All week I look forward to Sunday drives.
Here, in mid-coast Virginia, monster trucks charge down Main Street, which is also a highway, skidding from one red light to another below the graceful dark vultures at home in the highway skies. There is much and little to see along the vaguely pleasant stretch between universities William & Mary and Mary Washington. During the week, on our way from errand to errand, we go along Route 17/Main Street. We pass the guns, tattoos and donuts complex; the mega church with an electronic lighthouse sign; the ominous- sounding One Way Counseling Center; a tree nursery; Powhatan Drive; Piney Swamp Road; and all the little highway-facing houses nearly consumed now by vines and shrubs.
On Sundays, we venture further out, taking side roads off into the country or to the edges of a city never quite glimpsed. This is such low, swampy land. The ditches fill with oily, brackish water and the chalky dirt is covered with crab grass and pine needles. The big genteel estates, as in the Old Country, are hidden away down straight, mile-long, cedar-lined driveways. There are plenty of homes hugging the deeply grooved dirt roads, though, and in one of these roadside front yards, I glimpse a lawn jockey. I am disturbed. Not surprised. Okay, a little surprised. Later, I find the most satisfying synopsis of the object's history and the implications of ownership here from David Pilgrim (curator and founder of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University).
Wherever we wander, the countryside hints coyly at its previous incarnations. These mid-Atlantic coastal backwaters are dotted with names and zip codes alluding to the villages that once formed the center of American Indian and Virginian lives. As we drive, we skirt the site of the 2003 Werowocomoco archeological dig into Powhatan's Chiefdom, and then follow the fingers of land abutting Mobjack Bay, passing through places with names like Glass, Aquilles and Guinea. These three wisps of villages and their flat ample land share an old time general store, complete with rocking chairs on the front porch. Achilles has a high school and a post office (and absolutely nothing else in the way of buildings). Guinea breeds fishermen, whose dialect, some say, evolved directly from Cornish, and is now nearly incomprehensible to all outsiders.
On another drive we head away from the coast into Newport News on a mission to find Asian groceries. We're on another crosstown highway, this one tree-less, lined with places like the diner called Sam and Steve's House of Beef, a gentlemen's club called Chico's Chiken Palace n Grill, the A- framed Hot Dog King, a football-sized flea market, and the imposing lot of Hockaday's Used Cars. We finally find our groceries next to a storefront hookah lounge with deeply tinted windows.
Our other Sunday tradition calls for a brunch with bloody marys. These days we make egg sandwiches on the boat and then head to a tavern just across the river. This last week the Yorktown Pub is closed for renovations, and as our GPS is outdated and has taken us to half a dozen extinct destinations, we wind our way further inland again, mapless and with some trepidation. As we head to the highway, we pass through Yorktown. The empty park, with its trenches, grassy blockades, bamboo thickets and well-kept lawns, looks for all the world like the elaborate course for some golf-like game still undergoing preliminary testing. We find the bloody marys we are looking for, in a smoker-friendly sports bar at the Patrick Henry Mall (who knew that when Patrick Henry made a stand for liberty or death, his true legacy would be mid-range retail and beer-battered chicken wings?). Although discount bloody marys generally come unadorned here, it turns out that Southern hospitality can always be prevailed upon, and in no time at all, the bartender brings us plates of heaping pickles, olives and celery.
