One February morning before dawn I woke to find my wife crying
in front of her computer. The screen glowed blue in the dark room.
Outside, the streets and sidewalks were buried by new snow, and
more dumped down out of the sky, turning Boston into a sickly
yellow indoor-seeming palace of winter, peculiarly lit by the
streetlights and the smothered dawn. A blizzard had swept in to New
England overnight, dropping a foot on the city. And, as Sally had
discovered, closing the airport.
We were scheduled to depart that morning for a vacation in
Florida.
Sally desperately clicked through the flight listings, finding
only cancellations, and no prospect of anything flying for at least
a day, maybe more, once all the backups were taken into account. We
had only eight days.
“Let’s drive it,” I said.
Sally went into full-power executive mode, invoked her corporate
Hertz privileges and found a car at Logan. She bundled up and
headed off via the T, the only viable transport. I got Bud, then
five, out of bed, fed and dressed him, and organized the luggage in
the living room.
In about an hour, Sally returned with the biggest car she could
find, some sort of Hyundai, and plowed it into a snowbank in front
of our row house in Charlestown. We packed, checked the computer
once again for the weather pattern, and headed south as fast as we
could.
“Thank you,” Sally said, with tears in her eyes. “Thank
you.”
HIGHWAY 95 STREAMS NORTH-SOUTH like a modern Mississippi of
commerce along the Eastern seaboard. As with the mighty river, if
you live anywhere near it, you can hear it constantly, even in the
deepest hours of night, rushing with travel and trade.
Tributaries pour into it along the way, and, around Woodbridge,
New Jersey, it finds its full southbound strength. Jim McGreevey’s
original claim to fame was as the mayor of this town, one of the
biggest and most complicated highway interchanges in the country.
If you’re not careful, as you shift from the Garden State Parkway
to the New Jersey Turnpike (95), you will swear you have been
turned back North, and will vainly look for a way to turn around
again.
Route 95 stays jammed up in urban commerce till well below
Washington, D.C. (where we stopped that year for a quick nap and
meal at my sister’s place). Once below Richmond, you’re in Dixie
and the road opens up. You scarcely see a state trooper anymore,
and by now, on our trip, it was night, and the trucks, lit up like
the riverboats of yore with fantastic glittering masts and
outlines, boomed along.
Up ahead some distance in North Carolina I saw what seemed to be
a terrible accident scene, ablaze with emergency lights. But we
could not seem to draw any closer. Eventually we overtook a giant
wrecker flaming with strobe lights, towing a disabled car. I had to
speed up to 90 to get past the blinding apparition.
Like the old river, Route 95 has its tough and dangerous parts,
too. You do not want to pull over into some tourist mecca in the
middle of the night without a careful look. You may find yourself
in the middle of a drunken brawl. As well to keep in mind that
commerce also means crime. For all that, roadside suspicion seems
remarkably low. The most intimidating looking gas station jockey
will help you instantly if you have a sick kid, pitching in with a
roll of paper towels and a spray bottle.
ABOUT THE WITCHING HOUR of the morning, at perhaps the twentieth
hour on the road, we drew along the marshes and sand flats of the
Georgia coast. Not long afterward, with Sally and Bud just stirring
awake and my body craving coffee, we crossed the Florida
border.
“We’re here!” I told them, and they cheered, and we began to
look for somewhere to eat something and relieve the aching
bladders. Picking out a makeshift breakfast from a gas station
convenience store, stretching our legs in the blessed moderate
temperature and humidity, the realization suddenly hit us. We were
going to Port St. Lucie. Florida is a big state. We still had 400
miles to drive.
We did the drive twice more in years after that. We had some
advantages. We had moved to New Jersey, so we were 300 miles
closer. I had bought an old Cadillac Fleetwood, so we had a big,
comfortable car. But we also had a new child, a still
un-toilet-trained toddler. And Bud, as he grew older, began to have
problems with carsickness.
For a while it was fun. It was an adventure. But it was still a
very, very long way. And after that first trip, the one made under
the duress of bad weather in a rental car, when we flew back, we
found out the one real downside to driving to your vacation.
You have to drive back.
