Richmond Riche Monde – Sunset, Friday, 7 November 2014

William Van Doren, RICHMOND RICHE MONDE. Sunset from Richmond, Va. Oil on canvas, 24 x 30.

Stony Point to Stony Point (Sunset, Wednesday, 22 December 2010)

William Van Doren, STONY POINT TO STONY POINT (Sunset from Richmond, Va.) Oil on watercolor block, 13 x 19.

I live in an area known as Stony Point, in Albemarle County, Virginia, where I witness and paint most of my sunsets. Tonight’s sunset comes from an outdoor shopping mall 80 miles away that styles itself as “Stony Point.” This time of year, a remarkable number of sunsets seem to happen at shopping centers.

Strip, Virginia

I drove to and from Richmond today, which means I got to travel, and once again survey, the entire length of what I consider one of our most mysterious landscapes, and easily our most underappreciated. Yes, I’m talking about the median strip of Interstate 64.

It stretches virtually uninterrupted from just east of Charlottesville to just west of the capital. A consistent breadth through its entire (55-mile-or-so) length – perhaps 100 feet – it’s large enough to warrant recognition and small enough (or humble enough) to have escaped notice. I’ve decided to name it.

Strip, Virginia.

Heavily wooded, tangled with vines, marked by small hills and ridges and its very own swamps and ravines, Strip, Va., is a territory worth backpacking through, and in fact I’ve considered doing just that. I imagine the Virginia state police would probably not be too thrilled with the idea.

No matter how I may feel about the practice of wrecking forest to make roads, I must admit that 64, by sharply dissecting so many miles of woods, creates a margin where we see them as in a diorama. I expect the focus of passersby is usually on the ‘official’ lands to the north and south of the interstate. I began to notice Strip, Va., while traveling to and from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, with (among many other things) its fine collection of Fabergé pieces. I began to see in the strip – in Strip – a contained and jeweled miniature of landscape. 

If any piece of land ever stood out as a singular place, you’d think it would be this cleanly demarcated DMZ (demotorized zone). Vehicular travel no doubt accounts for the slight — a focus on getting somewhere suggests that Strip is next to nothing.

I’m not being at all facetious in my praise of this wild median. Bathed in exhaust fumes and headlight beams, held in place by a pair of two-lane federal highways rushing in exactly opposite directions, Strip strikes me as a truly American natural monument.