Further north on Rte 15

As I drove North, and began to enter the gravitational field of DC, things started becoming less flat-out country, more "picturesque."  At one point in time I found myself sandwiched between a Subaru Outback and a Volvo Wagon, and I knew I was closer to home.  Signs advertised "folk art" and there were beautiful old houses converted into restaurants and inns.  I was glad I had gotten a chicken biscuit earlier.

So it felt less legit in certain ways -- which is to say less foreign and native at once -- and yet it was sadly more sustainable in a sense. Where money flows out from the major metro areas, there's work.  It might not be the best work in the world, but in a place where the cost of living is low, it's easier to piece together a living. The ersatz is the real, however Baudrillardian it may be to admit it.

In Gordonsville, VA, I stopped to -- as they say in Russian -- "go where the Tsar himself goes on foot", and then I went for a little walk.  Gordonsville is real cute, quaint.  There's a restaurant on the main street called "Pomme" and it's got lots of high end antiquery.  I walked along the street to stretch my legs for a bit, and passed a number of cute old historic homes in good condition that said "Perrigo PBM," obviously some corporate offices.  Perrigo PBM is a pharma company, and PBM is a unit that sells infant nutritional formula, not a Pharmaceutical Benefits Manager, as the acronym would suggest.

But it returned my thinking to something I'd pondered earlier, about Oxford, about how it would make sense to relo a whole business unit to a small town if the unit was big enough and the town small enough that moving a bunch of people could shift the culture of the town.  I'll bet something similar had happened in Gordonsville, which is a very small town but pretty close to Charlottesville (closer than I had realized, now that I look at a map, which actually explains a lot, where the money came from for the restaurants and antique stores).

In general, as I went north thru VA, I saw more and more familiar names of genteel educational establishments -- Hampden-Sydney, Woodberry Forest, Fork Union Military Academy -- places where Virginia's landed aristocracy has half-educated itself for centuries.

And then I drove into the outer tentacles of DC, and all was traffic, and I was more than ready to launch myself into the not-so-hyperloop of the 95s and get my white ass on up the road.