I turn the key and take a drive. 

Driving a car solo is an experience of loneliness.  Sometimes it is a loneliness together as you become companion to other cars, islands moving as one on a highway. Have you ever looked at a person driving beside you on the morning commute, staring blankly at the asphalt ahead, another body isolated by metal and glass? I lack even this as I am alone on a barely two-lane Virginian road winding up and over wooded hills. The sky matches the gray line ahead of me, a misty pall over a modern world, hidden by foliage of shadow. I am driving to escape isolation in the summer of COVID, yet it is still just me, the road, the forest and the double yellow line ahead. 

I turn on the radio to distract myself from my ennui. But with a smartphone and unlimited data, “radio” in the choice-inflated twenty-first century means it can be anything you want it to be, streaming with an aux cord solving everything. I need something different, undetermined by the algorithms of the application, so I pop in the first CD I find in my center console, staring out at the road, trying to think of a place far away from here, a place of people, warmth, togetherness, maybe even happiness.

As the music flows from my speakers, the road before me disappears into the Virginian mists. I am staring instead at the speckled pavement that is the tarmac of Jose Marti Airport in Havana, Cuba. My plane is descending, fellow study abroad students chatter in the seats beside me, unseparated by glass. I am visiting Cuba, the first truly foreign experience I will ever have, 

an Afro-Cuban study abroad program an excuse from my state school to send us to an American enemy. The year is 2017, I am not yet married and I will drink more this week than I will for the rest of my life. 

The words of the idealistic philosopher and martyr, Jose Marti, mix with the balcony cocktails above sleepy Matanzas,where fellow co-eds and I marvel at the early morning bread-seller making his rounds. During the day, the music in these Cuban towns peels from every window as we share beers in the park with locals. Everyone gathered, everyone talked, spoke, embraced. From these gatherings my eyes lift to the country - deep, green mountains above crystal Caribbean waters, cities where the pedestrians did not stare down into phones, a freedom only limited by the lurking socialism that stood upon every corner. I learn the greatest difference between Americans and Cubans is how Cubans are not a slave to their past, even with all its propaganda. Every person I spoke to studied and understood the scar of enslavement emblazoned upon the national soul. They danced in the light of that haunted nationalism, with Benny Moré the soundtrack of a people unburdened, yet so burdened as I held with my hands in a museum the weighty chains of traders of human chattie. I am a fool.

Back in Virginia, as mambas peal through my stereo, a clearing appears. To this point, I had been driving aimlessly, meandering through the mountain roads outside my condominium home without purpose, seeing where I would land. I find signs welcoming me to Jordan Springs Virginia, a smattering of buildings nearly hiding in the Shenandoah mountains along a small stream running roadside. I follow my wheels along the stream until I reach a hodgepodge mansion, scattered statuary along a long driveway, and a historical marker. I pull over the car and turn it off. Benny Moré disappears from my ears, and the soft rush of the spring river replaces his song. 

The statues are gray, worn with age, and unmatching. The house, though large, is half-hidden by trees and a patchwork of expansions, extensions and architecture. The stream, though steady, and the source of these springs of Jordan, seems nearly buried by overgrowth on the roadbank. It is there though. My heart fills with hope of refreshment. Springs, water, blessing. I go to the historical marker and begin to read. 

I'm first taken to the story of the Catawba, Native Americans who sought the area for its springs. I am returned to the oft-ignored footnote of our national ancestry as the historical marker tells me the Catawba came to the spring for its seemingly "healing" properties. As I read on, the history of a home of Indians, settlers, elites, and even Catholic monks is interrupted with the historical scenes from the Civil War. The wounded, so says the sign, from Antietam and Gettysburg were brought here, among other places. In the basement of the growing resort complex, surgeons tried to heal soldiers from blue and gray by dividing limb from limb. It "ceased normal functions," so it said, as the volley of takeovers from my home of Winchester poured more wounded into the complex. .And those who did not survive the bloodletting were buried, their broken bones and splintered lives polluting the oasis until they were reinterred at the end of the war. Later on, the resort returned and functions still today as a wedding venue in a land and time where big weddings are nearly extinct. 

I look up from the historical marker.  In the mist, I scope out those grayed, worn statues, Etruscan and Roman figures, cheap replicas of the art of lost republics, almost disappearing in the trees. I notice a small, sad Venus de Milo.  Her arms had been amputated too. 

What did any of them expect to find in life? Jose Marti, dreams buried in his treatises about liberty, forced to surrender his breath to the Spanish soldiers of the kings and queens. The Catawba, holding conclave over flowing waters that would soon wash away their culture and memory. Nineteenth century tourists turned soldiers who mingled their blood with the water as they were amputated from their birthright. And, as I had failed to notice before, a missive, faded ink in a faded picture on a faded historical marker, from Robert E. Lee of 1866, who wished to heal his misguided heart in the land where his brethren were still buried, a place where misguided people donning masks now raise a toast to brides and grooms. 

A country much like that - toasting champagne for the already-politically divorced and isolated, a wedding-less wedding still kicking after two and a half centuries in this summer of riots and sickness. The gray rags of the fallen soldiers now are gray numbers in gray papers arriving at my doorstep daily, marking the treacherous milestones. The gray men became the gray mist, a poison cloud floating homeless in the homes of many still today. The gray men become the stone-faced statuary, a lesson frozen in time that was ignored, now disappearing into the forests along with the natives who believed in a healing that never came. 

When the people dance to the sway of Benny Moré, they are dancing in the social-distance samba into our slavery of death.  We are becoming stone, glistening with the waters of a spring that does nothing but hides the deeper pathogen now ravaging our schools, senate halls and churches: something no vaccine could cure.  And now my tears, which I sought to stifle through the winding road and the music of the Caribbean, now are a spring of their own. The mist has turned to rain, the statues say nothing as I plead with them to tell us a lesson, give us hope, open rock mouths to speak to help us learn from our mistakes and to bring back together our lost limbs. But the statues, the Catawba, the Union and Confederate casualties all stay silent, as the steady percussion of raindrops like drums of war guide me home.