I am just outside Washington, and to-morrow, discounting any mishaps, I will be reunited with the wife and Paida and The Boy. I didn’t think I would miss them this much but I have been half the man I am without them, uncertain and emotional sometimes, lonely and angry even, bewildered and lost at other times.
The drive up from North Carolina was uneventful, almost five hours but it was smooth , no traffic congestion; a stretch of torrential rain with reduced visibility was the biggest challenge. That plus the constant fear of passing these huge articulated trucks, they are called semis here. In Zimbabwe the moniker “gonyet” is much more suited to these behemoths of metal which are more like caterpillars in length and manoevrability. And in Zimbabwe they account for high fatalities on the road. Here too apparently. I have seem nay of them barrel down the highway at 120 km / h (70 miles / h), the legal speed limit of a normal car. They seem to have no restriction of maximum speed here and so they overtake at will, compete with little cars, tailgating sometimes like caterpillars on steroids.
The road is wide but bumpy, pock-marked, corrugated. I have travelled better roads in South Africa and Botswana. But again it is the road infrastructure, the different place names one encounters on this trip which points to two things – America is no longer Newfoundland; it is now an old country and with the insatiable love of the motor vehicle it is easy to see why the roads are in such a state. A million cars and more move up and down these roads everyday – big trucks carrying small cars, goods etc, smaller trucks moving furniture, mini-vans (what we call commuter buses / taxis) carrying families, big buses, small cars, motorcycles….any road carrying such tones of weight would buckle too.
From the names and monuments, the history of this country is laid bare. For it was here in Virginia that the northern Federal armies and the breakaway Southern confederates fought fierce battles in defence of their beliefs and ideologies. The South was defending it’s independent statehood and with that the right to maintain slavery.
The Potomac River on which the modern city of Washington is built and which winds through Fredericksburg flowed with the blood of young men sent to battle for matters that could have been best negotiated over a cup of tea. As I once again reflected on the tragedy of those times, I think of the continuing tragedies of this time…300 years later. And the words of Wilfred Owen come to me….

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
--- My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.