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Parking violator pays her dues

How rash of tickets created a civic-minded Durango resident

From almost the moment that I learned how to drive 10 months ago (as a 25-year-old), I became a wanted woman.

While I have dabbled in moving violations and twice been ticketed for speeding, parking violations are the wellspring of my criminal career. This is the story of how parking tickets – yes, those seemingly insignificant $9 orange-enveloped fines – led to a stint on the chain gang.

I avoided the law’s clutches for months. Then, one fateful day two months ago, my car was booted.

The law is a cruel, cruel foe – almost as vindictive as the colleagues who gleefully gathered to witness my downfall.

The city of Durango alleged I owed it $903 in unpaid parking tickets.

I turned to Nick Anesi, a brilliant attorney whose fee – to date, a bouquet of fuschia flowers he didn’t ask for – was within my budget.

Anesi asked me how I had gotten so many tickets.

Basically, I got my first parking ticket and appealed it. In the meantime, I got more parking tickets. Because I couldn’t afford them, I did the only reasonable thing, which was conceptually refuse to believe parking tickets exist.

Then, quite suddenly, I’d accrued 30 parking tickets during the course of eight months.

Anesi, to his credit, pointed out I was not a rapist or a murderer – a cheerful view of my wrongdoing shared by few of my colleagues.

Anesi met with city prosecutor Bill Corwin, and they worked out a miraculous settlement that Anesi believes made Durango legal history: I would pay about $140 to the court, and work off the rest of my parking debt by doing 40 hours of community service.

Hard time

Despite this miracle, I developed misgivings when I looked over the court’s list of 28 places I could work for.

The American Cancer Society didn’t take smokers. Parks and Recreation probably wanted people who enjoy being outside. My long working day meant I couldn’t volunteer for the thrift stores.

But a more basic question flummoxed me: How does one meaningfully serve one’s community?

My colleagues suggested I pick up trash on the side of the road in an orange jumpsuit, though this was not on the city’s list of options.

Anesi suggested that if I wanted to throw myself in the path of hardened criminals, I do hard labor. But he warned I should probably refrain from disclosing I was doing time for parking tickets and instead talk little, thereby cultivating the sort of mysterious air that might suggest I killed someone.

“They’ll take you more seriously,” he said.

Most people said community service was an unpleasant necessity, and recommended I find a genial employer willing to give me credit for hours I didn’t work.

Community nervous

On a recent Saturday, I left Durango Arts Center at 10:30 a.m., with about 100 glossy posters advertising the Autumn Arts Festival and a roll of tape as it began to deluge.

Art is the kind virtuous thing I have strong positive feelings about in the abstract. Furthermore, I admire myself for being such a strong abstract supporter of the arts.

Nonetheless, I had no plans to attend the Autumn Arts Festival – I’d been planning to court men and sleep.

But there is something oddly radicalizing about community service. In the process of applying yourself to something, you develop the assuring conviction that your work is important, and your perception of its significance in turn spurs you to work harder.

This happened while I was postering for DAC. Soon, I began to shift my entire opinion of local businesses according to whether they agreed to put up a Durango Autumn Arts Festival poster. For instance, when the owner of Poppy’s restaurant agreed to let me tape the poster up beneath the counter, I decided he was a deep, soulful person and wondered whether I should marry him.

By the time I arrived at Put a Cork in It, and asked my friend Alan Cuenca to display a poster, I was impassioned.

He initially said “no.”

“It’s a slippery slope,” he said, explaining that his shop was too small to advertise all the virtuous activities afoot in the community.

I told him I was writing an article about my community service and that if he didn’t take a poster, I’d shame him in print.

He groaned, accused me of abusing my power and took the poster.

Because of such victories, when I put up my final poster at Durango Public Library at 3:30 p.m., I was extremely proud of myself: Perhaps, I imagined, I was the most efficient – nay, the most extraordinary – community servant in the history of Durango criminals’ community service.

I anticipated that on my exultant return to DAC, volunteers would spontaneously burst into applause. I would tell them I was definitely coming to the Autumn Arts Festival because of art – and because of my expert postering, the whole town was.

But the car fates denied me this community service glory.

I turned on my car and accelerated, met resistance, and then felt my car lurching over a large concrete hump and into a median I’d forgotten about, where it languished for the next hour like a metallic beached whale.

Humiliated, I had to call DAC and say I was unable to complete my community service for parking tickets because of car problems.

I called my friend and colleague Shane Benjamin, who has proved himself a car-whisperer by the uncanny accuracy with which he diagnoses problems with my Honda based on my imitating its gurgling sounds via cellphone. He showed up at the library, did noble things with ramps, and my car was free.

I headed back to DAC. They gave me credit for the hour I spent in the library parking lot.

Later, I visited Cuenca. When I confessed that I’d crashed my car in the library lot, he looked down at the Autumn Arts Festival poster now prominently displayed on his table.

“Karma,” he said.

Airport

My ego battered, on Sunday I headed to Durango-La Plata County Airport.

James Farmer, who works as the airport’s janitor, quickly gave me a pair of leather gloves and put me to work in the long-term parking lot, which I was deputized to weed. Later, Farmer gave me broom and dustpan, and told me to sweep up litter immediately outside the airport and, if I was feeling adventurous, the short-term parking lot.

Though not a natural at housework, sweeping up public debris turns out to be my forte: I collected empty beer cans, Coors Light bottle caps, Happy Meal wrappers, weirdly ubiquitous pieces of broken black plastic, a tea bag that – in drying – had fused itself to the asphalt, rotting baggage tags and hundreds of cigarette butts – some of which I recognized to be my own.

I told Farmer I’d see him next week.

Only 26 more hours before I’m reformed.

Editor’s note: This is the third story in an ongoing series about a reporter learning to drive at age 25.

Sep 25, 2013
Community service options


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