* * Catching up with Rob Chafin

Robert Chafin is perhaps the most famous Christiansburg native in all of Germany. But his heart has always been close to home. For the past two decades, Rob has been performing opera on the circuit in central Europe. We sat down recently to visit and catch up.

Rob graduated from Christiansburg High School in 1981. A big guy – six-feet four inches and nearly 300 pounds – he tried to become a football player. “But that never really worked. I was one of the worst football players ever.” He broke a toe, ending his sports career. “So I went into drama.

“There were auditions for the play Winnie the Pooh and I got the lead role. The basics of what I learned in my high school drama classes have carried me more than anything else. I started in drama, but voice has always been part of my life. I always sang in (the United Methodist) Church where my family attended. I sang in the shower. I sang while I cut the grass.

“I went to Tech and met my mentor, Paul Zweifel. I was a biology major, studying pre-med. I thought I wanted to be a doctor. I was sick a lot as a child. I wanted to figure it out!

“Dr. Zweifel, who was my pre-med advisor and an unbelievably educated and cultured professor, convinced me to pursue my musical talents.” Rob earned his bachelor’s and master’s degree from the University Of Cincinnati Conservatory Of Music in vocal performance.

Rob teased himself about his unstructured life. “People who have regular jobs are often shocked by retirement. They have little unstructured time during their careers. Artists are used to it because we’re always striving and learning for the next role or recital. We always worry about where the next job is coming from, even when we’re at the pinnacle of success. We always feel like we’re only as good as our last job.

“I am a Strauss Tenor. I have a loud, high voice. I sing heroic roles because of my size. I started out my career in the leading romantic roles of Mozart and Rossini and now am getting into the Germanic/Wagner and French roles. Everyone in opera continues to redefine themselves. Their voices change and they adapt.”

Rob has been back in the New River Valley since late last summer. When we spoke, he had just returned from performing at Carnegie Hall in New York where 32 friends from Christiansburg sat in the audience. “They rented a bus, rode to New York, stayed at a hotel, and came to the performance. When we were on stage for applause, I had a whole section standing up for me. The other soloists looked, and I just said, ‘that is my hometown fan club!’”

He is quick to give credit to the people of Christiansburg who encouraged his artistic career, including Charlene LaLuz, Helen Payne, Helen Simmons, and Jill Graybeal. “I never felt like I was in an artistic wasteland. On the contrary, Southwest Virginia has so much to offer. I have been to many local performances and have been blown away by the quality. Southwest Virginia has produced more successful tenors than almost any other state. We have incredibly rich musical traditions, perhaps because of the rich folk and church traditions of singing.

“Talent will only get you so far in this business. What you need is confidence. I walk a fine line, as I think many performers do, between confidence and insecurity. I have been performing professionally for 23 years, and yet I still have doubts. There are a few roles at which I know I’m good. But I still feel the constant need to prove myself.”

Rob is teaching now at Radford University, “But I still have my feet on both continents. I’m here because on my visit last August, I fell and broke my tailbone and couldn’t travel (back to Germany). I still have places to stay in Europe, but I’m here now and I’m already ensconced in work. I never expected to be teaching, but I’m glad I am. It has been an incredible experience. I also had the chance to direct Hansel and Gretel in Bondurant Auditorium. It was a fantastic collaborative success, involving the schools of Dance and Drama with the Music Department.”

I asked him if he was done in Europe and ready to live again in the New River Valley permanently. “It’s a big decision. I’m in the process of trying to figure out what to do next. I am in the running for a few things in Germany and Spain, but it is a hard choice. Ideally, it would be great to be able to do both.”

He got pensive for a moment and said, “I love this area. I am the product of an incredibly supportive and nurturing environment. I think this area is an unbelievably rich source of untapped talent, culture, and intelligence.”

* * Taking a hike on the Appalachian Trail

There are strangers wandering through our woods. They are anything but aimless. I’ve seen them. I’ve talked with them. They’re walking to Maine.

The other Saturday, I went for a hike on the Appalachian Trail with new friend Blake Mitnick, an optometrist who lives in Floyd. We picked a section of the Trail near Catawba, choosing it primarily for its low-elevation, scenic character. A storm was forecast for later in the day, and we didn’t want to get caught on a high ridge top if winds and rain arrived.

Before we even arrived on the trailhead, we encountered a hitchhiker carrying a backpack. We offered him a ride, but when we told him our destination was shortly ahead, he decided to continue walking. He looked as if he’d been on the trail for awhile.

We parked the car on Newport Road in Roanoke County and hiked in a southeasterly direction, but northward on the Trail. Blake was surprisingly unprepared, with neither food, water, nor a raincoat, something I scolded him for. I lent him a small water bottle and fanny-pack.

The Trail crosses a small stream immediately, and then ascends the modest Sandstone Ridge. On the descent, the Trail parallels a babbling stream, beautiful with its rows of parallel ripples. At one place, there appears to be abutments for what I assumed was a grist-mill, which used the falling water to power the grindstones. It was a place of quiet, restful beauty.

Approaching SR-785 which is Blacksburg Road in Catawba and Catawba Road near Blacksburg, the trail entered an open pasture, with excellent views of Catawba Mountain to the south and east. Catawba Mountain is undulating, with minor peaks only 2000 feet high and the high point at McAfee’s Knob (3200 feet). The view made MacAfee look impossibly distant, but by trail it was only ten miles or so away.

We had brought my daughter’s dog, Jason, with us. I let him off the leash for awhile so he could cavort through the field. This worked well for all concerned until he decided to roll around on a cow-pie.

We crossed Catawba Road, a quiet stretch of macadam, and descended to a branch of Catawba Creek, the westernmost tributary of the James River. Blake and I crossed over a nice wooden bridge while Jason skipped happily through the creek. We ascended Catawba Mountain first in a pasture, with black and white cows munching lazily, and then through the forest. We reached the summit and continued in a northeasterly direction.

After a rest break at a campsite where someone had built a lean-to shelter of sticks and branches, we found ourselves in conversation with one of the long-distance hikers. He was a young man, in his mid-twenties. He carried a pack that seemed impossibly small for what I knew he must have been carrying: tent, sleeping bag, inflatable mattress, warm parka, cooking stove, food, water, and other accoutrements. He was from Rochester, New York, and he had his sights on the northern terminus of the Trail at Mt. Katahdin in Maine.

I’ve spoken with many thru hikers on past encounters. Invariably, they speak about the weather, as it is always an issue for them. At that moment, the weather was still pleasant: warming and dry.

Like many others I’d spoken to, this hiker said that the first three weeks were sheer torture, with constant aches and pains. “After that, my body hit its stride and my muscles didn’t seem to hurt any more.” He was traversing incredible distances, often exceeding 30 miles per day. Figuring 2.5 miles per hour, that’s 12 hours of walking! He started every morning around 8:00 a.m. and often didn’t finish until near darkness.

He said loneliness wasn’t a factor, because although he typically walked alone, there were several other hikers he’d frequently encounter at the many shelters. Still, there was a certain anonymity, as everyone used a “trail name” giving no reference to their real names.

He mentioned meeting occasional wackos, what with the Trail being unprotected and accessible to anyone who wished to walk it. But he said generally the people he met were wonderful. Often, near road crossings, “trail angels” would leave coolers full of free fruit drinks, candy, and sodas.

From my experience, most through hikers are either young, making the trek before spouses, families, and careers come their way, or sexagenarians, newly retired and still vibrant enough to deal with the extreme physical nature of the activity.

His destination that evening was Daleville, still twenty miles away, over McAfee’s Knob, around Carvins Cove, and over Tinker Mountain.

On our return to the car, the sky clouded up and quickly the rain came. I donned my raincoat, discovering that its waterproofing needed to be restored. Fortunately, the temperature was still mild. By the time I stashed my pack in the trunk and let Jason into the back seat, it was raining hard.

That evening, the temperature dropped precipitously. I thought about our friend on the trail and the upcoming day he’d spend walking in a cold rain, with his sights firmly set on Maine.

* * Riding the Virginia Creeper Trail

There comes a point on many long bicycle rides when I want it to be over and I wonder why I keep doing them. This point came on yesterday’s ride a couple of miles up from Taylors Valley.

I was riding the Virginia Creeper Trail, one of the most renowned trails in the country with old friends, Chris Hamilton and Jim Kline. We were riding the whole trail, 32 miles, twice, in two days. On Sunday, we drove to Abingdon, left our luggage at a motel, and then drove to Whitetop where we began our ride. We rode from Whitetop back to Abingdon. Yesterday, we rode back to Whitetop to retrieve the car.

I have known both these guys for almost forty years. Chris was an engineering student with me at Tech and my roommate for my last year there. Chris was one of the first people I hung around with who was an enthusiastic bicyclist, and he rode the western portion of what has now become the TransAmerica Bicycle Trail during the first year it was established as BikeCentennial in 1976. He lives in Harrisonburg, and we’ve remained friends. This escapade started when I convinced him to come down and ride the Creeper with me.

I met Jim at about the same time and he’s lived in Blacksburg since. But his interest in serious recreational cycling didn’t take root until decades later. He didn’t ride his first “century” ride – 100 miles in a day – until eight years ago. Since then, he’s ridden several and, in spite of being the oldest of the three of us at age 62, is best suited for riding due to his excellent fitness and chiseled physique.

The Virginia Creeper Trail opened in 1985 on an abandoned railroad grade that stretched from Abingdon to West Jefferson, North Carolina. It is wildly popular – and for good reasons! The scenery is unparalleled.

There is a considerable elevation drop from Whitetop towards Abingdon, starting at around 4000 feet and bottoming out at around 1750 feet where the Trail crosses South Holston Lake. Downhill riding is sheer bliss for me. My bike has shock absorbers on both wheels and I loved bombing down the bumpy trail. Chris and particularly Jim were less sanguine, as their bikes transferred lots of jolting to their arms and shoulders. As expected, our trip down from Whitetop to Damascus was fast and nearly effortless through spectacular forests. Much of the way was alongside the scenic, cold Whitetop Laurel Creek, where several fishermen tested their luck in the swiftly flowing waters. There were multiple interpretive signs along the way, but we decided to pass them by and save them for the following day’s uphill ride.

We stopped in Damascus for snacks and rest. It was a clear, hot spring day, but we unhurried. The exertion level never became severe.

Beyond Damascus, the character of the trail changes, with more fields and pastures and grander views. Just north of the South Holston Lake bridge, we rode through an area that had been devastated a year earlier by a rare tornado. A large copse of trees was broken and misshapen, and there were several piles of salvaged firewood. Worst, there stood the abutments of a destroyed bridge, formerly a great, sweeping edifice that I remembered from earlier rides. From what I’d heard, the bridge was splintered apart and couldn’t be repaired. The trail went down and back up a shallow ravine and continued on. A ranger told us that funds were being sought to rebuild it, but it would certainly be expensive.

All day, there were great rural scenes and lots of people on the trail. We were going faster than most and nobody passed us.

We reached Abingdon late in the afternoon where we rode through downtown past the iconic Barter Theater and the grand Martha Washington Hotel before finding our hotel. We took showers and walked to a nearby Italian Restaurant in a shopping mall for supper.

The next morning, we began the ride back to Whitetop around 9:00 a.m. Already it was warm, presaging a hot, dry day. Several early-morning walkers were on the first few miles of the Trail, but eventually it thinned out leaving mostly other cyclists. South of the South Holston Lake bridge on a great bend in the river, we watched an osprey soar overhead, intermittently chased by crows.

Again, we stopped in Damascus where in a fit of decadence, I ate a huge cinnamon roll dripping with sweetness and brimming with calories.

During the next few miles, I began to tire from the heat and the climbing. Being placed on a former railroad grade, the trail is never truly steep by highway standards. But I am not a good climber in the best of conditions and I don’t handle the heat well. I repeatedly soaked the scarf under my helmet in the creek to cool my roasting forehead.

Both my riding partners are newly retired and thus unhurried, willing to travel at any pace and stop frequently to read the interpretive signs and “smell the flowers.” I persevered, riding just below my threshold of what I call “heat frustration,” not as clinical a term as “heat prostration” but more descriptive. Finally, blissfully, we crested the top, where the Whitetop terminus is within two hundred yards of the highest point on the trail.

Once we had the chance to rest and cool down, we agreed that it had been a splendid ride, ample justification for a huge bowl of ice cream back in Damascus.

* * We old timers can still rock out!

Nights in white satin, never reaching the end,

Letters I've written, never meaning to send.

Beauty I'd always missed, with these eyes before,

Just what the truth is, I can't say anymore.

‘Cos I love you, yes I love you, oh how I love you.

      Nights in White Satin. © Justin Hayward 1967

My wife Jane and I don’t go to many rock concerts any more. Well into our bi-focal and Metamucil years, we find them expensive, loud, and generally overwhelming. But last week we attended a Moody Blues concert in Salem.

For those readers younger than we are, the Moody Blues are an English band that had a huge influence on rock music with a string of albums beginning with Days of Future Passed in 1967 and continuing to Every Good Boy Deserves Favour and Seventh Sojourn in 1972. They melded classical overtones with psychedelic styles to help define progressive rock. They have sold in excess of 70 million albums worldwide. Their best known songs are Nights in White Satin, Tuesday Afternoon, Voices in the Sky, and Story in Your Eyes.

Their stop in Salem was their only concert in Virginia, but one of 34 concerts on the spring tour in 80 days: a grueling schedule! The three members from their 1967 lineup were lead guitarist Justin Hayward, bass guitarist John Lodge, and drummer Graeme Edge.

The crowd shuffling in was noticeably comprised of folks in our similar age group. Many grey-haired women and balding men, all sporting a few more inches around the waistline, separated this audience from those of more contemporary acts. The Salem Civic Center is a small venue to begin with, but fully half of it was unused with the stage sitting in the center of the rectangular floor and seating on the floor and side bleachers only partially full. I guessed there were perhaps 2500 people attending.

Apparently the group’s promoters know their audience, as the concert started close to the advertized 8:00 p.m. time. There was no backup band. An intermission an hour later allowed us to refill our beer glasses and use the restrooms.

The band kicked off one favorite after another, with impressive volume from the loudspeakers. Jane and I wore earplugs for most of it, trying to preserve our hearing. She commented on it during the intermission, wondering whether the performers suffered hearing loss. I guessed they’d probably been fitted with custom plugs decades earlier.

Accompanying the auditory impact was an impressive video screen behind the band, flashing photos of the band members’ younger days interspersed with psychedelic images of the band’s albums and other graphics. The only thing missing from concerts of my youth was marijuana smoke wafting through the air.

I’m not a music critic, but it was great; the music was clear, crisp, and impressive. Hayward may not be of the guitar talent of Eric Clapton, but his riffs were distinctive and bold. Jane noted that Hayward’s distinctive voice had brilliantly withstood the test of time.

At one point, Edge, the drummer, spoke to us about how it had been 45 years since Days of Future Passed had been released and how he had turned 71 the day before. Where did the years go?

The three original members were joined onstage with a second drummer, a saxophonist, a keyboardist, and a particularly alluring flautist and vocalist named Norda Mullen from Tennessee. Hayward’s lyrics captured our ears but Mullin captured our eyes – at least the male eyes!

As they performed an energetic, raucous version of Ride My See-Saw as their encore, I reminded myself what a rich musical era the period of my upbringing had been. Who says oldsters can’t rock?

Ride, ride my see-saw,

Take this place, on this trip, just for me.

Ride, take a free ride,

Take my place, have my seat, it's for free.

      Ride My See-Saw. ©  John Lodge 1968

* * Suffering a broken clutch

This particular family crisis started with an absolutely hysterical call from our only daughter, Whitney. Jane and I were listening to a speaker in a huge conference room at the Homestead at a Rotary International convention when cell her phone rang. Whitney, on the other end, was crying inconsolably, like we hadn’t experienced since she was a child. What could possibly be so terribly wrong? I immediately assumed she’d crashed her mom’s car. Instead, she merely broke it.

Jane and I exited to the lobby where I took the phone from her. I said soothing, parental words to Whitney, assuring her that if nobody was hurt, somehow things would someday be fine again. Finally, she calmed down.

Long story short, Jane had loaned Whitney the family car, a Subaru wagon. Whitney’s own car, that her grandmother had given her when she turned sixteen, had failed inspection. It was already twenty-one years old (same as Whitney!) and it had some quirks, to put it mildly. For example, you could easily withdraw the ignition key while driving down the road. She was intent on trading it for something newer, which I knew she wanted to do but hoped she would wait just one more year until she finished college. One option was to take ownership of Jane’s car and let Jane get a new one. So we thought we’d give that option a test run. Jane and I were going away for the weekend. We’d take my car and leave Jane’s car for Whitney to drive and see how she liked it. Only problem: it had a 5-speed manual transmission and Whitney was accustomed to her old car’s automatic. She had practiced several times previously, and we all thought she knew how to do it. To put it mildly, things didn’t go well.

At our insistence, Whitney left the Subaru by the side of the road and got a ride back to town. I told her we’d handle things when Jane and I got home.

The following week, we had it towed to a transmission shop and had a new clutch installed. $777.00.

I asked Whitney on several occasions what she may have done to ruin the clutch. She said she didn’t know. Turns out, the car has a unique feature, found only on Subarus. It’s called a Hill Holder, and it keeps the car from rolling back once the driver releases the brake while shifting his or her foot to the accelerator to move forward uphill.

After getting the car home with the new clutch, Jane began driving it again and Whitney bought a used Honda 4-wheel drive car, with an automatic transmission. All was well again (damage to our checkbook notwithstanding).

Soon, however, Jane began to have trouble herself, with the car shaking as it began to move forward after the Hill Holder was engaged. Questioning whether she was using the clutch properly, I tried it myself and got similar results, along with a burning smell from the clutch. Thinking about it afterwards, I began to conclude that the Hill Holder wasn’t releasing properly, so the car’s brakes were fighting against the clutch, and the clutch was losing! Ironically, one of the reasons we chose this particular model when we bought it was for this very feature, reasoning it would be easier for Whitney to learn to use a clutch on a car that had it, and now its failure to perform properly was the source of her misery!

It seems you can find any information in the world these days on the Internet, so I Googled key words like “Subaru,” “Hill Holder,” “clutch,” and “burning.” Turns out, other people have had problems with the Hill Holder, too. In fact, I found a forum entry where someone had shown how, in five minutes, the Hill Holder could be disabled. So I considered doing that myself. Instead, I called the repair shop that had installed the clutch. The owner insisted I come by and let him adjust the Hill Holder to release sooner once the clutch was released, to see if that would solve our problem.

So that’s where we stand now. I drove it this morning and all seems to be working well. I went to the dealership to ask if the clutch replacement could be covered on warranty, since its demise seemed to be no fault of ours. You probably can guess the answer: “no.” Parenthetically, insurance is no help either; they’ll pay to repair your car if you crash it but not if you break it.

In hindsight, it seems that Whitney’s hysteria was as much caused by the stresses of her academic life as the car problem. And as it turned out, she’d likely done nothing wrong. Hopefully we won’t suffer through another episode like that for awhile!