By Sofia Samatar
“The Friendly City” is a weekly column about walking in Harrisonburg that will run during 2024. Each week, your friendly correspondent, writer and teacher Sofia Samatar, will reflect on a walk in our city.
Friends and neighbors, I advise you not to walk on Country Club Road.
My plan is simple: I’ve decided to walk from the synagogue to the nearby mosque, an easy twenty-minute stroll, according to my GPS. I’m moved by the cooperation between the Friendly City’s Jewish and Muslim communities, which I read about recently, especially during this devastating year. It seems right that their buildings should stand just a mile apart. I start at the synagogue, a short walk from downtown, taking a moment to circle the Jewish cemetery, where tall pines cast their shadows over the headstones, and sit on a bench in this quiet enclosure that preserves a hush despite the traffic passing beyond the low stone wall. When clouds cover the sun, the light green moss on the ground shines out of the gloom. The trees hold up their tasseled arms, their crowned heads, against the towering rain-filled clouds and a sky that seems refreshed, its blue rinsed clean by the cooler weather over the last few days. There is a tenderness to this cemetery, so small, with the little stones laid on the grave markers, along with other tokens of remembrance: a stained-glass dove, a ceramic map of Virginia on a leather strap, a seashell. Around the corner stands the synagogue, a brick building bearing a sign that reads This is My name for ever and this is My memorial unto all generations. The breeze rises as I turn and walk down Market Street, past the Budget Inn, toward the mosque, toward the mountains.
The trouble begins on Vine Street. Here the sidewalk disappears. There’s no crosswalk where I have to cross the street onto Country Club Road, but I manage to dash through a gap in the traffic and wind up fanning myself with my hat on the front lawn of the Friendly City’s Chamber of Commerce. This is an attractive house with a row of dormer windows, but I don’t advise you to walk there! I’m just glad it’s a public building, because I am tramping over the grass so as not to risk getting hit by the endless stream of vehicles rounding the corner. Here’s a yard sale offering stuffed animals and autumn-themed decorations; I don’t want to buy anything, but I gladly take the opportunity to walk through the yard. Here’s a pretty little church, its white doors bright against the brick. I hope the congregants carpool, or that they’ve set up some kind of shuttle service! As for me, I’m in somebody’s driveway right now, because there’s nowhere to walk. I’m in someone’s yard, trudging through purple clover, burrs, weeds, and bees.
Have you ever been driving through the Friendly City, relaxed at the wheel, listening to your music, absently running through your to-do list in your head, when you realize with a shock that you’ve narrowly missed running over some dimwit who is inching along the trees by the side of the road? Neighbor, that moron might have been me. In my defense, I didn’t know the sidewalk was going to vanish. I didn’t expect to be spilled onto a road that is clearly meant only for cars, plunked down on a narrow strip of grass littered with cups and cigarette packets, pressed up against the rough, prickly trees.
Look—don’t do this. Do not try to walk on Country Club Road. There are no more houses here, no helpful yards or driveways. The traffic comes whipping around the curves, with no chance for the drivers to see me before they’re on top of me. I stumble over tin cans, cardboard hamburger containers, the rubbery lid of a cooler, and other junk people have thrown out of their cars. The branches of these bushes, whatever they are, are covered with needle-sharp thorns that stab my hands as I try to protect my face. Sometimes the impenetrable vegetation forces me onto the road, and I wait, peering from the thicket, trembling like the terrified forest creature I’ve become, for a break in the traffic that lets me skitter out onto the tarmac, then dive back to be impaled on the thorns before the next car comes.
As a bonus, a cyclist hurtles past within an inch of my ear! For yes, there is a bike lane on Country Club Road—a frankly laughable stripe of white paint, along which an extremely thin cyclist on a streamlined machine might just squeak through. The biker blisters past me, eyebrows raised in surprise and teeth showing, unbelievably, in a genial smile. “Hi!” he exclaims, when he ought to be screaming at me to get out of the way, as his further side is being menaced by a Honda. It’s times like these I think we really do live in the world’s friendliest town. But I also suspect I’ve just encountered a serious thrill-seeker—a guy who’s decided to bike this route for the pleasure of taking his life in his hands, and whose fun would only be enhanced if a bear were set loose in the road. What’s a pedestrian to him? I imagine him describing our meeting to friends later—probably drinking a beer, seated at the very edge of his roof—and laughing over the scratched, horrorstruck face of the lady he passed in the weeds, who was clearly too panicked to say hello.
And then there it is: the mosque, rising serenely into the sky, its pale yellow brick gleaming freshly against beds of orange and carmine flowers. Sunlight warms the coppery dome, the sparkling brass crescents, and the pinkish-brown surface of the minaret, so highly polished it looks enameled. This elegant building exudes an air of stillness, as if some invisible barrier separates it from the noise of the road. A sense of reprieve, of retreat, links it to the synagogue and the little cemetery a mile away—although, as I’ve learned, for a walker they are not as close as they seem.
On my way home—determined not to return the way I came—I manage to avoid a stretch of Country Club Road by taking Clay Street. But from what I can tell, there is no fully safe and enjoyable way to walk from the synagogue to this mosque. If the local Muslim and Jewish communities have a history of collaboration, it’s not because of the cityscape but in spite of it. They have had to make plans and spend gas money; there is no possibility of a casual amble into one another’s spaces, of simply dropping by. I’m left with the memory of a discarded sign, left over from some unknown social event, glimpsed among the litter in the grass along Country Club Road, its imagery featuring an optimistic pink thumbs-up cartoon, its text welcoming the public in seven languages.
