I just posted my 3000th receipt. This dubious milestone comes with uncertainty: I can not say for sure what transaction this receipt records.
Evidence indicates this receipt records the $4.50 toll I paid last month to cross
the Triborough Bridge into Queens. Evidence: that particular toll is $4.50, and the
receipt was in a pile of other receipts from that same trip.
But this receipt seems odd. The date should be August 19, 2006, but it says January
1, 2000. I don’t know if this is common among bridge toll receipts, but it
appears to bill separately for each axle of my car. I know that tolls can be based
on axle count, but do they usually invoice individually like this?
Maybe so, but this Triborough Toll receipt looks vastly different from the only other
Triborough Bridge receipt that I possess.
This is the car my father and I drove to Sneedville, Tennessee. It was my idea to make the trek to remote Sneedville, having read some interesting stories about Melungeons, a people of Appalachia whose mysterious origins have never been authoratatively determined.
The Melungeons are a people believed to be of Mediterranean and/or Portuguese descent who settled in Appalachia during the mid to late 1500s. Thought to have lived peacefully for several generations they were eventually “discovered” and singled out for their distinctive physical features. Pushed off one desirable tract of land after another they were forced to settle in Sneedville, at the top of Newman Ridge.
The story of the Melungeons contains too much history to succinctly summarize, and new information has certainly come to light since my interest in the topic came and went several years ago.
We got to Sneedville late in the day, and had no time pursue Melungeon-related detail. I took some pictures, and once in a while I get e-mail from Sneedvillians (I almost said Sneedvillains) either asking about the photos or just writing to comment.
The most frequent comment seems to question a photo of a billboard announcing a Wal Mart Supercenter. Evidently no Wal Mart has been built in or around Sneedville, and some have questioned whether the photo is real. My response is I would have no
reason to perpetrate such a pointless hoax. That photo, like all the photos in that set, dates from the summer of 2000. As best I can recall it was taken near the town border, but I don’t remember the exact spot.
One of the funnier bits of detritus from that trip is the printout of the Expedia.com driving directions from Nashville to Sneedville. Expedia would have sent us on an astoundingly elaborate route to Sneedville via Nova Scotia and
Newfoundland.
I do not remember the exact route we took to get there, but it was a long, slow drive over sharply twisting roads. It was remote, no question, but I’m told by relatives in the area that houses are being built along the road to Sneedville and that the area
will likely change over the coming years.
We did not follow Expedia’s advice on driving directions, and it was years before I contemplated online driving directions services without laughing about the above mentioned attempt.
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At the risk of making myself look like an expert on the subject of Melungeons by spilling a too-large quantity of words about it, I’ll share this: A friend of mine, joking around with a friend of his, told his friend to “Shutup you damn Melungeon.” I had recently discovered the story of the Melungeons at the time, and while I did not assume my knowledge was unique or completely obscure I nevertheless was surprised to hear that word blurted out at all, much less as a derogatory term. I asked how he knew that word (I knew him well enough to ask without making a confrontation of it), and he said “Melungeon” was a commonly used insult at the college he attended in Kingsport, Tennessee. From what I gathered it was not meant as a racial slur, but more akin to calling someone “ignorant” or a “dumbass.” He admitted that he had no idea what the word really meant, but that “everyone said it” at his school. I explained as briefly as I knew how at the time what it meant, sensing it didn’t much matter. It was a strange and discomforting thing.
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The car that drove to Sneedville is also the car that I drove from Florida to New York for he long, lumbering trip up here late last year. I stuck mostly to Route 17 on that trip, and while there is much to remember about that drive the highlight was driving over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel Complex. Gusty winds, rain, and waves thrashing against the bridges made for a dramatic drive that nearly produced the illusion of driving on water.
I had the car here for about a month last year, but decided I did not need the aggravation right away. A friend generously let me park it on his property upstate. With *only* a 2 hour trip needed to get my car, I briefly imagined I would make an occasional trip up there to get the car for some purpose or other. But this is me, and as I should have well known 2 hours away might as well be 2 years away.
A few weeks ago I forced myself to go upstate and get the thing, and I will probably force myself to make some use of the car here.
Having never owned a car in New York I find that the common wisdom proves true. For my needs a car is a generally useless luxury, and its use has mostly involved moving it from one side of the street to the other to make way for street cleaning schedules. As I also know from common wisdom, parking regulations are sometimes obscure, and enforcement is arbitrary.
One fear I have about truly relying on the car is that I will get fat, or at least very lazy, for lack of any real exercise. When I get back here from Florida, (where walking anywhere prompts sarcastic gibes from car drivers to “GIT A CAR!“) I usually feel bloated and pasty for having walked no further than to or from the car (and for consuming ever-unpredictable road trip food).
The car is identical to the cars used by limo companies and car services. My clearest memory of driving the car in New York for the first time was seeing numerous people attempt to hail me for a ride. There was no question of what was going on: people on the street looked me straight in the eye and held up one hand, thinking that I must be a limo driver if I’m cruising around in this type of vehicle. The car also has a bunch of stickers in the windshield, making it look (from a distance) very official.
I know, of course, that this officialness is absurd. These stickers grant me as much authority as the uniform worn by an elevator
attendant.
I could probably get away with giving an occasional ride to a stranger. I wouldn’t charge any money. If anyone asks or looks for a Taxi & Limousine permit I would say that I drive around giving free rides simply for the enjoyment. We’d all be in cahoots since it’s illegal to hail livery cabs, and I assume it would be illegal to pick up passengers knowing that the appearance of being a livery driver is a not-so-slight deception.
The car is very large. Some call it a boat, I call it a yacht. Parking is not as big a hassle around here compared to other neighborhoods, but the car’s enormity (and my pathetic parallel parking skills) nevertheless rules out many parking spaces.
I think I’ll warm up to using it, though. Driving around yesterday I started to feel like it had potential. I could drive to the Unisphere and be there in 10 minutes, I thought, versus walking there and burning 2 or 3 hours of my precious time.
But that simple equation says a lot. The significance of the journey is drastically reduced, and the sense of distance almost eliminated. Often when I drive I think of a passage, I believe from from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which described travelling by car as travelling in a compartment with no sense of where you are or what the distance means. I often feel that way when driving — like I’m not really covering any distance, just transporting myself. The passage of time and the meaning of travel (should it possess any meaning) are all but vanquished.
I regularly walk long distances, crossing 10 or 12 miles at a stretch without thinking anything of it. A radio commercial I heard recently claims that every mile you walk adds 3 hours to your life. At that rate I figure I gain a full day of life almost every day, a positive-seeming but self-defeating ratio that can only get ugly when I attempt to cash in those extra hours and find that vices consumed them as quickly as they were awarded. Someday I will receive paperwork tallying all my bonus hours, charted against those hours lost to sinful debaucheries.
Why must the unbelievably elderly get a round of applause when their age is announced? “Meet Rosie, she’s 99!” (Applause). It is one thing to give longevity a nod of respect, especially when that 99th year sits atop a life of where survival was not assumed. But a considerable amount of luck is involved in reaching the nonagenarian plateau. I hear the obligatory round of applause as a bit of disrespect toward all those who Rosie has outlived. It reduces life to a contest, in which the dead are losers.
I think it would be fun to be 50,000 years old. I’d drive my car, picking up those who think I’m a livery driver, and pass the hours of transit with reminiscences about some epoch or other.
“I remember food. Man, what a hassle, you had to shove all this crazy stuff down your mouth to stay alive. You never really knew what it was, either. Chewing — I really hated that.” My illegal passengers would gasp in disbelief, but I’d just be getting started. “Hey, back before we had tails you really only had 2 hands to do stuff…”
–mt
September 13, 2006
