Shut Up, Henry

See if you can spot one of the low stone walls along this road. Henry Morgenthau couldn't stop seeing them. The first plan called for guardrails of fallen chestnut, and there was no shortage. The blight had killed the big trees where they stood, and the old road photographs show them looming along the shoulder, gray and enormous. But a landscape architect named Charles Peterson argued for stone, walls on the pattern of the ones at Mount Rainier. In the end the road got both. Stone in some stretches, and in others, rails the CCC boys cut from that dead forest, till rot took them in the nineteen fifties. A whole road with a dying forest for a banister. Franklin Roosevelt came up in April of nineteen thirty-three, a month in office, with the country flat on its back, to see if he could use Hoover's fishing camp on the Rapidan. Director Albright of the Park Service told this one on tape, years after. The President tried to walk a little way, and he couldn't. "I happened to be one of the fellows right near him," Albright said, "and we carried him down to the President's house." He said he couldn't use the place. The terrain was too rough. Then they put him in the touring car and took him up to see the road. Along for the ride was Henry Morgenthau, who ran farm credit for Roosevelt and would soon run the Treasury, and he'd been calling those walls a Hoover extravagance. Short of Marys Rock Tunnel, with Albright on the jump seat, Morgenthau started in again from the back. And the President turned around on him and said, "Aw, shut up, Henry. Nobody gets more scared than you do. If it wasn't for the wall, you'd be out walking." You'd be out walking. That same spring the CCC camps started up on this mountain, better than a thousand boys at a time. He could send them up here. He couldn't walk the trails they cut. So I keep him in that car, the wall sliding by at his elbow, and Henry finally quiet.