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range anxiety
Friday, September 25 2026
location: rural Town of Hurley, Ulster County, NY
After getting up fairly early (well before 8:00am), I managed to get through all my morning obligations by 9:00am, at which point I told the dogs in a solemn voice that they did not get to come, and they knew that I meant it because they didn't follow me out the door to see me drive away. I would be driving to the hamelet of Lyons in western New York to meet up with Gretchen and the other marchers on the penultimate afternoon of their march. To get there, I'd decided to take the scenic route through Middleburgh up to I-90 west, thereby bypassing the Albany area. Since my destination was much further west than the Adirondack cabin, though, I went straight at the one traffic light in Middleburgh to stay on route 145 instead of taking the left to go towards Schoharie. Just before doing that, though, I stopped at the Middleburgh Stewarts because I didn't think I'd had enough caffeine yet that day. I also bought a bag of surprisingly gourmet sea salt & vinegar potato chips (at least for a gas station), a product made by a company called Wrap City. The chips were thicker than usual and appeared to be cross-sections of potatoes that had not had their skins removed.
I'd been through Middleburgh and Schoharie many times, and, with the exception of the rarely-useful I-88 passing through, this area had always seemed like a rural backwater in the northeast Catskills. What I didn't know was that the village of Cobleskill, which I passed through today, wasn't far to the northeast and it has both a Burger King and a McDonalds. I hadn't looked at the map and assumed that the bridge across Schoharie Creek in Middleburgh went directly to Canajoharie, but it didn't work that way. I found myself on a mix of roads as Google Maps kept offering me choices that made little difference in terms of time. The route I took crossed through hilly terrain that was mostly agricultural and beautiful. I went through such places as Lawyersville, Janesville, and Sharon Springs (which sits atop a highland but includes a notable pond on the south end of town). After driving past the site of the No Kings protest we'd attended in Canajoharie, I drove past the quirky Betty Beavers gas station and got on the Thruway, tapping into my phone to tell Gretchen I was on I-90 west bound out of Canajoharie. The drive from there was pretty straightforward. I found myself listening mostly to KROCK, the somewhat extreme contemporary rock station that must broadcast from somewhere like Syracuse (though I can get it in the southern Adirondacks at the cabin).
A little before noon, I cracked open the one road beer I intended to drink, a Wizard Double IPA (16 ounces at 8% alcohol, or 1.2 ounces of pure alcohol).
As the Bolt's battery depeleted, I figured I could make it to the Warners service area, though I didn't know what I would do if the fast charger there wasn't working. When I got to Warners, I had to drive around in a loop (against the prevailing flow of traffic for half of it) before finding the fast charger. There was only one, and, ominously, there was no queue of people lined up to use it. I soon discovered that its credit card reader wasn't working, which forced me to install the AppleGreen app in hopes I could initiate a charge via RFID. Of course, though, the way the Google store has been enshittified, I initially thought that EvGo was the app I needed for AppleGreen, since it came up first in a search for AppleGreen. I even went through the bother and annoyance of installing the EvGo app before realizing it had come first in my search only to skim traffic from a competitor and it was useless for my needs. But then of course even with the AppleGreen app installed (or did it just need to be updated? they always do!), I either didn't have an account or didn't know my password for it. So I spent ten minutes setting up an account only to find that I already had an account tied to that email address. But then when I tried to reset the password multiple times, the new password never worked for some reason. None of these things are what anyone wants to be doing when one doesn't know whether electricity can even be produced from a charger, and I was howling at my phone in a rage by the end. Then a yellow jacket flew into the car and started bothering me, and I reacted with such a wild animal noise that I startled someone getting into a nearby car. It certainly didn't help that I was a little intoxicated from having consumed 1.2 ounces of pure ethanol. When I couldn't get the charger to operate using RFID, I called the toll-free hotline and got a surprisingly helpful AI assistant. I was able to explain things that were happening and "she" was able to do things on "her" end like try to initiate charging. But it soon became clear that the charger could not be made to work. Not to fear, the helpful AI explained, there was a a level-2 charger not that far away. But when I navigated to the location she said, it required driving forward to the next exit and then back, and it was over thirty miles away, well beyond the range my Bolt now had. But I set out anyway to the next exit, knowing that to get to a charger I would have to get off the Thruway. It was something like twelve miles to the next exit (Exit 40), and somewhere in there the Bolt stopped giving me an estimated range and instead just kept telling me I needed to charge soon. It also switched to a mode where it provided reduced propulsion, which was fine with me.
After taking Exit 40, I pulled over on the side of the road and did a Google search for "level 2 chargers near me." In my confusion at the result, it looked like one was only a few miles away. But then I saw that I was being directed back onto the Thruway to head east again, so clearly all I'd seen was the first leg of the drive. I then drove around looking at the exterior walls of a pair of gas stations to see if there were any 120v outlets. Such an outlet can only provide about four miles of range per hour with the level-1 charger I always carry, but that might be enough to get me to a level 2 charger within a few hours. Clearly I wasn't going to be making it to Lyons by the time Gretchen wanted me to be there. But I couldn't even find one such outlet. So I did another search for level 2 chargers near me, and this time I could see that the whole drive to one was only about eight miles. I didn't know if I had enough range to go that far, but I had no alternative idea, so I began following the driving instructions. Google Maps had me drive southward, crossing over a series of ridges that gradually seemed to be increasing my elevation. I tried to drive at around 45 degrees, which is generally the optimal speed for maximizing range, and I did my best never to come to a complete stop at a traffic light (though this wasn't always possible).
I ended up in a genuine city, one called Auburn that sits at the north end of a smallish Finger Lake called Owasco. Google Maps directed me to a set of chargers behind a Holiday Inn, and some even looked like fast chargers! When the Bolt made it to a stop in front of one, I could relax a little knowing that I was unlikely to need a tow. When the charger responded to my credit card and began charging the Bolt, I knew the crisis was finally behind me. At this point the car finally told me how many miles of range I still had: four miles. That's by far the closest I'd ever come to running out of juice before getting to a charger. I walked over to the shade and typed a brief account of what had happened into a direct message to Gretchen so she would know that I expected to be late. I then made myself a peanut butter sandwich. I figured I needed about 100 miles of range to make it to this evening's destination (Rochester), so that was all that I put into the Bolt's battery. Somehow, though, the price for that 96 miles of range came to over $20, which is a very expensive per-kilowatt-hour cost. But it was a lot cheaper than any alternative I would've faced had that charger not been where I found it.
The drive to Lyons took about a half hour and took me across about thirty miles generally northwestward across beautiful farmland, some of it (judging from the yellow signs depicted horse-drawn buggies) belonging to the Amish. The closer I got to Lyons, the more apple orchards I passed. Gretchen tried to call me just as I was approaching the center of the hamlet of Lyons, and there is no way for me to answer my phone while I am driving, particularly when I am not out on a big four lane road. I have to both answer it and get it into speakerphone mode, since otherwise the microphone does not work. And doing all that while trying to drive will definitely make me crash. So I pulled over and called Gretchen back, saying I was within sight of Lyons Town Hall's aluminum dome. She said she was too, so I only had to drive about a block.
I'd missed the big action that had happened in Lyons, where the marchers had presented a request to the Wayne County prosecutor to investigate animal cruelty at Marshall BioResources, the massive lab animal breeding facility that the march would be ending at tomorrow. I found Gretchen chatting with some of her closest colleagues over near a fountain. There had been good days and bad days on the march, and today had been a fairly bad one and she was exhausted from all the drama. Someone had led marchers to chant unfortunate things in front of the town hall, and Gretchen's co-lead Ella was dealing with a high-maintenance influencer who had just flown in and was making her wait around while she spent 45 minutes "changing" before the evening's event. (None of the actual marchers had felt a need to "change.") Then there was some weird press interview where Gretchen and Ella seemed to be given lines to repeat in front of the camera by the interviewer, and they were too fried to care. Eventually, though, Gretchen and Ella finished up everything they needed to do in Lyons and I was their cheauffer in the Chevy Bolt driving them to the next event in downtown Rochester. Gretchen had loaned our Subaru Forester to one of her colleagues so someone's little ten year old daughter could be picked up from the Rochester airport.
Tonight's event was to be something of a celebration of the march at Temple Theatre, a quaint old space from Rochester's golden age about the size of a high school auditorium. An enormous number of pizzas and other foods (including macaroni salad, leafy salad, faux chicken wings) had been ordered from Squatcho's, the amazing vegan pizza place nearby. The pizzas just kept coming, and it was difficult to imagine there would be enough people to justify how many had been ordered. A little over 100 people ultimately arrived for the event, a very small fraction of which I met or was introduced to by Gretchen. For awhile I stuck near people I knew, particularly Maryann from Mulberry Street (we'd be staying at her house tonight), partly because her feelings about large crowds where she doesn't know many people is similar to mine. Gretchen had also ordered a bunch of beer, though unfortunately about half of it came in bottles and nobody had a bottle opener. As for the food, for some reason I much preferred a mix of leafy salad with macaroni salad and was not especially craving the actual pizza. Beer-wise, I started with a hazy IPA of some sort that started tasting to me of chemicals while doing nothing to quench my thirst, so for my second beer I managed to open a bottle of Corona by popping the top off against the plastic top off a pole designed to hold a velvet rope aloft.
After everyone had tucked into a fair amount of food, the event began. It started with Gretchen, Ella, Maryann (just mentioned), her podcasting partner (and ex-wife) Jasmine, and a guy named Adam Maryann and Jasmine had interviewed way back in February about the Riglan lab dog breeding operation in Wisconsin. Gretchen told the assembled how this group was interconnected and provided the spark that brought this march to life. Gretchen had heard Adam's interview, decided to fly to Riglan for that open rescue debacle, and then learned about the much more massive Marshall BioResources near Rochester. This had given her the idea of perhaps having a march from Albany to Marshall, an idea that Ella had heard her mention when Gretchen was later interviewed on Maryann & Jasmine's podcast. Ella and Gretchen then got to talking and soon they'd built the organization to provide everything the march needed, including nice-to-haves like tonight's big event, which started to feel to me a little like the awards ceremony at the end of the original Star Wars movie (though in this cienmatic universe, the catering was being handled by the wookie, given Squatcho's mascot). After Gretchen had laid out the origin story, she called up all the committee leads until something like 21 people were standing on the stage. She and Ella talked about how indispensible everyone had been, and much applause was given. For this entire part of the evening, I sat all by myself amid people I did not know at all.
Towards the end of announcements from the stage, one of Gretchen's captains took the stage and called Gretchen and Ella up to present them with framed "art" commemorating the march. I couldn't see what it was at the time, and Gretchen and Ella did a good job of concealing their feelings about it, but the "art" was AI generated, with Gretchen who looked nothing like the actual woman and had a body identical to Ella's, though it didn't look like Ella's body either. In fact, all the marchers had that same body, and the everything else in the picture had a creepy cloned copy that could only provoke laughter, though the woman presenting these framed images was doing so sincerely.
While people at the event then turned their attention to making signs for tomorrow's protest, Gretchen was figuring out how to leave early, as she had no more energy to buzz around with her usual high-octane extroversion. Meanwhile Ella had been trying to figure out a way to ger herself and her little dog Jane to Maryann's house for at least a half hour, as she is an introvert who is used to early bedtimes. In the end, the three of us (and Jane) were able to get leave at around the same time.
At Maryann's house, we plugged in our Bolt (she has an electric car charger) and Maryann showed Ella up to her attic overflow guest room. Then Gretchen, Maryann and I all had a good chuckle about the framed AI-generated art and a few of the things that had transpired tonight. I went off to bed before Gretchen, and off in the distance I could hear Gretchen playing a message by Pat Ryan about the march. Pat Ryan, as you may recall, is not our congressman, but he represents the next district over and Gretchen is a big supporter. Nevertheless, Ryan took his sweet time recording a message of support, and Gretchen was grumbling about it.
On the road from Middleburgh, soon after crossing the bridge across Schoharie Creek. Click to enlarge.
On the road from Middleburgh somewhat further to the north. Click to enlarge.
Ella (with Jane the Beagle) and Gretchen (to the left of the sign) addressing march organizers on the village green in Lyons. Kai is the man with the closed eyes in the foreground. Click to enlarge.
Crossroads in the center of Lyons. Click to enlarge.
Ella and Gretchen on stage at the Temple Theatre. Click to enlarge.
The image generated by artificial intelligence earnestly presented to both Gretchen and Ella at tonight's event. The woman in the left foreground is supposed to be Gretchen. Click to enlarge.
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