Late  one spring morning in 1986, I was creeping along the edge of Ox Road, Virginia route 123, driving with one hand, and shoving mail into the boxes on posts with the other.  I was a substitute rural mail carrier,  working a route just south of the seemingly nonexistent town of Fairfax Station.

Beyond the mailboxes, prefab McMansions were going up on every side, as fast as the builders could hammer them together.

It was the second year of Ronald Reagan’s second term, and the woods along Ox Road were swarming with smalltime winners in the stampede for the billions  that the Gipper and his cronies were shoveling into a grand military buildup. The new settlers were devouring the woods along Ox Road like nuclear powered termites. Their contract profits were  pouring with the concrete under the rows of McMansions, markers of their status as suburban arrivistes.

Reagan’s frantic rearmament was meant to drive the Evil Empire of Communist Russia into bankruptcy and oblivion trying to match it.

The bankruptcy drive was ultimately successful, but the big plan soon capsized like the Titanic after the iceberg, sunk by the unexpected vigor of the aftermath:  who could have suspected that the Commies’ dark oblivion would turn out to be a den full of new monsters?

Continue reading Henry Taylor: A Quaker Poet Departs — A Holiday Read →