RHINEBECK, New York, USA — Driving a taxi during the pandemic enables you to feel like The Humungus from Mad Max 2 because you have a wheel in your hands and you are wearing a masque and so

many people are on edge and in a lot of ways rules have been suspended and upgraded simultaneously. It is a muffled world of loneliness and you fall in love with the DJ on the new radio

station in Kingston because she plays The Minutemen as well as the Debbie Harryesque home-care worker who is 64 and wears Chuck Taylors and you are 56 and just spent $149 on a pair of Kelham

Overlord Dr Marten’s boots for the winter months. You know, for survival.

like Barry Bonds when he was on the needle or the cream or whatever cheating substances many baseballers were taking back in the late 1990s.

In the vehicle, ventilation remains the key. I keep the moon-roof open slightly, and at least two windows cracked despite the cold. The heater is up and sent low, over the new DMs and under

the seats past the dropped packets of Splenda from the other drivers and the 11 cents in loose change and some dead willow leaves from the lakeside pick-up in rural Elizaville. That was a

surprising fare – a transplanted New York City native living amid the most virulent rednecks in her new neighbourhood. She also did time in Sarasota, Florida, and when I brought up Bradenton

Spring Training bliss, she flatly stated she disliked baseball. The remainder of our trip was therefore sullen silence until I turned up the oldies radio station and forced her to endure

“Candida” by Tony Orlando & Dawn as we glided into the abandoned Rhinecliff Amtrak station. 

The train experience here in upstate NY has been pared down by fewer available routes, diminished numbers of commuters, and a general sense that travel is not really a good idea right now.

Most of the interactions involving the masqued customers and the station personnel remind me of childhood TV viewings of the sitcom MASH, when Alan Alda and his somehow zany blood-spattered

cohorts would have entire conversations from behind the surgical face-coverings. We have returned to that, apparently, only without the clever one-liners about the new nurses.

There is (of course) an urgency to the well-documented hordes moving to the Hudson Valley from New York City, as if they are Charlton Heston’s Dr Neville from the film The Omega Man. They

are leasing cars from far-flung dealers and signing up for 1-year Airbnb rentals in remote wooded areas with sketchy cell phone service. We go through a sort of existential Yellow Pages

phone directory conversation. They ask about schools. Grocery store locales. The availability of handymen. Amazingly innocent non-tech questions from people who got into my cab only because

their beloved Uber was a 45-minute wait for service at Rhinecliff and they committed Generation Z suicide by surrendering to the old way of doing things vis-à-vis an actual dialled phone

number. 

So, you have an app that will supposedly corral you a ride, but you have no idea where the grocery store is or if the car rental place is open or what time the liquor stores close. Selective

smart phone efficiency is the order of the day, then. I possess the knowledge they request without the aid of electronics, though I rarely boast about it. I have been tech-shamed so many

times (mostly by freshly-arrived viragos from Park Slope, Brooklyn) because I do not take Venmo and all the other silly-named online payment services. “Welcome to the ‘80s,” I say to the

disbelieving Karens who are one-handed because their phone permanently occupies an appendage, and they will never put it down. Ever. Because it is their efficiency and more importantly their

 control. Their magic wand that can, in fact, promptly summon the manager to whom they need to speak with great urgency. “Why aren’t you using GPS?” they ask with a timbre of medium panic.

“Because I know where you are going,” is my reply without a measure of sarcasm or snark and hiding behind my own sky-blue masque. It is as if they believe we will fail to reach their

destination unless a cell phone is telling us where to go or there is some device guiding the experience and plotting coordinates, even ones that are painfully obvious.

And as we wait at the Rhinebeck traffic light, they come at me with muffled real estate questions involving numbers. I shrug them off as I do not practice the dark arts of landlording and do

not speak Estate Agent language. I offer baseball banter, or soccer. Any sport, really. They pass on that, and silence prevails in the cab in a thankful informational truce. The radio

volume knob is turned a few clicks to the right and Jon Bon Jovi takes over.

I have a teenage daughter at home doing mostly remote learning. One assignment involved reading Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. As she overheard my friend grilling me about the safety

of pandemic taxi driving, she reminded me of the novel’s ending. In a taxi, in Madrid. Talk of the great times that could have been between a couple who never really hooked up, as they say.

The final line: “Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

With that in mind, I will end this missive not with boundless and serene nature imagery, like the television program CBS Sunday Morning, but with passenger utterances of late — because the

sun does, in fact, continue to rise and set despite it all. What follows is one end of a transport-oriented lingua franca, if you will. The artless minutiae emerge quickly, sometimes in

baffling non-sequiturs. The ears were strained to hear these statements over the howling wind of the cracked windows, the cranked-up Dodge Caliber taxi heater and, of course, the muffling

effect of the Covid-19 era masque:

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