A La Recherche Du Temps Regula One

Posting that KHAAAAAN! clip yesterday and reading our friend Hucbald's response to it stirred up some very fond memories for me, for which I am sure you will mock me, possibly even pelting me with rocks and garbage.

You see, owing to a small but firm prediliction for space movie music, I used to own a cassette of the soundtrack from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The cassette ran to a little over 45 minutes or so of music, rounding off with Mr. Spock's intonation of "Space, the Final Frontier....." before sweeping into the closing credits.

It also just so happens that a little over 45 minutes is the time it normally takes (or at least it used to take me) to make the drive from Lexington, Virginia, home of Dubyanell, to Amherst, Virginia, home of Sweet Briar College. And while I was getting a law degree of sorts at the former, I spent a great deal of time courting the Missus at the latter. Thus, I made many, many trips back and forth between Metro-Lex and SBC. And during my third year of law school when I took part in several SBC theatre productions (the Missus was a theatre major - you do the math), the number of trips increased substantially. Indeed, during final rehearsals and performance weeks, I was heading over every evening. And as the Missus was a proper young lady (who also happened to live next door to a hyper-strict RA) and would not let me stay over, I duly made my way back to Metro-Lex late each night as well.

Lexington sits in the Valley of Virginia. Sweet Briar sits in the Piedmont. In between the two are the Blue Ridge Mountains. In that part of the range, the western face is steep-too. Heading east from Metro-Lex on Route 60, you first pass through the little town of Buena Vista. (Locally pronounced "Byoonah Vista", it is rayther curiously named thus in celebration of the fact that iron ore mined out of the nearby hills was used in casting some cannon used by the United States to win the battle of Buena Vista during the Mexican War. Rumor in my time also had it that B.V. had the highest per capita incest rate of any town in the United States, a claim I'm not sure I'd dispute.) Immediately on the eastern outskirts of B.V., the road begins to climb sharply, eventually snaking up the west face of the Blue Ridge a couple thousand feet in a series of turns which, the first couple times I took them (especially heading down), were quite white knuckle-inducing. The view from the top is spectacular.

Once across the crest (marked by Skyline Drive, which runs, so far as I know, along the entire spine of the range from southern Pennsylvania down to Georgia), the road begins a series of swoops and dives as it works its way through the jumble of hills crowded up against the eastern flank of the mountain, eventually picking up a pleasant little series of hidden valleys (one of which, I believe, is called Hidden Valley) until it finally makes its way up to the tiny town of Amherst, VA, there running into - of all absurd things - a roundabout before spitting the SBC-bound traveller out on to Route 29, on which one heads south a couple miles to the front gates.

I don't know how many hundred times I travelled this route (and, of course, its reverse). I did so in all weathers and conditions - rain, snow, ice, fog, gusty winds - and at all times of day and night. And looking back, I now recall that on many, many of these runs, I would listen to the STII:TWOK soundtrack. Particularly late at night, I would let the images from that movie evoked by the music mix with what I was sensing and seeing all around me. I got an especially geeky pleasure on those occasions when, travelling up into the fog bank from below, I was able to catch the track for the battle in the Mutara Nebula. (When confronted now and again in said fog bank by the psycho-killer log truckers who haunted this route, I sometimes found the parallel to being hunted by the Reliant just a little too realistic.)

Of course, I wasn't fool enough to let on about this simple but admittedly uber-dorky pleasure to the Missus (or to anyone else, for that matter) back then. I mention it without fear now because it was all such a long time ago that I'm sure the statute of limitations has run on any geek liability to which I might otherwise have been subject. I also mention it because, interestingly, while back then I whiled away the drive thinking about images from the movie, now I can't think of the movie without my head being filled with images from that drive.