It's Just a Freakin' Farm

Driving to the Northern Neck this morning was like driving through an English countryside, with scene after picaresque scene. Atmospheric, with verdant greens seen through veils of white and gray. Stay with me here.

First it was all kinds of foggy; in places it was dense and opaque and in others wispy and drifting. But it was layered over the rolling hills of Route 360 East and dotting those fields were goats and cows and bales of hay.

But mostly it was the splendor of the roiling sky that made the panorama feel like a Constable landscape. The clouds were enormous, stacked on top of each other and all shades of gray. It wasn't the typical sky you see in these parts.

Further along, the Rappahannock River looked to have been painted by Turner's chromatic palette. All an artist would have needed today to achieve that array of grey-greens was green paint to which he could add varying amounts of black or white and achieve every single shade i saw crossing the river. The small bit of morning sun showing through that massive cloud cover was both shimmering and subdued. Otherwise, there was not a thing moving.

My destination was my parents' house for a lunch of crabs and watermelon. The three of us destroyed a couple dozen crabs at our leisure on the porch. My plans to walk down to the dock afterwards were shot down when I was informed that the mosquitoes were huge and hungry after all the recent rain. On the plus side, sitting on the porch allowed me to enjoy all the wet smells: pine needles, herbs, bark, crab shells.

Heading home afterwards, I made a stop in downtown Tappahannock. Parr's Drive-in has been sitting there, squat and concrete, since I first started coming down to the area, but I'd never been in. It wasn't that the figure out front wasn't welcoming.

Who wouldn't want to try a place with a giant cone of french fries with his arms holding a bouquet of neon pink flowers and his skinny legs encased in combat boots? He stands right next to the red telephone booth, which someone was using when I pulled in.

Parr's is old school. The menu is on a plastic letter board and clearly they have run out of a few of the popular letters. Still, the most expensive thing is the steak sandwich at $3.69. A sign warns patrons, "No sitting on tabletops!" Apparently some people need reminding of that there.

I went for something I hadn't seen in ages, soft chocolate ice cream with a dipped top. I have no idea what kind of unnatural substance makes that topping harden like that, but nor did I care. As the owner handed me my cone, it immediately began to ooze ice cream through holes in the chocolate shell in the un-air conditioned drive-in.

"You want a cup for that?" he asked anxiously.
"Not really, but it is going to make a mess, isn't it?" I said giving in.
"Yea, it is, but it's so good it doesn't matter," the authority said.

I smiled and took the cup, but I didn't use it. I ate my cone right out front while a man sat in his blue truck and watched me make a mess. I think he'd decided that I wasn't a local.

Driving home, the fog had dissipated but the cloud cover was still decidedly European. But now the afternoon sun was making a valiant effort to filter through the clouds.

The result was a Dutch landscape, maybe 18th century, with lush green fields and dramatic differences in light and shady areas. The sky was still bigger than usual, but the sense of the farm and fields was very end-of-the-workday tranquil.

Warning/Stand Clear: When art history lovers take road trips.