Wednesday, March 28, 2007
This picnic was a walk in the park
Elizabeth Strother
Recent columns
- For those who have too little
- Time to gather mountain views
- Our blind spot on roads
- Following the money trail
From the RoundTable blog
Mother used to hate picnics. Looking back, I can understand why.
For her, a Sunday picnic for a brood of five children plus spouse started on Saturday night: pan frying chicken; boiling, peeling and slicing potatoes for her signature potato salad; chopping cabbage for slaw; sometimes baking beans and, always, a cake or pie.
Then she had to organize and pack all of the equipment that had to go along when we carried off a meal and left our kitchen behind: the eating utensils, plates, cups, napkins, tablecloth, washcloths. Kids scrambled to gather up all this stuff, but somebody had to think of it all, and that somebody was her. Oops: bottle opener. No twist-off caps then. Oh yeah, a sharp knife to slice the tomatoes. And on and on.
Sure, my sister and I helped cook, and Dad bought ice, loaded up the cooler and lugged it to the car and then to our chosen picnicking site -- which could be a bit of a hike. Most of the work, though, fell to Mother.
She always said she just didn't like sharing her food with bugs. But, come on. Getting the meal to the table was a production. What a royal pain.
I always loved those picnics.
As an adult, I love picnics still. And Sunday was a perfect day for one.
So, after church, I picked up a friend and we drove to a fast-food restaurant that sells fried chicken and fixin's. There, we spent five, maybe 10, minutes gathering our dinner. Then we headed up to Mill Mountain Park, five minutes away.
He lugged the food -- a plastic bag with convenient carrying handles -- to our chosen picnicking site, a table that happened to be unoccupied on an overlook at the mountain's edge.
We opened our various food containers, tore open our plastic-wrapped sporks and ate a meal almost as good as the nostalgia-soaked picnics of memory, if you don't count the sad lack of dessert. And, in a couple of ways, this meal was better.
One, we weren't bothered by bugs -- a table on the overlook meant we had no grass at our feet or tree limbs hanging overhead, a mixed blessing since we would have welcomed some shade. Two, we had the view. Downtown Roanoke and its surroundings spread out behind the slightest haze.
After we ate, we took a quick stroll through the wildflower garden, since not much was peeking through; the temperature had headed toward summer, but the plants hadn't yet caught up to spring. And then we went on our way.
It was a pretty and peaceful slice of the day, an unexceptional adventure and a joy. I wouldn't have traded it for the finest wine.
I'm torn by all the talk lately about the possibility of putting an inn and "upscale" restaurant on Mill Mountain, in our park, the public's park.
I like to imagine that a restaurant and café would mean Roanokers of every stripe could have a meal or refreshment while enjoying a millionaire's mountain view of the valley below. That when I hauled visitors up to the overlook beneath the Mill Mountain Star on a blustery evening, we could extend the pleasure and walk to a café for a warming drink.
And I like to imagine that these things could come to be without wrecking the gentle pleasures of Sunday afternoon. If not, I wouldn't want the idea to come to fruition.
If Mill Mountain isn't a tourist magnet, well, I don't want it to be. That's not what it's supposed to be. It's a community amenity.
If it's not serving the people of the Roanoke Valley as well as it could, that's another matter. City council, which has a deciding role to play in the inn/no inn debate, should be deeply immersed in a community conversation about what is important, what is not, and what is irrelevant to the decision it will be called on to make.
I sympathize with the naturalists, the mountain lovers who'd like to see nothing beyond a few trails on Mill Mountain, but I am not one of them. I like the park's easy accessibility; its clean, well-kept visitors center; the garden and pedestrian loop; the picnic tables and benches.
And I like the hiking and biking trails -- just knowing that they're there. I tell myself from time to time that, one day, I'll use those, too.
When Valley Forward and other inn advocates say they want to raise Roanoke's "cool" factor to keep its young adults here, I wonder if that would be an effect.
I'm out of the target demographic by several decades, but most of the people we shared the park with Sunday were not. Mainly young families and young adults ventured out onto "our" overlook, filled other picnic tables, rode by on bikes, walked around the park.
It was cool.
Strother is on The Roanoke Times' editorial board.
