The Transdimensional Gas Station

[BS3]

I have to say I'm still not certain it wasn't a real albeit mundane experience, probably with a little embroidery in the telling.

For one thing I feel like a made-up story would have had higher and more obvious strangeness added to it. In any case the fact that the petrol station proprietor didn't seem overly confused by modern currency, a Volkswagen van etc, suggests that there was really nothing out of the ordinary here.

As mentioned before in this thread, I had a similar experience of passing (but not being able to find again, despite careful searching) a distinctively old fashioned petrol station. In this case, I'm pretty sure the answer was confusion over which road I was on. The bloke standing at the pumps, modern car parked by them and sadly contemporary petrol prices on the sign all spoke of the essential normality of the petrol station, despite it subsequently 'vanishing'. But who's to say, if I was a bit more creatively minded or retelling the tale at several decades' distance, that I wouldn't start remembering, say, an Austin 7 parked at the pumps or something. I think something like that might have occurred in this case.

 

[Cochise]

The curious thing about this story is that I feel I've been there - not to the actual gas station, but that there are things I remember which just aren't there. It's a feeling which in itself is attached with some of the same physical manifestations as true panic.

The OP may not have been deliberately misleading, but suffering from false memory, which he/she realised when looking for the receipt.

 

[Krepostnoi]

There are often writerly 'tells' in made-up accounts, frequently used to instill Romantic atmosphere. For example, this...

'However, there were no eldritch feelings of strangeness or anything'

...seems a bit too archaic and altogether Lovecraftian, especially for someone writing in a second language.

I'm not quite convinced about the bit I highlighted. I teach ESOL, and one of the things I sometimes see my higher-level learners doing is throwing a surprisingly advanced word into their writing, in a way that doesn't quite fit: it's usually in the right ballpark in terms of meaning, but the level of formality or contemporaneity is a little off. Or maybe the word doesn't collocate with the other words in the phrase. (For a concrete example of what I mean by collocation, compare "strong rain" with "heavy rain". One adjective collocates, the other does not.) In this case, can a feeling be "eldritch "? Or is that word better applied to the writhing betentacled horror which evokes insert-collocation-here feelings within the observer?

Usually, what has happened is the learner has used a bilingual dictionary or translation app, based on a word in their first language. The resource has duly spat out a selection of words, but presented them context-free. The hapless learner chooses one at more-or-less random, and this is what happens.

 

[Steven]

I'm not quite convinced about the bit I highlighted. I teach ESOL, and one of the things I sometimes see my higher-level learners doing is throwing a surprisingly advanced word into their writing, in a way that doesn't quite fit: it's usually in the right ballpark in terms of meaning, but the level of formality or contemporaneity is a little off. Or maybe the word doesn't collocate with the other words in the phrase (for a concrete example of collocation, compare "strong rain" with "heavy rain". One adjective collocates, the other does not.) In this case, can a feeling be "eldritch "? Or is that word better applied to the writhing betentacled horror which evokes insert-collocation-here feelings within the observer?

Usually, what has happened is the learner has used a bilingual dictionary or translation app, based on a word in their first language. The resource has duly spat out a selection of words, but presented them context-free. The hapless learner chooses one at more-or-less random, and this is what happens.

Yes, good points. Nabokov, for example, was a superb writer in several languages, and I should've borne that in mind.

 

[Krepostnoi]

Yes, good points. Nabokov, for example, was a superb writer in several languages, and I should've borne that in mind.

He was, but he was extremely unusual. I can only really think of Beckett and Conrad as other examples of successful literateurs in a second language. It really is an extremely rare talent.

By way of contrast, in a former incarnation I was a pretty good literary translator from, coincidentally enough given Nabokov has been mentioned, Russian into English. But there is no way I would have tried to work in the other direction. I could probably have conveyed the gist, more or less, but any literary qualities would have been entirely lost. With that in mind, "eldritch feelings" is a fairly skilled mistake to have made.

 

[BS3]

I can only really think of Beckett and Conrad as other examples of successful literateurs in a second language. It really is an extremely rare talent.

A bit less globally known than Beckett or Conrad, but Flann O'Brien wrote important works in both English and Irish - or occasionally in English through Irish phonology in his newspaper column ("Namh deintilmean díos docúmaints ár bhéarigh sióruigheas")

 

[Aydee_Aitchdee]

The OP may not have been deliberately misleading, but suffering from false memory, which he/she realised when looking for the receipt.

That is a truly amazing point, I'd say that's entirely possible and entirely probable. Well done!

This is most plausible to me because it means there was no deliberate attempt to mislead, and I can see him realizing there was nothing Fortean and slinking away quietly. I wonder if he re-registered under a different name. If so, Swedish guy, no hard feelings and it was a great story, after all.

 

[BS3]

The thing is, if you removed the 'vanishing' aspect of the story entirely, there would really be nothing anomalous about it at all. They stopped at an old fashioned rural garage with an elderly proprietor, bought some stale petrol (as you might conceivably have bought in a rarely visited rural garage) and got a physical receipt. The only potentially improbable element was not being able to find the garage later on, which probably made the other elements seem stranger.

It reminds me very much of the famous French hotel "time slip" case which @Paul_Exeter convincingly identified as an actual, if somewhat old-fashioned hotel, the Auberge du Grand Pelican, and which the tourist witnesses were probably unable to relocate because there are a number of similar but parallel roads leading out of the town they were travelling from. Once you remove the element of being unable to find the hotel again, the whole experience became much less strange.

I note that at least one of the "vanishing pub" stories on the Isle of Wight can also be explained by the fact that that there is a pub on one of two very similar, parallel routes. No doubt those who reported the "vanishing pub" were also tourists, rather than locals.

While the writer of the 'transdimensional gas station' story was probably a bit more familiar with the area in question, I still note that he wasn't a 'local' as such and indeed had one other good reason that he might have got confused over which road he was on - him and his colleague both had their attention fixed on the petrol gauge.

 

[IbisNibs]

Shaggy dog story ("hairy dog" story if you use the wrong collocation) or a misremembered long ago afternoon, they both make sense to me. If struck with the realization that the receipt was a wishful false memory, the OP would have been accepted here if he'd fessed up to it. It's possible he didn't disappear out of embarrasement or pique, but because he left his mortal coil, or maybe he just got a life, or a real job. (!!!) Alternatively, maybe he found his way back to the Transdimentional Gas Station, but didn't escape a second time . . .

As a second language learner myself, and a bookish one rather than a blabbering social butterfly one (who are the ones who become really fluent), I can attest to how challenging it can be to use a wonderful new "advanced" word correctly. You glean these verbal treasures while wading through the literature (or pulp fiction) of your adored second language, and use them in your essay, only to get your paper back with the professor's little question marks and instructions to find a more appropriate word.

Having said that, on the internet there are scads (billions it seems) of examples of inapt (in my snarkier moods I would say inept) word usage by people writing in their first language. I think that's one way word meanings shift over time.

 

[BS3]

For reference, here's the probable solution to the Isle of Wight "vanishing pub":

Every version of this Isle of Wight story does seem to be explicable as confusion arising from approaching the Blacksmith's Arms at Calbourne from the appropriately named Betty Haunt Lane, which runs south from the Forest Road to Calbourne Road aka Middle Road, which are parallel and quite similar in general character - except one has a pub on it and the other does not. They are linked by several similar-looking minor lanes but only Betty Haunt Lane gives you a view of the pub on the approach with the gravelled car park in front.

There is no trace of any pub called either Falcon or Vulcan in that part of the island on any map I've seen between the 1880s and the present day - The Blacksmith's Arms does fit the bill, I wonder if it ever had an image of Vulcan on its sign?

More details on page 26 of the timeslips thread.

 

[SimonBurchell]

For reference, here's the probable solution to the Isle of Wight "vanishing pub":

I wonder if it ever had an image of Vulcan on its sign?

I suddenly had an image of a pub with Leonard Nemoy on the sign, in starfleet uniform and making a "live long and prosper" hand sign...