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Haymarket, Wilmington, and Pompton Plains
Saturday, July 31 2021
location: near the southwest end of Ridge Street, Charlottesville, Virginia
I was drinking coffee this morning with Jessika and Aaron when Jessika realized she should call her mother because it was her late father's birthday. Meanwhile Gretchen had wanted me to get back to the Hudson Valley at 8:00pm, in time for a walkthrough of the Brewster Street house; tonight the tenant, Eileen Peppers, was supposed to finally be leaving, ending her four-year reign of gaslighting and abuse. So I had to interrupt Jessika's phone conversation with her mother to say goodbye.
I'd researched the charging options around Charlottesville, but to get a fast charge there, I would need to pay a monthly membership into yet another charging network. It seemed easiest just to drive to the next charging station in the network to which I already was a member (in this case, Electrify America) that was on my way home. This was how I came to be driving steadily northward on US 29 towards Haymarket, site of the closest DC-area Electrify America charger to Charlottesville. (I remember Haymarket being an important place along the route my parents used to drive from Lanham, Maryland, to Staunton, Virginia in the year before we actually moved to Staunton in April of 1976.)
As I drove, I listened to my musical travel mix and ate cold leftover pad thai from last night. It was a little better today, because I'd added a lot more sliced-up jalapeño to it.
The Electrify America chargers at the Haymarket Walmart were a little hard to find because they were around the side. As always, after I had my car charging, I went into the Walmart to piss (if nothing else). As I walked in, some guy sat there by the doors, demanding that people take masks. It didn't matter that I was vaccinated; he wanted me to put one on. Perhaps the Delta variant of the coronavirus was bad in the Haymarket area. Or Walmart had changed its policy nationwide after various coronavirus surges throughout the south. I had no problem with putting the mask on, though the woman behind me in line acted like it was a bit of an imposition, though not one to throw a full Karen about.
I'd had the pick of the chargers when I'd arrived at the Haymarket chargers, but then my particular charger quit prematurely while I was over next door checking out a Home Depot that was still in the final phases of construction. So I had to move Bolt to a different charger. And then two other cars showed up, one of which was a Porsche. I didn't even know Porsche made a car that could be electrically charged. I spent some time sitting beside my car with my laptop in my lap doing some writing, and there was a Hispanic woman in a nearby car waiting to start her Walmart shift who kept staring at me. I wondered if perhaps she did a little prostitution on the side, as I feel I'm beyond the age of women having non-contractual interest in me.
[REDACTED]
From Haymarket, I would be following the route Gretchen and I would normally follow when driving from Washington, DC back to Hurley. I decided the next reasonable charging station would be the one just south of Wilimington, Delaware. Unfortunately, on the drive there, I hit several bad patches of slow-moving congestion. This started on the Capital Beltway, happened a couple times in Maryland, and was especially bad for the last fifteen miles of Delaware.
The charging station south of Wilimington was at a Wawa, which is a 7-Eleven-type franchise I think of being restricted to eastern Pennsylvania (a plays a big role in the pre-Charlottesville life of the Malvern Girls). This one was perhaps a little bigger, resembling a Sheetz. Intestingly, the vast majority of its customers were African American. Out at my car, a very tall African American gentleman parked another presumably all-electric Porsche at a charger nearby, and I wondered (admittedly with a certain amount of racist assumptions) if he was a professional basketball player. By the time I was getting ready to leave, all the working chargers were in use (and at least two of them didn't work). Two guys were there with identical electric Mustangs, one of whom jumped on my working charger the moment I left.
Initially my plan was to drive from Wilmington to Newburgh, NY on one charge. In theory this would've been possible, but I wasn't sure how it would play out in practice. Fortunately for me, the Bolt provides three numbers for what it thinks its range is: a high value, a low value, and a value somewhere in between. And that in-between value was just a few miles less than the distance to the charging station at the Walmart in Newburgh. So as I was driving up the New Jersey turnpike, I could monitor that middle number and see its relationship to the number of miles Google Maps was saying I had left. For awhile the numbers were three miles apart, and eventually, with careful driving (that is, always behind large trucks and rarely exceeding 65 miles per hour) I managed to get that number down to just one mile apart (though it was one mile too little). But as I got into other driving conditions and there weren't trucks to follow, that number started to grow. So eventually I decided to pull into a rest area and find a somewhat closer Electrify America charging station to set as my navigational destination. The one I ended up selecting was the one in Pompton Plains, NJ.
Unlike the charging stations at Walmarts, Sheetzes, and Wawas, the Pompton Plains one was at a Stop & Shop supermarket. After starting my car charging, I went into the Stop & Shop to piss and look for their beer section. But New Jersey is weird; they might allow you to pump your own electricity, but you cannot pump your own gas. And because of licensing restrictions, supermarkets don't generally sell beer. That's usually not a problem, and it wasn't one here; I could get Hazy Little Things at the no-name liquor store next door. As for food, there was a Moe's Southwest Grill in the plaza with the Stop & Shop and the liquor store. I'd never been to one of those before, but it's a lot like a Chipotle. They even have a vegan meat substitute, though in order to order it you have to say you want "meat," which I didn't. The resulting burrito wasn't as good as Chipotle, but it was perfectly fine for a solor road trip. It came with corn chips, but they were so cheap looking that I ground them up with my foot on the unused concrete base for an not-yet-installed vehicle charging transformer to make it easier for the birds and rats who would eventually be eating them.
Once I had a good charge in Pompton Plains, I could drive as fast as I wanted to for the rest of the drive back to Hurley. For the last forty miles or so, I popped open a road beer, the second of the drive (the other had been on the southern New Jersey Turnpike).
Back home in Hurley, it was after 10:00pm and Gretchen was still waiting for our evil tenant Eileen Peppers to say it was time for our final walk-through at the Brewster Street house. I was beat from a day of electric-car driving, which is arduous when there is no set time of arrival but which is demoralizing when there is. (Gretchen had, as you recall, wanted me to be home by 8:00pm, which, given traffic conditions and the nature of electric car driving, had proved impossible. But Eileen wasn't even ready for me to help Gretchen with the walkthrough when I finally did arrive two hours late.) So I lay down in bed to nap until Eileen said she was ready.
But Eileen never did say she was ready. So after 11:00pm, Gretchen and I decided to drive out to the Brewster Street house. I was doing the driving, and as I came to the bottom of Dug Hill Road, I had a moment of what felt like dementia, the kind my mother must experience all the time. I'd been doing so much driving from and to my childhood home that those mental maps had pushed aside all my Hudson Valley mental maps. So as I approached Hurley Mountain Road, I wondered for a moment where the fuck I was. But then I came out of the woods (and its lack of landmarks) and it all came flooding back.
When we arrived at the Brewster Street house, it was nowhere near ready for a walkthrough. Eileen was supposed to be out of there by the stroke of midnight (well less than an hour away), but there was trash and stuff everywhere, particularly in the attic room she'd illegally used as a bedroom (something about which we'd been willing to look the other way). But there was also a row of trash (mixed with possibly-good items) all along the curb. Who was going to deal with that? Eileen's son William was there, working hard to vacate the house. But he's only one person. He seemed to think all that stuff on the curb would be going into storage.
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