Living La Vida El Dorado
Aug. 22nd, 2020 08:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraThe street that runs around the periphery of the lost village of Haviland is called Roosevelt Road.
(As a side note, I will note that many things in Hyde Park have Roosevelt branding! FDR is the town’s cottage industry, after all.)
Since Roosevelt Road runs the length of a housing development, I wouldn’t call it a busy highway or anything. But it does get traffic.
So, I was chugging along Roosevelt Road, on the lookout for my next invisible trailer park, when all of a sudden, I see this adorable, chunky toddler grinning at me right from the middle of the road.
I threw my brakes on, stopped the car.
Ran out into the middle of the road.
Scooped up the toddler who wriggled furiously and protested by getting snot all over me.
Oh, Patrizia! You’ve done it now! I thought. This one is a toddling coronavirus plantation!
But what was I supposed to do? Leave the kid to be run over? Cars were already zooming by on the opposite side of the road.
I looked over and saw this scrawny girl standing by the side of the road next to an empty stroller. She was furiously punching in letters on her smartphone, oblivious to the world around her. She looked to be 14. Babysitter? Sister? (God forbid) mother?
“Excuse me, is this yours?” I shouted.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh. Tupak, how you get over there?”
I thought about screaming at her.
But what would that accomplish?
Instead, I got back in my car and began furiously dousing myself with hand sanitizer. My hands, my face, my legs. My dress. Fortunately, it was 90° out, and I dried fast.
Hopefully, I will survive.
###
Once I finished the trailer parks where the wheat fields and apple orchards once grew, it was time to hit the apartment complexes scattered all up and down Market Street, which connects lower Hyde Park along old Albany Post Road, Route 9, with upper Hyde Park, which has sprung up along a Route 9 subsidiary called Route 9G.
As another side bar, I will note that practically all the roads around here are called Route 9. There is 9G and 9C and 9J and 9W and God knows how many others—I guess they’re limited by the number of letters in the alphabet? But one does wonder why the Road-Naming Powers That Be didn’t just give all these subsidiaries their own discrete numerics. It really gets quite confusing.
The name “Market Street” conjures a giant Fun Faire with happy artisans manning booths where you can buy fresh-picked vegetables and fresh-churned butter and other wholesome goods.
I don’t think Hyde Park’s Market Street was ever anything like that.
One hundred and fifty years ago, the village was really a rather dreary place consisting of nothing but taverns where the underpaid servants who worked at the ostentatious mansions the Gilded Age rich once maintained in these parts went to drown their resentment and socialist sentiments in strong drink. Those mansions have mostly been torn down now.
Anyway, Market Street is lined with apartment complexes. The apartment complexes all have names like “The Golden” and “Eldorado.”
These names are pretty funny once you get inside and see what festering black mold traps these apartment complexes really are.
I recognized many food bank clients.
They did not appear to recognize me.
Mostly because I wear this huge white mask and my enormous straw gardening hat—it is 90° after all while I’m tromping around at National Counting Project behest! Also, I have a firm policy of never making eye contact with food bank clients, and this is exactly why! They will be acutely embarrassed if they’re ever forced to interact with you in any other context.
Past the “El Dorado” signs, these complexes are divided into housing blocks. And the housing blocks are a bit like prison blocks. Their populations appear to be divided along racial lines, which (of course) is strictly illegal.
If you can’t find one of the names on the deadbeat list, the National Counting Project instructs you to look for a “proxy” who will rat the deadbeat out.
The white El Dorado residents were very happy to tell me just how awful the Black El Dorado residents are.
Who says racism isn’t alive and well in the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley?
###
The end of the day brought me back to a trailer park. This one was behind the Dollar Store where I sometimes shop for scented candles.
These mobile homes didn’t look too terrible.
And while all the residents were either (a) not at home or (b) not answering their doors no matter how insistently I rang doorbells or loudly I knocked, the guy who owned the mobile homes was around, rebuilding a porch.
He was very happy to talk to me.
“I like your purple hair,” he said.
In fact, there was very little about me he did not like! He was wearing a Vietnam vet hat, and some might even call him handsome. He told me he’d been a social worker in the employ of the federal government for 40 years and that trailer park landlordship was his retirement gig.
I had to hit the gas on the interview stuff because I was desperately afraid he was gonna ask me out.
And now I’m gonna have to find another place to buy scented candles.
(As a side note, I will note that many things in Hyde Park have Roosevelt branding! FDR is the town’s cottage industry, after all.)
Since Roosevelt Road runs the length of a housing development, I wouldn’t call it a busy highway or anything. But it does get traffic.
So, I was chugging along Roosevelt Road, on the lookout for my next invisible trailer park, when all of a sudden, I see this adorable, chunky toddler grinning at me right from the middle of the road.
I threw my brakes on, stopped the car.
Ran out into the middle of the road.
Scooped up the toddler who wriggled furiously and protested by getting snot all over me.
Oh, Patrizia! You’ve done it now! I thought. This one is a toddling coronavirus plantation!
But what was I supposed to do? Leave the kid to be run over? Cars were already zooming by on the opposite side of the road.
I looked over and saw this scrawny girl standing by the side of the road next to an empty stroller. She was furiously punching in letters on her smartphone, oblivious to the world around her. She looked to be 14. Babysitter? Sister? (God forbid) mother?
“Excuse me, is this yours?” I shouted.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh. Tupak, how you get over there?”
I thought about screaming at her.
But what would that accomplish?
Instead, I got back in my car and began furiously dousing myself with hand sanitizer. My hands, my face, my legs. My dress. Fortunately, it was 90° out, and I dried fast.
Hopefully, I will survive.
###
Once I finished the trailer parks where the wheat fields and apple orchards once grew, it was time to hit the apartment complexes scattered all up and down Market Street, which connects lower Hyde Park along old Albany Post Road, Route 9, with upper Hyde Park, which has sprung up along a Route 9 subsidiary called Route 9G.
As another side bar, I will note that practically all the roads around here are called Route 9. There is 9G and 9C and 9J and 9W and God knows how many others—I guess they’re limited by the number of letters in the alphabet? But one does wonder why the Road-Naming Powers That Be didn’t just give all these subsidiaries their own discrete numerics. It really gets quite confusing.
The name “Market Street” conjures a giant Fun Faire with happy artisans manning booths where you can buy fresh-picked vegetables and fresh-churned butter and other wholesome goods.
I don’t think Hyde Park’s Market Street was ever anything like that.
One hundred and fifty years ago, the village was really a rather dreary place consisting of nothing but taverns where the underpaid servants who worked at the ostentatious mansions the Gilded Age rich once maintained in these parts went to drown their resentment and socialist sentiments in strong drink. Those mansions have mostly been torn down now.
Anyway, Market Street is lined with apartment complexes. The apartment complexes all have names like “The Golden” and “Eldorado.”
These names are pretty funny once you get inside and see what festering black mold traps these apartment complexes really are.
I recognized many food bank clients.
They did not appear to recognize me.
Mostly because I wear this huge white mask and my enormous straw gardening hat—it is 90° after all while I’m tromping around at National Counting Project behest! Also, I have a firm policy of never making eye contact with food bank clients, and this is exactly why! They will be acutely embarrassed if they’re ever forced to interact with you in any other context.
Past the “El Dorado” signs, these complexes are divided into housing blocks. And the housing blocks are a bit like prison blocks. Their populations appear to be divided along racial lines, which (of course) is strictly illegal.
If you can’t find one of the names on the deadbeat list, the National Counting Project instructs you to look for a “proxy” who will rat the deadbeat out.
The white El Dorado residents were very happy to tell me just how awful the Black El Dorado residents are.
Who says racism isn’t alive and well in the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley?
###
The end of the day brought me back to a trailer park. This one was behind the Dollar Store where I sometimes shop for scented candles.
These mobile homes didn’t look too terrible.
And while all the residents were either (a) not at home or (b) not answering their doors no matter how insistently I rang doorbells or loudly I knocked, the guy who owned the mobile homes was around, rebuilding a porch.
He was very happy to talk to me.
“I like your purple hair,” he said.
In fact, there was very little about me he did not like! He was wearing a Vietnam vet hat, and some might even call him handsome. He told me he’d been a social worker in the employ of the federal government for 40 years and that trailer park landlordship was his retirement gig.
I had to hit the gas on the interview stuff because I was desperately afraid he was gonna ask me out.
And now I’m gonna have to find another place to buy scented candles.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-22 03:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-23 01:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-22 04:54 pm (UTC)You saved that toddler's life and his mother/sister/babysitter from a world of grief and pain. I hope the golden (heh!) glow of that stayed with you a bit.
How do you rat someone out for the National Counting Project? Is it when say, "Joe Bloggs DOES live at Apt. 9-C [9!!]" or is it when you say "Joe Bloggs DOESN'T live at Apt. 9-C, and if he votes in this district it's FRAUD!"?
no subject
Date: 2020-08-23 01:17 pm (UTC)National Counting Project functionaries are taught to bang on neighbors' homes if a National Counting Project deadbeat isn't home, and then to attempt to extract the necessary demographic info from the neighbor. (Uh-huh, uh-huh. What color is he? Is he by any chance Latino?)
I will confess that I refuse to do this, though if potential neighbors are outside, I will flag them down and ask, "Do you know if this unit is occupied?"
I actually believe the National Counting Project when they say they don't share their info with other government agencies. From a personal privacy point of view, it's a fairly innocuous operation, and of course, the info they collect is invaluable for federal planning purposes.
But people at the lower end of the income/education spectrum really, really, really hate the gub'mint.