...the hideous truth I have for so long hidden within my heart: I am an alien in this fair land.
The fact is that I have only lived in Loudoun County for 16 years. I can hear newspapers being torn apart and bathroom doors slamming all across the county’s western end at the very thought. But hold – there is far worse to come.
For the entire truth is that I was a child and a boy and a teenager and a newlywed in…Fairfax County.
I’ll give you a moment to recover.
The Fairfax of my youth was a lot like the Loudoun of the past dozen or so years. We moved into our home near the edges of what were rightly Annandale and Fairfax, when Braddock Road was a single lane in each direction, and Burke was a 7-11, a post office, and a single-engine fire department. Leesburg was a far away dot on a map, surrounded by dairy farms and hayfields, and frankly, never entered into our admittedly provincial thinking. To be fair, I’m sure the thoughts of Loudoun’s 20,000 or so citizens at that time were just as provincial, and revolved around our activities just as infrequently.
The closest we’d come to Loudoun in those days were our annual July 4 trips to Lake Fairfax. I was convinced that the woods on the western side of Baron Cameron Avenue went on endlessly to the Pacific, filled with massive herds of bison, roaring rivers and howling Apache war parties.
I was a suburban kid, through-and-through, obviously. Our developments were surrounded by woods, and I spent many an idyllic afternoon throwing a line in the local creek - but that’s about as Huck Finn as it got. More often, I could be found hitchhiking to one of the two nearby shopping centers to buy a bottle of soda at High’s, or a milkshake at the lunch counter in the People’s drug store.
My god! Hitchhiking? Lunch counters? It sounds as if I grew up during the Great Depression.
By the way, it occurred to me recently that the stories my parents told me about the Great Depression when I was 10 years old were newer than the stories I now tell me own kids about my childhood. Think about that for a minute, and tell me you don’t feel your age.
Over the years, things did change in Fairfax. There were more houses, bigger roads, more schools and the huge but temporary tax bills that were needed to pay for all of it. In an effort to keep commuter traffic off of its Civil War-era streets the county seat, Fairfax City developed a bizarre road scheme that, in the end, left it with some of the worst traffic in the region. Politicians would better have served the population by focusing on schools and libraries and sidewalks, but spent the better part of a decade debating how to stop inevitable population growth.
Sound familiar?
My sister was the first in my family to leave Fairfax and brave the wilderness of Loudoun County. She had a little place in the woods south of Purcellville with goats and dogs and bantam chickens peering down from the trees out back. That was my image of Loudoun for several years.
I can remember driving out to her Loudoun place once when I was still living in Fairfax. When we drove past the 7-11 at what I would later know as CountrySide, I wondered, "Who on earth would go to a 7-11 all the way out here?" When my wife and I were looking for our first house after getting married, our real estate agent drove us out to Cascades, which I remember as being a single row of townhouses standing on a barren hill, and again I thought to myself, "This is all very nice – but why would anyone want to live way out here?"
Well, eventually we wanted to live way out here, because it was less expensive than way back there, and because I had a job near Dulles. We were a statistical cliché: the airport has been the county’s economic turbo for decades, and it was the opening of Loudoun’s landscape – formerly home to a dying farm economy – to development that led directly to its burgeoning population over the past 20 years.
And so here we are, all these years later. We were part of a wave of young couples who came to Loudoun to raise families and enjoy the kind of lives our parents had found before us in Fairfax. For the most part we were greeted warmly, by the people of Sterling and Ashburn, and with something less than a warm welcome by the government in Leesburg and activists from the county’s western villages. “Don’t Fairfax Loudoun” was the elitist political poetry of the day.
The reason that I now feel safe in admitting my Fairfax roots is that eventually, the suburban east gained the political heft to tell the decreasingly rural west where to get off. That’s an ongoing process. A few of the supervisors currently representing eastern districts were quite happy to use our suburban neighborhoods as political punching bags when they were working for the anti-growth forces, as was the current chairman—until our population grew to such a point that it became politically unwise to be so virulently anti-us. Then they decided we were not such a bad bunch after all.
But the weight, so to speak, shifted to the ‘burbs, and it will not shift back. To paraphrase Jim Morrison, they’ve got the thoroughbreds, but we’ve got the numbers.
So the next time you’re stuck in traffic and you see one of those fading “Don’t Fairfax Loudoun” bumper stickers, don’t stand for it. Hang up your cell phone, put down your newspaper, turn down your stereo, roll down your window and shoo them back where they came from. We’ve earned the right.
This one's genius.