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TrucksFebruary 24, 2009 I dropped Uhura Mazda off at Courtesy Motors around 8:30 a.m. She was overdue for a oil change, the passenger-side shoulder harness needed replacing (thanks, Travvy), and since Uhura gets inspected in March I asked Larry and the crew to tell me anything I needed to know before then. I walked up to Mocha Mott's for a breakfast burrito and a large dark roast. What I got was one helluva show. If you don't know beautiful downtown Vineyard Haven, keep in mind that the roads are narrow. Very narrow. Several roads run into Main Street, and most of them have a telephone pole at the corner. So a semi with a very long flatbed trailer had come down Spring Street and tried to make the left turn onto Main. Didn't make it. The trailer blocked the intersection on the diagonal. Thanks to the narrow streets, the telephone pole, and a gray Chevrolet SUV whose owner couldn't be located, the trailer was stuck. I grabbed the half-booth at the window, facing the street. Behind me were two guys about my age and a woman young enough to be someone's daughter. I listened to them, watched the street, sipped my coffee, ate my burrito, and read a few paragraphs of Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde. The bio is pretty good, but the street scene was irresistible. The truck had Quebec plates and a Quebec address on the side -- Mazar -- though the mud guards were from Reading, Pennsylvania. The kibitzers behind me said it was a hay truck. Plausible enough. The consensus was that any truck driver who brought a semi down Spring Street and tried to make a left on Main had never been to Martha's Vineyard before. The ferry dock was a block away, but the old quip had never been truer: "You can't get there from here." A guy from the Tisbury DPW (DPW = Department of Public Works; Tisbury = Vineyard Haven -- you begin to understand why the truck driver was confused) squeezed around the trailer, backed into position, and attached a chain to the rearmost axle of the trailer. He backed up. The trailer shivered but did not budge. Semi driver produced a 4x4; this was positioned behind the rearmost tires and the trailer was backed onto it. Valiant DPW truck, like a little tug cozying up to the QE2, tried again. A miracle, and I saw it with my own eyes: the rear end of the trailer skipped a foot or two to the right. Bravo! The truck proceeded up Main Street. The kibitzers at Mocha Mott's said that the Tisbury DPW guy probably wouldn't get any reward for his ingenuity, but what the hay [sic] he was probably getting overtime. I wondered if he'd get docked for endangering a town-owned truck. Strolling around town half an hour later I heard the semi driver had got stuck again on Franklin Street, near the Catholic church. Bet that guy will never, ever come back to Martha's Vineyard. I headed over to the Martha's Vineyard Times office. Thursday is the first anniversary of Rhodry's death, and I wanted to place a memorial ad. Larry hailed me from across the street -- I was going to call, he said, then I remembered you didn't have a cell phone -- then there you were walking down the street. Turns out Uhura Mazda's exhaust system needs a major overhaul. This tends to happen around 100,000 miles. Uhura is at 93K-plus. Shit. I'm glad I got the digital camera and the new muck boots before I knew I was about to go in hock to the credit card company for $1,300 and change.
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