Keeping Travelers Amused on 12-Hour Trips

When you cross the border into Maryland on Route 15, a sign welcomes you to the state and informs you that a guy by the name of Gov. Martin O'Malley runs the place. It seems like a bit of a waste, doesn't it? The people who live in Maryland already know; if they don't know, then they don't care; and the people who don't live in Maryland probably don't care, either.

If Maryland wants to welcome visitors with a factoid, then why not put some fun into it? Like a trivia quiz? Think how much more useful to travelers it would be if the sign at the border read, "Welcome to Maryland -- What is the world's third-largest flightless bird? Answer in 20 miles."

For the next half-hour everyone in the car could have a swell time debating the answer. Ostrich? Cassowary? Emperor penguin? Then you would get to the next sign and it would read: "Wrong. The answer is 'Emu.'"

They could run quizzes all across the state, like the old Burma-Shave signs. Wouldn't that be fun.

You have time to think about things like that when you're in a car for 12 solid hours, which you will be if you ever decide to drive to the Finger Lakes region of New York by the back roads. The back roads are scenic as all getout, full of bucolic farmhouses and quaint little gasoline stations and hand-painted signs for "Shoppes" seven miles up on the left.

YOU KNOW the difference between a shop and a Shoppe. A shop sells snacks and cigarettes and lottery tickets and tire-pressure gauges and wind shield wiper fluid. It has a bathroom around the back you get into with a key that you have to ask for, which the cashier hands over with an expression letting you know it's a huge imposition and you've got some kind of nerve, pal. The bathroom looks to have been cleaned around the Nixon administration. There's one dim lightbulb, a quarter-inch slurry of dirt and water on the floor (you hope it's water, anyway), and something has spattered and dried on the sink that looks like Jackson Pollack was having a bad day.

A Shoppe, on the other hand, offers hand-stitched quilts and homemade preserves and old-fashioned stick candy in glass jars and bunny-rabbit figurines and potpourri sachets and rustic plaques with whimsical sayings such as "Hard Work Won't Kill Me, But Why Take the Chance?" The place smells like scented candles and the elderly lady working the register is so gosh-darn friendly you feel like you're practically ripping her off not buying a quilt, or the 19th-century tail-bobbing shears, or the $400 cherrywood spool cabinet in the corner. She might come down on the price if you haggled, but what would you do with a spool cabinet? And anyway, time's a-wastin'.

Folks on the interstate make better time, but folks on the interstate don't get to stop at places like Clyde Peeling's Reptile Land (and pet a real live baby alligator!), which you get to just before you pass into a stretch of Pennsylvania where every third storefront is either a bar or an adult-video emporium. Prosperity seems to have passed the hill country by, but they still have their priorities in order. Or maybe they just don't hold high expectations for the people passing through.

EIGHT INCHES of snow fell in Bath, New York, and nobody was fazed in the slightest. They didn't stampede the grocery store. They didn't even seem to notice -- just as they didn't seem to notice the latest violence between Israel and Gaza, or the dust-up over the guy who might have been national chairman of the Republican Party until he made one of those mistakes that keep minority membership in the GOP down in the low single digits.

No, the residents of Bath were too busy keeping to their own affairs. There was one girl on duty at The National Hotel, where she was serving as waitress, cook, and front-desk clerk all at once. The Chat-a-Whyle café stayed open, and so did the library and the McDonald's playroom. The beatifically unflappable dad at the next table had retired from the Air Force and was happily employed as a prison guard in a former insane asylum. It wasn't exactly haunted, he explained, but things happened for which there was no rational explanation. Chairs in locked rooms fell over by themselves -- things like that -- and it gave you the willies.

If that doesn't, this will: Driving back through Maryland, we found ourselves behind a tanker truck with a warning on the back that read: "INEDIBLE -- TECHNICAL ANIMAL FAT -- NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION."

What in the world is technical animal fat? Maybe they should make that one of the trivia questions at the state border.

On second thought, maybe it's best not to know.

My thoughts do not aim for your assent -- just place them alongside your own reflections for a while.

--Robert Nozick.
Contact A. Barton Hinkle at (804) 649-6627 or .