In Washington, DC, Vincent, the store manager of the K Street U-Haul, doesn’t seem to tire telling renters not be alarmed in the event that the police around the Capitol Building stop you and ask for your documents and to check inside the truck.
Early Saturday morning (Dec. 10) I’m riding K’s bike to K Street to pick up the truck. I’m here to help move K's stuff back to Brooklyn. She’ll sift through the lot and take some of it to Los Angeles, where she is living now. The rest M and I will keep in Brooklyn.
It’s about a quarter to ten and a little nippy. Street as clean as a hotel lobby. Only police in idling cars, nattily dressed joggers and their puffs of breath, brilliant blue sky. A terrorist would really look out of place here. As would an over-designed orange-strapped U-Haul Ten-Foot Box Truck that I’m to pick up.
“There was a woman here mighty disappointed that she wasn’t able to rent that pretty little truck I’d set aside for you,” Vincent tells me. I smile and nod and he goes on. “But we were good to hold it for you. You said you’d be here at 9:15, and I was giving you an hour – ”
“Well, I’m here. As you can see.”
“Yes, you are, sir. Yes you are.”
*
I’d arrived earlier that morning on the Bolt Bus. Last one to take a seat on the aisle directly in front of the bathroom. Only four empty seats, counting the one next to the young woman in my two-seat row who’s playing the odds that she’d have the row to herself, none too happy about giving it up. Thinking, note to self: Take up space in row more aggressively next time, channel meanness; the other three did, she’d noticed, and this old man didn’t choose to sit with them, did he? No sir. Uh uh.
I am without doubt the elder on the Manhattan 8:45, stop @ Sixth Avenue, between Grand ad Watts BB. We are on the New Jersey Turnpike when I snap on the overhead light. My row-mate has her overhead on too, reading a vintage literary paperback, title and author I can’t quite make out. I’ve a couple of recent “Economists” and an “London Review of Books,” with a cool take on Lincoln and liberals’ legacy of racial separation http://bit.ly/uRNWEo, can’t wait to settle in and catch up on my reading. In no time, though, my row-mate shuts her light and curls into what amounts to a ball, shielding as best she’s able from my light, not yet muttering to herself of her bad luck to be saddled with an Old School reader, at 9:15!! on a Friday night; she being in the majority of riders on this sardine-packed bus, what else makes sense but to snooze; nevertheless I keep reading for about an hour of the 4-1/2-hour trip, finally succumbing to the BB vibe and snapping off the overhead – for 45 minutes the only one left on in the entire bus (I’m in the next-to-last row, so I know). Some folks are ducked into the rolling LCD of phone screens and laptops, but mostly the place is like a suburban graveyard. In text to M, I tap: “Hushed slow roll into the dead of night.”
I do lateral leg stretches and meditate on the night. At points, radiant with electric light, scrub land of New Jersey, only pitstop a corporate Delaware one, $3 water, no drinking fountains.
Finally we pull in to Union Station, DC, well after 1 a.m., and without a cab dispatcher, one, two, three cabbies at the station spurn my paltry ride, one pointing in the distance, barking something about my destination being right there, and when I ask him to clarify, he says something like RIGHT THERE, only louder and with what seemed like anger, so I start to walk with my overnight bag, Canada Life on its side, a zipper cloth pouch of a thing that once held my gym clothes in high school, and walk the streets of Colonial Washington. Dead. Wondering if I’ll see a founding father in a powdered wig or, better yet, a young man dressed as a Trojan soldier. That would be cool.
K and I have a warm reunion over a glass of wine, then we finish the painting of the apartment walls until around 4 a.m., sack out and up at 8ish, grab coffee and croissant, and then on to K Street and Vincent.
What can I say about the road home? Hardly a hushed slow roll. Instead, we talk, for hours. Five on the way back. But we’re in no hurry. K takes a power nap, really only 10 minutes, suddenly awake to the full moon, splitting the uprights of the Verrazano as we enter our home borough, Brooklyn.
We pull up before K's childhood home and with M’s help we unload in a jiff. We’re late for a party, so I don’t stop to show M the side of the truck that Vincent very nearly let go to the disappointed woman, what seems like ages ago. It’s pitch dark so it wouldn’t have made the impression it did on K and me when we were parked on the street in Washington. Pictured on the side is a slave woman with a lantern, making her way along the Underground Railroad. And the location, my home province, Ontario. Dresden, best known for Josiah Henson, the former US slave whose life story was the inspiration for the novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” My hometown, Owen Sound, just down the road.
Next: Running for Your Life: December Highs
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