In the Footsteps of Aldo and Walt

On Thursday morning, our first stop in Fredericksburg was the Central Rappahannock Regional Library. My younger sons needed books and my mother-in-law had loaned me her library card. Last September, when Hurricane Rita appeared to be aiming for Houston, I flew the boys up here for five days of, as it turned out, unneeded sanctuary. The storm swerved to the east, but the librarians still took pity on the orphans from storm. They let us sign out books on a temporary card, asking only for $10 as collateral. That was my opportunity to finally read Harry Franfurt's On Bullshit and Nixon at the Movies, by Mark Feeney.

This time I found Aldo Buzzi's A Weakness for Almost Everything. The Steerforth Press edition is subtitled "Notes on Life, Gastronomy and Travel" -- in other words, it's a typically delightful Buzzian melange. Only when I returned to my in-laws' house did I notice what someone had written in ink on the title page, between the main title and the subtitle: "Vulgar Don't bother." Buzzi is among the least vulgar writers I know. I can't begin to plumb the psychology of that marginalia, though it confirms one of my time-tested convictions: Never trust anyone with exquisitely neat handwriting.

How I love and occasionally rely upon serendipity. Included in Buzzi's collection is a sketchy travelogue, "From New York to Charleston, South Carolina, and Back (1956)." That was the year President Eisenhower signed into law the bill creating the interstate highway system. Buzzi, driving a Cadillac, relied on two-lane roads and enjoyed a more intimate, human-scaled visit to the United States. On the southbound leg of the trip he even stopped here in Fredericksburg, Va. Here's his note:

"Fredericksburg. Monroe's house, small, brick, very low, very comfortable, with a little garden behind and an old cemetery, and, scattered throughout the city, imitations (but larger) of Monroe's house."

I've visited Fredericksburg probably a dozen times in the last nine years but never knew James Monroe had a house here. Tomorrow, thanks to a writer from Italy, I plan to see it.

On the way to find his brother, wounded in the Battle of Fredericksburg, Walt Whitman had a tougher time getting here from New York City than Buzzi. As described by Roy Morris Jr. in The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War, after leaving his mother's house in Brooklyn, Whitman "crowded aboard a ferry to to Manhattan, took a second across the Hudson River to New Jersey, and caught the night train to Philadelphia. Pressing his way through a mob of fellow travelers, he had his pocket picked while changing trains, and he arrived in Washington without a penny to his name."

In a rented SUV, the first time I ever rode in one, my wife and I and the boys made it from Washington to Fredericksburg in one hour. Whitman, having no idea of his brother's whereabouts, or even if he was alive, wandered futilely for two days among the wounded in dozens of makeshift hospitals around the capital. With his gift for friendship, Whitman secured a little money and a pass to ride an Army train from Aquia Landing to Falmouth, Va., where he had heard Lt. George Whitman's regiment was recuperating. Morris explains:

"George, as it happened, was very much alive -- in fact he was in capital spirits. Not only had he survived the terrible battle with merely a scratch but his new promotion to captain had just come through. `Remember your galliant Son is a Capting,' he wrote to his mother with more pride than grammar. A shell fragment had cut a gash through his cheek -- `You could stick a splint through into the mouth,' Walt would observe a few days later -- but it did not seem to bother the imperturbable George."