Crosby Mott woke up on a genuinely beautiful June morning — the kind where the light comes through your windows at a specific angle that makes you feel like you have opinions about America — and announced that Charlottesville was, quote, "accidentally re-entering peak analog America."
I asked what that meant. He gestured broadly at his phone, which was open to a Reddit thread about 2016 Snapchat filters, and said, "Look at this. Everyone feels it. The town is slow right now. Juneteenth week. The tree work on 5th. Vibes of a place remembering itself." Then he closed his phone, placed it face-down on the counter like he was decommissioning it, and said he was going to spend the whole day navigating by printed directions, intuition, and "what the street is trying to tell him."
I want to be clear: it was 70 degrees and sunny. It was a perfect day. He chose to do this on a perfect day.
He printed the directions from MapQuest. MapQuest. I did not know MapQuest still existed. Crosby printed them, folded them into thirds like a gentleman, and put them in his shirt pocket like a man who has learned nothing from the last fifteen years of infrastructure.
His first stop was a coffee place on the Downtown Mall. He arrived forty-five minutes late because his printed directions told him to take 5th Street SW, which, as anyone in Charlottesville has known since June 1st, is down to a single lane for tree work between Cherry Avenue and Harris Road. Crosby did not know this. Crosby sat in that lane for twenty-two minutes, nodding slowly, like the traffic itself was communicating something meaningful to him. He texted me from the line — using his phone, which he had re-enabled because "emergencies" — to say that the delay felt "earned."
When he finally got to the coffee place he had written down, it had moved. Not closed. Moved. It is now one block east, which is a thing you can find out in eleven seconds on Yelp, but Crosby did not do that because it was his analog day. He stood in front of the old address for a while. A woman walking a dog told him the new location. He thanked her like she was an oracle. He was genuinely moved by this interaction. He described it to me later as "the town providing."
At lunch, he tried to find a restaurant by asking a man outside the library what was good nearby. The man suggested a place over on Preston. Crosby walked to Preston. He found the restaurant. He ordered a sandwich. This part went fine, and Crosby treated it as confirmation that the whole system worked, which, respectfully, one success does not a methodology make.
The afternoon went sideways when he tried to get to a used bookstore based on "I think it's north of the hospital, you can feel it." It was south of the hospital. He walked north for sixteen minutes into what turned out to be a neighborhood with no bookstore, but several very nice houses, and he stood on a corner looking at them with his arms crossed like he was a new UVA president quietly sketching a strategic vision. He called me. I told him to turn around. He said, "No, I think the street wants me to keep going." The street, for the record, did not want that.
He got home at 6:45, sunburned on his left arm only, carrying one book he'd eventually found by accident, a cup of coffee gone completely cold, and the expression of a man who has conducted a very important experiment.
"I think," he said, "the town is more itself than people realize. You just have to let it show you."
I asked how long he'd spent in traffic on 5th Street.
"That's not the point," he said.
He ate his dinner. He checked his phone. He showed me the Reddit thread about 2016 nostalgia again, as evidence. Then he fell asleep on the couch by eight-thirty, one arm over his eyes, the folded MapQuest directions still in his shirt pocket.
It was, I have to admit, a very him kind of day.
The town did not re-enter peak analog America. But Crosby had a nice time, mostly, and the dog lady outside the coffee place really was kind, and sometimes that's the whole thing right there.