Category: travel

It uses gasoline

As I was nearing Dayton, I noticed that the gas light was on. What was worse, I had no idea how long it had been on.

It was the steering wheel’s fault.

I find the Element to be quite a well-designed car generally—in fact, I’m a little obsessed with it and am already dreading the day that we will have to trade it in, because I don’t think I’ll ever find a car I like as much. However, there is a problem with the steering wheel, namely the fact that there is no perfect angle to adjust it to—at least not relative to the field of vision of someone of my height (six feet, for the record).

When the steering wheel is tilted all the way up, the upper part of it blocks the top of the speedometer dial. I can see the angle of the needle but can’t be sure exactly what number it’s resting on. 60 mph is at high noon, which is straightforward enough, but let the needle incline much to either side and—with the steering wheel all the way up—I can’t just glance down and see whether the car is traveling at, say, an unremarkable 70 mph in a 65-mph zone or an asking-for-it 76.

Because of this, when I am driving at highway speeds I tilt the wheel all the way down, exposing the upper third of the speedometer dial so that I can easily gauge any speed between about 40 and 80 mph. The downside is that the fuel gauge is now blocked in this position, something I don’t remember ever noticing until on this very drive, as I hurtled along the country roads somewhere between Xenia and Bellbrook.

There are long stretches of the drive between Elkins and Dayton where gas stations are sparse, but fortunately this was not one of them, as the needle was closer to E than I’d ever seen it before in this car.

I quickly found a BP, ran my credit car, inserted the hose, and—while the pump was running—took the opportunity to shed my knit pullover and don the button-down shirt I’d left hanging in the back seat so as not to arrive at my meeting in an excessively wrinkled, bedraggled condition. I used my reflection in the tinted side window to knot my tie, noticing as I did so that traffic had come to a halt on the road behind me, because of a stopped school bus, and I enjoyed imagining the reaction of anyone who noticed my little display.

The realization of how easily I could have run the tank dry reminded me of a time, back when Amy and I were first dating, that I’d had her Cabriolet for a weekend while she was out of town and the car just stopped running one evening.

At first I’d had no idea what the problem was. I was rounding a corner somewhere in Baltimore’s Mount Vernon neighborhood, where I lived at the time, when I noticed the engine lurching and straining. I was able to pull it into an out-of-the-way spot in an alley before it died altogether. I tried and tried to restart it without success.

This was in the last year or so before absolutely everyone had a cell phone—and I certainly didn’t—but fortunately I was near a friend’s apartment and went there to call and wait for AAA. It was a long wait until the call came back that a tow truck operator was on his way, then a longer wait out in the alley before an old-fashioned wheel-lift tow truck appeared in the rearview mirror and eased to a stop ahead of where I’d parked the Cabriolet.

When the mechanic walked up, I told him I had no idea why the car had stopped running. I suppose a mechanic probably assumes that, if you’ve run out of gas, you’ll know it, so his mind did not at first leap to that possibility. He told me to turn the ignition on and pop the hood so that he could start some diagnostic step. Flustered for some reason, I first tried put the key to my own car into the slot, and it promptly became so jammed that he needed to hand me a pair of pliers so I could wrench it back out.

“And I’m the one who’s been drinking and playing cards all night,” he said, laughing, in a rasping, wheezing, startlingly Tom Waits-like voice, before disappearing under the hood.

Tried this, tried that. Finally he stuck his head back into view.

“I think you’re out of gas,” he told me, in a tentative tone that suggested he was beginning to suspect he might be dealing with a stone cold idiot.

Nonsense, I thought. Only an idiot can’t tell whether they’re out of gas or not. I’m not an idiot. Although… how much gas DID I have?

I scanned the instrument panel so that I could tell him he was wrong, that the gas gauge was showing half a tank or something like that.

Then I realized: There was no gas gauge. I could see the speedometer, the tachometer, and, in the lower left of the little window directly behind the steering wheel, a thermometer, but—now that I was looking for it—I could find no gas gauge.

Then my eye fell on Amy’s rock.

Growing up, she had from time to time joined a friend’s family at their vacation home in Maine, and one summer she had kept, as a souvenir, an unusual looking rock, speckled grey and white or, in some lights, almost orange.

This rock now lived on the little ledge of the instrument panel, and the combination of the particular shape of that ledge and the particular shape of the rock and the particular forces of acceleration and inertia that the car’s motion tended to apply had resulted in the rock almost always coming to rest in the lower right corner of the panel—directly in front of the gas gauge, as it turned out.

I snatched it up.

Sure enough, the gauge’s needle was buried below the E.

That was the only time I’ve ever run out of gas. I’m glad to be able to say it wasn’t my fault.

Oh deer

I never saw the deer coming.

One second my lane was clear. The next, there was a deer spinning across it.

At first I couldn’t decipher what I was looking at. I was piloting the Element through the wilds of eastern Ohio on Route 50. There there the road is a divided highway with a wide, grassy median. At this particular point, the eastbound lanes sit considerably higher than the westbound.The median is rolling terrain, essentially the foothills leading up to the high slope along the shoulder to my right.

I was keeping vague pace with a maroon SUV in the left lane, about 50 feet ahead. Suddenly, a deer was describing a sort of pirouette across my lane—but it was faster and more incomprehensible than that. It had the effect of freeze-frame photography, a series of shots showing off the deer from different sides.

Click.

First the left side of the deer.

Click.

Instantly the right side.

Click.

And then the deer was on the shoulder, in a pose that at first looked almost relaxed: rear legs folder under its hindquarters, front legs extended.

The posture of a sitting dog. at rest. All was frozen for a split second, in which it was possible to believe the deer might just be pausing to collect itself before bounding off into the woods to the north.

But of course deer don’t sit.

Then I registered that the deer was scrabbling with its front legs, struggling to rise, and I understood that this deer would never stand again.

The maroon SUV was pulling off onto the left shoulder and then I was zooming past, all of this registering and understanding over in seconds, and as I zoomed past I was understanding more, the meaning of the dents and cracked plastic on the SUV’s front right corner, that fact that its side mirror was dangling against the side of the car from a bundle of wires, surely not the way it had left the factory or even the driver’s garage this morning.

And then the whole scene was in my rearview mirror, a quarter mile distant, a half, and I was rationalizing why it wasn’t necessary for me to exit, turn around, and go back to see if the driver needed help. Not that much damage, the car was stopping in control, everyone has a phone, what kind of help could they really need anyway.

Other than maybe mercy-killing that deer.

I thought of all the times I had been distracted on this drive—trying to update my meal-tracking app with the bag of cashews I’d bought at a gas station, researching whether anyone else had already registered the URL I’d dreamed up for the podcast I was planning, answering a text message—hands-free, of course, but that’s only pretend non-distracting. Finding the little microphone button, leaning closer to shout clearly and distinctly at the phone’s little microphones over the road noise, glancing at the screen to see how mangled the dictation was… God.

Driving is the kind of activity where, by any reasonable measure, we should constantly be thinking about how imminently we could die. In seconds the car could go from comfortable chariot into jagged, piercing torture instrument, bouncing and rolling down a steep hillside, suitcases and floor mats and the Maglite ricocheting around, pin balling against our soft, weak flesh and bones.

So easy, so relatively likely—and yet I only ever realistically consider that I might be about to die on planes, where the odds of the slightest thing going wrong, much less actually dying, are something like that of being struck by lightning while standing on one’s left foot singing Yankee Doodle. I look out the window, consider the nice things people might say about me at my funeral, steel myself to stay calm as the downward plunge begins, eye the person next to me and get ready to offer a comforting arm.

I shook my head to clear it, looked at the clock. Two hours until home.

I kept a careful eye for deer. For at least the next ten minutes.

My goal is to exceed your expectations

Back at the hotel, around 0515, as I was throwing things back into my bag and preparing to decamp for Starbucks, I had decided to have a second cup of coffee.

The room featured one of the little one-cup brewers you see everywhere now. You tear open a little packet containing a disposable plastic tray and a tissue-papery pouch of grounds. The tray slots into place on the coffee machine, and you pour enough water for one cup into an opening on top, put your cup in place, and press a little silver button to start it brewing.

I grabbed one of the three remaining packets. Decaf, which I don’t mind later in the day but wasn’t what I was after now. I flipped through the remaining two and discovered my room had apparently been stocked with three packets of decaf and only one of regular. For a second the thought jumped to mind that that made it okay that I’d forgotten to bring cash for a tip, but of course it didn’t.

It had snowed the night before, just enough to coat the car under a half-inch of white, but the parking lots were clear and wet, no doubt percolating under some sprinkling of anti-snow poison. I started the car warming with my spare key, walked back into the lobby to get the luggage cart, and loaded all of my bags onto it in the room.

No formal checking out is ever required anymore, at least not from the hotel’s standpoint, they have your credit card information, they’ll get their money. But it feels weird to me to just leave the key cards in the room and walk out without saying goodbye.

I parked the luggage cart by the side door leading from my hallway out into the parking and walked back to the lobby.

There was no one at the counter, but I could see a sliver of a man’s oxford-shirted shoulders back in the office. I ahem-ed, and immediately regretted bothering him. He was up like a shot and hurried out to the counter, his hands together in a supplicatory posture in front of his chest, and actually apologizing for “making you wait.”

This excruciating awareness we carry around of how vulnerable, how expendable everyone is these days.

My mind went back to the laminated letter I’d found waiting in my room after I’d checked in the night before. It was from a man named Potts, the hotel’s general manager, the man—the letter informed me—who is “directly responsible for the room [I] have been given.”

It went on, in a tone I found uncomfortably abject:

“My goal is to exceed your expectations. If you feel that this is not the case or if there is anything I can do to make your experience her [sic] more enjoyable please contact me immediately, so I may have an opportunity to correct the problem and address any concerns.”

About a year ago, as I’d been checking into a different hotel, the manager had tried to hand me a chocolate chip cookie. According to a little plastic placard standing on the counter, which alleged that the cookie was “fresh-baked,” this was a standard Hilton practice at check-in. If it happened that I weren’t offered a cookie, I was apparently supposed to get some sort of discount. After I had demurred, the manager went on to make some similar points to those in Mr. Potts’s letter but ended with the direct request that—if there turned out to be anything I didn’t enjoy about my stay—I should tell him directly and not “write a bad review on Yelp.”

Mr. Potts’s letter didn’t mention online reviews explicitly, but I felt his terror of them emanating through the letter’s protective layer of plastic. As it happened, in the course of the evening, I did find myself somewhat unsatisfied with the hotel, namely because of two fruitless trips to the little alcove next to the front desk where snacks and beverages were arrayed for sale.

On the first trip, I was after almonds, which I’m almost always triggered to eat when I travel, especially when I’ve reached the discomfiting plastic environs of yet another hotel and feel the blank isolating anonymity pressing in on me. No almonds, so I went back to my room empty-handed.

Then, a little later, it occurred to me that some gum or mints might be just the thing, but after I’d walked all the way back down to the lobby again they turned out not to have any of those, either.

I went back to my room and made do with two hard-boiled eggs left over from the lunch I’d brought along in a little cooler. As I peeled and ate them with a little of the salt I carry with me in my possibles bag, I imagined being the kind of person who would contact Mr. Potts and ask him to “address” his lobby shop’s lack of non-legume-based protein and/or means of breath-freshening.

The strategy that came to mind was to mention the ennui and existential despair that had come over me as I’d walked up the long, empty, dimly-lit hallway toward my room, transfixed by the dizzying, amoeba-like patterns worked into the carpet, but then to let him off the hook by saying I’d forgive it all if he could run to the store and bring me a tin of Altoids, preferably the invigorating and life-affirming cinnamon-flavored variety.

I enjoyed imagining this phone call as I undressed, got into bed, and hoisted the immense weight of volume 6 of Knausgaard’s My Struggle onto my belly.

But back to checkout. I had handed the clerk my key cards and, thinking we were done, was already turning away, my mind on my unattended luggage at the end of the hall.

“Want to sell your hat?”

“What?” It had been off script, unexpected, so at first I didn’t understand what he’d said.

“Want to sell your hat?” he repeated, with the slight awkwardness of someone repeating a joke. “That’s a great hat.”

“Oh,” I mumbled. “Uh…thanks!”

“Have a great trip!” he said, with a great big cheerful smile.

“You, too!” I replied, trying to match his cheerfulness, not noticing what I’d said until I’d turned away and started down the hall toward the luggage cart.

You, too?