Thursday, December 14, 2006

FOGGY

I’ve tried several times to write about my drive into work this morning. I played around with poetic metaphors of cotton wool and The Twilight Zone but it never came out right, so I’m just gonna tell it like it was.

I walked out the door and couldn’t see past the edges of my carport. When I backed onto the road and started forward, tendrils of fog swirled around and over the hood as if I was driving under water. Signs and intersections appeared and disappeared like ghosts in a bad dream.

Hunched over the steering wheel, peering ahead like a female version of Mr. Magoo, I drove right past the same turnoff that I’ve been taking for almost 30 years and had to turn around in a parking lot. The visibility was almost zero and I felt as if I was lost driving in the same area where I’ve lived my whole life.

I got behind a log truck driving 30 MPH down twisty highway 33 and all I could think about was getting rear-ended by another car. Visions of logs punching through my windshield and into my body (me getting squished like a bug with blood and gore all over the place) kept flickering through my mind, so I turned on my hazard flashers. You know, just in case.

On the way, I witnessed several almost-wrecks. Cars slammed on their brakes to avoid hitting other drivers who suddenly appeared out of the gloom, spinning around in the center of the highway while horns blared and other vehicles dodged around them, hoping all the while that someone else wasn’t approaching unseen in the fog.

It was bad, people! You couldn’t see red lights or the glow of vapor lights until you were right under them. There was no way to know if anyone else was on the road until their headlights jumped out of the murkiness right in front of you. Even through you were on familiar roads, you couldn't tell where you were and just had to guess when a stop sign or intersection was coming up. What made it so bad was the idiots who still drove 70 and 80 MPH; you never knew they were around until you saw blur of head-lights as they sped by.

I made it in with a 45 minute drive instead of my usual 20. The fog has burned off, but I bet it’ll be the same white-out tomorrow morning. I think I’ll just leave early and hope the fast-driving morons oversleep..................

EXTRA: Ya'll go visit Donna, she needs cheering up after she HOOVERED A POT-BELLIED PIG TO DEATH!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Holy crap. That must have been a scary drive.

Interesting.