Rush Hour

Most of the time,
Or so it seems,
The cars never end.
It is as if someone called a convention and no one can find the hall.
They come in bunches as I wait,
If I’m lucky. Bunches suggest there will be a break.
And I can whiz into the morass, join the insanity, and fire up my fight or flight response
With the other adults-turned-animals.
They call it “rush hour,”
Which is optimistic, in my view;As it seems to be growing longer day by day, lenghthening through the morning till ten or eleven, beginning again shortly after two or two-thirty by early quitters anxious to get a jump on the crush, and growing every year,
And seems near blending seamlessly into the homebound late afternoon traffic,
And even continues into the evening. Six, seven,
Then, just when there’s some hope rising,
That all the workers have found their way home,
The partygoers and diners hit the streets and highways, and extend the rush hour into the wee hours of the morning.
Rush hour is usually “over” about two a.am.
When the drunks swerve home…those who try,
Stupidly,
Sometimes without incident and not obviously D.U.I.,
Other times commisserating with a power pole or tree or worse, eacher,
Or another car,
Or a pedestrian.
Lord help the late churchgoers
Still beaming with a benedictory blessing…the sermon went too long,
The altar call cannot be rushed.
The Spirit cannot be interrupted in the pentacostal fervoer for some mere human invention called time—
One o’the clock, two o’the clock—
Lord help them! Blessed as they are, backing in heavenly grace,
They will need all that grace, and skill, attention, stamina, intelligence, wariness, and plain luck and lightning reflexes to muster up and survive the roads this night, to make it home without getting hit by a drunk going the wrong way on I-95.
At 2 a.m.
Or even going the right way. All the angels in heaven and on earth can’t keep those drunks off the expressways, it seems.
Finally, however, in the silent night the streets are quiet at last.
Lit by amber halogen lights like angels’ candles they seem
For just a few minutes.

Then rush hour starts again, too soon—
Five or si in the morning reminds us why they have twelve lanes
As the streets fill again
Before daylight.
:Gentlemen, start your engines!”
the inner voice sounds through the coffee and cobwebs
into the mobile wombs we pop and unpop at or parking spaces—
it seems unendlingly.

But it is not completely unending.
Rush hour actually does pause, or seems to diminish o an almost safe level
At the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Once each week it happens:
On Sunday morning one can still drive in mid-morning to get a newpaper
An pretend he lives in a small town,
Not in the middle of an expressway.
(Of course, if everyone decided to do that….)


I cringed all the time my youngs sons rode their ikes to school,
Praying they would make it without getting hit.
Scott actually did get hit, once,
Riding his bike home from Publix
Where he bagged groceries.
At the ripe old age of fourteen.
But it was his fault;
He didn’t stay at the curb till he had the walk sing
But instead darted to the center island, then tried to bolt onthrough as the light changed.
The driver of the car that hit him couldn’t see him riding past the van beside him and knocked him down,
Knocked him off the bike, stopped, got out to check him—
We think he stopped not from conscience but because a patrol car was right across the intersection and saw it, most likely.
Otherwise that driver, true to the unwritten but universally followed S. Florida NASCAR rules everyone seems honorary members of, would have perobably continued on his merry way
And let Scott be run over by the next guy
And possibly killed
By a hit and run driver.
It happens more han a hundred times a year in Dade and Broward counies alone.
The lawyers here are amoral sharks and everyone knows it.
No one wants to be involved. The courts will crucify them.
The lawyers will ruin them,
And the state will revoke their driving priveleges,
And no one can get anywhere in stretched-out, horizontally-built South Florida without wheels.
If you stop, and admit you made a mistake,
Suddenly your money is gone, your job is gone, your life is gone and everything you held dear,
If you stop, knowing you were probably unobserved,
Rather than speeding away and trying to forget the whole thing.
It must have been a dog, or a raccoon that came up from an adjacent canal, that thump…that thump…
No way it could have been a child.
No way at all.
He who thumps and drives away
Lives to drive another day.

Scott got a $50 fine for crossing the street illegally.
I paid a $300 ambulance call and hospital checkup.
The overzealous paramedics immediately immobilized him to a board,
Taped his head and chest down over his forehead like a pharoah
And trotted their mummy off to the emergency room.
Someone called us at home at some point in this process
And we had no say in the matter:
“Your son Scott has had an accident at the corner of Royal Palm and Soral Springs Drive…I was there before the call ended, almost, barly breathing, my chest heaving…
My son Scott, lying flat on the ground on the corner sidewalk…My God, what a sickening moment!
But he looked up at me with his bright green eyes.
The paras had screwed up and left his mouth, eyes, and nostrils untaped. He could breathe.
And he could talk.
“Hi Dad.”
“Scott, my God! Wat happened? Are you allright? Are you hurt anywhere?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Oh thank God!”
“Except I jammed my thumb when the guy hit my bike.”
He wiggled his right thumb. He jammed it when the bike went over.
Scott was treated and released.

Mark, four years Scott’s younger, wove in and out of traffic on Sample Road for ten years going to and from three schools on his bike in rush hour.
He never had an accident.
But he sure picked up a lot of thorns, nails, and flat tires
That seemed to occur to him only the next morning at seven-twenty
When he would be late at seven-thiry if I didn’t drive him to school immediately
With his flat tire fixed or not. If not, I’d need to also pick him up at 3:00 when school let out.
Other emergencies forced my diving into the crush of rush hour traffic to rescue my sons from the many showers and lightning storms that came out of nowhere in South Florida day and night without warning.

But we survived.
Yes, we survived rush our in the Megalopolis.
And continue to survive going on fifteen years.
Our sons are grown and gone—
Except when Mark comes home from Florida State for breaks
And his friends begin their phonathons and dropins and comeonovers
And the evening’s entertainments call him to establishments throughout the area as far south as Miami and the Keys
And as far north as West Palm and Stuart
And I worry a father’s worry till the cars come home
And the garage door motor begins its low drone
At two or three a.m.
And everyone in the Kauffman clan is safe for a few more hours,
Alive, with their limbs and organs intact,
Safe from rush hour for another day.
I thank God for his grace and protection of my family
From South Florida crazy drivers and their rush hours.
Oh Henry, Henry, Henry Ford,
You had no idea what you started.
But I don’t blame you.
I blame Sam Levitt, who started the first suburb in the ‘forties on Long Island after the war—and Herbert Hoover, who promised us two cars in every garage and the chicken in every pot.
The little picket fence,
The little house in the burbs we could all escape to at the end of our workday in the city…

But who could know we couldn’t build enough roads to escape each other?
And ho foresaw that every business and human enterprise in the land would insist on beginning work hours at the same time?
Every day!
And that all schools would start at the same time.
And all churches and clubs.
And throwing every registered and unregistered vehicle, motorized and unmotorized, onto the streets and avenues, alleys and expressways of our fair cities
Like ants responding to an invasion,
Cramming into our cars,
Careening through our inadequate concrete chutes and gungles like blundering bloodcells in veins, banging around, trying to get on and off the right ramps, dodging each other like soldiers in trenches dodging bullets.
The other cars fly by, some actually at the speed limit,
Creating stationary targets for the others to ram
As they make up their own rules of the road as they go.
And praying all the while that our vehicles hold together with spit and pluck long enough to get us where we’re going,
Witout asphyxiating us,
Without crushing us,
Without killing us,
Without smearing us all over the windshield or the road,
Without drowning us in one of our ubiquitous canals that gulp down whole cars upon entry!
Without incinerating us in faulty wiring fires that explode in flumes of black smoke from our engines sometimes without warning
And give no time or space to pull over, stop, leap away, or try to salvage what we can before the whole car goes up in flames
As happened to Mark’s Toyota on the turnpike:
Singed his tires to the road it did, melted his dash and blackened the whole interior.
All I could do was sign it over to the road vultures who towed it to the impound at the service area, for charges
Without spearing us through our windshields and pinning us to our seats with road debris
Kicked into the air by the dump trucks ahead of us or hurled from an overpass by an unidentified delinquent for kicks,
And get us home,
At a reasonable hour,
In a reasonable condition of health and mind,
For supper with our family,
In time for the blessing,
Day
After day
After blessed day,
Year
After year
After blessed year;
Until someday,
If we survive,
IF WE SURVIVE
IT ALL,
In one piece,
We can escape the madness,
And retire (to South Florida? To North Floria? To Georgia? To Tennessee? My God, where can we retire to where the carnage promises to be any less?)
And our rush ours will end.

Surely somewhere there’s a better world.
And a better way of moving in society to fill our daily needs.
But where?
And do we have to all die to get there?
And if there were, and people learned of it, wouldn’t we all just go there and create the same tangled mess?
I’m distrustful of those magazine articles that rate “the best places to go on vacation,”
Or “the best places to live”
Or “the best places to retire.”
I figure if they publish them, people will go there en masse and the information will soon be obsolete.
Maybe rush hour is just a paradigm for the way we are
And if we didn’t have it,
We’d invent some other, equally obnoxious way to keep our numbers in check;
Maybe we need our misery we go so out of our way to create
In order to justify our continued existence.
When we pull into our own drive or garage,
When we enter our own domeciles,
It is as if we are saying, “Look at me! I survived another game of it!”
Give the man a T-shirt.