On Friday after work I drove home through a snowstorm that had started sometime that afternoon. The sixteen mile drive took me a total of four hours and seven minutes, which puts my average speed somewhere around four miles an hour.
For those of you who have never had to pay attention to it, four miles per hour is a speed so slow you actually have to work the break more than the gas – something you have to actively try for, like getting every question wrong on a test.
It was impossible to miss the irony in the verse I had just taped to my dashboard a day before to try and memorize – “Be joyful always and give thanks in all circumstances.”
About two hours into the normally forty-five minute commute, that turned out to be a real difficulty. But all it took was a little observation and I suddenly found something to be very thankful for.
It turns out that four miles an hour is a great speed at which to look into other people’s vehicles.
Now in our defense, (us being all the commuters) the sign we passed immediately after getting on the highway at 4:15 said 2 hrs 45 min. to circle. This seemed an almost impossible figure. After all it was still light out, and none of us could fathom how it could actually take that long. My thought was “they must be giving us a real liberal estimate.”
It seemed other drivers had this same thought and like me, refused to believe they’d be home any later than 6. I could tell by the way they stubbornly refused to take off their hats and down jackets, and get comfortable for the long drive.
Fast forward to an hour later, as we were just passing the exit to a mall it usually takes me five minutes to get to from work and with it another sign that also read 2 hrs. 45 min. to circle, and that stubborn hope was gone.
Only a few commuters beyond this point were still bundled up and sweating it out. The rest of us had began to discard layers. For me, it was my hat, gloves and coat. For the man who had no business driving a Prius in a snowstorm, or perhaps no business operating a vehicle at all, it was everything. When I passed him, (he had pulled to the shoulder with his blinkers on) he was sitting in his suit pants and belt, shirtless. I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt and hope that I’d simply caught him changing, but something about his waxed, spray-tanned chest led me to believe that here was a man who tried to remain shirtless as much as possible.
After clothing, the next thing to go was decency. I’d had to pee since a half-hour into the drive, and at every exit ramp I passed there was a car spinning out trying to get up or down it, which eliminated the gas station option for me. If I had better coordination, I’d have tried to pee in one of my many empty coffee cups. As it was, I’m a little lacking in that regard, and thought it best to wait until I absolutely needed to, and then wet my pants. Luckily it didn’t come to that, but I believe it did for several of my fellow drivers. I say this because I passed more than one with the same look on his face that Steve Martin has as Rupert in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels when he’s wetting his pants at the dinner table.
Other snowstorm-induced indecent behaviors included nose-picking, which I jumped right on board with; talking to yourself, which I tried but proved too awkward; and gesturing inappropriately to other drivers, which I avoided altogether.
Last to go were the rules of the road. Though I was one of the rare drivers who kept my eyes on the road and just listened, even I got through two episodes of Sex and the City and half of Elizabethtown before my computer died. Other drivers had their laptops on their dashboard and were typing away. One looked like he was Skyping with somebody, and another I believe had decided to take a nap and had fallen sound asleep during one of the half-hour segments in which we all put our cars in park and didn’t move at all.
We shared a lot that night.
At the very least, we all shared this look of resignation:
And this view:
But I like to think I’m the only one lucky enough to have a boyfriend waiting for me at home with a big bottle of red wine and a big plate of sushi, just for me.
I’d commute four hours every day if it meant sushi for dinner and that rare opportunity to choose the television programming for the night. That, it turned out, was very easy to be thankful for.












