Registering the new pickup truck. This, too, is America.
There have been a few complicating factors in registering my new pickup here in North Dakota. Because I bought it in California, but I registered it here in North Dakota and paid North Dakota sales tax on it.
I have thus been driving America for the past seven weeks with no plates, carrying only a not very convincing 30-day certificate from the North Dakota Department of Transportation (DOT), which I printed in a hotel lobby somewhere. That’s 6,992 miles with no vehicle license or license plates. I worried every day that I would get stopped for speeding and wind up in a Turkish prison. I drove well under the speed limit all over the country, and I never parked in a no-parking zone or overstayed the two-hour limit. Every time I found myself side by side with a law enforcement officer of any sort — from state highway patrol to mall cop — I panicked and waved at the officer(s) in an unctuous manner that said, “this guy is running drugs, using the old ‘I’m a friend to law enforcement’ trope.”
You think I’m joking.
Because I got the pickup in Bakersfield, California, at Motor City GMC, and drove from there to North Carolina and from there to Philadelphia, and from there back to North Dakota along three of the continent’s great rivers, the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri, I could not for all that time appear in person at the North Dakota DOT. As you can imagine, they don’t want to do this sort of business by long-distance fax. So, I asked my friend, videographer, and podcast editor, Nolan Johnson, to visit the DOT as my proxy. Nolan has been involved in the whole new pickup saga from the beginning and has done serious work on the project. This is my way of trying to justify sending someone I care about to a DOT line anywhere in America. He agreed cheerfully and readily after I told him we may have to rethink the whole videography initiative.
Get this. Because the DOT in the state capitol complex was “fully booked,” Nolan and his amazing dad, Dennis, drove to Jamestown, 100 miles east, to work the transaction at a less-crazy satellite DOT, the kind you find in a minor strip mall. They made the drive. There was a delay in Jamestown due to heavy DOT traffic. Father and son worked their way forward like Dust Bowlers at a soup kitchen, and they did finally get to the front of the line.
But guess what? Almost any American could write the next sentence. It turns out that Nolan did not have all the necessary documents. When the DOT functionary says, “Sorry! You didn’t bring your junior high school attendance forms. You’ll have to come back,” you have experienced one of the most common and most frustrating of human experiences.
So Dennis drove his son back to Bismarck. Nolan blamed me, of course. I blamed Dennis of Santa Fe. Dennis blamed Frank of Utah. Frank blamed Douglas MacArthur.
Now I am home in Bismarck for a week. Meanwhile, Nolan has done yeoman’s work researching DOT protocols, which, of course, vary in every state. Absolutely; how many and precisely which documents do you have to have in hand when you finally reach the front of the line? We have now gone over the checklist twenty times. Nolan drilled me for the ordeal. I was miffed when he barked out at me, “FORM 3 — DESCRIBE!” while we were playing mini-golf in St. Louis. But eventually, I mastered it.
Jokes aside, it is literally true that I have lost sleep over this transaction or, rather, an endless set of transactions. I awoke in the night, wondering if I mislaid the temporary insurance fax when I reshuffled the papers on Thursday. A few nights ago, I concluded that the pickup would never get licensed, and I’d either have to drive it back to Bakersfield and leave it on the GMC lot — or pour kerosene over the whole thing and light a match. Honestly, I wondered if my visit to the Bismarck DOT would be like the opening salvo of the endless case of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce in Dickens’ Bleak House, which is not finally resolved until court costs have bankrupted everyone involved.
This morning, when my dreaded appointment finally came, I was nervously showering (fumbling with the soap) when it suddenly dawned on me that Nolan, that cur, had told me he would print out the mandatory registration application form in a St. Louis hotel and then he snuck out of town without doing it. Now, I was just 45 minutes from an appointment, which, if I were even thirty-five seconds late, would send me to the back of the line or I’d be bluntly told to make a new appointment for early August. So I texted Nolan (I couldn’t locate the URGENT Emojis). “Nolan. What about that application form? Can you scan and send?” I’ll say this: Nolan is prompt. Within seconds, he texted, “Give me twenty minutes, I’m almost to level nine in Go Hung Gun Mayhem III.”
Speaking of Nolan, he was supposed to accompany me to the DOT this morning for several reasons, one of them good. However, he called at the last minute to say that he had been stricken in the night with double secret diphtheria and possibly pneumonia, and he regretted that he could not make it. And as he hung up, I heard in the background, “Who’s dealing?”
I arrived at the DOT four minutes early, fumbled with the papers in the glove box, went through my mental checklist, and made sure I had my wallet and checkbook before creeping inside. I registered my presence (oh, yes, you have to have an appointment you made three weeks in advance and then had to confirm twice more when the DOT sent you email reminders, but now that I am here, I have to register?!) A few minutes later, I heard on the PA system, “Number 106. You may approach!”
I’m not joking. I felt like George or Elaine cowering before the soup nazi on Seinfeld. Don’t you all feel that way in your interactions with the government? (At TSA, I am always pretty sure I am carrying something nefarious.) I approached the window (Room 101 per Orwell’s 1984?) like Walter Raleigh on his walk up the scaffold for his beheading in London in October 1618. I had an internal debate about whether to make eye contact with the clerk or look down in abjectness. I debated whether to say, “Hey, how’s your day so far?” That, of course, might have been a fatal mistake. No soup for you. I debated whether to play the age card: “I’m an old, old man, and I don’t even own a cell phone or one of those newfangled computer things, so please walk me through the process…”
My clerk frowned at me or maybe at the world. I expected her at any moment to blurt out the mantra of DOT workers, “Come back with the broom of the Wicked Witch of the West!” and thunder me out.
Au contraire.
Now let me paraphrase Carson Park’s 1966 hit, Somethin’ Stupid (sung by Frank and Nancy Sinatra). You see how I had worked myself into a nervous wreck. I was bracing (really, clenching), “♫ But then she had to spoil it all by saying something friendly like ‘I’ll help you.’ ♫” “Welcome,” said Karla, for her name tag said it all, “Let me see what you brought and get you through this with a minimum of fuss.”
I wept. I blew kisses — not to her, for that might have brought on security, but to the cosmos. Karla took my check. She even repeated the amount when I didn’t quite hear it. She handed me a pair of splendid new North Dakota license plates and the blue annual registration sticker for me to put on myself — with studied pride — when I got home.
So now I am street-legal. The minute I got home, I put the plates on and affixed the blue tags. I went through all my papers one more time and put them together in my glove box. Clearly, I was delirious because normally, I would have waited several days before waking up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night to go out to the truck to take care of this before those documents flowed down the river of time and oblivion.
Before my best friend Karla handed me my receipt and the plates, she asked, “Now, you don’t want vanity plates, do you?” Yes, I wanted to order plates saying LTAMERCA (in the manner of George W. Bush: mer’ka), but she said, while that is perfectly acceptable, it would take six to eight weeks for them to come in the mail. I’m like the wise gambler who has won $200 in his first hour at the slots. I knew I couldn’t beat the odds much longer.
So I grabbed EBE65XX and fled to find the nearest screwdriver. I mean the drink.