May 1, 2015.  We have just emerged from another wilderness experience.  As much as I rhapsodized about running water and wifi in Charlottesville, our next stop was in the heart of darkness.  Nestled about 5 miles equidistant (on tiny switchback roads) from the Blue Ridge Parkway, Natural Bridge Station and absolutely nowhere, is a remote oasis called Cave Mountain Lake.  We arrived there as planned at about noon yesterday, thinking that we would unhook, drop off the Airstream and go tour my alma mater, Hollins College.  But having traveled through the rain forest to get there and found our campsite between two rushing streams just as the sun came out, we decided that the better course was to go for a short hike, down a bottle of sparkling cider and play some board games. By dinner time, we had resolved ourselves to another night without water, electricity, TV, wifi, cell coverage or fellow travelers. We went to bed early and slept like logs in our cozy dry metal tube, as a thunderstorm raged outside.  Brad says that the shape of the Airstream makes it unlikely to be struck by lightning.  Even Doris was not afraid of the thunder, as she usually is.

This morning we did tour Hollins, which is a few miles north of Roanoke, just where I left it.  The ancient campus (but for several recent additions) looked and smelled so familiar after 40 years — the aroma of boxwoods is impossible to forget but oddly hard to call to mind unless you are in their midst.  I took four thousand pictures and showed Brad my room on the second floor of the West dormitory — the exact bedroom that my Aunt Ginny lived in when she was a student at Hollins in 1918!  My Aunts Mary, Frances and Winnie also attended Hollins in the early part of last century, but I think they had different rooms.  It would be quite odd otherwise.

After lunch, we rode the short distance to Claytor State Park, where we thought we had reservations for the next two nights.  But they had no record of us and were completely full.  They suggested that we try Hungry Mother State Park (I am not making this up) near Marion.  We called ahead and were assured that (i) there is a place called that, (ii) it does have a campground, (iii) it is lovely, and (iv) they would save us a site with full hook-ups.  True on all counts.

My friend Diane, whose famous apple orchard we will visit tomorrow, told me of a cool farm-to-table restaurant (The Harvest Table) in Meadowview, which is sort of near Hungry Mother.  We had dinner there tonight and were excited to sample some of Diane’s Foggy Ridge cider.  I tried both the First Fruit and Serious varieties — both delicious! Brad ordered braised duck and I had pulled pork.  Everything on the menu is locally or regionally sourced and just fantastic.  So lucky that we learned about it in time for dinner tonight.  Plus, the restaurant is owned by Barbara Kingsolver — one of my farvorite authors!

OK — here it is: the legend of Hungry Mother.  When, some time ago, Indians destroyed several settlements on the New River, a lady named Molly Marley and her small child were among the survivors taken to the raiders’ base, north of what is now the park.  Molly and her child eventually escaped and wandered through the wilderness for days eating berries and such.  Molly finally collapsed, and her child wandered down a creek until he found help.  The only words the child could utter were “hungry mother” (or more likely, I think, “hungry” and “mother” but that is not part of the legend, nor would “Hungry and Mother State Park” roll as easily off the tongue.)  As legend has it, when the search party arrived at the foot of the mountain where she had collapsed, they found Molly dead.  Today the mountain is called Molly’s Knob and the stream Hungry Mother Creek.  When the park was developed in the 1930’s the creek was dammed to form Hungry Mother Lake.   What a lovely story behind this quaint name!  Or maybe not.