Wisecracking Across America - 28. Chapter 28

Wednesday, June 9, 1999

The difference between the East and West coasts is you can drive fifteen hundred miles from San Diego to Canada and almost always see the ocean. On the East coast, once you're much south of Bangor you gotta creep eight hundred miles to North Carolina before you can even glimpse the water. Yeah, there are boardwalk stretches on the Jersey shore, but---like Cape Cod---the beach houses barely hold back the suburbs.

In L.A. Tom was used to crazy traffic, but somehow Boston scared him: "It keeps turning up on Worst Drivers' lists," he said. "And they joke that using turn signals is like giving information to the enemy."

And he didn't even know about traffic circles. But I'd lived near Boston, and the sight of cars parked half-on-the-sidewalk facing the wrong direction on one-way streets only made me laugh. So I was gonna drive from Maine. Still, when it came my turn, Tom held out. For one thing, just navigating bored him: "There's nothing to do."

"There's the whole country to look at," I kidded. But he didn't reply. And secretly---the other, bigger thing---I think he wanted to drive the entire trip himself, just to say he had. So I let him go on, figuring eventually he'd crack. Which nearly happened in Boston.

I'm not even talking rush hour. Okay, we were on the central artery---which is constantly being rebuilt. But by luck, or a miracle, all the lanes happened to be open. And it was a clear, midweek afternoon.

The history of Boston traffic is there's always been too much. This is separate from the street jams: those get blamed on early colonists, foolish enough to pave wherever cows had wandered. Back then, the city also looked like a fist, connected by a thin, stubby arm to the mainland. Gradually, the arm thickened with landfill, but it was always too scrawny for cars. After much of what passes for debate in Massachusetts---more like partisan howling---a highway was built. Which was outdated even as the blueprints unrolled. Plus, it cut off the city from its harbor.

Forty years later, a new solution's underway, though wise folks claim it's equally inept: they're burying the central artery. Yep, putting it all underground, with parks planted on top. Streets will again be open to the bay---thoughtfully unpolluted for the occasion---but you can guess how much digging this is gonna take. Slow digging, for maybe ten years. While everyone struggles to get to work.

I explained most of this to Tom as we left New Hampshire. I'd considered bypassing downtown, and it's not like we were stopping at Paul Revere's house or the Old North Church. Two wide highways circled the city, just waiting to be used. Though like the central artery, they'd been built decades before, with even the newest section twenty-years old. And, as quickly as Boston was looped, houses replaced farms, demanding further roads. It seemed quicker to cut straight through.

Still, we were stopped on a dark, claustrophobic bridge when I noticed Tom was sweating. And it wasn't even hot.

"You okay?" I asked.

Not that I could do much if he wasn't. In fact, if he suddenly passed out, I could mainly climb over his body, lean hard on the horn, then be stuck in the driver's seat myself for the next half-hour. And all that would panic the dog.

She was already tense. Usually, she woke only when we stopped, figuring it time to eat something or ruin someone's lawn. Now she was staring like this was my fault.

"We could turn on the air conditioner," I suggested. We hadn't used it yet, but I thought it might help.

"I'm fine," Tom denied.

So we sat. For what felt like a very long time. When traffic finally picked up to a crawl, eight seemingly unmarked lanes suddenly converged, and Tom mumbled---I'm sure he thought to himself---"I don't know where I'm going."

I steered him left, steadily, to the commuter lane---we had enough passengers. And though the lane was barely wider than Tom's skinny truck, the fact we were soon going ten miles an hour, while other drivers were stuck doing crossword puzzles, seemed to calm him.

Of course, I knew the Cape tangle lay ahead. It used to take me two hours to get from western Massachusetts, then the rest of the weekend to cross the bridge. Driving at night made the trip faster, but you risked being clobbered by deer, ill met by moonlight. There were always plans to ease the maze, as there was endless construction. But nothing helped.

Surprise! In the years I'd been away, the knot was finally broken, and Sagamore Bridge was no longer a three-day stay. Of course, I later heard that meant people could commute daily to Boston, so sold their inland homes. Which led to fierce overbuilding, a freaky drop in the water table, and a threat to empty the entire peninsula. Tentatively, they've halted building---and you can bet how smoothly that went down in this cradle of democratic squabbling. The hope is that fresh water'll beat back the salt. Of course, new folks claim the whole thing's a scam.

But we were just travelers. It wasn't our problem. And, overall, it took us less than forty minutes to get through Boston, another hour to reach the Cape. Amazing time.

"Want me to drive?" I asked again, when we stopped in Sandwich. The dog had to walk. I could tell Tom was considering, but we were back in the truck before he answered quietly.

"Let me see."

And I never did drive, not the whole trip. Well, a couple of miles to the cleaners at my mother's house. And I moved the truck once at a gas station when Tom was inside. Largely, I sat and watched.

157 miles