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License Plate, O License Plate!January 02, 2006 One of the big perks of each new year is starting the license plate game from scratch. The idea is to note a plate from each United State before the year runs out. Plate has to be on a motor vehicle and on Martha's Vineyard -- the ferry does count, on the theory that any vehicle on the ferry either has been seen on island roads or will be soon. I've been playing since the late 1980s. I've seen all 50 plates (plus D.C. -- I count D.C. because I lived there for so long) in one year twice at most since I started playing. North Dakota is the chronic spoiler. Nebraska isn't easy either. 2005 wasn't a very good year: at midnight, December 31, I still hadn't seen North Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Iowa (which usually isn't hard), Arkansas, Alaska (not usually hard either), or Hawaii. On the first two days of 2006, I spotted as many firsts as I did the last six months of 2005. The last months of every year are sludgy; the first month is euphoric. For the record, the first 10 of 2006 were, in order, as follows: Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Oregon, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Not a bad haul, but not as good as last year, when I got South Dakota on January 1 because Steve Dunham was visiting his mother at the corner of Davis and Skiff, and his Black Top Gypsy has South Dakota plates. South Dakota is nowhere near as scarce as North Dakota (which, way back in college, a friend of mine thought was a Democratic Party plot to score two extra seats in the U.S. Senate. He was from Utah. Go figure). When I started playing the game, it wasn't hard to get 30 or more plates in January. These days I think 20 is pretty good. Partly it's that I spend less time in town than I used to. Partly, I swear, it's because all those out-of-state-platers have moved here and registered their vehicles in Massachusetts. You don't see nearly as many as "good island cars" as you used to -- a "good island car" looks like it couldn't possibly pass inspection but runs pretty good till you try to take it off-island, then it dies immediately after, or shortly before, it rolls off the boat. For more about the license plate game, see Ten Reasons Why I Like Living on Martha's Vineyard.
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