| Shad Derby Bash, It's A Gas Gas Gas (To Get There) |
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| Written by Jennifer Abel | |||
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Gas prices are high enough to change the way I measure distance: last year, if you’d asked me how far Windsor’s annual Shad Derby was from my house, I’d’ve said “About 45 minutes.” Now it’s “about seven dollars, round trip,” and it’s only going higher. I went to the Derby in part because I’m a sucker for small-town historical fairs, and also to say hi to Joe Visconti, who’d set up a campaign booth there. But on my way to the Derby on May 17, I bought gas at a record cost of more than four bucks a gallon. I’m not the only one worried about gas prices; Joe’s situation is even worse than mine. My resume lists mostly English-major jobs, which means that when I carry “equipment” to work this amounts to paper, pens and perhaps a book or two. Joe’s a contractor, and lugging construction equipment around takes a lot more gas than moving writer’s supplies. The morning of the Shad Derby he bought coffee at a nearby gas station and then told me, “The station owner’s saying six dollars a gallon by the end of summer.” “Six?” I shook my head. “I read five in the news last night. That’s bad enough; six’ll really hurt. And whatever the price is, I don’t expect it to drop after this summer, either.” If the folks at the Shad Derby were any indication, a lot of people in Connecticut are worried about gas prices. Despite a few limited mass-transit options in some of the larger cities, for the most part you can’t get around without a car here. And the fairgoers in Windsor knew this. Joe’s friend Betty, an artist, brought her face-painting kit to the Derby and spent the day brushing colorful patterns onto children’s faces while Joe chatted with their parents. Neither of us were surprised to hear that “People are more worried about gas than they are about the war,” as Joe said. “The price of gas has a more immediate effect,” I replied. “And it’s more likely to grow worse.” I vaguely remember, as a child back in the 1970s, hearing words like “energy crisis” each night when my parents watched the news. Looks like today’s kids will grow up with similar memories. There’s no single magic-bullet solution, but alternative energies, along with more efficient use (read: conservation) of the energy we’ve got, will certainly get us closer to whatever solution there is. Joe thinks tax incentives for conservation and research into alternative energies are part of the answer. This is probably more feasible than my plan: go back in time and design America so that we never got so dependent on oil in the first place.
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