Side Salad

THIS JUST IN

Tammy, the senior Side Salad courts correspondant in Chesapeake, Va. (she also doubled last week as the auxiliary backup Doppler 9000 weather center when our North Carolina bureau was knocked out by Hurricane Isabel), has the distinction of hosting two of the upcoming sniper trials that few people outside of Virginia and Maryland seem to be giving a shit about at the moment.

This may be the first trial in which a governmental body has created a Web site strictly for one trial.

Then again, they have a page of photos promoting the latest civic engineering achievements in the $20 million construction of
The Great Bridge Bridge. (They should have the Department of Redundant and Repetitive Titles look into the name.)

Sounds like delivery of small-town justice ultimately will be a smooth and efficient procedure - as long as they can figure out how to get the bridges in town to stay on schedule:

As you know, or you should since you are a media type, both sniper trials are being held in my town. Actually, one is being held about 3 miles from my house, the other about 15 miles. You could say that I'm in the epicenter of sniper trial central. The Virginia Pilot is hyping it even more than the recent hurricane. It has the feel of a Super Bowl event, if we had a football team, which we don't, because these hicks around here can't be counted on to buy tickets to support an actual team. They mainly like to complain how we are the 4th or 18th largest market without a professional sports team. You haven't heard anything until you hear the complaints of a redneck who life has treated unfairly.

So the big news here is that the news is coming here. That's right, CNN, ABC, NBC FOX and even the Today show (which usually only shows up when it's time to cry over an aircraft carrier return) are all about to descend on my sleepy little backwater town. View image

This has fostered a grand sense of materialism in our local folk. Everywhere you go there's talk of renting out homes for $8,000 a month to some unsuspecting reporting team. A little less if they agree to feed the pigs after work. I hear talk of a booming sniper trial t-shirt business. There are rumors of a sniper trial countdown clock (14 Days Until the Trial of the Century) on the highway, but I doubt there's any room in between the 4,000 Lotto billboards that dot our roadsides. This is an actual ad from the paper:

For Rent:

3 bedroom brick home for rent during the sniper trials. $5600 per month, all amenities included. Use of kitchen extra. 6 miles from courthouse and two blocks from 7-11. Only large, conservative news organizations considered.

I am dumb-founded why they felt they had to pay the extra ad cost to mention they were only two blocks from 7-11. Especially since we have them every two blocks anyway. I have my doubts that they would decline to take money from a small, liberal news organization.

I wish you could see the courthouse area where the second trial will be held. That's the one 3 miles from my house. They call it the Taj Mahal. It's stuck in the middle of nowhere and it rises from the ground like a soaring pheonix. It really does kinda look like the Taj, if the Taj had a redneck interpretation.



It's the center of activity here in Chesapeake. No resident can escape visiting to get their yearly city sticker, pay their taxes, go to the library, fight a traffic ticket, visit the juvenile detention center, go to the police station, or get a Slurpee. It's kind of our one-stop all-encompassing community government area.

And to access it, there is one, two-lane road that goes over a wooden lock bridge that is raised every hour, on the hour, to let boats go by. So, for about 15 minutes of every hour, of every day, you cannot get to the vital community government center because you have to wait for pleasure boats to go by. Once you go over the bridge, there are no hotels, no restaurants and no gas stations. There are six pawn shops though. And a trophy store. And a 7-11.



This means that all the media types will have to stay on my side of the bridge and join the giant clusterfuck that we call "goin' to the southside."

Getting a traffic ticket here isn't nearly as traumatic as having to appear in court and figure out how "go to the southside" to fight it. In fact, it may be that nobody has ever actually fought a traffic ticket here since it's too difficult to fight the traffic to get to the courthouse.

I usually try to plan only one trip a year there and conduct all my business at once. This planning requires more coordination than a two-week cruise. First I have to fill up the gas tank to the brim, since I could conceivably run out of gas waiting to cross the bridge. Packing snacks and drinks is a must for survival. A good book and an umbrella are useful if you have to get out of your car and sit on your hood waiting for the parade of boats to end.

Sometimes the bridge opens on the hour, the parade of boats take a half hour to go by, the bridge goes back down and it takes a half hour for the start of traffic on this side to get up to the bridge. If you're unlucky, you don't make it through on this pass and you get right up to the front on the hour, when it's time to open again. But at least you have a better view of the boat parade.

And to this we add the gigantic media machine. There was actually a court debate on whether or not to start court on the half-hour during the sniper trials to accomodate the media and the bridge. However, it is my prediction that it won't work, since it's very likely that you could sit through two bridge raisings before you actually make it over. It may end up being the first media event where all the anchors and reporters have to sleep in tents on the courthouse lawn just to make sure they get there in time each day.

My advice to everyone is, unless you want to pawn something between November and January, watch the trial on TV. On the bright side, if you do make it over the bridge, and you find a parking space, you can rush over to the newly-erected kiosk that sells keychains that say..."I came, I saw, I visited... The Chesapeake Taj Mahal.