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pass the faceless houses
Thursday, March 31 2011
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
I didn't end up leaving for Virginia until about 12:20pm. Deborah came over with Juneau and two ebullient mystery mutts (she was dogsitting) and they, Gretchen, Sally, and Eleanor had some sort of epic romp in the forest. Meanwhile I was copying MP3s to a portable device so I could listen to something on the road.
I encountered absolutely no congestion and only a modest amount of highway construction on what was to be a seven and a half hour drive. I took the NY Thruway to I-287 to I-78 to I-81 to Staunton.
On this particular drive I'd been sensitized to suburban crud by the writings of James Howard Kunstler (which has proved better for shaping my worldview than his entertaining podcasts), so I found myself paying special attention to the buildings in tract developments. What a bunch of abject crapola! So many houses, so few windows! What I kept seeing was endless houses, all with whole sides that had no windows whatsoever. And sometimes those sides would all be pointed south. To not put a south-facing window on a house in the temperate northern hemisphere is to commit architectural malpractice. What, did they also have stock in companies selling therapies for seasonal affective disorder? And even the sides of houses that had windows would only have a few small ones. It made me wonder how dungeonlike it must be inside them. Then again, if the only window you care about is a 42 inch flatscreen LCD, perhaps glass windows to the outside, revealing the depressing repetitiveness of the constructed outdoors, are something of an anachronism. It's also possible that the sort of people likely to move into a development adjacent to the interstate are especially unconcerned about the nature of the outdoors. Interestingly, I noticed that the inclusion of windows in the construction of buildings dropped off sharply once I'd left Maryland for the Virginias. Either building codes require fewer windows in the pro-business South or people there are less insistent on having them.
It wasn't just the housing developments that looked cheaper and crappier in the south; commercial regions looked less planned and generally more destructive of environmental assets. Mind you, respect for such things isn't especially even in New York. But in West Virginia and Virginia commercial crud seemed wanton, reaching beyond capitalist response to consumer demand and becoming more of a general fuck you to nature.
At some point in the drive I found myself feeling simultaneously hot and weak. I've been known in the past to diagnose illness from such symptoms, but this time I knew I was simply hungry. I reached around me to a big bag of Goya-brand corn chips on the back seat and began impulsively feeding myself. I ate through about half the bag before I was satisfied. No salsa, no beans, just corn chips. It was a simple pleasure, like drinking a pitcher of water after crossing a desert.
In Carlisle, Pennsylvania, I saw that there was a Burger King, so I took the exit and ordered a couple of veggie burgers, a large order of fries, and a cup of coffee. There's non-vegan mayonnaise in the secret sauce they put in these burgers, something Gretchen suspected for giving me a bout of atomic diarrhea along 295 south of Trenton. This time, though, I didn't feel the least bit ill after my lunch. I did, however, experience difficulty finding my way back to I-81 and so witnesses could see me yelling at the world to demand where the fuck I-81 south was. It's good to be able to just yell at the top of your lungs, producing an sonic effluent that a sealed Subaru can contain at least as successfully as a nuclear reactor vessel. It turned out that this particular exit was the kind where the southbound and northbound exits left from different parts of the surface street grid, and if one were to go the wrong way looking for the southbound ramps, all one would see would be signs mentioning northbound, with no clue that one was getting colder, colder with respect to the southbound ramp. There needs to be a sign for "You are going the wrong way if you are looking for x."
Just north of the Virginia state line the ABS light came on in the Subaru, so I pulled into a rest stop to see what that even means. Seriously, ABS? I looked it up in the Subaru manual and at first it didn't even say what ABS stood for, just that I should take the car in for servicing immediately. I hate manuals that infantilize the driver; only near the end of the paragraph (and in a parenthetical statement) did it say that ABS signifies "antilock brakes." Well, my brakes were working fine, and with my style of driving, I barely use brakes anyway. I actually think the infrequency of my brake use had convinced the computer that my brakes had failed; later, when I got off the interstate and went to a gas station to buy a sixpack of Icehouse, a few applications of the brake made the ABS light wink out. (I often see tailgaters on the interstate who are forced to use their brakes about 20% of the time; they're probably disappointed with the gas mileage they're getting.)
When I rolled up, my mother (Hoagie) was just leaving the house at Creekside (the doublewide she'd bought defensively from the across-the-road neighbor, also the place I'd be staying). As I was getting out of my car, I was trying to unlock all the doors so I could get to my shit, but the button interface on the door of a Subaru is not completely intuitive in the tactile sense, so I actually hit the button to lock all the doors just before slamming that door shut. Oops! I'd locked myself out of the car, something I hadn't even thought was possible with a modern car. I was thrown immediately into a frustrated funk, cursing, grumbling, and whining. I have to say, though, that Hoagie and (when he showed up), my brother Don were very understanding and as helpful as they could be. They found me wires with which I might reach in and try to hook the door handle or maybe punch the buttons. But the thing about those controls was that I didn't actually remember what did what and which were even functional when all the doors were locked. Hoagie and Don (the latter of whom was barefoot despite the miserable cold drizzle that was falling) held flashlights for me while I flailed away, but the two wires I tried just weren't stiff enough. I felt like fucking smashing one of those windows, but Hoagie had a better idea. She has some sort of 24 hour roadside assistance plan through the AARP, and perhaps that could be used. So when I finally gave up on the car, I had her take advantage of that service. Within an hour, they'd sent some guy out with a tow truck. He had some plastic wedges, an inflatable rubber wedge, and a stiff rod with a plastic finger on its tip. After popping the window out from behind the trim and making himself a little gap, it took only seconds for him to reach in with the rod, grab the latch, and open the door, all without damaging anything.
If one visits a place only once or twice each year (as I have done with my parents' compound), each visit is a snapshot in a form of timelapse photography. The slow accumulation of crap can look more like a tsunami. Creekside is gradually taking on the appearance of a hoard, though it is still quite functional as a guesthouse too. As for my childhood home, it's still as funky, musty, and cluttered as always. I find myself only breathing through my mouth when I'm in there.
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