| Wednesday, December 10, 2008 |
15:58 - And here I'd thought water-soluble driving ability was a West Coast thing
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Apparently people aren't any better at driving in adverse weather conditions here than they are back in California. This morning, in well-anticipated medium-weight rain, the Saw Mill Parkway was brought to a 90-minute standstill, right at the Reader's Digest City turnoff, by an accident involving what I counted to be nine cars by the time I got there and they were cleaning it all up (seven on the right, two on the left).
And it's not even cold today. Not like the fifteen it was a couple of days ago.
Oh, but that was as nothing compared to the way home. Picture, if you will, a T-intersection where... well, like this:
In the mornings, I have to turn left from A onto B; and C has no stop sign proceeding downhill onto A, so I have to come to a stop on the uphill slope and wait for the intersection to clear, then turn left. Doing this sort of thing with a manual transmission—without slipping back down the hill and crashing into the guy behind you—is a tricky skill to master, but it's one of those skills that, once honed, one can be justly proud of. Just like avoiding ending sentences with prepositions.
So anyway: on the way back, I have to turn right from B onto A, heading downhill. As I'm coming to the intersection, I hear some high-pitched honking that rises above my stereo for a second or two; I think it's probably just the song I'm listening to (I recently re-synced my car iPod, and it seems to have realized after rebooting that "shuffle" really means "shuffle everything, not just a subset of songs Brian is sick of by now", so now it's playing things at me that I don't know all that well, and might very well have things like car horns in them), and I proceed to the stop sign and look for traffic coming downhill from C. All seems clear.
As I turn right and head into the intersection, I notice something odd: there's two cars at the head of a long line at the stop sign on A, and the driver's doors on the first two of them are open. Now, bear in mind that it's dark, it's raining, and I'm staring into the glare of headlights for just a brief couple of seconds as I rotate through this intersection on my way down the hill; but in that brief time, I see what to my best approximation appears to be Santa Claus clambering out of Car #2. Red-faced, stocky guy on short bow legs, with an enormous white beard, waving his arms and stomping up the hill toward the guy in front of him. WHAT THE HELL YOU DOING?
And then I'm gone, and I can't see anything of the scene in my mirrors. I guess the guy in front is getting coal in his stocking this year. Or maybe a BMW with one of those hill-hold features.
One other regional observation before I close: arms extending out of drivers' windows to deposit cigarette ash? Everywhere. Even in pouring rain.
Oh, but those road plates are finally gone from the Tappan Zee Bridge. Truly a red-letter day, this, as now a half hour is shorn from the westbound commute in the absence of an unmoving thirty-mile jam-up across Westchester. It's downright enjoyable now.
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Brian Tiemann
