for they had only ridden bicycles on the flat paths of Florida and, unlike northern kids, they were unaccustomed to inclines and didn’t know how to conserve their energy.
It was at Valley Forge as well, that I taught my daughters the delicate art of skipping stones across streams, impressing them with my uncanny ability to uncork a “triple skipper.” We would often stop by one meandering brook and toss our stones in the stream. The girls looked forward to this as a daily ritual when we were in town visiting Nana.
So on a trip with Taylor to see “Nana before she died” as Taylor requested, and what I really took to mean, in case I die, Taylor asked for a last ride through Valley Forge before we drove to the Philadelphia airport for our flight back to Florida. For Taylor, Valley Forge was a sanctuary, a reminder of all that was good about her childhood, when there were no such things as ports in one’s chest to deliver the chemotherapy, when hair was long and luxurious and every moment of summer vacation promised magic in the next breath, when the most important thing in the day was the possibility of a “triple skipper” across the stream with the covered wooden bridge.
I drove a back way into the park, up past the ceremonial arch, parking by the spring-fed water fountain that Taylor had always loved as a girl. The water was as cool and refreshing as it had always been, and Taylor stood beside the car, just looking away toward the soldier huts a few hundred yards in the distance.
“Do we have time to stop at the stream, Dad?” she asked.
I said that we had plenty of time. One of the side benefits of being a tad anal was that I was nearly always early for everything. While it was suggested a customer show up ninety minutes early for a flight, I might show up three hours before takeoff, so we had plenty of time to dawdle in the park before the flight.
I parked the rental car by the spot we had always parked, down the way from the covered bridge. The girls had always crossed a small pedestrian bridge which forded the stream but to our surprise, that bridge was no longer there.
“That’s not right,” Taylor said as we stood by the car, stunned that the pedestrian bridge was gone. “Things aren’t supposed to change here. This is frigging Valley Forge. That isn’t right, Dad.”
It was cruel. It was if the forces of nature had not only given Taylor a brain tumor but had taken away a revered memory of childhood.
“How do the kids get to the other side of the stream to throw their skipping stones?” she asked me.
I didn’t know, nor was I ready for her tears. Taylor began to cry. Cry for the lost pedestrian bridge, cry for the change of it all, cry for the broken memory of childhood, shattered like some porcelain doll by the awful hand of fate. Or maybe she was crying for herself and what she was going back to: the unknown future.
There at Valley Forge she had felt secure in the past until the present intervened and reminded her that change comes to all people and all things, even a national park.
We didn’t stay long after that and I drove on to the airport and we returned to Florida.