sunrise appointment
all morning commuting not
created equal

Been driving to work for over 40 years.

Never got to like it.

Still don’t.

But …

Back in 2009, we got relocated to Atlanta, Georgia and I drove from the upper north side of Gwinnett to midtown ATL 5 days a week for 12 years.

Was it bad?

I will tell you that one Sunday the Pastor started his sermon with “… Maybe you have an awful job. Maybe you are dealing with a bad financial situation. Maybe you have health issues … Maybe you start your day driving on I85.“

45 minutes to 1 and half hours EACH way on average until I started to leave for work at 6AM, then the trip in took 34 minutes but the return trip started at 5pm with all the folks who just wanted to get home.

It was long.

It was scary.

Each day had the chance to end up in a chaos or death.

But I lived near the freeway and I worked near the freeway.

It was a left turn onto the free way out in Gwinnett and a left off the freeway in midtown so overall it was not TOO demanding.

There was really just one way to go and for good or bad, you got on the road and made due.

Not like when I lived on the north end of Grand Rapids, Michigan and worked on the south end out near the airport.

With that commute I had lots of ways to get there and back.

Lots of ways and all of them bad.

Some with freeways, some with back alleys.

Take I96 to Patterson.

Take Fuller to Michigan to East Paris.

Take Fuller to Lake Drive and the Beltline.

I can remember them all.

All of them with left turns, right turns and intersections with stoplights and all of them leaving you wishing you had taken another route.

Exasperating to say the least and not much to say on the side of what might be any redeeming factor.

The winter weather that came with living in Michigan was the frosting on that commuting cake.

Today I live just miles from the Atlantic coast.

My office is within walking distant of the beach.

My home is about 10 miles away.

I leave early in the morning.

With the changes of seasons and the time change, 4 times a year I drive into the crack of dawn..

I like to think that I have an appointment with the sunrise.

I am still surrounded by some of the dumbest drivers on God’s green earth.

Add in the demands each driver faces when they are tasked with operating a moving piece of machinery while trying to manage their lives via call phone and there is a level of exasperation that isn’t going away.

Years ago I signed up from traffic alerts for my commute in ATL.

I still get them.

In the last 24 hours I have received alerts that:

Accident. Left shoulder blocked – I 85 South at GA-140/J Carter Blvd/Exit 99 …

8 mph on 85 South @ Jimmy Carter Blvd (just before) …

20 mph on 85 North @ Old Peachtree Rd NW …

Accident reported – I 85 North at GA-317/Exit 111 …

This morning, the sun was still dripping water after sliding up and out of the Atlantic Ocean.

Not all commutes are created equal.

no matter how good
you feel, the morning won’t be
as it is right now

I know how you feel.

If I were walking, I’d be a foot off the ground.

It’s like just falling in love — you want the sensations to last forever.

You don’t want to go to sleep because you know that no matter how good you feel, in the morning it won’t be as good as it is right now.

W. P. Kinsella in the book, Shoeless Joe.

Going back to my roots, I have started listening to books on tape, welllll, audio books on my drive to work.

It is a shame really.

I live in a coastal paradise.

The drive through palm trees and across the intercoastal waterway as the sun rises out of the Atlantic Ocean should be enough of a daily treat that I would never tire of seeing it.

To be sure, I greet the visual aspect of my twice a week commute with pleasure that far outweighs any that I might have felt driving into the city of Atlanta.

It is my co-drivers.

The people I share my experience with.

The people who I would gladly banish to far off Mongolia if I could.

Bill Bryson once wrote something along the lines that God planned for Mr. Bryson to spend part of his day with the dumbest people in the world and that God arranged that by bringing the dumbest people in the world in their cars to drive along with Mr. Bryson to work.

I know what he means.

The frustration of yelling at drivers who marvel at things like a traffic light changing.

These people find this so marvelous, they sit and watch it for several cycles.

I need to escape and I use audio books to take me away from these people.

I can lose myself in the story and find myself at work or at home and much angst-less than without the audio book.

I also happened to be gifted three Audible credits for Father’s Day and because of this, I discovered Audibles free list.

I returned to audio books with an old favorite, Shoeless Joe.

I love the book and the choice of words in the writing but I also like the reader, Grover Gardner and I have searched out his books as he reads with a voice I hear in my head when I read.

Anyway, listening to Shoeless Joe, the writing in Shoeless Joe has been much on mind

W.P. Kinsella can turn a phrase with the best of them.

Mr. Hemingway wrote that to write about an experience is such a way that the experience became part of the collective consciousness of the reader was what it took to be a writer.

Mr. Kinsella writes about common things in our collective consciousness in a way that makes me stop and say to myself, Yup, that’s it.

Mr. Kinsella even starts this passage with know how you feel.

And he does.

If I were walking, I’d be a foot off the ground. It’s like just falling in love — you want the sensations to last forever. You don’t want to go to sleep because you know that no matter how good you feel, in the morning it won’t be as good as it is right now.

Romance.

Being in love.

Being happy to see someone.

You want the sensations to last forever.

You don’t want to go to sleep because you know that no matter how good you feel, in the morning it won’t be as good as it is right now.

But the feeling doesn’t last forever.

In the morning it won’t be a good as it is right now.

Love stories start with romance.

The romance or maybe the romantic feelings don’t last by the love story can go on.

Romance is a hybrid world.

A land maybe of make believe.

The land where, for a while, dreams can come true.

A land where feelings can’t be sustained.

Because in the morning it won’t be a good as it is right now.

I am remined of Orson Welles in the Third Man with this famous speech.

You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

driving in the dark
no slow down through the circles
all the lights are green

Sure I drove in Atlanta traffic on a daily basis for years.

I learned to cope.

I did not learn to like it.

I didn’t like traffic then.

I don’t like traffic now.

On the grand scheme, there is not a lot of traffic where I live and work now but there are some odd factors that impact traffic.

One thing is the only one way to work and that way is a bridge.

A four lane – two lanes in either direction – soon to be condemned bridge.

Not that Atlanta had any alternate routes that worked either but they did have lots of lanes.

Another thing is that anyone who needs to be at work in the area where I work, has to be at work at the same time.

Everyone using the same bridge at the same time creates traffic.

Frustrating traffic.

To add to the frustration, there are two traffic circles on my route to work.

So I have been leaving earlier.

Then the time changed.

And leaving early put me in the dark.

But it was okay.

I was the only car in the traffic circle.

When you are the only car and the idea is to slow down and yield to traffic on your left, there was no slow down as there was no traffic.

There are a handful of traffic lights between me and work and most of them are placed by some deviltry to do nothing but annoy me.

But it was okay as all those light were green.

I am not so foolish as to think I have found the trick.

I am not so foolish as to think this could happen again tomorrow.

I am happy for just today and for today, that is enough.

Hope for tomorrow, but for today …

driving in the dark
no slow down through the circles
all the lights are green

one land by two sea
three if by a computer
enemy is us!

He said to his friend, “If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry-arch
Of the North-Church-tower, as a signal-light,—
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country-folk to be up and to arm.

From Paul Revere’s Ride by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

I live and work in a resort community in the Low Country of South Carolina.

I am becoming acclimated to the area and its seasons and by seasons I mean the big ones, tourist and non tourist.

Right now is the down time.

The calm before the wake up storm of Spring Break that precedes the real start of the tourists that hits with Memorial Day.

Everything speeds up but at the same time everything slows down.

During the season, the number of people on the island where I work will triple.

While the population increases, the amount of available space on the roads for traffic stays the same.

As this IS an island, there is but one way on and off.

As population triples, travel time triples.

I like to use the analogy of an hour glass.

You can add more sand, but if you don’t increase the size of the neck of the glass, it will take a lot longer for the sand to dribble through and it no longer is an hour glass.

In March, the traffic increase is a forgone future.

You know its coming but there isn’t anything you can do about it.

You can enjoy the lack of traffic that is one of the major pluses of non tourist season.

That is, until two weeks ago.

I get traffic alerts on my phone from the County Sheriffs office and this one morning I got an alert that due to construction, traffic to the island was running slow.

I checked the Google for travel times and was shocked to see it would take me almost two hours to make the 22 minute trip to work.

To rub salt in it, the Google let me know that if I opted to ride a bike to work, it would take only one hour.

I checked in my office and let them know I would be leaving once traffic died down.

One of my coworkers responded to my text, to “Stay Home” as he was stuck on the bridge to the island and hadn’t moved in 30 minutes.

I continued to monitor the traffic, keeping the over filled hour glass in mind and knowing I would be at the very top of the sand in the hour glass, I waited until the trip showed a travel time of 45 minutes and then I left for work.

As I slowly drove across the bridge, I kept my eye open for the reported construction and I felt a bit cheated as there wasn’t any evidence of any work.

Traffic was the topic of discussion at work that day and the idea that the tourists were here early was raised.

Not this early was the consensus though it was said without conviction but more as prayer.

Then a funny thing happened.

We all left for home.

Once again, traffic collapsed.

Normal travel times for the trip home blew up.

My normal (non-tourist time) 22 minute trip home took 45 minutes.

Again, there was no sign of any road work or construction though folks at work had talked about the dread ‘resurfacing projects’ but there was no evidence of anything like that.

What WAS going on here?

The next trip was worse.

I began to leave home earlier and try to get out of work earlier and while that helped, my travel times were no way near what they had been.

The only thing that made sense was that it was true, the tourists had returned.

The paradigm had shifted.

Was the year round year of tourists that we saw during covid that was created by online schools and remote work now the norm?

I began leaving for my commute an hour early.

It was frustrating.

It was scary.

If it was like this now, what would it be during the FULL SEASON.

The topic became of the ONLY discussion at work.

I know what you are saying.

After driving in Atlanta rush hour for 12 hours, how could a little island traffic be such a pain?

WELL LET ME TELL YOU.

There is a wonderful traffic sign you see in ATL.

It says simply KEEP MOVING.

While it may not be an accurate description of ATL Traffic, it is the MINDSET of the veteran ATL driver.

Keep moving.

There was the benign sense of the overwhelming that took over my brain in ATL and traffic became one homogenous band of brothers with the goal, keep moving.

The traffic would speed up and slow down by osmosis.

Here, the island traffic is made of 30,000 cars maybe with 30,000 independent, free agent drivers who all think that but more those other drivers, they could make it to their destination faster and if you would give then 10 or 15 feet of space, they will show you.

People speed up.

People brake.

People come to a full stop.

All on whim.

In ATL, I would get in my lane, have my music or audio book nd get into this mental travel zone and make it to work.

Now it is full on interactive driving that demands my complete attention or someone was going to get hit.

It was the most frustrating of commutes I have ever had.

For me, looking ahead to worsening traffic as the season progressed, like Tom Sawyer and the fence, “… all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit.”

Then an odd story appeared in the daily paper.

The story was followed up with a news release from the Hilton Head Island Township.

It was kind of a statement, kind of an explanation and kind of an apology.

About a mile after you cross over the bridge onto the Island, you come to a traffic light.

According to the statement-explanation-apology, the town and the South Carolina Dept of Transportation had set up a new computer timing system on this traffic light.

The new computer had not functioned correctly, so the statement-explanation-apology said, and only three cars were able to make the left turn at the light.

More than three cars wanted to make that turn, and cars backed up quickly and filled the left the turn lane and blocked one of the two traffic lanes in the main road to the island.

The construction was this work on this system.

Kind of an AI road construction that wasn’t real.

The traffic was all too real.

I am relieved.

I am a little bit more relaxed.

But I do have a question?

Why?

How?

Did it take the powers that be take two weeks to notice?

Boy Howdy!

Welcome to the Slow Country.

driving with only
half a brain need to save the
other half for work

Due to road construction and the tourons*, my last couple of commutes have been a little rough.

The bridge to the island where my office is was built in 1984 and while there have been no improvements to the bridge, the number of cars using the bridge has doubled.

They are putting more sand in the hourglass but not making the neck that connects the two halves of the hour glass any bigger so travel time gets higher and higher.

Seems like someone could realize that if you double the amount of sand in an hour glass, you would need to double the width of the neck to make sure it was still an hour glass.

I think it was Bill Bryson who said traffic engineers cannot fix traffic but they can spread the problem out over a larger area.

But I digress.

The problem for me is that I am getting so agitated with other drivers.

I get so agitated that it takes a lot of time getting my mind back in line to work.

I thought about how I used to commute.

I thought about how I used to commute when I worked in Atlanta and started writing these haiku.

In many ways my old ATL commute was much much worse.

The saying was what would you get if you took the cars in the world and put them end to end?

The answer was ATLANTA!

Atlanta traffic was always doing its best to kill me.

Low Country traffic just was to annoy me as much as humanly possible.

Over those ATL years, I was able to develop a commuting mind set where I used my half my brain, so to speak, to drive to work, and saved or reserved or protected the other half of my brain so that I could work once I got to work.

If I did it before, I can do it again.

I got up this morning a little earlier planning to get a head start on my drive.

I thought about my drive and the music I would listen to and the views I would enjoy driving towards the sun rising out from the Atlantic Ocean.

I made a big travel cup of coffee.

It was magical.

Did I worry when I had to go through that first traffic circle with a bunch of South Carolinians who understand neither the concept of yielding or know their right hand from their left?

No I did not and I successfully navigated that first road hazard on the my commute.

My mood was threatened when the feller in front of me who had successfully fended off my efforts to pass him stopped for a yellow light.

I just went with the flow.

Did I worry when I entered the merge lanes for the Bluffton Flyover where half the cars are trucks pulling trailers of tools twice as long as the truck that make blind side merging such an adventure?

Same for the merge of the Bluffton Flyover with 278 where you meet up with all the auslanders who slow down when they see the water of Mackay Creek and they point fingers at the water and yell, SEE THE WATER and slow down to see the water.

No I did not and I successfully navigated that second and third road hazards on the my commute.

It didn’t bother me when there was the usual fender bender on Pinckney Island where you finish the first bridge (the one not yet condemned but not deemed safe to use) and start the second bridge.

I used the slow down to have a big sip of coffee.

The taste of hot coffee in a well worn plastic travel cup took me back, BOY HOWDY.

On to the island and through the first 2 traffic lights and then over the Cross Island Parkway and the next 2 traffic lights and bang, zoom, I was at work.

Stoplights in the low country are always an adventure as, for some reason, South Carolinians are always surprised that the colors change and that the change in color requires a reaction beyond saying, GOSH THAT COLOR JUST CHANGED, LETS WATCH AND SEE IF IT CHANGES AGAIN.

But I made it.

I got out of the car and grabbed my backpack and walked up to the doors with a light heart.

I used my entrance code, which I take as a sign that I still have a job and entered the building.

I walked into the office and greeted my coworkers with a smile.

I made my commute and saved half my brain for work.

I wasn’t agitated or angry or spouting off at the mouth with all the things I wanted to yell at drivers that I didn’t yell because I knew they couldn’t hear me. (Okay I DO YELL even though I know they can’t hear me – you can ask my wife)

Nope.

I was fresh and happy and ready for work.

I started my day with a focus on the drive and left half my mind for the job.

Yessir.

I zipped open my backpack and saw that I had forgot to pack my laptop.

*Tourons (according to Wikipedia) Touron is a derogatory term combining the words “Tourist” with “Moron” to describe any person who, while on vacation, commits an act of pure stupidity. The term is considered park ranger slang that describes how some tourists act when entering a national park. The phrase indicates an act of ignorance and is known to be used in different subcultures. It is also used to describe tourists in general when they are outside their normal “comfort zone”.

Tourists acting as Tourons can drive erratically. A common occurrence is to see vehicles stopped in the middle of the road at the first sighting of deer. Drivers and occupants leave the vehicle to take pictures, backing traffic up for miles. The term is used as humor to defend against the usual aggravation of continued exposure to tourists by even local residents of tourist areas.