Subtitle: ‘Jesus Take the Wheel’
Apparently the traffic jam from hell made national headlines. I’m surprised I wasn’t the one making headlines — if there had been shots of me on a traffic cam, howling and crying and screaming, y’all would’ve known EXACTLY who it was!
Anyway, I could tell you about all the existential pondering I did during that three-hour joyride, or I could tell you the funny side of it. Because like my one colleague said, I don’t just have stories — I have STORIES.
I was calm for the first 90 minutes. I had trouble merging onto the Beltway, but going from a two-lane GW Parkway to a five-lane Inner Loop of the Beltway usually alleviates the waiting in line thing.
Usually.
So I got on the Beltway and immediately merged behind a lumber truck. And it scared me so I shot over to the far left lane as efficiently as I could, given the gridlock. But hey, I’m only on the Beltway for four miles — I figured it wouldn’t be THAT bad.
So an hour and a half later, I’d gone MAYBE two miles. I’d been listening to my headphones so I figured, hey, maybe I need to turn on a radio. So I flipped on 99.5-FM, just in time to hear the DJ saying that she hopes everyone’s having a good day, unless we were in the mess leading up to 270 ’cause it was closed, in which case we were screwed.
And thus, I was screwed.
And I really, really had to pee. Like, hence the howling and pleading with the universe to throw a girl a bone or a catheter or a miracle or something. Mercury went into retrograde with a bang today, I say. Jeebus H.
Anyway, I started debating pulling over to the shoulder and just voiding my widdle bladder on the medial strip, but I feared my big white ass in the air would start redirecting satellite traffic. And I really didn’t want Cingular or XM’s waves bouncing off my butt, so I thought better of using the highway as my toilet.
Unfortunately, I’d just scarfed down a huge bottle of water during my captivity, and I was miserable. Like, psychotically miserable. So, armed with the knowledge that NOBODY was getting onto 270, I had to figure out an alternative.
So, I hopped all the way back across the Beltway to the far right lane. Local yokels know that the left lanes go to Rockville/Frederick (where I was headed) and the right lanes go to Bethesda/Baltimore (and all the way back around the Beltway). I figured, nobody’s going to be going THAT way, right?
Wrong again.
So I headed up the way I don’t know very well and could see the mess on the 270 spur (the overturned truck and cop cars and the last remnants of the wreckage), as well as the mess in the other exit that leads to Rockville. The line was about five miles long. I sat in it for a minute before driving ON THE SHOULDER and merging left again, bypassing all of it.
We’re at hour two-and-a-half-plus at this point, and I’m jaundiced.
I took the Wisconsin Avenue exit — seemed safe. No one was in line for it anyway. I figured, just get me to a powder room and maybe I can figure out where the fuck I am and try to either get to work (which was just a couple of miles away) or just pack it in and go home and work from there.
So, I figured, Bethesda is a pretty urban area — there are grocery stores and gas stations and toilets everywhere, right? How hard could it be?
So I saw a sign for the hospital and I think, yay! Hosptial! Hospitals have bathrooms! They treat crazy people like me who have mascara and tears streaming down their cheeks and the onset of psychosis from the claustrophobia of sitting still on the Beltway in a tiny sports car for three hours, no?
This is where the story gets good (yes, finally — shut up).