Two states

The senate's president pro tempore looked like he'd swallowed a turd.

"I didn't realize y'all were from Northern Virginia," he said after our ninth-grade teacher identified our class to the senators in attendance on the president's request.

Even at 14, I thought that was a little weird. It hadn't taken very long to get to Richmond from Arlington, but every time I came down here I was struck by how different Richmonders viewed their part of Virginia from ours. There were the competing accents, of course, but mostly what registered was the surprise that we'd made the journey at all.

"I can't believe you're going back today," they'd say.

Because Richmond has such a marginal role in the national music scene, I travel a lot for my job. The other night I drove up to D.C. to see a concert. Now, I don't think this is such a big deal. But I have friends and neighbors who think it's absolutely insane. The guy who lives next to me has been to D.C. once in his life. He's 60.

Recently, the Rolling Stones played in Charlottesville. To read the local press here in Richmond, it was as if Keith Richards bought a place in the Fan. There were no fewer than six pieces about the show, the normally somnolent Times-Dispatch columnists falling all over themselves to express gratitude that the rock dinosaurs had finally discovered Virginia. But here's the thing--bands every bit as old, artistically irrelevant and contemptous of their fans as the Stones play the Nissan Pavilion all the time.

The Nissan Pavilion is 101 miles from the Times-Dispatch's offices on Franklin. Scott Stadium in Charlottesville is 74 miles from them. That's a measly 28 mile difference--roughly from here to Kings Dominion, a distance Ross MacKenzie wouldn't think twice about driving to laugh at a drowning orphan.

So what I'm wondering here is what's the source of the mental distance between Richmond and Northern Virginia. I don't find it in Tidewater, where life is a lot closer to that in NoVa. Is it that there's more traffic? More people? That it's an economic powerhouse while Richmond's been treading water for a long, long time? Is it that Northern Virginia doesn't allow people who own grocery stores to set its cultural agenda?

Tomorrow, if patterns hold, Tim Kaine will probably win most of Northern Virginia. Just one Northern Virginia county, Fairfax, has a greater population than that of Henrico, Hanover, Chesterfield, and the City of Richmond combined. And yet the T-D feels comfortable stating that Kilgore's "philosophy generally reflects Virginia's philosophy."

I'm not interested in arguing the particular merits of the gubernatorial candidates. The point I'm getting at is that Richmonders still want to claim ownership of a particular idea of Virginia, one into which Northern Virginia does not fit too neatly. So it's generally ignored, even though it's a lot closer to Richmond than places that the T-D editorial board feels more in line with philosophically.

The risk is in pretending the most dynamic part of the state doesn't exist, because irrelevance for this region looms larger every time we try to fight closer integration with Northern Virginia. I've heard from people on both sides of the performing arts center debate that they don't want Richmond to become a suburb of D.C. What they don't seem to grasp is that there is no way around that happening. Fredericksburg used to be a far-out suburb of the District. Now suburbia is growing ever-southward, past Fredericksburg and inexorably toward Caroline County. You only need to drive down 95 to see that.

But who could ever imagine doing such a thing?