19 December 2009
To All, a Good Night
Holiday Roads
So the power is on, and the cable Internet works, and if the snow is still coming down at an inch-an-hour, so what? By God, it is good to be at my table this morning, and it was good to spend a few hours in my own bed. It did not look like it would happen for several hours last night.
I got a tweet from the on-ramp to I-64 in Charlottesville just a few minutes ago. It was from a co-worker who was going to stay a few minutes later down in Charlottesville to be polite and sample the Holiday Party dinner, and by the time the smaller than expected buffet line had moved through, the authorities had closed Route 29..
The diiner was quite elegant; the function was held at the Boar’s Head Inn, a landmark in Mr. Jefferson’s town.
It had started out as one of those holiday travel crap-shoots. It was supposed to snow pretty hard, you know the predictable consequences of that here in the Old Dominion: complete and utter chaos.
My fundamental mistake was in believing the weather-guessers prediction that the front would arrive sometime after midnight.
The scheme originally had been to sleep there down there and come back via the farm, and hit a cocktail party in Reston this afternoon. Then there had been one of those long-distance discussions that left me profoundly unsettled. Not bad, really, in fact good, in a way, but with such profound implications to the past and future that I knew I would be gnawing on it all day unless I did something to distract me.
The prospect of holing Big Pink with a full liquor cabinet did not bode well. They say travel broadens one, and the idea of being both sober and on the move had a certain attraction.
That was one of the long list of small discrete decisions that read a like the investigation report leading up to the Class Alpha aircraft accident. Since I would not be staying away the night, I did not have my computer or much in the way of support equipment- and found myself after a BSF at the farm to pay for the new storm doors- at the Boar’s head just as the first flakes were coming down.
“Fuck,” I thought to myself, clipped on my tie and went inside to make the best of the cocktail hour.
I couldn’t stand it beyond seven PM. The snow was getting heavier outside the leaded-glass windows, and I had no room in which to sleep and no back-up plan.
Thank God for all those thousands of miles spent navigating the drifts of Michigan winters growing up. I was with the pros in the trucks, passing dozens, if not hundreds, of cars off the road and into the snow banks.
It was a detailed and tense technical drive, enhanced in effect by the post-adult prostate and bladder, and no place to pull off, nor even slow down.
I made the seventy miles to Richmond, which if you look at the map will see is not entirely in the right direction, and arced onto I-95 North for the ninety miles to DC at an average speed of between zero and thirty.
Call it fifteen. I swerved around the fancy sports cars with their flat wide performance tires stalled on the hills, tires racing futilely.
It was like the cockpit of a DC-3, headed over The Hump. Snow danced in lights, which dimmed as the ice thickened over the lenses.
The wipers grew heavy with hardening slush, clicking like dual metronomes, ceasing to do more than brush away streaks of moisture on the Perspex surface. The pale blue glow of the clock told me that I would not arrive anywhere good until tomorrow at the earliest, but the time expanded and contracted with each twitch of the Bluesmobile’s front end.
When at long last- the three-lane highway was running at somewhere between two and four at many points- I crossed the Beltway and was almost home. I was able to step up the knots. Forty, even fifty in spurts.
There is something magnificent about commanding a big car in adverse conditions, bending the elements to your will.
Close to the Washington Boulevard exit, I blew past a Prius in the ice-encrusted P71 Police Cruiser. The operator of the fuel-efficient and underpowered car was somehow conniving to occupy all three lanes of the Shirley Highway simultaneously.
I looked back in amazement in the rearview as the driver lost the chance to correct (which I had been doing several times a minute for 127 miles at that point) and did a graceful pirouette, starting lleft, overcorrecting right, then left again as the nose slowly came around to commit to the full monte.
With enormous, if ponderous grace, the car closed the circle with deliberation and slammed gently sideways into the Jersey Barriers facing the wrong way.
They seemed chagrinned, from what I could tell as they fell out of sight.
“Merry Christmas to all,” I thought, setting up the nose of the car to plow off the highway and into the snow mounded over the exit, “and to all, a good night.”
Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
The saga of Admiral Rex will resume tomorrow.
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