Onramp to Fear
The odds against it happening to me, or to you, are on the order of 386,000 to one.
So they say.
But every day that we awaken to pictures of tempered glass shattered like a broken kaleidoscope, the odds feel like they are falling, the chanciness spiraling in closer. A man who works at the shop that tunes my car had his rear window shot out. The writer who sits across from me in the office has decided not to drive the freeways after dark with his toddlers in the car. The CHP hotline is a digit off from a friend’s phone number, and I wonder whether he is getting some of these calls, the panicky ones from the San Diego Freeway, the helpful-hint ones from Wisconsin or Indiana.
*
“Random” is what the newscasters call it, and certainly it has an unnerving aimlessness. Foreign cars and domestic, the 101, the 91 and the 605, two politicians’ namesake freeways, the Glenn Anderson and the Ronald Reagan.
But track the CHP log in the way we pasted up timelines in fifth grade, and the numbers take on flesh and rubber and purpose; suddenly there really is someone cruising along a seamless loop of concrete, bent on mayhem:
Monday night, the northbound 101 (where I might have passed him in my transit). Rear window broken at Western Avenue, 8:16 p.m. Another at Cahuenga Boulevard, six minutes later. Then the curving transition to the west, because 11 minutes later, a window is broken at Van Nuys Boulevard. Two shattered farther west, near Balboa Boulevard, and two more, relentlessly west, at White Oak, and at Canoga.
No wonder we are eyeing one another, car to car, making threat assessments, slowing down, speeding up, giving a second glance to overpasses and another look at the shadows on the shoulders of the freeways--searching warily for the Night Shatterer, the Glass Blower, the Window Whacker, or whatever catchy handle he will sooner or later acquire.
It is Tuesday afternoon, and we stand at 235 and counting.
*
Anxiety Central is a windowless second-floor room in a CHP office. It is so isolated from the racket of the freeway alongside it--where the vandal brazenly struck at 10:36 p.m. two Wednesday nights ago--that the only discernible siren sound comes from a TV cop show on one of the TV monitors.
It is disappointingly unlike a wartime situation room--no maps with clusters of pins at the East L.A. interchange. At 1800 hours last Friday, the CHP brought in the white plastic log books and the IBM 486 computers, wrote Consolidated Operations Center on the board and set up this Vandal Apprehension Task Force.
It doesn’t often happen--maybe three or four times a year--that they slide the doorplate from the side that says “conference room” to the side that says “Emergency Resource Center.” They did it for the riots, for Rodney King trials I and II, for O.J., for floods and fires, and now for this.
The information moves in a loop, from dispatchers or hotline officers, across the room or across the table to the investigators, and then out to the field officers.
The scent of pepperoni and black olives and hot pizza-box cardboard suffuses the room; no one has time to go out to eat.
“So we’re up to 17, or 18?”
“18.”
The calls, like the exploding windows, come in bunches. Whoever commits this mayhem usually begins about 7 p.m., and winds up by midnight, almost as punctually as a work detail. It is now 10:10; one investigator calls over to another on the phone with a victim. “Tell ‘em not to clean out the vehicle till someone can look for evidence.”
Nothing here especially bespeaks the fact that the CHP is at maximum deployment--no “I need tomorrow off,” no special requests--except the fatigue and the alacrity of people working hard and working late. They are fueled by more than cold pizza; the notion that anyone but the CHP could be calling the shots on their freeways is more than a crime. It is an affront.
*
An 11-year-old boy is shot riding in the back of his mother’s minivan. Drive-by slayings are news only on a slow news night. These too are crimes on wheels, awful and senseless, but they recede like landscapes we have driven past.
Why would murder blur and fade from memory, but these window shatterings--which amount to little more than wholesale fast-lane vandalism--obsess us?
Because, more than parks, more than malls, even more than ATMs, freeways are our public spaces. They are the only really neutral, egalitarian territory in the city, shared by clunkers and Caddies, where we all speak the language of the internal combustion engine and all operate by the same set of rules, mechanical and civil.
Joan Didion wrote of our freeways that they are “the only secular communion Los Angeles has.” So it is that when something untoward happens on a freeway, it seems to happen to us, all of us, and to put us all at risk, whatever odds they are giving.
