The last commute

April 27, 2007

In a couple of hours I will begin The Last Commute. This is the last time I will fight my way to work through the other grumpy, under-caffeinated workers of Northern Virginia. This is the last chance people will have to suddenly stop in front of me at the top of an escalator. Or to stand in front of the Metro doors, mouth agape, as I try to disembark from the train. Today is the last day some mentally deficient freak of nature in a business suit can attempt to hold open those self-same Metro doors with his briefcase, breaking the unconscionably fragile door mechanism, requiring everyone else to get off that train and climb on the next.

I had some terrible commutes in the last nine years. I wasn’t living here yet when a jumper threatened to leap off the Woodrow Wilson Bridge and caused a multi-hour traffic standstill on the beltway. But there was the time the gunpowder truck tipped over, gridlocking the Beltway, I-95, and I-66. I didn’t make it to work that day.

Once, someone blew their brains out while driving on I-66. At first I thought perhaps he’d seen one to many one-passenger cars go by in the carpool lane, but no: he’d been having a cell-phone argument with his girlfriend. Put the gun down and drive, eh?

That wasn’t the only suicide that kept me from getting where I needed to go. Someone threw themselves in front of the metro train ahead of mine, bringing the whole Red line to a grinding halt (sorry for that visual). I can’t remember how long that delay was, but it took me five hours to get home when someone else — a young man on a motorcycle — thought it would be fun to drive on the railroad tracks my commuter train. When you feel a full-sized train bounce, you know something is deeply wrong.

I’ll never forget trying to get home after Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. It took a very long time. Evacuating the city took forever, but once we got out of there the Virginia Railway Express did their level best to get us home as quick as possible using hastily-hired buses. Some folks, apparently temporarily forgetting that the VRE ran trains and not a bus service, were upset that there weren’t more buses waiting in the wings. But I was actually proud of the calm, mostly orderly, and mostly patient reaction of most of the folks on my commute.

I’ve commuted from Manassas to L’Enfant Plaza using a car, a bus, and the subway all in the same trip. I’ve taken the train from Fredericksburg then a Metro to Bethesda on a daily basis. I’ve stood in negative wind-chill and waited for a train that’s thirty minutes late. I’ve raced to the Metro parking lots to get a spot before they fill up — thirty miles away from DC. I’ve driven from the City of Fairfax to Fredericksburg via Culpepper in order to avoid I-95. I’ve driven past the Iwo Jima memorial, then paid $25 a day for parking. I’ve submitted to metal detectors and X-ray machines and bag searches on a daily basis. I have remembered to leave my pen knife home.

Today it is done. There is one last commute. We are moving away.

Posted in Diary