November 20 – traffic woes again

traffic woes again
radio news to laugh at, like …
alternative routes!

Woke up and glanced at my phone to check the weather and a traffic alert popped up.

“Major Morning Headache as I85 closed …”, read the alert.

Dismayed but hopeful, I clicked on the alert.

It might be North Bound I85.

It might be South Bound, on the other side of Atlanta over by the airport.

It could be any number of exits that didn’t come between me and my job.

The alert loaded, slowly, slowly, too slowly.

Ads popped up.

Video tried to play.

I stood there, phone in hand, swatting all those down like flies.

The headline finally loaded.

Major Morning Headache as I85 closed South Bound at Pleasantdale Rd Exit. All lanes blocked.

Oh for crying out loud.

Smack dab in the middle of my commute.

Had it been targeting me, it could not have been at a worse place.

All lanes blocked?

Just what did that mean?

I click on WAZE and it estimates my commute at 45 minutes.

I looked closely and WAZE was basing this on the current time USING the dreaded ALTERNATIVE ROUTES.

If you don’t use WAZE or are not familiar with Atlanta, let me give you a warning.

Alternative Routes do not work.

The best advice I ever got about living in Atlanta was to make sure I lived within 5 minutes of a major freeway.

Otherwise it would take as long to get to the freeway as it took to get to my destination once I got on the freeway.

To leave the freeway, even during an ALL LANES BLOCKED emergency doesn’t work.

Besides, the alternative routes are already full from there usual morning traffic.

I got myself ready drove off to work.

With resignation but some hope I made the turn onto I85 and within 10 minutes I was in gridlock.

I would click on 750AM for traffic every ten minutes or so.

The first reports, Traffic Guy was suggesting those wonderful ALTERNATIVE ROUTES.

Satellite Blvd., Buford Highway and Peachtree Industrial.

Approaching the Pleasanthill Rd Exit, I could see rookie drivers making the choice to try these routes and making the effort to get off I85 and over to one of these side roads.

I stayed put.

My time to work was 3 hours.

30 minutes later, Traffic Guy was still advising alternative routes but that they were backing up and 2 lanes on i85 were now open.

15 more minutes and the accident was being cleared, my total trip was 2 hours.

Traffic Guy was announcing that the backup was hitting I85 all the way back to Duluth and impacting all other local roads.

Alternative Routes?

What a joke.

November 13 – moonlit morning drive

moonlit morning drive
full moon over Atlanta
pretty, still so wrong

Dr. Samuel Johnson famously said about the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland, that it was, “Worth seeing, yes; but not worth going to see.” (The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791) by James Boswell)

A full moon was shining this morning in the clear cold, VERY COLD, dark of this November morning when I left for work.

I headed west towards the moon as it sank lower towards the horizon and the sky slowly changed from black to gray to blue.

With Atlanta and its buildings in view, the moon hung over the city with a complete spectrum of morning hues across the dome of the sky.

It was stunning.

Incredibly simple.

It happens every day as the globe spins and the skies revolve over head.

Still, I felt lucky to see it.

I felt even luckier that I got to see it while remaining comfortably warm in my car.

Never the less, on the whole, all things considered, I would rather have been in bed.

There is something wrong about getting up at 5AM.

November 7 – morning drive, traffic

morning drive, traffic
slowed by fatality
just inconvenienced?

Minutes after merging onto I85 Southbound to midtown Atlanta, traffic started slowing down and then stopped.

Not good but not terrible.

This often happens as the freeway climbs up Peachtree Ridge in Gwinnett County and the trucks slow down.

I stayed stopped for a minute and then two minutes and I open up the WAZE app on my iPhone.

Checking Route … HEAVY TRAFFIC … You will reach your destination in …. 2 HOURS!!

TWO HOURS?

Radio on in time to catch the traffic report and it opens with RED FLAG ALERT for I85 in Gwinnett County. Traffic accident with fatalities has all lanes closed just past Boggs Rd.

When I was in college and drove back home it took 2 to 3 hours to get to Grand Rapids from Ann Arbor.

It seemed like forever.

I was going to be in my car that long just to get to work this morning.

And all these people around.

Cars and trucks as far as the eye could see.

Everyone late.

Everyone inconvenienced.

Because, well, because some one died.

Someone’s lives were really going to change.

I was inconvenienced.

Work.

Lives.

Driving.

Jobs.

Something seems to have gone wrong here.

October 29 – every day, each drive

every day, each drive
story sparkingly renewed
new chapter added

Mark Twain wrote of life on the Mississippi River, saying “There were graceful curves, reflected images, woody heights, soft distances; and over the whole scene, far and near, the dissolving lights drifted steadily, enriching it, every passing moment, with new marvels of coloring. I stood like one bewitched. I drank it in, in a speechless rapture. The world was new to me, and I had never seen anything like this at home.“

I was struck this morning by the comparison of Twain’s river and my driving on i85.

There is an odd, industrial age, dystopian (been wanting to use that word for ages), Fritz Langish, beauty to all the cars and trucks and concrete.

I also have learned to ‘read the river’ on my drives.

Catching the glimpse of the cobalt blue emergency strobes sets off warnings.

A sign that says Chamblee-Tucker Road 9 Miles / 20 minutes translates instantly to traffic moving at 30 miles per hour.

Break lights 10 cars ahead has me slowing down.

Twain continues, “The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book — a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day. Throughout the long twelve hundred miles there was never a page that was void of interest, never one that you could leave unread without loss, never one that you would want to skip, thinking you could find higher enjoyment in some other thing. There never was so wonderful a book written by man; never one whose interest was so absorbing, so unflagging, so sparkingly renewed with every reperusal. The passenger who could not read it was charmed with a peculiar sort of faint dimple on its surface (on the rare occasions when he did not overlook it altogether); but to the pilot that was an italicized passage; indeed, it was more than that, it was a legend of the largest capitals, with a string of shouting exclamation points at the end of it; for it meant that a wreck or a rock was buried there that could tear the life out of the strongest vessel that ever floated. It is the faintest and simplest expression the water ever makes, and the most hideous to a pilot’s eye. In truth, the passenger who could not read this book saw nothing but all manner of pretty pictures in it painted by the sun and shaded by the clouds, whereas to the trained eye these were not pictures at all, but the grimmest and most dead-earnest of reading-matter.”

October 24 – thinnest of margins

thinnest of margins
my life didn’t change today
whale ropes, driving

Driving home on I85 in Gwinnett County, Georgia, I made the simplest of lane changes.

Going to my left with the car in front moving at my same speed, I checked my left side view mirror and glanced at my rear view mirror and started to merge slowly into the next lane.

I looked up and the car in front had stopped, most unexpectedly.

Instead of a smooth, gradual slide to the left, I jerked the steering wheel and the car swerved hard to left.

I reversed the wheel to the right and straightened out in my new lane, moving past the stopped car that had been in front of me.

It had to have been all by instinct.

They say that the time it takes for a batter to decide to swing at a baseball is longer than it takes for a pitched ball to travel 60 feet 6 inches.

Baseball is a game of inches.

I doubt there was room for a folded over piece of paper between my right front bumper and that car’s left rear corner.

A whisker.

A hair breadth.

And I was on my way home.

The driver of the car in front of me was on their home.

No accident.

No stopping of rush hour traffic.

No exchange of paper work.

No waiting for cops to determine who was at fault.

Nothing.

Nothing worse than a bad scare.

The scare was bad enough.

It was several minutes before I could relax and say a quick prayer of thanks.

I have been in an accident where the margin went the other way and the car coming up from behind me barely clipped my bumper and both cars were badly damaged though no one was hurt.

At least once a week, I see worse.

Much worse.

In Moby Dick, Herman Melville writes, “but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.”

Melville is commenting in his passage that describes the rope known as a ‘whale line’ the work of the men in a small boat going after whales.

He writes, ” when the line is darting out, to be seated then in the boat, is like being seated in the midst of the manifold whizzings of a steam-engine in full play, when every flying beam, and shaft, and wheel, is grazing you.”

But whaling and whale ropes?

I was driving a car, something un-imagined by Melville.

Maybe Melville couldn’t imagine a car but he knew life and he writes,

“All men live enveloped in whale-lines.”