Once upon a time, I fancied myself the leader of the pack, cruising down the highway in my sporty silver Honda Insight at 58 miles per gallon. An earnest environmentalist, I'd donated my rusted-out Nissan Sentra to the Sierra Club and purchased this pioneering hybrid for $15,000 a year after it had first been driven off the lot. A friend warned me not to risk this "bleeding edge" technology. Besides, he said, the forthcoming hydrogen fueled cars would be cleaner. (Still waiting, 25 years later.) A deep green from Maine told me that if I really cared about mileage I should go with biodiesel (recycled fry vat oil) and keep 50-gallon fuel barrels by my driveway.

Truth be told, I didn't care that much about cars. I just wanted four wheels, keys and a vehicle to salve my carbon-emitting guilty consciousness. The Insight was perfect, not just high mileage, but a showoff in the lookalike world of bland hatchbacks and SUVs. Nothing else looked like it, a pocket-sized two-seater sporting a tapered design with aerodynamic fender skirts covering the rear wheels and the front wheels four inches wider than the rear. In fact, most of those added miles per gallon came from the aerodynamics and the lightweight aluminum components.

On one occasion the hybrid battery died. (Under warranty, thank goodness!) Did I notice? With my three-cylinder engine? You bet. I died going up hills and didn't dare try passing in the oncoming lane because my car had lost its peppy acceleration. Yet I still averaged better than 50 mpg on the gas engine alone. The sad truth is we could all be getting fantastic mileage if we didn't consider it so goddamned un-American to be driving zippy little cars. We want our hulks and mobile comfort zones.

For 15 years, my car and I were one, a crusading team for a greener world. But nothing lasts forever, especially not when you park outside in winter and slowly lose the undercarriage to rust. My Insight was in its last throes — the AC gone, the undercarriage guaranteed to fail its next inspection — when I drove up to Maine to climb Mount Katahdin, monumental and a mile high, where Thoreau himself felt spooked by the "vast, Titanic, inhuman Nature" he encountered on the cloudy summit. Fortunately, my cousin and I had ideal weather for the strenuous climb and a long lunch break at the top amid the crowd of hikers to enjoy the 90-mile views in all directions. A day to remember.

But there on a dirt road my Insight met its noble death halfway up a steep incline. I heard a loud pop in the engine. The orange dashboard lights went black. I was able to roll back safely to the roadside, then I flagged down a passing car to borrow a phone. (I didn't yet have one of my own.) The rest of the afternoon was spent with a park ranger, then the flatbed tow truck driver for the 40 minute ride to East Millinocket where I made $34.13 for my Insight as scrap metal. We'd had a good life together — 276,453 miles — but when the time comes to meet make my maker, I'd chose the middle of a wilderness park myself.

Back home, I test drove several plug-in hybrids, the next stage in higher gas mileage, but had to face the fact that I lived in a cottage with a gravel parking area that froze over like a hockey rink in winter, not the ideal situation for running a power line from the shed. So I settled for a Prius C, the smaller hatchback model, and we've done fine, I guess — 147,972 miles so far — but I can't call it love. When I walk out of Adams, I can easily mistake it for three or four lookalike models (Pri-i?) in the parking lot. (Dear Kia. Dear Subaru. Must we all look the same?) The Prius C is nothing special. The green car revolution left me behind years ago.

As it happens, back when I considered plug-in hybrids, EVs were planting their first public stakes in Kingston. QuickChek by Exit 19 installed a row of stylish Tesla chargers in 2016. Ulster County had already installed nine the previous year in back of the county courthouse and elsewhere. In 2018, the City of Kingston put in its first three. A decade later we have by one count some 164 chargers at municipal lots, car dealerships, restaurant lots and possibly places you wouldn't think to look. We now have 450 registered EVs in the 12401 zip code, perhaps 3 to 5 percent of our total car population. And once you've identified your first Amazon EV delivery van — a cartoonish creature with bug-eyed headlights and picture-window windshields — you know you'll see them everywhere. EVs have quietly slipped into our daily lives.

Not that I've paid much attention, not being a car guy. But my trainer at Mac Fitness, who is an EV obsessive, has kept me abreast. More than a year ago, he had a dream come true when he was able to buy a used Kia Niro EV that has kept him engaged and entertained. On his phone while I stretch and strain, he can check his recharging status at the solar carport charger at the Ulster Savings Bank parking lot nearby. In these times of punishing price hike — lately, he's been shocked at how tomatoes have spiked — he's acutely aware of how he's saving by filling up on kilowatts rather than gas. Soon after our all mighty military began bombing Iran, I thought to buy him a bumper sticker: "Keep Bombing. I'm Recharging." Funny, but not so funny now that we're paying for this war at the pump. My latest fill-up at $34.85 would have been $24.16 back in January. My trainer fears that those of us with combustion engines face even darker days ahead.

To get a sense of EV life in Kingston today, I caught a ride with Hugo, a busy guy with a young family and a job he commutes to in Albany. Yet he's also an EV evangelist, so on a day he stayed in town he ferried me around at lunch hour to see various charging stations. I didn't say so, but my excuse for not dumping the Prius C for an EV has been that I park on the street. I don't have a driveway and a garage to recharge overnight. He didn't say so, but, in effect, he was showing me that I didn't need a home charger.

There are plenty in public. His first EV, a Chevy Bolt back in 2019, he recharged at a parking lot in the Rondout, an invigorating walk up or down from his house up the hillside. (I happen to know a Tesla owner who lives in a Rondout apartment and also recharges at a public lot.) Now Hugo lives Uptown with solar panels on the roof to supplement his home recharging, but he'll still use public stations. If he's at Planet Fitness he'll park at the chargers in front of Kohl's. If he wants a rapid charge at the Uptown Bank of America, he'll go for a brisk walk at Dietz stadium. The only place he doesn't recharge while going about his day is at his state agency in Albany. Too many others got there too early and grabbed all the spots.

Now he's on his third EV, a Hyundai Ioniq 5, a handsome white crossover hatchback with digital screens on the dashboard that to me are pure wizardry, but also with enough room in the back for his daughter's cello. He bought it with only 3,000 miles on the odometer, yet at $36,500 he saved $15,000 or so off the price for a new vehicle. The Trump regime sought to kneecap EVs by eliminating their tax credits at the end of last September — $7,500 for new, $4,000 for used — which led to a sharp drop-off in new EV sales, But used EV sales actually set a record in March, spurred in part by high gas prices. And three-quarters of Americans buy used.

We passed our first rechargers in the municipal lot on Cornell Street, an original from 2018. I knew this parking lot well, since I've parked there during winter snow emergencies so as not to get a ticket tucked in to the six inches of snow on my windshield. Somehow I'd never noticed this charger in the far corner by a bushy sidewalk tree — stylish, like a slimmed down gas pump. A humorist had added a small "F--k Elon" sticker near the top.

From there, we went off to find chargers in the student parking lot at SUNY Ulster behind the high school. Then we headed to the malls, where businesses, rather than local governments, have installed chargers in hopes of serving customers. Then the county offices on Ulster Avenue, where I learned the difference between the Level 2 chargers we'd seen so far and Level 3 rapid chargers that change the game if you're willing to pay double or more for your kilowatts. Integrated into the electrical system for buildings, Level 2 chargers provide AC current that translates into 10 to 20 miles of charge per hour. Hence, my trainer parks in the solar carport, then goes off to work. Rapid charges provide far more powerful DC current so you can be on your way in 20 or 30 minutes. But to have a rapid charger, Central Hudson must get involved to build nearby transformer boxes and perhaps upgrade the power lines.

One thing I noticed on our lunch hour tour, nobody was recharging at any of these stations, not until we got to the rapid chargers at the Uptown Bank of America, where all the action was. At one point we had have four Ioniq 5s and one sparkling blue Equinox plugged in side by side. On his phone, Hugo linked up his app with the charger screen to pay, then let me plug in the handle to the car. This plug wasn't unlike a gas station nozzle except it didn't drip or smell.

While we waited, I chatted with a neighboring charger who drove a matching white Ioniq 5. She confirmed Hugo's contention that many EV drivers aren't EV buffs. His analogy: we all live in homes yet how many understand the plumbing or the electrical wiring? Not her. And certainly not me. For all my bragging about my Insight, I couldn't have told you the first thing about what happened under the hood. The mpg meter on the dashboard was enough information for me.

On the way to Bank of America, Hugo had wanted to show off the naughty little secret of EVs. They accelerate like fiends. Anyone with an inner drag racer should be in one. At the traffic circle, we turned onto I-587, the 1.2 miles-long “interstate,” where Hugo floored it to show me what zero-to-scary felt like. Alas, after a quick burst, he had to desist because a pair of gas vehicles toddled ahead in both lanes. To be honest, I wasn't disappointed. Even a truncated zero-to-scary had me wide-eyed and gripping my knees.

On the way home, Hugo let me take the wheel. The immediate notable difference was the accelerator pedal that I needed to keep pushing or the car grew sluggish. There was no easy coasting, perhaps no need for braking. Regenerative braking, this is called: the use of the brakes to recharge the battery. My Prius has it, but nothing like this EV.

Back in 1996, I'd had a magazine assignment to cover a solar car rally — really early EVs and hybrids. One participant told me his goal was to drive from New York City to Washington D.C. without touching the brakes once. On this trip I had the chance to drive the General Motors EV1 around a parking lot, Detroit's early prototype. At the time California planned to require that 2 percent of all new car sales be EVs by 2000. Never happened. If you've seen the movie, “Who Killed the Electric Car?”, you know the sorry fate of the EV1. GM decided to stick with gas engines. But if you live long enough … here I was driving down Albany Avenue in an EV with plenty of EV company on our streets. Maybe I wasn't ready to dump my Prius C for recharging in a parking lot, but I was feeling better about the world.