Tomorrow, the town will receive its first automated vehicle. It is said to be a bus. And you can ride in it. They gave away tickets! But if you didn’t get a ticket, there’s still a chance! They are doing walkup tours. All of this reminds me of those old newspaper stories about the first plane in town. Here, it was 1911, and the headlines read “‘Birdman’ with Machine Coming.”

“Take a ride in the air ship, and listen to the band play. Welcome to our city. There will be a hot time … stand on the hub of the wheel of the center of population and feel the world go around.”

That October, the flight crew reassembled their plane (it had to be hauled in by train) in the meadow next to our building. The paper says thousands of people came from all around to see two flights. An uneven field, a barbed wire fence and a stall on takeoff caused a crash.

The locals rushed in and started tearing apart the plane for souvenirs. One of the flight crew threatened to shoot the looters, so much of the plane, and the pilot, Horace Kearney, survived. He flew the plane again that December, but died in a plane crash the following year.

The next summer, there was another plane and another flight in Dunn Meadow, another pilot got his plane in the air. He crashed into a fence trying to dodge power lines and telephone wires.

So maybe that’s the reason they are also closing the roads for the automated bus.

The bus is expected to go up and down one of the main business roads. Today they’ve cleared off the parked cars, too. This is apparently going to be a three or four block ride up a straight street.

So, naturally, we’ve closed all of the intersecting roads, as well.

Blocks of two-lane gridlock.

You don’t want to inconvenience the robotic bus, after all.