Adventures In Disorienteering

So the hiking trip went quite well, and I'm back in my room with Isaac, still unshowered, playing some rather vigorous minor-key chords on Katie's keyboard in the room next door... There's a story behind that, I think, but first I'll direct you to the photos I took over the past few weeks.

The hiking itself was enjoyable and well-needed, though more difficult than any I think I've ever done before. I realized pretty quickly that the hikes we'd done in school, while often over harsh terrain and incorporating many of the notorious features such as lack of showers and pooping in the wild, were generally not long treks with packs and were usually accomplished with the assistance of water trucks, camp cooks, and other niceties. This set in the first time the trail faded out and I realized I had no idea which way to go; I'd never been on a hike where someone else hadn't been interpreting the trail. Fortunately, Katie's Girl Scout experience had taught her to read trail blazes, and she taught me how to read the painted signs. She became the navigator for most of the trip, reading blazes and also interpreting the topo map, a tool I had a vague idea how to read but had never actually seen in action.

I say "vague idea how to read" and mean I knew that the wavy brown lines meant a steeper slope when denser, but I didn't know how steep, and apparently Katie and Isaac didn't either, for we found ourselves on the third day clinging to a steep face of rock overlooking the Palisades Parkway with a minimum of thirty pounds strapped to each of our backs. We later agreed there'd probably been something in a guidebook somewhere which we hadn't read which would indicate that that particular trail should not be climbed without a top rope. Such was the spirit of ad-hocracy of the trip.

For the most part, though, we were not so ad-hoc as to completely incapacitate us, and what we got to see for our risks was quite lovely -- the views from that face were incradible, and we really felt we'd accomplished something. Later on that trail we also saw three white-tailed deer and a mother pheasant who came rushing at us as if she was going to peck the hell out of our knees, then dashed in the opposite direction from her babies in a textbook example of mother bird behavior. We also saw a snake and some really awesome fungus (see pictures). After two and a half days of pounding our legs until they had no sensation left, we found ourselves at a green picnic ground scattered with buttercups and collapsed in time for sunset. All in all, the hike was great.

(takes a deep breath as she begins to tell the story which will make her father say, "I TOLD you always to check that before you go on a trip!!!!" and possibly have a seizure.)

It was the drive back which was almost catastrophic. We'd driven up in the lovely-though-battered white Cadillac Fleetwood which Isaac had been given by a generous member of his parish to ease the commute he has to make with his amps and other equipment up to their New Rochelle church. The car guzzled almost an entire American tankload of gas just getting Isaac from Brooklyn out of the city, and was definitely putting off some bad fumage as we made our way up the Palisades getting there. Cars passed us honking angrily. I'd tell you how slow the car went when Isaac floored it, but the spedometer was so broken the needle only left 5 MPH once, and that was to do some frantic waving in a lower-than-optimal range of the dial.

"Is this heap insured?" I asked Isaac. He made hurt noises, as if it was mean that I'd even questioned his ability to be responsible, so I didn't press the issue.

When we got back in the car this morning to make our way back, the car acted as Isaac said it sometimes did, refusing to shift out of neutral after he started it up. He floored it, and the engine raced. As we made our way out on the highway again, Katie and I speculated as to how the car might be tuned up. We agreed the idle was too high. I was hearing a high screech which also sounded really familiar at high speeds. I figured it was a belt of some sort. I was still getting some pretty heavy fumes, even in the backseat, but I decided not to say anything about that; Isaac was still acting wounded about our attempts to black-box his engine, and since the fumes weren't anything like the awful sulphur ones I got a dose of when the Vista Cruiser's battery boiled off one hot day in L.A., I decided not to say anything. It was just an old car. If anything, it smelled like a little oil was burning.

But no old car is just an old car; there's always something specifically wrong, and with some smarts it could be fixed. A childhood with my dad should have taught me that, at least.

As we neared the New York-New Jersey border outside Orangeville, the car gave up on accelerating on a slope. We coasted to a stop just past the state line. The wheelwells were smoking. While Katie made use of her mom's AAA card, I poked under the hood. The radiator fluid was fine; all the hoses and belts appeared to be in pretty good shape for their age. I tried the dipstick...

...promptly discovering that we'd made the same mistake I had six years ago on a cross country trip.

The dipstick was bone dry, even upon a second dipping. There wasn't a drop of oil in the engine. There was barely even any grime. It was a dead certainty the screeching which sounded so familiar was the music of an engine fusing into a hunk of solid steel crappitude.

And we were out of AAA's jurisdiction, so we were going to have to let the Palisades Police take care of us.

So we sat it out for a while. Isaac and Katie jammed on harmonica and tin whistle, and Isaac taught us both how to play the bones. I tried to remember how to sing "Carrickfergus," but it wasn't quite in the right key.

Eventually a New Jersey state trooper pulled up to investigate. At this point it was revealed that Isaac had just taken the plates, registration, and insurance of the last owner. Katie assured me he'd set the process in motion, but the point was moot, as the deadly serious trooper pointed out that the registration and insurance weren't even in the name of the nice old parishoner who'd given Isaac the car.

And the plates were coming up in the file system as "voluntarily surrendered."

And then, "stolen."

And then the trooper didn't like the looks of the fact that Katie had a Michigan driver's license when she was claiming to have grown up in Jersey and be living currently in New York.

And then he didn't like the looks of the bag of lemonade powder Katie had left on the dashboard when she went to freshen up her canteen.

"This isn't Hollywood," he barked when we insisted he just taste it. "We don't just go sticking our fingers into bags of powder and tasting them to see if they're cocaine!"

Two or three or four more officers, plus a tow truck, came and went. The Jersey officer looked us up in the computer system and wrote down all of our information. He didn't like it much that the only ID I had on me was a credit card, nor that I balked at giving him my social security number, which I mentioned I hadn't been asked about by cops before... which led him to give me the eye until I volunteered the information about the "parading without a permit" charge a few years back. All in all it was clear that even though we were filthy and smelly and relatively in posession of our senses, he thought our story about taking a gift car to go hiking didn't wash. He kept asking repeatedly how we'd come into possession of a stolen car. As he wrote down our information for what must have been the third time, he looked Isaac over and made some comment about how he couldn't be doing too badly, out alone with two women in the woods. Katie and I thought this was hilarious. The cop said he didn't see how any of this was funny. I don't see how he could possibly have been keeping a straight face; he was trying to process in a church organist in a funky old car given to him by a parishoner, and the car somehow was turning out to be stolen even though it was old and now broken beyond repair. It's so high-concept, someone has already bought the script rights out from under me.

After some negotiation over the radio it turned out we were in the New York state police's jurisdiction. They searched our pockets, finding nothing more scandalous than the pair of underwear I'd neglected to put on that morning in my eagerness to get back to civilization. However, as we were still apparently in posession of stolen property, they handcuffed us and put me and Katie in the back of a cruiser. Isaac got read his rights and went off in a K-9 unit van with another cop and a cantankerous Rottweiler we were told was nearing retirement and not in command of all of his senses.

Our cop, by contrast, was young and pleasant, and told us he liked to listen to just about any kind of music. "Except rap," I said. "Yeah," he said, sounding surprised that I'd guessed. I considered asking him if he knew anything about Clear Channel, but judged it better to go along, get along, and not to try to throw up any sort of obvious shibboleths.

When Katie and I walked into the state troopers' station, there was a scrawny Indian American kid in a Harvard sweatshirt and giant untied sneakers sitting inside, shackled to a bench and looking haggard as an officer questioned him.

"So why did you shoot the guy?" he asked the kid.

"I don't know," the kid responded.

"You just shot him for no reason."

"He was pissing me off, I guess."

"You're eighteen, right? Eighteen, and just shot a guy for no reason." The officer shook his head and wrote some stuff down. Katie exchanged a look and I made our way to another bench, to which we were handcuffed. I had all sorts of thoughts about how the criminal system exposes people wrongly charged to people who have committed heinous crimes -- we'd been singing earlier about litterers put in with father-r^pers -- until the officer asked him some more questions, and it became clear that the kid and some friends were simply in for reckless driving. He had, in fact, been chased right past us by the same officer just minutes before.

In the end, Isaac got three tickets -- one for driving without insurance, one for driving without registration, and one for driving in an uninspected car. The story behind the stolen plates was weirdly anticlimactic: a woman had given the elderly parishioner the car but failed to take off her plates. When she didn't manage to retrieve the plates (why wasn't clear), she apparently decided that the easiest thing to do was report the plates as stolen.

They held us for a while, eventually unshackling us and releasing us to the lobby, where we had a rollicking discussion about civil disobedience and whether the cops had actually had a right to search our backpacks as they did. Katie called an uncle to try to get a ride, much to Isaac's chagrin; this would be the first time he met any of her family. I called Chuck, who laughed heartily as I'd hoped, and he sent Rita to get us, bless both of their hearts. I owe them some piroshki.

Posted by Gus at June 03, 2005 05:45 PM