Home of The Brave

In Bedford, Va., Memories of D-Day Linger Beyond the National Memorial

Okay, so Bedford, Va., is not your father's weekend getaway. And by this I mean: It's your grandfather's weekend getaway.

I say this not to poke fun at grandfathers, nor at any small hilltop cities between Roanoke and Lynchburg in central Virginia -- God's country, or Jerry Falwell's and Liberty University's country, its rolling hills and Blue Ridge vistas absolutely, nondenominationally transcendent on a crisp fall afternoon. I say it mostly to obscure the fact that I recently completed the transformation into my father and have, in fact, already received approval on my application to be grandfathered.

Getting older, yes I am.

But: Being statistically closer to meeting my maker than my 20-year-old nephews, my 35-year-old stepson or any of you "reading" this story on a "device," I like the idea of spending more time in His country before I go. As long as I can do it in an alert, attentive fashion (since I've also decided that the only thing more tragic than youth wasted on the young is enlightenment wasted on the dead). So I'm fairly certain you young whippersnappers need to put down those Xbox thingies and TiVo'd "24" episodes and retreat for a day or two in Bedford sometime soon. You'll get some air, some space and some beauty -- and maybe learn something meaningful about the history of this country. If you're really lucky, you may even glimpse how those two concepts could be related.

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My visit begins at the National D-Day Memorial, on 88 acres of flat, high ground not far from Bedford's not-yet-restored-but-you-can-see-it-coming Victorian downtown. An imposing field of stone-and-concrete plazas that looks as if it had been built for thousands, the memorial today has no more than 20 or 30 visitors, all of us white-haired or headed that way. They say the memorial was built here in out-of-the-way Bedford because Bedford, in that June 6, 1944, landing of 150,000 Allied troops on the Nazi-held French coast, suffered the most severe losses per capita of any community in the United States. Today, I'm thinking it was also built here because, well, it's a beautiful spot to sit, walk and be grateful.

Congress approved the memorial site in the '90s but declined to foot the bill, so it costs $5 per adult to get in, and -- though President Bush spoke to a crowd of 20,000 at the park's dedication ceremonies in June 2001 -- the foundation that runs the memorial is still finishing pieces of it. This includes an education center to replace the worn surplus tent where school groups now come to spend a day discovering what Granddad did in the war.

No matter what you did, or in what war you did it, you can walk alone or take guided, 45-minute walking ($2) or golf cart ($3) tours. Seeing as D-Day was more than 60 years ago, it's no surprise that most visitors opt for the golf cart.

Tours start in the quiet, larger-than-life Eisenhower sculpture garden, meant to represent the planning stages of Operation Overlord, as the landing was code-named. It continues through the central fountained plaza, which symbolizes the beaches, the channel and the operation itself. The beach and cliffs are evoked architecturally and with life-size bronze soldiers, crouched, climbing and giving their all. Here, the names of the 4,600 Allied soldiers from 12 countries who died on D-Day are etched in plaques along the perimeter, and fountain jets randomly spit loud plumes of spray, a surprisingly moving soundtrack.

Up on the highest plaza, the victory level, the 44-foot arch bearing the Overlord name shelters the memorial's last life-size bronze: a helmet-topped rifle bayoneted into the ground. A field marker for the ultimate sacrifice.

This is also where, our ex-Navy volunteer guide says, many veterans just sit and gaze toward the Peaks of Otter, which define the horizon a dozen miles west, and try to believe they actually lived through what memory tells them they did.

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According to a National Park Service ranger at the Milepost 86 Visitor Center on the Blue Ridge Parkway, people have been coming for more than 8,000 years to the hollows and valleys around Sharp Top and Flat Top (the given names of the Otter brothers). Native Americans hunted here. The first inn for westward-bound Europeans opened here in the 1830s. The most recently built inn, the 63-room Peaks of Otter Lodge, opened in 1964.

The lodge's large, open-beamed dining room seems as it always was, though both the affable wait staff and the furnishings seem newer. The room is still defined by the wall of windows facing Abbott Lake and the fondness of its patrons for sweaters, walking shoes and any menu item the kitchen produces with "catfish," "chicken" or "cobbler" in its name.

There are six or seven hiking trails nearby, ranging from strenuous treks to the summits of Sharp and Flat, to an easy, under-a-mile trail around Abbott Lake. I have a camera and loafers -- and I'm not afraid to use them. Plus, I skipped the cobbler. I take the lake trail.

Like the simple rooms at the lodge, which purposefully lack phones and TVs, the trail is quiet and sunny. Except for the occasional joint pain, I am lost in memories of things my brothers and I did when we were kids and pretty much only went indoors to sleep or eat. I wonder: Why did we stop living outside?

Which leads me to the last stop: the nearby retreat built by the most enigmatic and multi-tasking of America's founding fathers. Under perpetual restoration by a team of light-stepping, archaeology-conscious caretakers, Thomas Jefferson's Poplar Forest is based on his design of a neo-Palladian, octagonal, native-brick main house, which he started building in 1806 when he was 63 and serving as president, and the kindred landscaping of what was once more than 4,000 acres of gardens, forests and plantations.

Jefferson was America's first polymath: architect, diplomat, author, statesman, horticulturalist, paleontologist, inventor, founder of the University of Virginia. This was a very public man, very much in the news and noise of the day. He built Poplar Forest for private, quiet time, and to see it, and him, in this light is alone worth the trip here.

From the enormous double- and triple-hung windows and the 16-foot skylight in the central dining room to the high unrailed Tuscan porch facing the lawn and forest beyond, the house is open to light and the elements -- the landscape -- in a way that is unusual even in 2007, and was unheard of 200 years ago.

Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Jefferson penned those words at 33 and lived exactly 50 more years, dying on July 4, 1826. In the last 20 years, he apparently spent significant time planning, building or being at this place in the woods 90 miles from Monticello.

He willed Poplar Forest to his grandson, who sold it and moved to Florida.

Kids.