“Do I want to go to an old drive-in movie theatre [called Goochland] in the Virginia backwoods? What kind of question is that? Get in the car!”
– C.

No doubt about it, things are different ’round here. Last week, after a particularly long day getting my sister to a doctor’s appointment and returning to find the internet in a complete state of disarray (not an unusual event around here, but a consistently frustrating one), I spent the entire afternoon trying to input a load of edits for a project I’d been working on and then send it off. I was also putting a bunch of interview information for another project into some semblance of order. It took hours longer than necessary.

So, when I threw my metaphoric pen down and looked up, I and everybody else were in need of some evening entertainment. The family have turned into big movie goers of late so that’s what they suggested. But going to the movies (locally) these days is taking a step back in time.

Welcome to…

Goochland Drive In!

Pay your fare, find your preferred space, tune into the correct radio station for audio, and play badminton until your double feature starts.

What? How do your kith and kin pass the time in a drive in parking lot, then?

Hands down the best thing about Goochland is that they do things old school! Cartoons before previews, animated urgings concerning concessions, and some old Americana (like the famous Keep American Beautiful commercial featuring a weeping Native American). The preshow is just about as fun as the movies themselves and really preserves this form of entertainment nicely.

Our heroine is kidnapped!

Our well intentioned, but somewhat clueless hero is finally on the way.

The dramatic showdown!

Everything is of course resolved by a quick trip to the concessions stand.

In between features they played old cartoons from the 1960s with villains that looked like these guys:

With everyone’s car radios around you tuned in the movies, the audio is in magnificent stereo and drowns out even the nighttime frogs and bugs. Fireflies add rather perfectly to the atmosphere too. Just pull up some gravel and enjoy! I highly recommend it.

“He loved the extensive vaults where you could hear the night birds and the sea breeze; he loved the craggy ruins bound together by ivy, those dark halls, and any appearance of death and destruction. Having fallen so far from so high a position, he loved anything that had also fallen from a great height”
― Gustave Flaubert

Alright, we’re all clear that a certain morbidity level is to be tolerated, yes? Excellent, let’s proceed.

I was talking to friend and Favorite of the Blog, Caitlin Kelly the other day about how philosophically weird the county is. Civilization and wilderness run smack into each other and wage a constant war for supremacy. Unbelievable poverty live side by side with immense wealth – I’m talking massive, old family estates next door to collapsing trailers. This neck of the Virginia woods is a textbook study in contrasts.

And I’m afraid I often come down on the side of rust, ruin, and wreckage. Goodness knows I can scheme about owning my 18th century red brick pile someday, but the truth is I find the falling down bits more fascinating. Some houses and buildings were abandoned slowly, as farms failed, wars took their toll, or families simply died out, and others you get the sense that people just walked away from them all at once and never looked back.

For some reason or another (I suspect the lone, flapping, ghostly curtain and creeping vines), I find this house charmingly spooky. I could be reclaimed and fixed up beautifully – or it could be haunted. Either is possible.

You can see how the area was settled and developed. This is one house built in stages: the left bit is the original (probably single room) cabin and the family, or later generations of it, added on the right bit for additional room and respectability. Then, who knows what happened – I for one long to!

Some of it is haunted (probably), some of it is sad, and some of it is just photogenic.

‘”We’ve restored this building to how it looked over fifty years ago.’
‘No, surely not, no! No one was alive then!'”
– Eddie Izzard

Our county is old, predating the country old (wait until I show you our “main street” with the old courthouse that Patrick Henry worked at). Which means that’s it’s a fantastic mix of layers of history just piled haphazardly on top of one another and land, buildings, and items are constantly being re-purposed. Case in point:

This humble abode was once a local schoolhouse.

“Don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?”
― D.H. Lawrence

Some of the local fauna we ran across on my latest walk/jaunt/jog/amble with the dog:

Racoons.

Rabbits – which the dog was practically foaming at the mouth to chase.

Goodness knows what this is – either a groundhog or a beaver. Whatever it was, it was as long as my leg and could scuttle like lightning! I barely snapped a shot before it took off through the fence. Mika just about lost it over this one, the rabbits were as nothing to it!

They were highly suspicious of us and moved immediately to the other side of the pasture. I am not from around these parts and the cows are snobs who declined to make my acquaintance.

“A committee is a thing which takes a week to do what one good man can do in an hour.”
– Elbert Hubbard

I think that makes us a committee. My house looks like this:

And as I type this a strange man is attempting to free style rap outside my door in an extremely nasally voice. Less than a week, minions.