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Sign | Mar 26 2002

Duck sign

It was Rachel’s idea to steal the duck sign. It’s on Broadkill Road, a few miles from her mother’s beach house in Delaware. Had we succeeded, I wouldn’t be telling you any of this. This raises the question of what I’m not telling you. I’m not telling you a lot.

Rachel spotted the sign on her way back from Kmart, where she’d bought four containers of contact lens solution (Delaware has no sales tax, so Rachel likes to stock up on stuff like contact lens solution). She immediately stopped the car and got out to check the bolts. The bolts seemed easy enough to unscrew, although the top bolt would require a stool or something to reach.

When she returned to the beach house, she reported her findings and asked for my help. I agreed so long as we didn’t get caught. My philosophy is, I’ll steal signs with my girlfriend but I won’t get caught.

After much discussion (sign stealing is not a felony, we decided), more investigation was deemed necessary, so we drove back to the sign, bringing two large wrenches and a foot stool. If all went well, we would steal the sign in the middle of the night, when few people used that road.

Things went badly. There was almost no shoulder on the sign side of the road, which meant we couldn’t park the car in a way that would block view of what we were doing. Worse, the top bolt was higher than Rachel had described: a good four feet above my reach. We’d need a small ladder to do the job, and there was no small ladder back at the beach house. We considered using the car as a ladder, with me standing on the roof, but that seemed crazy. What if a car suddenly appeared in the distance? At best, I’d have time to jump down from the roof, or perhaps lay flat across it, but there’d be no time to move the car, which would be parked right against the sign, sticking out halfway into the lane.

I turned to Rachel and said, “I’m not sure we can do this,” by which I meant, “No fucking way am I doing this,” and we returned to the beach house.

The next day, heading back to Brooklyn, we stopped again and took some photos. It was sad. Rachel really wanted that sign, and I wanted to get it for her, and it had all come to nothing.

About the only good thing is that I can tell you about it.