Our automobile journey from Pennsylvania to Boston was not well planned. Though the assignment of blame is a negative process that undermines healthy personal relationships, I could not help blaming Mr. P — silently, fiercely, as we inched 20 mph on the Massachusetts Turnpike in blizzard conditions alongside hundreds of other poor planners. He was the one who looked at the weather forecasts and surmised that the storm would stay off the coast until it arrived in Boston in earnest at around 7pm, by which time we should have arrived safely at home to batten down the hatches and enjoy our forced domestic sequestration. But he was also the one who was driving, so he certainly didn’t need me to eulogize his folly.
I started out at the wheel on Sunday at 10am after we packed the Jetta full of gifts and foodstuffs and bade farewell to family, who beseeched us to have a safe journey. Flakes were falling in New Jersey, but the roads seemed to absorb them, giving us a false sense of safety until the accidents started. We passed a pickup truck that had crashed bed-first into the side rails. A full-sized van started to pass me on the left when I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw the van hurtling towards us backwards. “He almost hit us!” I kept repeating as Mr. P coached me on using the manual transmission to brake the car. All of his instruction flew out my head when a black GMC truck sailed sideways in front of us and I slammed on the brakes, whimpering as the truck hurdled gracefully into the side rails. That’s when Mr. P took over the wheel.
Ironically, we made it over the George Washington bridge in better time than usual owing to the dearth of traffic, but slow-moving gridlock awaited us in Connecticut. The roads began to coat as we inched forward at 30 mph, calculating with dread the time that this pace would have us home. We did pick up some speed as we worked our way through Connecticut, but the certifiable mess on the Massachusetts Turnpike slowed us down to 15-20 mph. Our wipers began to freeze, leaving splotches of ice on the windshield that impaired visibility, but it was hardly the time or place to pull over. As Mr. P had been driving for 7 hours straight, I offered to take over. It was a token gesture, and we both knew it.
We arrived home at 7pm, tired but jubilant. “Looks like I won’t be going into the office tomorrow,” I said when we read the the governor had declared a state of emergency.
“Oh shit,” Mr. P said. “I had a floating holiday to use by the end of the year, so I took the day off tomorrow!”
“Poor planning,” I commented.
