A SPECIAL REPORT ON TRANSPORTATION : Safe & Sane : When the Freeway Flow Congeals and There Is Fretting in the Fast Lane, Drivers Need Defenses

B umper to bumper, slow and go, and--with a hard grip on the steering wheel--twist and shout.

That crawl on Orange County’s freeways to and from work can lead to the traffic blues, unless you find a way to cope with the stress.

Conducting business on the car telephone, listening to talk shows or classical music, screaming behind rolled-up windows at jerks who cut you off, or just settling back for a long ride, no matter when it delivers you to the office--these are a few of the ways Orange County commuters deal with their drives. Here are the thoughts of several.

There was a time when Don McGarry used to ditch the freeway when the traffic got bad to try his luck on surface streets during his daily 84-mile round-trip commute.

Now when traffic slows to a crawl, he crawls too. But it is not stressful, he said.

“It’s just a way of life. You relax and roll with the punches,” said McGarry, who drives a pickup truck with his wife, Del, from San Clemente to the family mechanical engineering business in Anaheim. “We just kick back. If we’re 15 minutes late, it’s no big deal. I used to get upset but no more.”

His pet peeve on the road? Truck drivers. “They don’t slow down whether the traffic is heavy or light. But I’ve yet to see many trucks pulled over, other than if they’re wrecked,” he said.

In the last few years, his drive has gone from 42 minutes to well over an hour. The amount of time beyond an hour depends on any of a number of factors, he said.

“If it rains, it’s bad. If the wind blows, it’s bad. It’s terrible except on a normal day, when nothing goes wrong.”

But McGarry, 54, uses the time to think about the business and solve problems. His wife, the office manager, does needlepoint. Together they listen to radio talk shows, a humor show in the morning, a sports show on the ride home. Because their sons open up the business in the morning, no one is upset if they walk in a little late.

They have no plans to move closer to work. “I love the ocean,” McGarry said. “They don’t have one in Anaheim.”

Carrie DeCriscio is on maternity leave these days, and so she is on reprieve from the grueling, hour-plus commute from her Cypress home to her workplace, TRW in Redondo Beach.

“It’s a hell of a drive,” said DeCriscio, 25, of the 50-mile round trip. She does not drive at the heart of the rush hour--she works from 6:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. as a security receptionist--but traffic is still bad, she said. “I have to leave at 5:20 in the morning to get there on time.”

Although hours involved in caring for a newborn are not any better, DeCriscio--whose household also includes 10-year-old Joseph and 3-year-old Andrew, in addition to 4-month-old Blake--is not looking forward to resuming the strain of the commute.

“I’m rushing to leave. I’m rushing to get back. I just want to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible.”

The stress is not so bad on the drive in to work, when she is rested, she said. But on the way home, tired from the job and eager to be with her family, “sometimes I can’t stand it,” she said.

And she carries the stress home with her.

“I see it in my mood, in my patience and tolerance. By the time I get home, my tolerance is low. . . . And we never get a home-cooked meal during the week. Who wants to cook a meal after you’ve just spent an hour and a half on the freeway?”

She used to listen to traffic reports in her Ford Taurus, but no longer. “If you listen and take another route, the traffic’s just backed up on the other route.” So now she listens to music to soothe her nerves.

Still, she and her husband have no plans to move. “I can’t stand the South Bay. City traffic is so ridiculous. I’d probably spend just as much time on the city streets getting to work. When I try to go to the mall on my lunch hour, it’s a joke.”

“I don’t drive alone by choice,” said Arianne Overturf, who leaves her El Toro condominium at 5:30 a.m. each day to get to her job as an art director in Irvine by 6 a.m. “I wouldn’t mind car-pooling, but no one starts at the same hour.”

Still, she finds there are plenty of other commuters on the San Diego Freeway with her at that early hour.

“Traffic is bad, even at the time I leave,” said Overturf, 30. “If I leave any later than 6, there is a lot to deal with, and that’s shocking to me. I’m not even in prime-time traffic, and there’s so much of it.”

She used to live closer to work but moved south, 18 miles from her job, to buy an affordable home. She doubts that she could move closer because of Irvine’s high housing prices.

Traffic even affects her life after work. “Friday nights, Saturday nights, Sunday mornings can be bad,” she said. “I find myself planning alternate routes.” If a weekend outing takes her to the northern part of the county, “I’ll figure out another way to come back, other than the Santa Ana Freeway,” she said.

She finds the traffic stressful because “it keeps getting worse. It’s not just some temporary situation. And I don’t see anything being done.”

Land developer Oliver Cagle spends a lot of time on the road, winding his way up Coast Highway from his home in Capistrano Beach to his office in Newport Beach’s Fashion Island, as well as navigating the freeways and city streets to architects’ offices and government agencies.

“I happen to enjoy driving,” said Cagle, 44. “There may be some people who don’t.”

A traffic jam does not necessarily interrupt business. He picks up his car phone and makes a few calls. He dictates memos or letters into a tape recorder. “And if I don’t want to work, I listen to music,” he said.

His commute to the office takes him about 25 minutes, and he would not think of giving up his Capistrano Beach property to get closer to his work.

For one thing, he doesn’t consider the drive along the coast stressful. “I’ve got the ocean, houses and scenic vistas on my drive.”

When someone cuts off Glee Anne Jeffries as she crawls along the freeway with other commuters, she does not suffer silently. She tells the offender off at the top of her lungs.

True, the windows on her 1968 Volkswagen bug may be rolled up, and the target of Jeffries’ wrath may be a couple of car lengths out of earshot, but the outburst helps her deal with the stress of the maddeningly clogged Costa Mesa Freeway.

“I yell at them, sure,” she said with a chuckle. To deal with the tension of the basic, ever-present traffic, “I sing or listen to the radio. I do what I have to to try not to let it get to me, even though it does.”

It usually takes about half an hour for Jeffries to travel the 13 miles between her Costa Mesa home and the law office in Orange where she is a paralegal.

“But if there’s just one accident, it can take an hour,” she said.

Jeffries, 28, is on flexitime, working part time from 10 a.m. to 2 or 3 p.m., 5 days a week, to keep her off the freeway at peak hours and to give her more time at home with her 19-month-old son, Mark.

Those hours, however, make it difficult for her to join a car pool, and riding the bus is too inconvenient and time-consuming, she said.

She wishes Orange County had some form of mass transit for commuters and favors a tax to finance a system. “I would love to get on the subway or something like that,” she said.

For even with her off hours, her drive is trying.

“Traffic is getting worse,” she said. The severity of traffic “used to depend on what time you traveled on the (Costa Mesa) freeway, but now it doesn’t. It’s bad all the time.”

Clifford Vails has tried it all--car-pooling with co-workers at the Los Angeles Unified School District, even riding the bus for 2 hours each way for the Cypress-to-Los Angeles trip.

But after his car pool broke up and bus fare went higher than the cost of gasoline and insurance, Vails went back to making the 30-mile drive alone.

“It takes 45 minutes on a nice, clear day and up to 1 hour, 45 minutes, depending on how many trucks jackknifed,” said Vails, 54, who prepares bids for public works jobs for the school district.

The drive is stressful at times, he admitted. “It depends on my frame of mind.” His blood begins to boil when he sees “these idiots, the ones who are a menace on the freeways, cutting in and out. They don’t signal, and they speed like mad to get two car lengths ahead of you. And they get there 30 seconds before the ones who go with the flow.”

But he has no plans to move closer. He bought his Cypress home when both housing prices and interest rates were low, and “it would not be worth it” to move closer and take on a new mortgage, he said.

“When I first settled here 35 years ago, traffic was nice. You didn’t have the freeways you have now,” he said. The time it took to drive from Orange County to Los Angeles was “considerably greater because you took surface streets, but the volume was considerably less.”

He foresees a day when the traffic in the area will be so bad that people will move away. “That could be a significant factor, maybe in 10 years,” he said. “But by then I’ll be retired.”