If you can know a town or region from its radio stations, then you can know a state from its rest areas. Each state, it seems, has its own ideas about how much, or how little, it needs to make available to the sojourners on its interstate highways. Each one wears its expression of these ideas in its freeway waystations like a badge – or, in some cases, a brand. You’d think that a state would like to be in good odor with its citizens about this. Literally.

On this trip, Iowa won the blue ribbon. Its rest areas were bright and airy, fully stocked and clean, and staffed with real live people whose function was to keep them that way – and who clearly cared about the job and about the travelers they were serving. Only in Iowa was there a uniformed person to point out to me that I could refill water jugs comfortably from a tap rather than awkwardly from a drinking fountain. Cheerfully and politely she told me this. At 1:30 on a Monday morning.

What’s more, the places had vending machines. Lots of them. Clean and well-tended like everything else. With far more than the usual assortment of junk. Why, you could almost get something resembling a decent continental breakfast without mortgaging your first-born child, and fasting for the rest of the decade to bring your sodium and cholesterol levels back to values that will not draw stiff, irate lectures, and budget-busting prescriptions, from your physician.

It was while I was trying to acquire such a breakfast that I encountered the silver quarter. And I would never have known about it, except that the machine to which I was offering it kept throwing it back.

The silver quarter was one of a bunch of quarters I had in a bag, the leftovers from a $20 bill that was transmuted into coin, and then into laundromat-washed clothes, on the day before this trip got started. All the other quarters were greedily gobbled up by the vending machine, but this one kept rattling down into the coin return slot. Stupidly, I picked the coin out of the slot and fed it back to the mechanical cafeteria, which tossed it back into the coin return.

After this cycle had been repeated half a dozen times, it finally occurred to me that there might be something wrong with the coin. Dawn was still brand new on the Iowa corn, and entirely too few hours had elapsed since the incident with the water jugs. My cognitive powers were not at their best. I picked up the coin and squinted at it, thinking that it might be a Canadian quarter. Or a slug. In which case I should be thankful that the machine didn’t jam. Just what I didn’t need, to be responsible for jamming up a vending machine in an Iowa rest stop by feeding it slugs like a stupid New York tourist.

My confusion increased when I saw that the coin looked like a perfectly ordinary, if somewhat aged, American quarter dollar, with the eagle on the back - rather than all the promotional sloganeering for the several states that quarters have gotten themselves into lately - and the bust of George Washington trusting in God on the front.

Then I checked the date on the coin, tucked under George’s shoulder.

1939. Nineteen flippin’ thirty nine.

Hitler was beating the crap out of Poland.

My mother hadn’t reached puberty yet. I wondered if she would have let herself get there if she knew that I was going to be the result.

And silver coins in America had real, honest-to-goodness silver in them.

I stood in front of the vending machine for a few minutes, contemplating the irony of this. I hope that there wasn’t anybody behind me, waiting to buy their continental breakfast – or perhaps the Pepsi version of the dog’s breakfast – and too polite to push past me or otherwise snap me out of it. Like I said already, it was early, and I was still a wire or two short of a complete circuit.

Still, here I was, remembering when the U.S. Government decided, in 1965 or so, to take all the silver out of silver coins (the dime, the quarter, the half dollar). Good luck finding a dime for a cup of coffee (yes, forty years ago you really could get a cup of coffee for a dime), if word gets around that the dime has fifty cents worth of silver in it. Even the Government can do that math. Come to think of it, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a silver dime or quarter in circulation …

But it was no easy task to design a coin that had the same size, the same color, the same weight, and the same bounce as the old silver-containing coins, without actually being silver coins - or costing as much. The U.S. Mint had to come up with this sandwich composite trick (called “clad coinage"), a then-new technology, to accomplish the feat.

And why was this so important?

So that the new coins could be used in existing vending machines!

And now here I am, standing stupidly at the crack of dawn in the middle of a rest area on Interstate 80, half an hour’s drive west of Davenport, Iowa, in desperate need of caffeine which I can’t get because a vending machine won’t accept the old coins, the ones it was supposedly designed to take in the first place.

Eventually, of course, I did snap out of it and finish acquiring my breakfast by fishing additional, acceptable quarters out of my bag. Shortly thereafter, Hotel Subaru was once again on the road, crossing the Mississippi and heading for Pennsylvania via Indianapolis and Columbus – the decision having been taken to bypass Chicago and the toll roads of Indiana and Ohio.

And I slipped the silver quarter into the car’s coin pocket. It’s still there.

   - O Ceallaigh

Copyright © 2006 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.

All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

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