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illogical results of extreme corporate cost-cutting
Monday, May 20 2002
setting: Hogwaller, Charlottesville, VirginiaWhen I woke up this morning in Jessika's guest room, not only did I have a horrendous hangover, but I had a tick embedded in my throat like some tiny Count Dracula. I'd been finding ticks on me (a dozen or so in total) ever since Jessika and I visited the abandoned Rockfish Gap Tunnel, though for some reason she hadn't found any on her at all.
Today was my day to go back to Staunton, so I had Jessika drop me off at the Charlottesville Greyhound station, which is very close to the Downtown Mall. I hadn't actually been inside this station in recent memory and had no idea how big and bustling it actually is. It's something of a hub for this part of the country, with a half dozen boarding gates, television chairs, and toilet stalls you don't have to pay to use. The main thing it lacks is a built-in Hardees, but there are vending machines in case you don't want to walk around hungry.[REDACTED]
My bus to Staunton was actually originating in Charlottesville, so it wasn't especially full when I boarded. The one thing I hated about the ride was how slowly the bus climbed the Blue Ridge. You'd have thought we were hauling 30 tons of manganese ore.
Unlike its Charlottesville counterpart, the Staunton Greyhound station has none of the qualities of a regional hub. It's a simple storefront with a desk and a telephone and perhaps a coin-operated toilet. In the past this station was in the heart of Staunton's downtown, between the train station and the Stonewall Jackson Hotel. Now, as already mentioned, the Staunton Greyhound Station is not even in Staunton, but is adjacent to the Augusta County Office Complex in the dismal northern strip village of Verona. I'd thought of this as but a minor additional inconvenience after arriving via that nightmare ride from Washington, DC. But now, here in the middle of the afternoon after a simple ride from Charlottesville, the fact that I found myself in Verona seemed like a gross injustice.
I know the economic reasons behind the sorry new home of the "Staunton" Greyhound Station. Storefront property in Verona is dirt cheap, and Verona is easy to reach from I-81. Be that as it may, by any measure of customer service or transportational effectiveness, the Greyhound Station has no business being in Verona. Verona is not a stop on the Staunton municipal bus system, and even if someone intended on walking from the station, the highways into Staunton from the north are typical of the pedestrian-hostile late-model works of VDOT. I don't know where the sidewalks being on the north end of Staunton, but it's a long way from Verona. In a just world, a monopoly like Greyhound would be required by law to locate their bus stations near city centers. But their attention to the bottom line, as well as Greyhound's apparent lack of regulation, makes this nation's inferior public transportation system just that much crappier.
This wouldn't have been a big deal, but today I wanted to be independent and free, not requiring the services of either a taxicab or my pickup-driving mother. I was determined to use the Greyhound Station as the final motorized stop on my journey. So I set out on foot, stopping along the way at Tastee Freeze for an all-American lunch of a burger and fries.
The walk into Staunton down US 11 was even longer than I imagined. The road was straight and stretched out into the grey distance discouragingly. It was an unusually brisk day for this time of year and periodically rain would spit down from the clouds. Adding to 11's hopelessness was its vast width and relative paucity of traffic, though I wasn't even trying to hitch hike.
Happily, soon after I passed the aggressively-annexed and completely desolate northern Staunton City limits, a car stopped in the center fifth turning lane and a girl with bright pink hair asked if I needed a ride. "Yes, I do!" I said, running over and hopping in.
She was young and looked like she might still be in high school. When I asked her what she was listening to, she told me Sleater-Kinney. In the course of exchanging brief versions of our life stories, she revealed that she'd attended Fort Defiance High School, a place about as backwater and narrow-minded as my own Riverheads. I imagine a girl like that with pink hair and an interest in non-testicular alternative rock would experience some trouble fitting in at Redneckistani high school.
The girl let me off in front of the ugly new parking garage downtown, diagonally across from the dingy remnants of the old supplanted Greyhound Station. From there, I walked all the way out to my parents' farm on foot. According to Yahoo Maps, that was 5.6 miles. My brother walks this distance both directions at least once each week, but this might have only been my second time.
Walking past the place where the new southern loop crosses Middlebrook Road was especially depressing for someone like me trying so hard to live for today in a human scale way (as opposed to the scale of the mountain-leveling State). I've said it before and I'll say it again, highway departments have no interest in finding ways to make their creations compatible with the landscapes they pass through. When in doubt or perplexed by the task at hand, their solution is to level topography and default to four lane highway "solutions." In the case of the intersection of Middlebrook Road and the southern loop, they had the added complication of building in the highly flood-prone Lewis Creek Valley, famous for sending disastrous floods through the Wharf section of Staunton (home to the Jolly Rogers Haggle Shop). To cope with the additional runoff from vast new expanses of paved former-farmland, the imaginative engineers of VDOT had seen fit to include a massive flood-retainment pond inside the loop of one of the onramps. It's a vast dirt-colored circular pond drained by an artless vertical cement pipe. Beneath all of the fill of this intersection is the former site of the Furr Stockyard and an old house where Josh Furr used to live. We used to practice playing loud rock and roll in that old house, but the topography has been so drastically altered I couldn't even tell you where that house used to be.
At about this point in my walk I began sipping vodka as a means to fill in the depths of my hangover.
Once I made it home, all I wanted to do was go immediately to bed.
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