Beautiful Places: NoVA

I was 16 the first time I came to the mid-Atlantic, headed to Georgetown for three weeks as a Junior Statesman of America. Flying into Virginia's Dulles International Airport in early July, I remember thinking "It's so green!" For a teenager who has grown up surrounded by sand and palm trees, and whose concept of natural beauty is based on the mountainous landscapes of Montana, Northern California and Vancouver Island, a mostly flat, green, deciduous forest is fascinating to look at, but not particularly pretty.

I thought downtown Washington was beautiful, with its white marble and broad avenues; I liked the look and feel of the brick in Georgetown and its narrow, tree-lined streets. But looking out my dorm room window at the river and Northern Virginia on the other side just made me think about how uncomfortable I was every time I walked out into the sauna that is summer in the mid-Atlantic.

The Potomac looked the way the air felt: like very soggy mud you'd want to avoid whenever possible and wash off immediately if it happened to come in contact with your skin. The leafy cover provided by the trees reminded me that if I stood under any of them for more than 30 seconds, at least three of the five gazillion mosquitoes who love the area's shaded, damp scenery would inevitably find me and launch an attack.

When I came back to the area two years later for college, not much had changed. The Potomac was slightly less brown, and I did enjoy being able to watch the seasons change, but I still didn't see any innate beauty in the landscape. (With the exception of fall colors. "The leaves are changing color! On that tree, and that one over there, and...all of them! Look!" was pretty much my standard line every time I walked out the door in October, and my dorm mates from cooler climates spent the month laughing at me.) In the six years since, a love of the region has snuck up on me.

I lived in Alexandria my first year out of college, in a decent-enough one bedroom, the one thing about which I absolutely loved was the view. Most of the outside wall in my living/dining room was window, and overlooked the forested rolling hills between Alexandria and Mount Vernon. I didn't pay much attention in the summer, but once the leaves started to change, I would stand at the window and just look every day.

When I started running on the Mt. Vernon Trail, I regularly jumped at birds singing in or flying out of bushes practically at my elbow as I passed. And at the rustling of some small creature in the underbrush. And at the awful, sticky feeling when I was the first person through some of the morning's spiderwebs. My pace slowed by a good 15 seconds per mile on the stretches of trail that paralleled the river, as I watched the herons and ducks come and go and the occasional fish briefly break the surface with a splash.

I still approach potential spiderweb hotspots with caution, but I've stopped jumping at every other manifestation of the region's native species in my path in favor of appreciating them: on long runs, my first moment of levity in the morning comes from the bullfrog chorus I pass heading south; I gauge the progress of the season by the height of the cattails in a marshy Potomac tributary; I know where to look for ducklings to coo over in early summer.

Lately, I've begun to find even the morning haziness that's an omnipresent indicator of humidity in July and August beautiful (even if the humidity that causes it is still completely, disgustingly, damply uncomfortable). It adds a dreamlike sheen to the landscape and makes things like the doe and her fawn playing in a meadow between the river and the US-1/395 bridge this morning feel a little like reality has momentarily bumped up against a fairy tale. Northern Virginia will likely never be the first thing that comes to mind when I think of beautiful places, but it has a lush, green-and-pastel appeal that epitomizes all the best parts of Virginia charm, and makes you wonder if its roots might be in the landscape itself.