He finished, glanced at her, and looked back into his coffee cup.

“That’s insane,” she said. “Strange, but you’re crazy if you think that.”

Okay, he sighed. Maybe.

“You want me to believe you met a ghost hiking in the Park?” She shook her head. “Nope. You’re good at making stories.”

You explain it, then, he said.

“What? You stumble along and see a woman on the trail, sleep with her, say good-bye, and then say she’s a ghost?” She snorted and stood. “Thanks for the coffee. Take care,” she said as she left.

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By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.—Psalm 137

The Antietam flows peacefully to its rendezvous with the Potomac River past the town of Sharpsburg, Maryland. It is not a stagnant, standing body of water, and yet the creek carries with it, at all times, the memories of joys and fears, of tears and blood, of hopes and futility.

Native Americans hunted and cultivated here. Since the establishment of Maryland, generations of men, women, and children have farmed the lands watered by Antietam Creek. Merchants established themselves in the towns and drovers pushed wagons over roads sculpted from rock and clay into western Virginia and Pennsylvania. Marriages, births, and deaths are recorded in the churches that serve local congregants.

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My life was recently ended; almost. Ironically, my demise almost occured in conjunction with an award of an honrary life membership I’d received some few hours earlier.

I was driving south on one of our most infamous Interstate highways—I-95—about 1:00 A.M. en route home from Northern (or Occupied) Virginia. (I’d just overtaken, or passed, another vehicle in the middle lane.) It was raining—not heavily, but steadily. I had set the cruise control of my Tacoma at 70 mph and I was cruising south in the left lane I had a CD playing Baroque music in the stereo and had just set my coffee mug down and drawn on my cigarette when…

The rear of the pickup truck started swinging to the right, into the middle lane. I compensated by turning slightly into the skid.

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Out in western Virginia, in the shadow of the Alleghenies and very near West Virginia and Romney, you may pass by the village of Gore. If, that is, you travel on US Route 50 west from Winchester. You might not notice the sign that points to Gore off of the four-lane US highway, but you will pass right by it; the village is just by and south of Route 50.

Gore? Well, no; I don’t know how the village along Back Creek at the head of Back Creek Valley got its name. Perhaps from a family named “Gore.” One such family migrated out from the Northern Neck and Lancaster County into what is now West Virginia and spread south into Tennessee. I really haven’t researched it and, I’m afraid to reveal, it’s really of little interest to me.

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