Alone On a Freeway

There are 504 miles of freeways in Los Angeles County and roughly 1.5 million people use them to come downtown each weekday in 363,000 motor vehicles. So doing, they waste an average of 485,000 hours a day in traffic congestion.

I mention this only because last Tuesday I was one of the 1.5 million people in one of the 363,000 motor vehicles on about 60 of the 504 miles of freeway wasting 2 1/2 of the 485,000 hours trying to reach downtown from my home in Topanga Canyon, and I almost came to the conclusion that there was no way to get there from here.

I realize that being stuck on a freeway in L.A. is not something likely to make the 11 o’clock news, but consider being stuck on three freeways, one state highway and a city street on a single route and you will begin to understand the degree of my trauma.

Let me say first that I don’t “have” to appear in the main office of the L.A. by God Times every day. An electronic linkage that connects my word processor with their word processors allows me to transmit my columns from home in the form of blips and chuckles over the sun-kissed miles.

However, I choose to drive into town two days a week because I “like” the smell of diesel fuel and the whimsical interplay with panhandlers and because my mother once said to me that a man ought to go to an established place of labor each day to kill the pig that yields the bacon that feeds his brood.

So last Tuesday I responded to my own schedule and to a primeval urge to bring home the bacon and I hit the old freeway. Well, actually, I hit the old highway first and it went nowhere.

Topanga Canyon Boulevard was at a dead stop four miles from the ocean due to an accident that not only turned the boulevard into a parking lot but caused disaster on Pacific Coast Highway as well.

In fact, it precipitated a SigAlert which, roughly, means that everything has gone to hell and it would be best to avoid the area.

I therefore made a U-turn and headed north on Topanga, which was no picnic either, and ended up eastbound on the Ventura Freeway.

After a few easy miles that lured me into a state of driving somnambulism that shuts down the brain, I was suddenly awakened to the fact that all lanes of traffic were coming to a complete stop.

It seems that chunks of concrete had somehow spilled onto the freeway and no one was going anywhere until the chunks were removed.

My vision of hell is to be trapped in traffic on the Ventura or, worse, to spend eternity in a line of cars creeping down a freeway like ants stuck in honey, doomed to die in an environment we had meant to exploit.

As I brooded over my fate, up ahead somewhere, in that vague distance where help is supposed to arrive, something had apparently been moved because one lane opened and we began to edge slowly ahead.

But edging ahead is not good enough. When I saw an opportunity to leave the Ventura I muscled my way across four lanes and veered south on the San Diego Freeway. God help me, it came to a stop too.

I didn’t know what it was that time because the disembodied radio voices that monitor traffic congestion never seem aware of my particular problem, though it is usually a mattress that has fallen off a car-top or insulation off a truck or inebriated surfers off their ersatz Jeep.

By now, a trip which normally takes me about 45 minutes had become 90 minutes long and I was still only halfway there.

I turned off the radio because there is only so much verbal inanity I can abide and tried to pass the time by thinking good thoughts. I fantasized about sex and then about food but stopped when I realized I was thinking more about food than sex and that worried me.

I was drifting closer to the sorry state of crisis commuting that turns drivers into maniacs when I saw a light at the end of the tunnel, in this case another freeway.

It was the Santa Monica this time. I veered westbound on the final lap toward downtown and, of course, ran into another accident. A BMW had collided with a Chevy station wagon and their owners were methodically exchanging names, addresses and personal histories dating back to pubescence.

I will spare you further details of the anguish I endured except to say that even when I got off the freeway there was an accident that blocked the street to the Skid Row parking lot I am forced to use while my newspaper builds a Taj Mahal of parking structures closer to the main office.

By then, however, it had ceased to matter. I said to hell with it, turned back onto the freeway and returned rather effortlessly to my modest home in the mountains.

I have decided there is more than one way to bring home the bacon. Next time I’ll have it delivered.