First of all I’ve never had to wait for a
paper tablet to open. I could just
simply take out my pen and start writing.
On the other hand this is much more legible than my handwriting as anyone
who as ever received a handwritten letter from me will attest. Here I am wasting more time on writing about
the computer instead of just getting to it.
Last night and into this morning we drove
back from Cle Elum. The roads were bare
and dry (as they say on the pass reports), and travel was somewhat
unremarkable. That is, the same or
similar to what the experience has been in the past. On the third hand (the other other hand) it
occurred to me at some point that being in a vehicle moving at 70mph through a
pitch black night over a mountain pass could be considered remarkable. How scary would that experience be for someone
who had never experienced anything like it?
We finished work early. I think it was around 11:30 pm that I picked
Kristi up from the front of the club in the dark, the cold with only the lights
from the building illuminating the Cle Elum street. She had locked the back door of the club that
we loaded in from, returned the keys to the bartender, and come around to the
front where I had driven our car loaded with our gear.
We drove out to the Cle Elum main drag and
slowly left town. I’ve had experiences
with the local gendarmes late at night there and know that one must drive the
speed limit (25 mph) or risk a ticket, and probably some humiliation as they
will assume that you have been drinking.
It was a low traffic night on I-90 and I hit the gas and very quickly we
were moving at 75 mph through the wintry night.
I asked Kristi to get me a piece of “tortarustica”, which she did and I
had a bite to eat. After the
tortarustica she gave me a “carmelita”, then another carmelita (dessert bars). Tortarustica is a pastry filled with sausage,
and spinach plus other stuff. I don’t
know exactly what the ingredients are, but it’s a hearty meal, and excellent
served cold in an automobile speeding through the black Cascade Mountain
night.
I-90 is changing. I guess it always has been changing. The mountains are unforgiving and drop tons
of snow on the roads over the passes, and sometimes tons of rock as well. We had a conversation with a retired snowplow
driver who had been buried in the snow a couple of times. He was in his snowplow and was dug out soon
enough, but it was interesting talking to someone whose professional life was
dealing with the snow, rocks, and weather of Snoqualmie Pass.
On this particular night it was freezing,
and that led to thoughts of ice on the road.
I even thought I saw a couple of snowflakes, but there was no serious
snow during our drive. You follow your
headlights through the dark. You follow
the white lines on the road. You turn on
your brights when there are no other vehicles ahead of you, then you dim them
again, watching the road disappear in front of you when the lights go back to
dim. I don’t know how much of the
driving is intuition, but there has to be some.
I can remember nights when it was white knuckles all the way through the
snow, ice, cars sideways in the road, or in the ditch hoping you would not join
those “losers”. You see familiar
landmarks and note your perceived distance from the top of the pass but last
night it was all topsy turvy as the landmarks are not the same after the most
recent road construction.
There are signs about the road
construction – “left lane closed ahead”, “construction zone”, “slow”, and now
in the 21st century they have digital readouts over the road in
several places that give you the varying speed limits. You slow down, but they very seldom tell you
that the construction zone is over and you can speed up again. I didn’t see cop one for the entire
trip. I guess they were all in the
little cafes along the route eating donuts and drinking coffee waiting for
their shift to end.
I’ve always thought that it was somewhat
of a miracle that we have never been in a serious wreck. We haven’t even been in spinouts, or sliding
sideways incidents very much, and those that did happen happened at very slow
speeds. We have driven many, many miles
through serious blizzards, across roads that were covered in ice and so
slippery that you could barely stand on the ice if you were to find yourself
outside your vehicle in the black ice night.
We have seen roads washed out so there was only one lane, landslides
requiring detours, roads with the flood waters up against the edge of the
surface we were driving on. I wonder
when a tie rod will break, or a tire blowout, or a tree fall from the side of
the road, a particularly severe wind will send us sliding out of control down a
bank, rolling into and icy river or off of a precipice ending in a ball of fire
on the rocks below.
Before we were even packed up Kristi was
telling me that she was wide awake and could drive. I drive faster than she does, so when I can I
try to do the driving. Also, I fall
asleep in the car and Kristi is an excellent co pilot as she is always
awake. Certainly that is part of the
reason that we haven’t been involved in a major car crash. Many times I’ve had her caution me to look
out and had my fat pulled from the proverbial fire. I only wish she didn’t alarm me with such an
intense sense of alarm, although I suppose it is justified considering what the
price of no alarm at all might be.
One more thing . . . we played very well
last night and given that we do not work as often as we used to, it was very
satisfying.
