A Question of Balance

Something tragic happened on Interstate 81 in Virginia, south of mile marker 272 on this past Tuesday. It must have been some kind of road accident, because it put me in the worst traffic jam of my life. I went 4 miles in 2½ hours. In that time I managed to get up to an exit, so I took off for US Highway 11, which parallels the interstate. There I found another 4 miles of traffic at nearly a dead stop. (And there, too, I was passed by a tow-truck dragging the burned-out hulk of an RV and trailer, which I assume had something to do with the traffic snarl.)

Then, Thursday, on Loop 610 in Houston, during the morning rush hour, there was an accident on the southbound bridge over Richmond Avenue. I was heading north, so I wasn't stuck in that traffic jam, but I got a good look at it: two vehicles, blocking two of the five lanes of traffic; three fire engines and four police cars blocking the other three lanes; traffic squeezing by on the shoulder; and behind all that, a sea of cars stretching back for miles, far beyond my exit.

I tend to see all change as the motion of a pendulum --- a clichéed image, I know, but an apt one. Things creep along, getting worse and worse for somebody, some group of people, and then they've had enough and take it upon themselves to make some noise, and --- another cliché here --- they become the squeaky wheel that gets the grease. 

In this case, the group of people who Had Enough were those who, since 9/11, we have taken to calling "first responders": policemen and firemen. Up until, oh, the late 1970s, road accidents were largely viewed officially  as problems because of the traffic jams they create. Before that, the role of police and fire-department personnel was to first see to any injuries, and then to get the vehicles out of the way so traffic could flow again. On very rare occasions, there would be a flare-up. Often, there would be some undesirable substance left on the roadway --- oil, or transmission fluid, or antifreeze --- and very rarely, some more exotic substance being transported in a damaged container.

Getting traffic moving was an important function, and not completely unattended by risk. Those chemicals on the road ... they could be anything. They might get on the cop's skin and cause his hand to rot off. The damaged cars might explode, showering everybody with shrapnel. All kinds of things might happen, and of course on occasion all kinds of things did. And every now and then, some passing car would take out a cop or firefighter; as the comic says, "you can't fix stupid." 

The "first responders" began to see their duty in terms of the danger occasioned for them, instead of in terms of the service required of them. 

I used to be a Revenue Officer, the mean, heartless IRS guy who comes and throws people out of their houses, takes their cars and paychecks and furniture or whatever. It's apparently pretty easy to upset people when you do that, and although I never had any serious problem doing it myself, I often heard about colleagues who were shot at, or harassed, or threatened. I often felt like that was a justified response to the characteristic arrogance, insensitivity or crudeness of the individual Revenue Officer. The way I was taught the job was, "It don't cost you nothin' to be polite when you takin' somebody's car." That's literally true, though not always easy, but my point is not there. My point is that this rarely-occasioned and somewhat self-inflicted danger was adopted by the national employees' union as justification for various changes in policy. Their particular desire was to make the Revenue Officer position out to be so dangerous that it warranted hazardous-duty pay differentials and preferential retirement treatment. It isn't that dangerous, so they didn't get those things; all they got were some changes in training policy and, in the end, some diminution in the range of the Revenue Officer's individual discretion.

The police and fire-department employees have national unions, too: professional associations and actual unions. And there are enough "first responders" doing enough potentially dangerous things to get the attention of trial lawyers. Together, they raised enough of a ruckus that more official attention was paid to the safety of these "first responders" in road-accident situations. 

Now, when there's a road accident, roads are routinely closed down completely. No one responding to the scene takes any interest in getting traffic going again until every last spot of spilled chemical, every last shard of broken glass, every last shred of personal belongings is washed away or swept up or swept away from the scene. Environmental activists got interested in all those chemicals being washed into the roadbed, and so now, before they wash off the road, firemen have to know exactly what chemical they're dealing with, and maybe they have to have special equipment come out to suck it up.

Meanwhile, here we are, the general public, who have no advocates for our interests except at election time (and then, only theoretically), stuck in traffic. A rough calculation of the delay I encountered in Virginia tells me that about ten thousand vehicles were affected; that's at least ten thousand people, probably more like fifteen thousand, and who knows how many millions of dollars worth of cargo delayed. (In my own case, the result of that slowdown was stress, and another night in a motel.) I would bet the accident in Houston affected many more people than that. This kind of casual delay has become the norm in road-accident response.

Much as I admire the bravery of our "first responders," that bravery doesn't make them immune from criticism. And much as I acknowledge the need for their safety in doing their job, that is not the only consideration at work here. My complaint is not that traffic backs up; it is that traffic is allowed to back up so much and so needlessly. My complaint is not that roads are closed, it is that they are closed so often and for so long. My complaint is not that attention is paid to the dangers inherent in road-accident response, it is that too little attention is paid to the injuries caused to the rest of us. 

It's a matter of balancing interests. For now, the pendulum has swung too far, and the diffused interests of the general public are being too much ignored. Drivers need to become squeaky wheels.

County Count Update

Other people seem to take my county-counting more seriously than I do. It started maybe 20 years ago when I came across a large United States map that had all the nation's counties shown on it, and I started to wonder how many of them I'd been to. I started colouring them in (devising rules for those trips made when I was very young: if I could remember the trip, and knew its final destination, I was confident that my father would have driven the most direct route; he was not a man to wander aimlessly about the countryside, so I knew, to a sufficient degree, that I had been in the counties along the way. There may have been other trips I don't remember, and there may even have been a digression or two from the bee-line route; but if I don't "know" that, then I don't count those counties) and discovered that I'd been to quite a lot of them.

As the years went by I kept on filling in new counties when I'd go to them. I was living in West Virginia at the time -- West By God Virginia -- and since I had no family and no property there (and there being nothing in the world to do in West Virginia, except incest and arson) I started taking routes to destinations that led me through counties I'd not already been in. Heading up to Pittsburgh to catch a flight? Let's go through Grafton this time. Flying out of DC? Lots of counties in western Virginia, a new route every time.

Then, living in Wyoming, I took little opportunities to visit counties I would not otherwise have gone to. I missed my exit off I-80 one time, and the next exit was in Utah, where I'd never been before. Another time, I noticed that if I went a couple of miles farther along the road I was on, I'd be in Scott's Bluff County, Nebraska. Sure, why the hell not.

Eventually it became an excuse to go to places that I had no independent interest in. My first trip to Wisconsin, in 2007, was grafted onto a trip to Minnesota to visit in-laws, which in turn was grafted onto a trip to Montana, Wyoming, and North and South Dakota because my wife had never been to places like Devil's Tower and the Black Hills. All that, in turn, was grafted onto a trip to Toronto to meet up with a Canadian friend. And as long as I'm up that way, why not run over to see the Finger Lakes on the way back? And the Corning Glass museum. And let's see if Steve wants to come up from the Metropolis to meet me for a couple of days. (The result, not surprisingly, became the longest trip of my life -- 10,000 miles in 5½ weeks, and it would have been longer had northern Indiana not proved so incredibly boring to drive around in. Every rural intersection of line-straight roads gets a four-way stop, whether it needs one or not.)

This trip just finished was plenty long. It started as a trip to Wisconsin to deliver and install some stained glass panels (see prior post), with a stop along the way to visit friends in Kansas City. This time I went up through western Missouri, because there were counties there that I'd not been to already, while I'd been to all the counties in eastern Oklahoma and Kansas. (I can see that trips to Kansas City will be getting longer and longer, as I arc farther and farther east or west, in order to go through a few new counties.) The way from KC to Wisconsin started off as a wander through remote parts of Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota, but in the end I decided I'd attempted too much, and went more or less directly --- still managing to visit more than a dozen new counties along the way. This decision came about because, by the time I made the drive, the trip had expanded from a two-week sojourn in Wisconsin to a week in Wisconsin and a week in Maine (for humanitarian reasons, if you can believe it. Yes, me!) plus the time required to get from one to the other (on the freeway; ugh! But I did get to go through 5 more Pennsylvania counties, plus a side-trip to Sullivan County, New York) and then home. In the end, the trip was 23 days. It would have been 22, but there was this traffic jam in Virginia....

Anyway: so people seem to think that I'm seriously trying to visit every county in the country. I say I am, and apparently manage to say it without an appropriately ironic or sarcastic expression, since I frankly don't care if I do it or not. The County Count business is trivial. I like seeing new places; I like travelling around the country. I like meeting strangers, even if our meeting consists of just a fifteen minute conversation about some local oddity, or their new truck, or why Obama is a-fixin' to drive this country bankrupt, or how the police arrested that guy for robbing the IGA.

The county-count is why I'm driving up to Washington (state) later this year, instead of flying like normal people. Well, that, plus the fact that I have so little tolerance for airports and airlines, plus the mockery of airport security. (Not that I feel unsafe; I just feel like the TSA is wasting more public money than any other agency these days. And that, my friends, is saying something. I get too pissed off at them to reliably pass through their mock-tech screenings. It's one of the reasons I choose not to own a gun: I would use it, eventually.)

So. Trip to Wisconsin: done. Stained glass panels: installed. Three days on the freeway: done. Humanitarian concerns: answered. Four and a half more days on the freeway: done. County count? I've now completed ten states, with the drive through Coos County, New Hampshire. I went to 49 new counties this trip --- not a lot, considering the distances involved, but I was in kind of a hurry for a change. I've now been to 2,114 of the 3,096 counties in the USA. In a month or so, I'll start on the last big trip of the year, out west. Haven't planned it yet, but I know that I'll visit the last county in New Mexico, and will go to two states that I've never set foot (or wheel) in before. There'll be a whole lot of new counties visited then, I reckon.

And then, I think, that may be it.

Tapas? In Bangor, Maine? Really?

Sometimes when I'm travelling, I stumble across a really great little place. Usually it's something that seems perfectly ordinary and expected, but turns out to do its bit in extraordinary fashion: the roadside café in Middle Of Nowhere, West Virginia, or the taquería in southwest San Antonio. Last night, I thought I'd found that rarest of rarities, a strand of silver among the dross.

Bangor is not a bad little burg. A town of 30,000 or so, plus suburbs of another hundred thousand, nestled into the hinterland of eastern Maine, it's close to the dramatic coastlines, the rugged wildernesses, and the phlegmatic self-sufficient poverty of Down East, but it has none of that itself. It's an olio of blue-collar factory workers, fishermen, and small-town professionals, with the expected salting of quaint, dissociated relics of the 1960s masquerading as individualists or artists. In summer it's a pleasant place for someone accustomed to the heat of South Texas; I don't want to think of what it's like in winter.

The town's cuisine is generally geared toward the sea. Lobster, fish, scallops and shrimp are on every menu, and these people naturally know how to fix those things. It's possible to find a good burger in town, and baked goods, and local ice-cream options are astounding to city folk who think well of Baskin Robbins. (My favourite is Pete's Pretty Good Ice Cream, down the road a piece towards Acadia National Park; see my blog from last summer's trip.) And every now and then there's a little blip of unexpected sophistication, like the tapas restaurant I found last night.

The place is called l'Aperitif, recently opened on Broad Street. It's on the second floor of a peculiar looking office building, with a balcony dining area that looks across the road and railroad to the waterfront; about as pleasing a view as one is likely to get hereabouts. The furniture inside tends toward the glitzy; outside it's Costco specials with Sam Adams umbrellas, and a poorly-laid carpet that seems to attack you as you walk. Still, the effect is pleasant, and if you don't look too close you might be able to persuade yourself that you're within smellin' distance of some European finesse.

We started off with a couple of frozen margaritas, using two different tequilas for comparison. Both were good, though the difference in taste between the two was noticable. Neither, though, was blended sufficiently. My dinner partner, who apparently has forgotten how to drink a margarita in her many years away from Paradise South, scarfed hers down so fast that she was left with a glass full of ice chunks. I exercised more discipline, and gave the ice a chance to melt over the course of the meal, but still the drinks could have used another minute or so in the blender before presentation. I don't hold this against them, being enough of a localist snob to think there's no way these Yankees could make a perfect margarita anyway. Maybe they've read about it, but they just don't know how it's done.

Our first tapas order was kofte, a specialty from the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. I have an Egyptian friend back home, Leila, who makes kofte to die for (and maybe she will read this and invite us over, hint hint?), but these were made with lamb and served in pita bread with a tomato-based sauce and some exotic greens of the New-Age-Trendy variety. A ramekin of what looked like yogurt-cucumber sauce was offered, but I didn't try it. The effect was successful, overall; the flavours were good and cooperated with each other, though I thought the portion size of this dish was a little skimpy for the price.

For our second dish, my dining companion picked tomato caprese. The presentation was, again, well done, with the cheese slices being cut in such a way that the tomato shape was maintained. The tomato itself was fresh enough that it might have come from the farm that morning (which it probably did; Bangor and environs is awash in farmers' markets). Next came chicken satay with a peanut sauce, three skewered pieces nicely arranged on the traditional small tapas plate. I'm not big on satay, but having now had it twice this week I feel confident when I say this satay was on the plus side of well-prepared.

My companion chose a chocolate-brownie martini for dessert. I elected to spend that time with my slowly-melting margarita, and couldn't think of any dessert that could possibly complement that taste. I did, though, sample the martini, which looked and tasted very, very rich. It must've been good, because it was gone and the glass licked clean before I could try a second taste.

The service is a mixed bag. Our waitress was a pleasant, chipper little thing who probably hasn't had much experience with curmudgeons, living in such a small city, but she was knowledgable about her menu and was ready to provide information about the dishes when asked. The bar and the kitchen were both slow. I'm sure they would say it's because each item is prepared with care by hand, but there's a limit to how much time that excuse will buy you. And if they are actually using all that time for careful preparation, the margaritas would have been properly blended.

Then there's the owner. He has, shall we say, a voice that carries. He takes the hearty, hale-fellow-well-met approach to his guests, and though he didn't come over and talk to us directly, we certainly heard every word he said to those diners whom he knew personally. I suppose if I'd seen him coming I wouldn't have been so startled by the sudden loud noise, and I suppose that, if I was in his circle of acquaintance, I'd've been appreciative of the individual attention, so much more sincere than those restaurant managers who go around asking every table how things are. But after the initial unexpected volley, his conversations took their place amid the background noise and I could return to contemplation of the view, the food, and our own conversation.

There are aspects of l'Aperitif that are pretentious. Hell, just daring to open such a place in a backwater like Bangor might be called pretentious, though I prefer to think of it as bold. I'm all in favour of offering the perks of big-city life to people in smaller cities, and maybe, in time, if it survives in a small market, this place will come to be a Local Favourite, adding just a little dash of sophistication to a not-bad little burg.