Ed’s monster truck taxi service

My monster truck has become the airport express for the suitcase squad. Over the past few weeks I’ve taken a number of folks to the airport, all of whom left here on one-way tickets back to the mainland. I’m getting pretty darned sick of having to bid adieu at the top of that ramp at the departure area, especially at ungodly hours like 3:00 in the morning (“three a.m. in the morning,” as we say here).

All of these fleeing folks were either professionals in the private sector here or their family members, or, in one case, a pet (which may or may not qualify as a family member, I guess).

Some of these guys vanish into the ether and never are heard from again. Some–a good number, actually–manage to keep in touch with us here, and we’ve got quite a little network going. All of them read the on-line version of the Tribune, by the way.

It’s darned difficult to track population moves as they happen. In the U.S., one very clever indicator of domestic migration trends comes from tracking U-Haul movement. U-Haul is an outfit that rents trailers and small trucks to folks who are too frugal (or cheap, take your pick) to fork out the cash for professional movers to haul their stuff from here to there. Some genius figured out that surveying U-Haul stores and figuring out where, and where from, all the one-way moves were involved would give a good indicator of where folks were moving, and where, of course, they were leaving.

There’s no U-Haul here in Saipan, of course. All we can do is look at ancillary evidence, and from what I’ve seen, the suitcase squad has snowballed into a downright economic “abandon ship” call.

And not every member of the suitcase squad is merely a statesider returning to home turf. A good number of locals seem to be making tracks for the states, or at least taking a good hard look at the opportunities there. I’m aware of relocations to the western shores of California, the eastern expanses of North Carolina, and a lot of places in between.

The exodus is more a result of the Commonwealth’s economic problems than it is a cause. It is a “current indicator,” a finger on the pulse of the current economic situation. It doesn’t predict anything, really. All it points to is the fact that a lot of people have lost faith in the CNMI’s economy. The issue is whether they’ve lost faith for good reason. And the answer to that is a definite yes.

For the foreseeable future, then, the issue isn’t how much more investment capital we can gain, but, in some cases, how much of it is leaving. Some airlines have already made such adjustments. The acid test will be whether a major hotel decides to call it quits, and, though I won’t claim to be personally acquainted with any such cases, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the big hotels leaves its rooms to the geckos and the bugs.

While all that is sorting itself out, I’ll be left hauling folks to the airport in my truck, waving good bye, and maybe I’ll apply for a taxi license. Can I make a profit on one-way fares? And can I charge extra for operating at “three a.m. in the morning”?