(Posts will be a week or so delayed as I catch up. I’m posting this from a campsite by a pond in New Hampshire. Greetings to all my new subscribers! Thanks to you, this relaxing camping time is covered, as is a fancy prepper-ish camp stove I impulse-bought.)
It was only a minor traffic violation, the kind of trouble you can’t get into if you’re not driving a car.
I could have walked right past the policeman who had stopped another driver by the side of the road without any problem—if, of course, that road hadn’t been a highway. Which it was.
And for once I was driving on it—not walking! not being a passenger! actually driving!—a situation so vanishingly rare for me, given I’d been grubbing through the subway daily in New York City like a mole person for over twenty years, that I had forgotten the law that you can’t drive in the lane next to a police car that has pulled someone over. If that’s actually a law, and the officer wasn’t taking advantage of the fact that I have forgotten everything I learned as a sixteen-year-old. Back when I was an Angeleno, basically disowned by my friends and family, effectively not an American citizen because I didn’t get my license immediately when the opportunity presented itself.
(And I am still not an American, because two out of three New Yorkers cannot be considered culturally American because we don’t have cars and don’t drive everywhere. Our manner of getting groceries, taking our kids and pets places, storing our crap, going to work, exercising, and flirting with people using large metal purchaseable proxies for our own sexiness and making out with them in remote locations are, as a result, measurably different from the rest of this country. Physical culture. Bam.)
The officer was a white man and exceedingly blasé; maybe just who he was. Certainly also because I was white, and making calmly surprised white lady noises instead of releasing the Karen.
Did I know why he had pulled me over? No, I am from The City, I do not car. Where was I coming from? Gardiner. Where was I going? Saratoga Springs.
Could he see my license and registration?
Yes, officer, my license, sure, but… this is a rental?
A rental car owned by another citizen, not a company. Someone I do not actually know. Whom I trust because he got good stars and ratings on an app. This app was new to me. It had also been new to the blobby white security officer who had blustered up to shoo away me and the car’s owner, a light-skinned black man with a carefully-tended beard, when we were trying to do the car handoff in pouring rain by the Hoboken train station just over a week before.
I hovered a while afterward as I saw the guard continuing to talk to the car owner, not wanting to leave a black man alone with a white man emboldened by his badge, but it seems the guard was just getting the guy to explain this new rental scenario to him.
There’s no familiar playbook here. You rent a car from someone else for a while. It’s not like a regular rental, or one of those cars or scooters you pick up at the side of the street. It’s like AirBnB. Or, like… like you are borrowing their shoes, maybe is the New York City parallel. Wearing the stale-fast-food funk or too-florid deodorant of their mode of transportation for weeks or months. Until it smells like you instead.
Was I moving to Saratoga Springs? asked the cop who had pulled me over near Saratogs.
The plate I was spinning began to wobble. Why did he ask that question… ah. I was visibly lugging a car-sized chunk of my worldly possessions.1
Am I moving out of New York City? I don’t know. I’d been planning to for at least a year before the pandemic knocked the world off its axis, making it unclear whether it was safe to move. I did hand off the lease on my old place in Inwood to my roommate, Adriane. Aside from what’s in my car, my stuff is in a storage unit.
Do I have a home address, if he asks? This is not something American society wants you to answer “no” to. It can be nigh impossible to claw yourself out of the mass violation of human rights the country calls “homelessness” if you don’t have an address where someone can send benefits and employment paperwork; lacking an address, like lacking a driver’s license, makes you a non-person for many American purposes.
“You’re going to be homeless,” said Adriane’s sister Dyann, with a worried pout, when I told the two of them I was giving up the lease.
No, not homeless. I have privilege in the form of savings and excellent credit, safe and sane relatives and friends with spare rooms I can stay in; and of course, my skin color, “accentless” speech, and relatively straight teeth.
They do not call people in my line of work homeless. I haven’t worked in an office since early 2018, when I was hired by a cryptocurrency startup whose offices in Boston I would visit once monthly. Its employees were spread between Canada, Germany, and Washington, DC. Before that I worked for a tech consultancy that sent me to Toronto or Delaware every week, where employees could bugger off to the Caribbean of a weekend, with the company paying for flights, because of the way taxes and accounting counted their flights “home” as business expenses, even as those flights added to their own hoards of frequent flyer miles. Before that, starting in 2015, I was on a grant for a year where my bosses were in Massachusetts and San Francisco. Right now my boss is in Poland, but we do tech-related work for an NGO in Ireland, and our colleagues are scattered across every time zone.2
The guy who pays my health insurance, though, is at a different NGO I’m consulting with. He’s in Connecticut. By the grace of some patron saint of bureaucracy, this did not fumble across the state-line tripwire of the insurance companies and torpedo my care in New York City during my lifesaving medical treatment last year. We’ll see how that goes while I’m on the road. My psychiatrist is not supposed to fill my prescription for an antidepressant when I am not physically present in New York City, because, as previously stated, you have no rights in the United States unless you have an address, a driver’s license, and first/last/security in the bank. Maybe Canada will open its borders again…
Where does my mail go, though?3 Ok, yes, that I can answer. The kind friends whose house and cat I took care of in Brooklyn the past two summers will continue to collect it for me.
I am not doing the things American society is prepared for me to do, as a forty-plus human being with a doctorate and a womb. Nobody who needs to know my address—my doctors and pharmacies, the tax collectors, relatives who want to send me presents—has any precedent for handling what is going on here.
I am playing out late-stage evolutions of European traditions of movement, ones that I can trace directly back to my ancestors, people whose movements often boded ill for others. The Captain Andrews who gave me my last name was a captain in a war on the Pequot people.
“Nomadic” is not a good description of what I am doing, here. It would be inappropriate to compare myself to, say, the Bedouins or the Apache. Nomadic communities have culture, because they do this together. I am moving around alone. Deliberately, because I want to re-examine where I live with other people. But probably what needs examination is how I live with other people.
I am unmoored.
But right now, who isn’t?
The news says plenty of people moved when their jobs went remote. In the city, at the turn of every month over the past year, the maw of a moving van or two gaped on every block, more vans than I ever remember seeing before.
The question is, of course, who moved by choice, and who moved out of desperation. Those of us whose butt-in-chair jobs had already let go of the idea of employees sharing the same physical space, we had the privilege of surviving the pandemic. Those whose jobs demanded that they hold things and people, they died in greater numbers. Schools and their teachers teetered heartbreakingly on the pivot, as we failed, yet again, to make a real reckoning of whether it is necessary and safe for children to be hugged by the adults around them, and of what shape of society schools are supposed to prepare children for.
They keep telling us when they think we will go back to the office, back to school. They keep guessing wrong. Meanwhile, healthcare workers have been in at the office throughout the shutdown. They can’t not.
Nobody actually knows.
I shut up and oversimplified all of that to the cop.
I’m exploring the possibility of moving upstate, I told him.
This seemed to pacify him. Still wrote me a ticket, though, which had apparently turned into a printout-based process at some point in my long pedestrian years in Manhattan. I don’t have to appear physically in court, though. I can mail it in with my signature.4
Writing this from the massive, taller-than-me fireplace in the living room of the Saratoga Springs apartment where friends of mine split their time, commuting between two college campuses in two different states. This used to be a mansion. So did the place I came from in Brooklyn. We are like hermit crabs, hunting for larger shells, fighting off others.
Including my zabumba and my repique, because I am becoming the kind of compulsive drummer who does not want to leave home without at least one drum. Chekhov’s Drums here will hopefully be used when I get to Maine.
John Brunner wept.
Cool cool! Let’s keep basing societal trust on perishable media and handwriting! Worked for William the Conqueror!
ibid