Rote ride

Remember how once, maybe when you were 14, 15, 16, you literally knew every inch of the streets where you lived? You walked them or biked them, went up and down them dozens of times every day, and you knew every crack, every pothole, every chip the plows had taken out of the curb. I never thought I would know anything again as well as I once knew the streets where I grew up, but I’m approaching that level of knowlege with my current standard bike loop. I know every drop-out, every hole, every crack, where the shoulder starts to pitch, where the tractor-wash spills out onto the road. I watch the slow decay of the roadkill, too — of particular interest right now is a dead frog who must have hit something, rather than being run over, because he’s just a splayed, unflattened, shrinking frog corpse, caught in mid-leap. I had assumed I would never know a place so well again, but apparently I was wrong.

Not long ago, I got to ride around my old village, too, where almost nothing has changed. Our school was turned into a condo twenty years ago, and they built apartments on the schoolyard. The main street has changed businesses, but not the look, and it still has one of the last small-town movie theaters around here (when we were growing up, it was an “art house,” sometimes showing some standard movies, but also edging over into the porn side of “art.” Proctor’s, many have forgotten, went much further over that edge for a while). All the houses are the same as they ever were, the streets the same. I forgot to look at whether the fire alarm boxes were still there. Growing up, one of the major activities was deciphering the fire codes when the horn went off up at the firehouse. Each box had a number, and the horn would blow corresponding to the number. I think our box was 42, so the horn would blow four times, then 2 times. That way the volunteers knew where to respond. For a long time, only fire department members had the cards with the codes, but through shrewd observation and an utter lack of anything to do other than ride our bikes around the village until we found out where the firetrucks were going, we were able to put our own code sheets together. Any kid worth his salt instantly knew where an alarm was. The “newer” part of the village, built out on the western edge and in fact beyond village limits, got three-digit codes. I have no idea whether this was common, or just a Scotia thing (we were also perhaps the only village in the state to have a mix of professional and volunteer firefighters, and I was stunned years later to learn that vastly larger towns and villages, including on Long Island, relied entirely on volunteers.) Anybody else have coded fireboxes?