3 am: what's goin' on?

We eighty-year-olds are often up in the middle of the night, for reasons that need not concern younger readers at the moment. Usually, I can get right back to sleep for a couple more hours. But sometimes, like 3 am last Tuesday morning April 26^th, I lay awake thinking about some writing projects coming up. Not worrying, just mulling over thoughts or maybe planning ahead, or just enjoying the night sounds of a small town.

      I began wondering if the sound of thunder signaled approaching rain . . . . no, a peal of thunder doesn't last that long . . . maybe a couple of trucks passing by? Finally, I got back up, threw on my warm bathrobe, stood looking out the living-room window.

      Yeah, trucks. Big semis, all west-bound, some followed by a car or two. They keep coming, in pairs or threes every few minutes. There's nothing open this early west of us on McKinley Avenue between here and the next town, two miles farther on. My imagination suggests a clandestine military assembly forming up somewhere with evil intent. Or maybe the town council has finally decided to repair our street and is getting an early morning start. But it's been going on for an hour now; five more long big rigs have just passed, one right after another.

      Common sense starts to creep in. There must be a bad accident closing the west-bound lanes of I-90 (that parallels our street, a half-mile away) It's four o'clock now; I turn on the TV, but the news channels are just more Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. No local news. 4:15 still steady traffic westbound. Time to go back to bed and snatch another hour of sleep.

      By 6 am, I was up and out across the street where a gap in the buildings allows glimpses of I-90. I see ordinary traffic in both directions. But big trucks are still passing my home on the street behind me. Interstate 90 is the major highway from Seattle to Boston and points in between. I have often clocked the large-truck traffic to average one or two every minute, a total of between 1,000 and 2,000 every 24 hours (many long-distance drivers prefer night time to avoid local daytime traffic.)

      Heavy traffic continued on our street about nine hours altogether. The obstruction on the highway was a wrecked east-bound truck whose driver had failed to negotiate a curve at the west end of Kellogg and had veered into the west-bound lanes, crashed and soon caught fire. Both the driver and his passenger walked away with only minor injuries. My home street is the only other connection to the next highway entry point, two miles west. Traffic had continued beyond where I could see the distant highway, and then was diverted back into town at an exit only a hundred yards from the wreck. The police and fire crew were very efficient, but it takes a lot of time to transfer tons of cargo and then lift the remains of a huge vehicle out of the way. Mountains to the north and south of our valley allow a fifty-mile detour for ordinary cars, but the big freighters would need to go an extra 150 miles. The West is not all flat desert.

      More about the Republicans next. They seem to be having a major wreck of their own in California this week. And we Americans may not walk away unscathed.