Belmont Sketches
The Pavilion
At the north end of Belmont Bridge, which carries Avon Street over the railroad, a huge white tent, like a circus big top, billows into view. Adjacent to city hall, the pavilion is open to visitors to the Charlottesville Downtown Mall, the stretch of Main Street closed to traffic. In summer, it hosts “Friday After Five,” a street party sponsored by the downtown business association. At any time, it is a venue for live music, civic gatherings, and special events like a wine-tasting, a charity run, and a school graduation.
Aloft on the white tent stand three men. Their boots dent the fabric, which springs back as they walk. The men are tied by the waist to the tubular arch from which the tent is hung. They are adventurers, an avalanche rescue mission, a team engaged in alpine research.
Black hoses snake up the white slopes and water sprays from the top. It’s March, and winter is over. The men are washing grime from the tensile roof. In a place known for neoclassical red brick and white columns, for men and buildings of the eighteenth century, the pavilion is avant-garde, a concession to the present. Both temporary and permanent, it shines in the sunlight like a mystic iceberg that drifted into town, a snowcapped peak, a souvenir of the frozen arctic.
Belmont Downtown
Belmont was laid out in 1891 on the estate of Slaughter W. Ficklin, whose brick house still stands on the highest ground on Belmont Avenue. The house was converted to apartments with an addition that turns it back to front. Close to what was then the town, this area was developed first, and it has the best houses. Churches, stores, and a public elementary school were built nearby. All are still in business.
Where Monticello Road runs southeast down to Thomas Jefferson’s mansion, it creates an intersection like an elongated X, and a village center grew up here. Belmont Downtown has seven restaurants, a tire store, a mechanical contractor, a law firm, and so on. It has two-story brick buildings, shade trees, and parking on the streets. The streets come alive at dinner time, with all the restaurants. Apart from that it’s quiet here, like the rest of Belmont.
With four hundred acres and four thousand residents, Belmont has a little bit of everything. It’s upscale and scruffy, charming and ordinary, quirky and quaint. Belmont is a garden suburb, a walkable neighborhood, and a model for the New Urbanist movement. It accommodates all ages, incomes, beliefs, ethnic groups, and political parties. Why would you want to live anywhere else?
The Trees of Belmont Park
In Belmont Park, before the leaves open in April, a blight appears on limbs and trunks of redbud, pin oak, dogwood, and maple. Sleeves are fitted snug to the bark, tea cozies crocheted in bright and mismatched colors. Dozens of them, at eye level and lower, like gaudy armbands for an unknown cause, leggings for a workout, a costume for a fantasy ball.
Tracy calls it yarn bombing. Her house faces the park, and she has to live with whatever happens here. Yarn bombing is soft graffiti, a protest against unlovely monuments, sterile urban open space, and street junk. A few years back, it was a fad in big cities from Europe to Japan. What is it doing here?
Charlottesville is a small town with urban aspirations. Belmont Park is small, a square of green in a residential neighborhood. Only neighbors come this way, to walk their dogs, shoot basketball, and sit on benches. Children play on the jungle gym and swing on the swings.
Resentment grows. Someone took over a public good for a private whim. A fiber artist ran amok. Tree clothing isn’t art, it’s visual pollution.
One morning, all the yarn is gone, every last stitch. A citizen at dead of night unraveled it or cut it clean from the bark. Or the city department of parks and recreation sent a maintenance crew. Or a special squad for landscape repair, trained in removal of unwarranted additions to the natural environment, restored the trees to their natural state, naked in the chill spring rain.
The Palfinger Grapple Saw Crane
At Stonehenge and Druid Avenues, in Belmont Park, the great white oaks are dying. One hundred feet tall and two hundred years old, they are lopped at the apex and gnarled at the root. A massive truck with flashing lights is parked on the grass in a polygon of yellow caution tape. Braces extend from the sides of the truck, like shores from the hull of a ship, or landing gear from an alien spacecraft.
From the truck bed rises a crane of steel pistons and turning joints, a giant robot arm with a claw and a buzz saw at the end. The crane grips a limb up high and cuts, then lowers the dead branch to the ground, where a man holds a control box in front of his chest with both hands. His eyes are on the task in the sky and not on the control box. This might be the ultimate toy, better than any video game, flying drone, or all-terrain vehicle.
The next day all is calm. The Palfinger Grapple Saw Crane is gone. The hollow stump of the great white oak is sheared flat, a ring of wood with fresh sawdust strewn about. Inside the stump is rotten and black, as if coated with soot. It looks as if the resident elf was evicted from his home, which was razed to the ground. The jog in the concrete walk remains where another tree was. One by one they fall and leave traces.
The city grinds stumps, smooths the earth, and sows grass seed and straw, then plants new trees to replace the ones cut. Two saplings flank the patch of straw through which thin blades of grass sprout. Stakes and ropes tie the saplings down, to keep them from wandering off. The city does not water them, feed them, or tend them, so one sapling dies. In a year or so, the city removes the corpse and unties the survivor.
Quarry Park
Sunday afternoon in May is fair and mild. I walk to Quarry Park, named for a former gravel pit. Leveled and laid out as a baseball field, the park lies in the flood plain of Moores Creek. Overhead looms a bluff with a crown of gables, a condominium complex at the city limit. A road crosses the creek here and heads down to Scottsville.
Before the suburban shopping mall, before the drive-in, and even before jalopies and hot rods, the abandoned quarry was a hangout for teens. One drowned there, the legend goes, in the pool formed by rainwater and seepage from the creek. It was a midnight party, with alcohol. On a dare, a girl dove into the black water and never came up. She was thin and quiet, with long dark hair and piercing gray eyes. Her death was hushed up, but it prompted the city to buy the property, fill the hole, and create the public park. The body was never found, so it may still lie there, deep below the surface.
What I see in broad daylight is a grassy green diamond, a dirt infield, a chain link fence, and aluminum bleachers. As their parents watch, little boys practice baseball. They line up on the field in pairs to throw and catch, throw and catch. Some boys run the perimeter, where a path is worn at the outfield fence. Near home base, some boys swing bats, like swords at an unseen foe. They wear baseball uniforms, and so do the coaches, full-grown men.
Beside the field stands a great sycamore, its lower trunk obese and gray as an elephant. The tree lifts white arms to the blue sky, eight arms in all, like a Hindu god. New green leaves like jewels adorn the outstretched fingers. A little bronze plaque identifies the tree as Platanus occidentalis, cited in 2013 as an outstanding specimen. A pedestrian bridge crosses a stream here, the same stream that runs diagonally under my yard half a mile to the north and wiggles its way through the grid of streets. On the bridge, a sign calls it Quarry Creek.
A bigger bridge of planks in a truss of rusted steel spans Moores Creek and leads to a hiking trail in woods to the south. Not up for a hike, I halt mid-span. Upstream are rocks and rapids, and downstream is a placid pool. Moores Creek is still wild, overhung by trees, studded with rocks, and laced with banks of mud that shift with seasonal floods. I hop in place, and the bridge bounces.
Forearms on the railing warmed by the sun, I lean and gaze in the water. Today, untroubled by storm runoff, the water is clear and shallow. I see the bottom of mud and stone, the shadow of the bridge, and myself standing on it. Birds are singing, branches rustle, and boys shout from the baseball field. I wave at myself in the flowing stream, and the shadow waves back.
Little Free Libraries
In 2009, Todd Bol of Hudson, Wisconsin, built a model of a one room schoolhouse as a tribute to his mother. She was a teacher who loved to read. Bol filled it with books and put it on a post in his front yard. His neighbors and friends loved it, so he built several more and gave them away.
Rick Brooks saw Bol’s do-it-yourself project. Brooks was at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Together, the two saw an opportunity to achieve a variety of goals for the common good. Inspired by community gift-sharing networks, “take a book, leave a book” collections in coffee shops and public spaces, they created Little Free Library.
Brooks retired in 2014. The organization continued to grow and receive national media attention. The Little Free Library Book, written by Margret Aldrich, was published by Coffee House Press in 2015. Todd Bol passed away in 2018 from pancreatic cancer, shortly after the organization celebrated the landmark 75,000th Little Free Library. He remained dedicated to the mission in his last days, saying, “I believe in a Little Free Library on every block and a book in every hand. I believe people can fix their neighborhoods, fix their communities, develop systems of sharing, learn from each other, and see that they have a better place on this planet to live.”
The most common design is a wooden box with a roof on a post. Design and build it yourself, or buy one ready-made. The website has several sizes for sale. You can register your box there, and you can list it on a map and database, for people to find it using a mobile app. If privacy is a concern, you might think twice about that map and database. The honor system has limits, too. Scavengers take the best books and sell them to used book stores.
Belmont has a dozen Little Free Libraries, sometimes two on the same block. Some are maintained, and some are neglected. The books, culled from the shelves of residents, are worn and tattered. The subjects range through pulp fiction, nursing manuals, classic novels, and kiddie lit, along with old magazines and videos. I find trash, both the literal kind and the literary kind. And every now and then, a book I must read.
The Fourth of July
July Fourth, in the hot afternoon, neighbors gather in the back yard of Clancy and Shannon’s house. We sit on the deck and watch the birds at the triple feeder, suspended over a garden bed of coneflowers, daisies, and hosta. A stone birdbath with a solar panel and a jet in the middle plays merrily in the sunlight. It’s a solar-powered fountain. Goldfinches fly in, and red house finches, and motley sparrows, and trim chickadees, too many to count, in constant motion.
Enclosed by a board fence, the grass is weedless, freshly mown, a mantle of green laid flat and smooth. Clancy is proud of his lawn. A giant umbrella, adjustable in several angles, shades a table and chairs on the deck. There are iced drinks, snacks in pretty glazed dishes, and cushions to prop here and there as required. A hint of breeze makes the heat less brutal.
Hannah brought limes, a knife, a cutting board, ice cubes shaped like stars, prosecco, fresh mint leaves, and an elderflower liqueur called Saint-Germain. In a loose white blouse and a sweep of blonde hair, while graciously explaining where all the ingredients came from, she crafts a cocktail that hits the spot. She also brought chips, gherkins, olives, and napkins. Her straw tote bag is big on style and just plain big.
The view from the yard is open over the fence. Carter’s Mountain is a long ridge to the east and south and close to town. This year, instead of setting off fireworks in McIntire Park with masses of people and cars and contagion, the show has moved to Carter’s Mountain. The sun sinks at last in the west, the air cools, and more people arrive. Shannon arranged this long before, behind the scenes, in her capable way.
Children run barefoot on the perfect lawn. They wave sparklers in the gathering dusk. Everyone eats hotdogs and potluck salads. We sip wine and circulate. Fireworks erupt at last from the mountain nearby. Conversation dies down, and we watch with rapt attention.
The End of Summer
In August, late on Sunday afternoon, a day that is clear and hot, I am reading on the sofa when a gust of wind shakes the house. A flurry of creaks and pops, as the old wood frame is forced to bend, or as if the ghosts in the attic were startled out of their summer doldrum. I bestir myself and see by the clock it is cocktail hour. But first, a walk.
I take off my glasses, a new prescription for reading, thin lenses in a wire frame. For sixty years I needed glasses, until this year when cataract surgery removed the clouded natural lens in each eye and replaced it with an artificial lens that corrects for astigmatism. The world had grown dim and yellow. It was like a fresco in an Italian church that was once coated with grime from the smoke of tallow candles, and restored as suddenly bright and blue. The thick glasses I wore all my life are obsolete, and I move through the clean landscape with wonder, observing all with the naked eye.
I step outside, and the sky is a mass of dark clouds. The temperature has dropped, and a cool breeze blows. The pace of life has suddenly gone from easy to brisk. At the corner of my block, is a thin man in shorts and sandals, with a vape stick and a matched pair of terriers. He walks as though to an appointment and raises a hand in greeting. As I approach Belmont Park, another man with long black hair and beard, wearing a loose oversize shirt like a caftan, walks his mournful hound. He too is alert, and the dog lifts its nose from the ground.
A loop around the park is my daily route, and today is no different. Under the ominous sky, the grass is withered, the redbud trees are draped in black seed pods, and the bank of day lilies is reduced to dry stalks. On the back side of the loop, though, a pale blue balloon rolls lightly over the ground and into the empty street, where it bounces on the pavement, bippity bop, like a blob of sky that fell to earth. Did the balloon escape from a birthday party? There are no children in the pavilion, where parties often happen. The jungle gym is vacant, and the fountain of tubes that spray like a fire hydrant, is also deserted. The carefree globe continues on its way, who knows where, with no traffic to squash it or anyone to chase it. In my pale blue shirt, black shorts, and moccasins, I feel at one with the blue balloon, light and elastic. My eyes are blue, and as if in answer to a questionnaire, I have always thought blue is my color.
As I turn the corner of the park and head home, the breeze invigorates, and the cool air refreshes. The mass of cloud grows darker, though. By the time I reach my block, there is a rumble of thunder and a drop of rain. I dash to the porch as the storm begins. Safe inside with a glass of wine in hand, I watch the rain pour down in sheets. Summer is over.
© Robert Boucheron
Robert Boucheron is an architect in Charlottesville, Virginia. His stories, essays, book reviews, poems, and translations have appeared in Alabama Literary Review, Bellingham Review, Fiction International, Literary Heist, and Saturday Evening Post. He won a fellowship to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in January 2025.
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