Catoctin Mountain is the defining landmark of the Jaaxes’ home in Thurmont and the terrain that connects their family life to the unfolding response to Ebola. Its slopes overlook orchards and farmland, while the surrounding countryside carries memories of earlier battles; in the narrative, the mountain is at once a real feature of the Jaaxes’ daily geography and a backdrop against which present danger and historical violence meet.

Setting and the Jaaxes’ Home

In August 1989, after their promotions and Nancy Jaax’s appointment as chief of pathology at the Institute, Nancy and Jerry Jaax moved back to Thurmont. Their contemporary Cape house stood on the lower slope of Catoctin Mountain, above a sea of apple orchards, with meadow and forest around it. The setting gave their family room to live outdoors, while placing their home within view of the town and the larger landscape.

From the kitchen window, the countryside opened into rolling farmland, folds and hollows, tree bands, and family farms marked by silos. The land was beautiful, but its view also reached into the past: armies had marched across it during the Civil War. Passenger jets crossing high above the fields left contrails in the sky, setting modern movement against the older traces of conflict below.

A Route Between Home and the Institute

Catoctin Mountain also shaped the Jaaxes’ daily movements. After learning that Ebola had been found in a monkey colony in Virginia, Nancy and Jerry drove north toward Thurmont along the road at the mountain’s foot. Nancy told him that she would likely visit the monkey house with C. J. Peters to examine monkey tissue. The discovery followed them home, turning a familiar route through the countryside into the passage between family routine and an uncertain Army response.

The mountain remained present even at Fort Detrick. On the dark November evening when the Institute’s scientists brought evidence of a filovirus in the Reston monkeys to senior officers, the light was fading behind clouds flowing off Catoctin Mountain. The landscape linked the meeting to the Jaaxes’ home territory: the emerging crisis was being considered within sight of the same mountain that bordered their domestic life.

Historical Landscape and Narrative Significance

For Jerry, the countryside around Catoctin Mountain was not merely scenery. He read military history and could imagine Union and Confederate armies moving across the land beyond the bedroom window. His thoughts connected the region to the combat at Antietam, where the cornfield had been devastated by gunfire, and that night he was reading The Killer Angels, a novel about the Battle of Gettysburg.

This historical awareness gives the mountain’s setting a double significance. The Jaaxes’ home looks over a landscape that is fertile and inhabited, yet marked in memory by earlier violence. As Nancy returns to work with Ebola and the Army begins to confront the monkey outbreak, the mountain and its surrounding fields quietly join the domestic and military strands of the story without becoming a scene of action themselves.