Very Late Night Coffee

We spent the last 30 hours out in Rotus (the Rest of the U.S.), driving down to Whidbey Island, north of Seattle, to visit an old friend from California who has joined the general progress to the Northwest. South Whidbey, it appears, is rapidly filling up with our old friends and neighbors. (In urban California, not categories to be confused, generally.)

On our way, we stopped in Bellingham to get gas, where prices turned out to be very cheap. Point Roberts’ five gas stations appear to operate, for the most part, as a resource for Canadian drivers who would just as soon not pay the high taxes that Canada reasonably adds to its gasoline prices. The real costs of using gasoline, of course, are not just the costs of getting it out of the ground, refining it, and getting it into our cars. Instead, they also include all the costs generated by the CO2 that gas-run cars generate, CO2 that muddies the air we breathe and warms the globe as an afterthought. Canada, like Europe, adds some to gas taxes to take that into account as well as to increase the price so that people pay more attention to using it carefully. The U.S., unwisely, does not.

The result of this is that Point Roberts' gas stations are more likely to be competing with British Columbia’s gas prices than with Whatcom county’s gas prices. Yesterday, in Bellingham, the lowest price I saw was $1.59/gallon. The price in Point Roberts was $2.65 earlier in the week, and $2.17 this evening. So that’s a negative feature of living here in the exclave: higher priced gas. On the other hand, it’s as well to discourage use by higher pricing. But I guess I’d prefer that the increased price was going to taxes rather than to even higher oil company/gas station operator profits.

The Bellingham gas station had pumps that could accommodate about 12 – 16 cars at a time and, since it was all credit card driven, very fast. Cars got in and out quickly, but there was, nevertheless, a line, in which we were number six. I don’t think I’ve been in a gas station line-up since the late 1970’s when we had the great national gasoline shortage and people were shooting each other for jumping the lines. Yet one more opportunity to be remembering various sorts of bad old days. Gas shortages, depressions, stock brokers jumping out of windows, soup kitchens.

While we waited, I noticed next to us a maybe 25-square-foot building which advertised itself as an espresso hut. Not so strange except that it is open 24 hours a day. Perhaps too long in Point Roberts, I cannot for a moment imagine why anyone any place in the world would need a 24-hour espresso hut, let alone enough people to make it profitable. Is the larger world really filled with lots of people roaming around at 3 a.m. feeling a big need for espresso? Why would that be the case? Coming home from a late shift, a graveyard shift? Surely espresso would not be what is needed. Surely the next point would be sleeping not caffeine injections.

A truly strange form of economic development, but there it was, obviously in business. Could this substitute for our failure to have local pizza delivery? After all, if Bellingham can have multiple 24-hour espresso huts, why can’t we have at least one? Don't we want to be just a little more like Rotus, just a little wider awake?