Curses may fly, but she’s above it all

THERE is no time on any freeway in L.A. when the traffic is truly light. It used to be that if you were driving at 3 a.m. during a 100-year storm when roads were closed due to slides and flooding, there were very few vehicles around. That’s not true anymore.

A case in general reference was the two hours it took me to drive about five miles from the McClure Tunnel to the 405 on the Santa Monica Freeway when absolutely nothing was going on, not even a mattress in the fast lane.

At a normal rate of speed, it takes only a few minutes, but on this particular occasion it was an agonizing crawl at a time when everyone should have been home eating their tuna casseroles, or whatever.

A maddening aspect of the occasion was that even though I had the car radio tuned to KNX, there was not a word of explanation from its traffic reporters. That’s when I began cursing Meghan Reyes. She was keeping me tuned to every problem on every freeway but the one I was on, and I couldn’t find words enough to frame my distress at being trapped in a row of vehicles going nowhere.

One experiences emotions in a traffic jam similar to those of a patient with a terminal disease, through anger, denial and acceptance. On this particular evening, I gave in to the unavoidable, stopped cursing and amused myself by wondering if traffic reporters were aware of how satisfying it was to malign them from afar. That’s what led me to Reyes.

She is a good-natured woman of 32 with a shrug to her personality that allows a degree of forbearance in dealing with those who act out their flashes of road rage not by shooting or punching anyone or trying to run them off the road but by damning the traffic reporters they count on to get them out of the mess they’re in.

Reyes has been doing the job since 1997 in the air and on the ground, and, in fact, it is something she has wanted to do most of her life. Her mother, Karen, said that when Meghan was just a little girl she’d listen to traffic reporters on the radio and jabber along with them, copying their style and cadence. I’ve heard of kids born to be piano soloists or theoretical physicists but never traffic reporters.

Now she looks down at the entanglements on the freeways and the side streets from 2,000 to 5,000 feet every weekday morning from 6 to 9:30 and anchors the traffic reports every afternoon from 3 until 7, when it supposedly has all thinned out and the vehicles are breezing along like automated kiddie-cars at an amusement park.

In actuality, there never seems to be a time anymore when the freeways take on the aspects of a country lane. It used to be that Friday was the worst day, Reyes says, but now it’s Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. More like every day if you ask me.

Among the hazards of being an airborne traffic reporter is that there are so many other traffic reporters up there in planes and helicopters that you have to be careful not to become a statistic yourself. One must avoid not only the aerial spotters but also law enforcement aircraft and recreational fliers. As L.A. ground traffic gets worse and the air traffic over the ground traffic gets worse, satellites are going to have to monitor it all.

On one occasion, Reyes came close to buying the farm, as they used to say, when the Cessna she was in began filling with smoke. The pilot landed all right, but moments after they ran from the wreckage, the plane exploded into flame. A dramatic video shot by a TV traffic watcher reveals how close they came to being sauteed. It was shortly after the incident that Reyes, shaken but determined to carry on, learned to fly, just in case. Forced to accept the idea of a child emerging from the womb wanting to be a traffic reporter, I have even more difficulty accepting the fact that she wanted to remain at the job after that horrific experience. “People need us,” was Reyes’ explanation, which can make one feel a little contrite when one curses her.

“They telephone and yell sometimes,” she says, not seeming too fussed about it. “When they use the F-word I call them back using Caller ID and shower them with kindness.” She explains that she has to use her 60-second time slot to focus on big problems. “A SigAlert on the Santa Monica that shuts down three lanes takes precedence over a minor accident on the 110.”

In October, Reyes will become a reserve officer with the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. Her “passion,” she says, is to someday be a full-time cop working not in the air but on the streets of L.A. County, which may be a lot more dangerous than being caught in a burning airplane at 5,000 feet.

I’m not sure how her lifelong ambition to be a traffic reporter segues into being a police officer, but at least there will be a verbal familiarity linking the two jobs. We’ll be able to curse her as a cop just as we did when she was a traffic reporter. That’s satisfying too.