Traffic Light

Fred had done a lot of traveling in his wayward youth, and now that he'd moved back home, to central Illinois, he could hardly help thinking of some of the wild things he'd done. That was because now, living in a small town with a wife and two young children, he was out driving on the streets of the town a lot, and there were a lot of traffic lights. He'd moved here from the mountains, where there were virtually no lights, but just endless windy gravel roads and cliffs, so now he was happy with less responsibility on his mind, but he had these lights to sit through. Even a couple of seconds of sitting at a red light, in one of the town's many intersections, and his mind would go off into the crazy things he'd done as a youth.

Once he'd made a bunch of money, in illegal ways mostly, selling pot which was illegal at the time, and he'd found his way down to the beaches of Belize, where there was a community of like-minded people hiding out from the law mostly. Marijuana was part of every conversation for him at the time; whole days went by with nothing else but a bunch of smoke, and it was pretty powerful smoke, as he would tell his friends later. But one day his friend Mattie talked him into driving this old car 500 miles through the jungle to get to some old ruins that Mattie was sure held the secrets of human history. Fred had no doubt that he was right. But what he should have done was check to make sure the car was up to the trip. They both knew that 500 miles would take them about ten hours, driving tortured mountain gravel roads where anything could happen.

What they couldn't have foreseen was that the roads were not only gravel, but also terrible. At one point they hit a pothole so big that the car's transmission broke. They were something like 180 miles into the trip; they'd been on the road almost five hours, and they were deep in the middle of some jungle where it seemed not another soul was anywhere for miles around. They opened up the hood and messed with the car, but neither of them had any sense of how you could fix a transmission out in the middle of the jungle. It was pretty sure, they knew, that no one was going to come by, at all. No help, no neighbors, no village nearby, nothing, just the jungle sounds of birds and frogs and other loud animals that seemed to be giving them unwanted advice. They stood there in the early afternoon, and then, it started to rain lightly.

The car still wouldn't go forward. It wouldn't go into first, or second, or third. Finally to their surprise they noticed that it went into reverse, though. That was their only option. Although they were prepared to camp, they didn't want to camp, not knowing what kind of animals there were in the area, and besides, there was absolutely no place to pull over. They wanted out of this little jungle place with a terrible gravel road through it. So, they got back into the car, and put it in reverse.

Progress was tedious. They were going backwards, over the same terrible roads they'd come in by. Fred was driving, and he drove by putting his foot on the gas and at the same time twisting himself around and looking out the back window. That road had a lot of twists and turns, and a lot of potholes. What took them four or five hours to get in, took them more like eight to get home. And the pot hadn't helped. He and Mattie kept up a steady smoke, all the way into the jungle, but when they tried to think straight and drive backwards, it was really difficult. He swore that night to ease up on the pot.

But he wasn't really able to live up to his word. When he got back to Illinois, he got a job as a truck driver, doing long haul trips across the midwest carrying all kinds of things. They set him off in this huge truck and on one of his first trips, he almost sliced off the top half of his truck going under a bridge that was too low. They told him to use his GPS to get on the right highway, and he did, but here he was driving down this one highway, and along comes this bridge with a height about a foot or so below what he was carrying. Fortunately he saw it, and stopped just in time. The front of his truck was right up against the bridge itself and he knew there was no way he could fit under it.

It was night-time, and again he was alone. He got out of his truck and looked around; no traffic going in either direction. He was hoping somebody would come by who would help him, directing traffic if nothing else, but there wasn't a soul around. Worst of all, the road had pretty steep ditches on both sides so it was impossible to simply turn around. He had a fairly long truck and would need a wide driveway to turn around, but he hadn't seen one, and had no idea how far he'd have to go, backwards, to get to one.

Still, it was the middle of the night, and he was carrying what, a few thousand pounds of someone's valuable merchandise, and he was responsible to not run it into the ditch, or just stop and give up for the night. He put it in reverse and slowly, slowly backed up until he could find a crossroad.

As it turned out the nearest crossroad was about six miles, and he'd never seen another car coming either way the whole time. He'd only been going about twenty, just like it was when he was in Belize, and he was shaking in fear that the truck would jackknife or get turned in such a way that he'd be unable to maneuver.

That was another night that went on forever. He'd had to turn around and go back, and find a better way, and somehow it took him almost all night, and at the company they weren't that sympathetic, even though they had set him along on the wrong road. It was almost as if it was a test. If he lost his cool out on that lonely midnight road, he wasn't fit for driving.

Now, it was a blizzard. He had a wife and two young kids, and was responsible for the kids' transport across town to the daycare. He had finally kicked the pot habit: it hadn't helped in Belize, hadn't helped in the trucking business, hadn't helped at all, in general. Now he had children, and wanted nothing more than for them to grow up and not have to live through any of that stuff. When he was out in his car, on the city streets, he prayed; sometimes he prayed hard, or through the entire trip. But the town's traffic was incredibly predictable. People kept to the order of the law and the road. They stopped at reds, or soon after it turned red, sometimes flying through those things. The walk/don't walk signs would flash downtown and people would actually use them, and everything worked out fine, unlike some of the crazy cities he'd seen. Overall he had nothing to worry about. Still, his past came to haunt him, and every time he went out in the car, he'd have visions of broken transmissions or low bridges, impeding his progress or forcing him to back up and start all over again.

At this particular stoplight there was a blizzard, but cars were lined up in all four directions; he was first in his own lane, going straight and waiting for a green. The light going the other way turned yellow, then red, and just for a second there, cars in both lanes were stuck behind their red while the delay that they'd timed allowed for him to get his green and go. In that second, he prayed. May I only go forward now, and only go where I'm going, and may everything work out. May none of these cars come flying through their red smashing cars in the intersection to smithereens. May all the things I can possibly imagine, please, not come true, and let order prevail on this earth. Amen.