Traffic Jams Archives

October 21, 2013

Moon and Temperatures Rising

I left Cape late, but I had good intentions of making Athens, Ohio, in a straight run. What I hadn’t counted on was a one-hour traffic jam between Nowhere, Illinois, and Not Quite to the State Line, Indiana.

Except for putting me behind schedule, it wasn’t that bad: I just munched on junk food and cranked up the audio book on World War II history I was listening to.

When I looked in the rearview mirror, though, it was apparent the young couple behind me was having a lot more fun than I was. They smooched through the whole moving parking lot. I kept waiting for their windows to fog up.

(I cropped out their license tag for the same reason I’d stand on a table in some cowboy bar and say, “I’m fixin’ to take some pictures for the paper. If you aren’t supposed to be here or you aren’t supposed to be here with the person you’re with, stay over in that corner of the room.”)

That’s SOME moon

A couple hours later, I pulled into a rest area for a 22-minute nap. When I got on the entrance ramp to get back on the Interstate, I thought I was looking at a big Gulf Oil sign. There was this huge orange ball hanging in the sky like a gas station logo.

I was already committed to getting on the road, so I resisted temptation to shoot the moon (so to speak), but I finally had to pull off on the shoulder to bang off half a dozen frames through the windshield. It was one of those times I wished I was a passenger: that silly moon kept teasing me with great photo ops for the next 45 minutes.

Scads of deer

Friend Jessica’s husband and a buddy went deer hunting last night and each bagged one for the freezer. I told her it would have been easier for them to drive along the road and pick up the dozen or so I saw on the shoulder after getting into Ohio. I hope the occupants of whatever vehicle hit them came out better than the deer.

Jessica lives on 40 acres so far out in the wilds of Athens County that the Lady in Sky who talks to me through my GPS kept asking, “Are you SURE?” Just as we pulled onto her driveway, a deer came running across the road in front of us.

April 16, 2013

Independence Traffic Jam

Yes, children, we had traffic jams in Cape in The Old Days. I shot this one on Independence looking toward Kingshighway on the same day I shot the demolition of the St. Charles Hotel, April 13, 1967.

It took some headscratching to figure out where it was taken. The key landmarks were the bridge over Cape LaCroix Creek, the Wiethop Truck Sales sign, the highway sign pointing to Hwy 61 and the car dealership way off in the background.

I must have been using my 200mm telephoto lens. That would have accounted for the way everything is compressed and looks closer than it really is.

The only thing that’s still there is Wiethop. Moon Distributing Company and Pollack Hide and Fur, which don’t show at that intersection, are long gone. Harris Motor Company has become Aldi’s. The area off to the right contains Kmart, Schnucks, Walgreen Drugs and some other stores.

And, that traffic-jammed two-lane road has become four lanes with a suicide center turn lane.

November 17, 2012

General Sherman, We Need You

I was making great progress heading back to Florida from Cape. The weather was great, traffic was light to moderate, everybody was pretty well-behaved.

Well, there was a bit of a delay at Monteagle Pass, but we’ll go into that another day. I’ve got a couple of different routes I take; this time I opted to go through Atlanta on 1-75. I’ve been lucky the last few times, blasting through the area in about 30 minutes with only a few taps on the brakes.

Coming into town just about dusk, I thought I was gong to catch a break again. See how nicely the traffic is spaced out?

Look at all the taillights

Alas, around the corner was a forest of red taillights as far as you could see. It took 1-1/2 hours to do what I have been doing in 30 minutes. The skies were clear. There were no wrecks. It was just like everybody confused and thought the Interstate was one big parking lot and they needed to practice for Black Friday.

General Sherman had the right idea

I’ve always been convinced that General Sherman had the right idea of what to do with Atlanta.

[Wife Lila, who always exhibits better taste than I do, objected to my General Sherman suggestion, pointing out the death and destruction he meted out on horrific March to the Sea. Atlanta, to me, has been the source of major traffic jams, is the home of the Atlanta Braves and was where our corporate HQ was located. None of those things endear the city to me. Maybe we could just build bypasses that bypass the bypasses that exist around the city and leave General Sherman to his rest.]