7.1.24
Sylvia went on a run while I wrote and tried to make up for the wishy washy late plans by picking a breakfast place with her in mind, planning out where to park, and doing the arduous logistics work of being in an unfamiliar place and having a body that needs to be fed and moved places.
Sylvia came back and said the beach is nice. She lights up on the beach. She lights up in nature, generally.
We went to a place called The Stand. This was a win. We both got different oatmeals and coffee for now and a muffin for later. These muffins are very welcome on the ferry later. The oatmeal was the slimy kind that has oatmeal goop that she called ‘interstitial fluid.’
“We should get steel cut oats,” she said.
On our way to The Stand and to… Well we’ll get to parking at Cape Cod in a bit. While in the car that day, we talked about waste management and waste treatment. A thing she is passionate about is what we do with our waste. Culturally, how do we encourage people to dispose of their waste in the most helpful ways possible? How do we treat that waste so it is minimally harmful and how do we turn paper, rigid plastics, and compost into useful resources?
After we got back from the wedding we watched the John Stewart reaction to the presidential debate and had a conversation about government. We’ve had this conversation before: What is government for? It was a good conversation that gave me the room to adjust my perspective on two things. The government’s responsibility for 1. healthcare which isn’t relevant right now and 2. the environment. I’m not sure that I really had a change in perspective on the environment – the tragedy of the commons is a key argument for a governing body. The perspective shift I had was how closely the government’s responsibility for infrastructure could/should align with its responsibility for the environment – for the world’s pre established infrastructure.
Anyway, we tied that conversation into the waste treatment one and I liked that talk a lot. It is great to hear Sylvia talk about her areas of interest and expertise.
Falmouth in Cape Cod, though? Yikes.
Check out this map. The Martha’s Vineyard ferry leaves from Woods Hole all the way down at the bottom of the peninsula. There’s a Woods Hole Parking Garage, right? Ha. More like a parking SPOT. It looks like a mechanic’s shop that decided to charge a billion dollars to store six cars every day. They have them folded up and blocking one another and parallel parked within an inch of one another.
The employees there have to be former Tetris pros or something. Earnestly, calling it a ‘parking garage’ is disingenuous. Like, sure, technically it is a garage and technically you could park a car there if there were no other cars but… Look at this street view pic. They had 4 cars parked where my red car is parked.
Now, look. I knew that we were likely going to drive down there, see that the parking garage was full, and then have to trek back up to the ferry parking on the map to the North but I was at least expecting a parking GARAGE.
Look at what I get when I google ‘parking garage’. Does the above look at all like the below???
Come on.
Okay. So Sylvia is taking all of this fine and, honestly, I am also except that there are cars literally everywhere and I would say that everything is a one way street except that isn’t true because there were also zero way streets around the ferry for people parking their cars in specialized lots for loading onto the ferry so it was worse than if everything was a one way street but that’s fine. Maybe I park in a handicap spot while Sylvia goes into the ticket building and asks what’s up with parking while she gets tickets for the 1:15PM ferry.
Thank you, Sylvia. We find our way back to the road and head back up to the ferry parking that we probably should have just started with in the first place. Then it was supposed to be 20min to the ‘parking garage’ > 20min back to the shuttle lot > 20min back to the ferry > 20min back to the shuttle lot at the end of the day.
Do you think that’s what happened?
We’re in Falmouth, friends. It sounds like Foulmouth for a reason. I’m going to tell you what happened.
The drive back to the lot is burdened with heavy traffic. We’re stopped still on one particular stretch of the road for quite some time. We were talking about something but I can’t quite remember what – I was focused on the road – or rather was unfocused by the road.
Thomas Landers was the parking lot. We were waved into row J like we were a plane in an airport. We were pointed to the row of shuttles. We asked when the shuttle left (we both needed to use the bathroom) and were yelled at to get on the shuttle now. We asked when the next shuttle left and were yelled at to get on the shuttle that was leaving. We tried to get on the shuttle and then were yelled at that the shuttle was full. Then we were yelled at to come back to the previous shuttle and get on.
Guys. We need to use the bathroom. Stop treating us like we are children.
“We would like to use the bathroom,” Sylvia says.
“Oh,” one of the yellers says. “Go in that building.”
Thank you.
There was a TV around the corner in the building playing everyone’s favorite reality TV show, News Media Politics, but I didn’t bump into anyone while I was in the building.
“When does the shuttle leave?” Sylvia asks.
“When it’s full,” says one of the yellers.
Okay.
Turns out that was not true.
We got on the shuttle which was pretty empty and sat at the front. Some people got on and sat in the back. Then, four women who mostly looked related got on, each with a dog. This party sat up front with us. In this party we had Alfie, a black and white Portuguese water dog. We had Teddy, another smaller Portuguese water dog but with a brown coat like your vintage curly haired teddy bear. We had a mysterious unnamed and unidentified maybe-corgi mix that was the smallest of the bunch and jumped into a bus seat, looking regal and alpha. We will call this one Napoleon. And then we had the fattest English bulldog I have ever seen in person or online. This guy was also unnamed, but we’ll call him Chonk and the thing you should know about him is that the bus shook when he took a step.
Chonk huddled his way under the baggage shelves the shuttle had. Napoleon panted. Teddy sat on his owner’s lap (his owner was roughly the same size as him). Alphie came over to get pets from Sylvia.
The rest of the front of the shuttle was empty. Six seats maybe. And the back of the bus was not full either. But we set off regardless after a minute or two of no one else showing up.
The last character in this story is perhaps the most important: the driver. She was a Karen’s worst nightmare. She was on the other side of menopause – maybe 58. She spoke like Bob Peterson’s Roz from Monsters Inc. It’s not so much that she was tired – it was more like she had found some internal limit for things being in her way.
Like, if she woke up one morning and couldn’t get the lid off her jam jar, she’d just break the glass against the counter corner like she was TNA world heavyweight champion Bobby Roode in November 2011 and then she’d just use a shard of broken glass to spread the jam on her slice of over toasted Wonder Bread like that’s how she did it every morning.
I sneezed when the bus started rolling.
Teddy’s owner asked, “Are you allergic to dogs?”
“No, I’m not,” I said.
Three of the four laughed nervously.
“Dogs can’t be on the seats,” she called back. “Fine on the floor or in your lap but I’m not having my next haul keel over because they sat on a hair.”
They had already been on the seats. And wouldn’t hair get on the seats if they were in laps? Two of these dogs are bigger than a six year old.
Napoleon’s owner awkwardly pulled his front paws onto her lap but his back paws were still on the seat. Teddy was already in a lap as much as he could be. Alfie was hanging out with Sylvia on the floor and four people on that bus couldn’t have joined efforts to lift Chonk into a seat if they wanted to. I have no idea how Chonk even got into the bus – I was distracted by Alfie when they got on. His legs might not have been thicker than mine, but they were thicker than my arms for sure. And I do 70 count planks five days a week!
Nothing more was said of dog hair death. The warning had been issued and that checked the box that needed to be checked. I guess? I don’t think dog allergies are like peanut allergies, but anaphylactic shock can kill a person.
I took a Dramamine in the car on the way up and it seemed like I took it soon enough. I felt the vehicle swerve and jostle that would normally set off my motion sickness and I was doing fine. I know this road well. I just traveled it both ways within the last hour. I had Google mapped it the night before. I knew where we were going.
Or at least I knew where we were supposed to be going.
An ambulance drove by.
“Yep,” our driver says. “I sure don’t want to be in one of those.”
We chuckle.
“They’re headed off to get someone,” she says.
Traffic becomes a bit odd. The traffic I just experienced forty minutes ago on our way up and down was awful – that’s just how this place is, isn’t it? But there was something off. Did the dogs notice it? Did they smell something off our driver?
It was moving for a few minutes in halting start-stops and then stop-stopped altogether.
From another driver, I would have expected a sigh or some complaining or some asking-about what’s-going-on or simply a relaxed resignation. Our driver simply grunted and turned the bus off the road, onto the grass, and around the corner of a rocky hill.
Dr. Leslie Gay and Dr. Paul Carliner, thank you for Dramamine.
Sure enough, around the corner we could see a wreck a ways down and the ambulance stuck behind eight people playing the traffic jam logic game Rush Hour next to a steep cliffside drop off. The blue car was horizontal across both lanes. The red and green cars were too close to the blue car for them to correct. The two black cars behind the red and green weren’t moving and the yellow cars were pointed in the wrong direction for the lane they were in.
I am sure there is a story behind how they got into that configuration but we weren’t around long enough for us to work that out. There was an overgrown dirt and gravel path our driver squeezed her way into. It was an extremely uncomfortably steep angle. I don’t think we could have gotten up the road if we were going the other way, it was so steep.
Trees quickly consumed the sunlight and we found ourselves on a canopied path kicking up rocks and dust like the first hundred boulders of a landslide. It became dark and, while it didn’t actually become cooler inside the shuttle because of modern day vehicle air conditioning, it felt like it did.
Nobody was talking except the bus driver who was mumbling something mostly incomprehensible but emphasizing the word ‘road’ loud enough every six or eight words so that we could hear she was focused. The dogs weren’t barking - they were just tuck tail scared except Chonk who had moved into the aisle when I wasn’t looking. Did he slide over? How does that thing even get from A to B. Were they planning to take him for a walk on Martha’s Vineyard? What, up and down the dock in Vineyard Haven? I don’t think the dock is built for that kind of weight, lady.
I noticed I was squeezing Sylvia’s leg and loosened my grip. The look we exchanged said, “What on earth is going on?”
The path kept angling downward. “Aren’t we almost at water level by this point?” Sylvia whispered to me. Up ahead the tunnel of green we were driving through turned into an actual rock mouthed tunnel.
The bus driver said,“[Something something something inaudible] tunnel. Hold on to what your mother gave you!” Then there was a huge bump that lifted me out of my seat and threw me into my seatbelt. “And those dogs!”
Teddy was already being squeezed like his stuffed toy namesake and Napoleon's front paws remained gripped. Floor sprawling Chonk was either going to be fine or was going to make a hole in the bottom of the vehicle, so that was that, but Alphie was not so secured. I saw him become air born and launch in my direction before all light in the bus was eliminated by the unlit dark of the tunnel. There weren’t even lights in this thing like there would be in the normal city tunnels we’d later come to drive through in Boston. Was this a mine shaft? An old smuggler’s railway to some secret port?
I would not end up finding out.
What crashed into me did not feel like a dog named Alphie. I felt some hair but I felt way too much skin. And it was wearing clothes! “What on earth?” I exclaimed. These clothes were too baggy for this to be Sylvia. She doesn’t have this kind of arm hair and I still sensed her in the seat next to me.
“Yelp,” the figure across my lap said. Said. Not barked. It followed this up with a, “Sorry, sorry, sorry.” It was the voice of a thin old man. Tall? How could I know that? Our limbs were tangled and he was putting too much weight in between my legs.
When he shifted his pointy weight onto my right leg instead, I found a moment of relief and in that moment noticed the fluttering of… wings? No – this was plants rubbing up against the windows of the shuttle. But not just some plants, it was like the shuttle was driving through a very thorough dry car wash where all of the brushes were bouquets and there were more than a hundred feet of brushes to drive through.
I took a breath and was met with the scent of dog, donated clothes, and shredded flowers.
Lights came on inside the bus. I’m not sure if the driver turned them on or if there was some sort of light sensitive automation that did it. Either way, it was delayed.
We were indeed driving through a lot of flowers. Looking out the sides of the windows all I could see was hydrangeas. We had seen these things all over Rhode Island - they have these big spherical blooms that are usually blue but sometimes are pink or some kind of light mixed drink color. The ones around – and in front then I saw – of the bus were blue.
How did the bus driver know where we were going? How fast were we going? I don’t know and I don’t know if she knew.
“Excuse me,” the old man in my lap said. He was trying to get up and I helped him and as I did I noticed that the dogs were gone. In their place were these old men. Did the dogs slide to the back? I looked but just saw the same folks I barely registered when we pulled out of the lot.
I remember thinking the parallel thoughts: I don’t remember seeing these men in the back and These men look an awful lot like those dogs.
There was a fat bald man on the ground with a flat nose and three chins that drooped more heavily to the left and right. He wore a beige bowling button up with orange-brown shoulders. Chonk. He didn’t even look like he was concerned to be on the ground. He also didn’t look like he would be able to get up on his own.
There was a short king with both his hands on Napoleon’s owner’s left leg. His eyes were just barely open and he was moving his lips like he was trying to dislodge a thought from his mouth. His hair still had some pepper in it – he looked like he was perhaps 65.
Teddy looked more late 50s but still had a full head of ginger blond curly hair. Thin silver glasses sat at the end of a big nose on a long narrow face. He himself sat, butt in lap, on his owner, his legs and feet spilling over into Napoleon’s seat and his arms wrapped around the woman in what looked like a suffocating attempt to squeeze world order from the thing nearest and dearest to him.
Alfie could have been Teddy’s brother if he didn’t look well over 20 years older. This man had white white hair and looked to be, generously, 79. He wore a black and white shirt with paths that were probably once black but were now faded to the point of appearing brown.
“Are you alright?” I asked after we had become untangled.
“Yes, yes,” he said. “Quite alright, though there will be bruising. There’s always bruising at this age. Getting out of bed is a bruise.”
Spears of light then began to flash into the shuttle at irregular but increasingly frequent intervals. The light was coming from above us. This was sunlight, not anything artificial.
“Welcome to the Blue Isle,” the driver called back. “Consider this the scenic route that happens to be faster than the car clogged mess behind us. Next ferry doesn’t leave until 1:15, so you should still be able to catch it but if you may have to hustle if you don’t already have your tickets.”
Nonplussed, I looked at Sylvia. She was rallying faster than I was and asked, “Where did you say we were?”
“The Blue Isle,” the driver looked at Sylvia through the passenger view mirror in the front. “Can’t you hear?”
It was surprisingly quiet, actually. The bus was hardly making any sound itself and we had surfaced from the hydrangeas into full sunlight. The bus wasn’t amphibious but if it dreamt of being a submarine, this might well be its dream. Looking out all around us, we were in a literal sea of hydrangeas. Undulating waves of blue flowers stretched as far as the eye could see except for the small blue island we were pulling up onto.
I say blue island because that’s what it was called, I guess. In reality, it was green with grass and yellow with sand and brown with a small cabin building to the West. There were also, though, a lot of hydrangeas.
At this point, the women with the dogs were coming around to put voice to their confusion.
“Teddy?” Teddy’s owner said, looking at the spectacled man on her lap.
“Hi Esme,” Teddy said with a smile. He was beginning to unwind. The bus had now fully pulled up from the hydrangea ocean and was riding smoothly on a road made from tightly packed grey bricks. Later in Boston, Sylvia and I would talk about bricks and wheels. I wasn’t thinking about this road consciously when I brought up the subject, but looking back on it, I must have been subconsciously because this road made such an impression on me. How was it so clean here when the dirt and gravel thing we had just come from had weeds the size of my siblings growing in the road’s center?
The two across from me hugged. Chonk’s owner appeared to have fainted and Chonk had given up trying to lift his head to see what was going on and was now staring at the ceiling of the shuttle. Napoleon and his owner looked at each other in an attracted loving way which I found quite uncomfortable.
Alfie left me and crossed over to sit next to his owner. He put a knobby hand on her knee, looked her in the eyes and said, “Gloria, you have been so good to us and to your sisters and cousin. You should know that the four of us see how you do your best for our pack and, even when things don’t go well, you put your mind to getting things better. That’s the important thing and it’s a thing to be proud of.”
Gloria burst into tears. She didn’t fall into Alfie with a great sobbing hug but instead became racked with quiet gasps as she looked down at her hands. Alfie put his arm around her and pulled her into his frail body that seemed less frail in that moment.
“What is going on?” someone called from the back. I turned my attention in time to see the single building on this island framed in the shuttle’s back window.
“You’re on a shuttle to the Martha’s Vineyard ferry,” the driver called back. “You senile?”
I guess we were still on track.
“I mean all treats are good,” Teddy said as he was straightening himself after getting off Esme’s lap. “But the ones that smell like fish are the best.”
“I thought you liked those best,” Esme said. “What do you do with all those tennis balls?”
Teddy gave a proud smirk as he puffed out his chest and said, “I’ll never tell.”
I swear Napoleon and his owner were about to kiss when the bus driver said, “Here’s another bump!”
It was less jarring than the last but we were now kicking up sand headed straight back into the sea of hydrangeas. The two would-be-lovers cracked their foreheads together and then there was a stomach lifting drop as we must have cleared air and slammed into the ground, now fully again under-hydrangea.
The cabin lights were still off so it was much darker but we had spears of light again. In one flash I saw dogs. In the next flash I saw the old men again. Then dogs. Then old men. The flashes became less frequent as we continued our descent.
By the time the shuttle lights flickered on we were in another tunnel and the dogs were dogs once again. They all looked quite happy except Chonk who just looked like he was focused on breathing.
The tunnel we were in now was more what you would expect from a tunnel with a road. Actually, it was asphalt again we were driving on and there were rectangle yellow lights fixed to the ceiling of the tunnel.
“Almost there,” the driver called back. “Made good time. Should be able to grab a chicken wrap in the ticket office if you’re hungry.” We had our muffins from The Stand.
The tunnel inclined and we found ourselves in a significant parking garage. Like, an actual parking garage. Rows and rows and rows of white lines and thick concrete pillars that our boy Chonk couldn’t take down if he gave a serious tackle.
Alfie’s head was in Gloria’s lap. She was petting him with one hand while drying her eyes with the other.
“They expect me to take all of these folks back?” The driver was talking to us in her way, which was to say that she was talking to us but did not care for, expect, or want a response.
There was a big crowd at the top of the underground parking garage. On the other side of them were more traditional garage doors that looked familiar. “No way,” I said.
“What?” Sylvia asked.
Look. A lot of that is likely hard to believe but the hardest thing for me to believe in that moment was that the bus driver had just dropped us off inside Woods Hole Parking Garage – that dinky looking mechanic’s shop we tried to park in 40 minutes ago.
I’m coming up on 20 pages drafted here so I’m going to head to bed and pick up with muffins tomorrow