Blocking the Box

I haven't ranted on this blog in a while, so I figure I'm due. That and the yelling and screaming to myself in the car is getting really stressful. I'm hoping that someone in City Hall has a Google alert set up, and I'm going to use every phrase I can think of that THE CITY OF BOSTON might have used in said Google alert so they somehow come across this post.

I've been riding my bike to work 2-3 days a week since April, which has reduced my car-driving stress considerably. But, last week, after getting home from vacation, I was lazy and drove every day. And then it commenced raining like hell for 3 days straight. So, I drove through the city for 8 work days in a row, something I've not done since last winter.

Keep in mind, folks, that it is still technically summer in Boston. There are some students dribbling back this week, but there are still no school buses or little kids on the streets. Traffic is still "light".

Boston drivers are notoriously shitty. Shitty in their skills, shitty to each other, shitty on reaction time, and they make shitty decisions. This actually applies to most Massachusetts drivers. A friend and I were driving to Maine, and when you cross the border from Mass into New Hampshire, there's a sign that says "Drive Courteously. It's the NH Way" on the side of the highway. We decided it was just for the Massholes crossing over as a warning to stop driving the way they usually do and remember they are now visitors in someone else's home.

I learned to drive here in MA, drove mostly in my small hometown and then headed to college and didn't drive at all for 4 years. Then I went off and became a Maryland driver and a California driver and a Pennsylvania driver before returning to Boston. And I am still a Boston driver at heart. I'm fast and aggressive, and I can look in 12 directions at once if necessary. I can bob and weave with the best of them. If you don't have these kinds of skills, you are probably that idiot stopped at the Storrow Drive entrance ramp waiting for an opening. It ain't coming, honey, let's go. Stick your nose out.

Boston drivers are also notorious law-breakers. As a matter of course, they run red lights, take rights on red even when the sign says they can't, change lanes without signaling, travel in the far left-lane with no intention of moving, and cut people off as often as possible. They also flick each other off, yell out the window, call each other names, honk a lot, and tailgate. We would win the gold every time if tailgating was an Olympic sport.

Mayor Menino should be held responsible for the horrible light system in Boston. There aren't any weekend settings, so you sit at lights downtown on Saturdays for three cycles while the invisible, non-existent pedestrians do their crossing. There are badly set lights in Boston and all the surrounding communities so only 3 cars can get through a whole busy clusterf*ck. A friend of a friend who moved to Boston from NYC once said he was going to run for Mayor of Boston just so he could change the effed-up light systems. He went back to NYC.

But this entire rant is about one thing. One. BLOCKING THE BOX. Don't know what that is? You're probably a Bostonian.

Blocking the Box is when someone pulls forward into an intersection but is stuck in traffic and can't move forward through the intersection, so when the opposing traffic gets their light, that someone is still sitting in the middle of the intersection. They are blocking the "box" made by the intersection and now nobody can move across. This is bad for so many reasons. SO MANY; here's three:

1. It's freakin' unsafe. Now an emergency vehicle cannot get through. People are dying in those ambulances, you know.
2. It's freakin' annoying. I have been waiting patiently for about 3 light-cycles already, and now that I'm the third car back, I still can't get through the damn intersection because you are SITTING IN IT. Like a moron.
3. All the people behind me are piling up into the intersection behind them. And there are probably morons just like you blocking the box back there. And the cycle continues.

In NYC, there are signs everywhere that say DON'T BLOCK THE BOX. In Guiliani's time, they probably pulled you straight from your car and hauled you off to jail if you did it. Now they just give you a big whopping ticket. Facts are, people don't do it. Certainly not taxis, which are some of the worst offenders in Boston. New Yorkers know they have to behave on the streets in order for life to keep on keeping on. Why the hell don't Bostonians know that? (And don't even tell me that NYC's streets are straight and easier and so that's why they don't have to do it and we have to do it here to get anywhere. Bullshit.)

In Boston, police officers often just watch this happen and do nothing. NOTHING. The stupid Boston Police Department has officers on the street standing around WATCHING this happen. Pull these f*cknuts over and ticket them. It's a pretty easy concept.

This happens in snowstorms. That's super fun. You know, the roads are already horrible, and everyone's moving at a snail's pace, so let's inch out into the intersection and then just play chicken to see who can force their way through instead of actually allowing the light to do its job. That'll be fun. Maybe we'll slide a bit and hit each other! We can sit in the dark and the snow well past 7 p.m. and into having to pee and being super hungry to add to our frustration and our asshole-ness! Woot. Fun times.

The two most offending intersections I come across regularly for this are the intersection of The Fenway and Brookline Ave (especially during Sox games) and The Riverway and Longwood Ave. The Fenway and Brookline Ave is a virtual corridor to the hospitals and this is very dangerous. Yesterday, I was the SECOND car back when the light turned green for me to cross Brookline and only the FIRST CAR got across. I couldn't go. When people take a left onto Longwood from The Riverway heading east, there is another light right away which is timed badly (BROOKLINE CITY HALL, get on that). So people pull that left anyway, knowing everyone is stopped and then they block anyone who is travelling west's ability to go forward when the light turns green. It's a real mess, considering The Riverway can get backed up all the way back to the Landmark Center.

Boston needs to do something about this. Boston needs to do something about a lot of things, I know. This is likely very low on the list. But the CITY OF BOSTON and MAYOR MENINO should know how completely and totally annoying it is. And the BOSTON POLICE DEPARTMENT should probably at least tell the cops that if they see egregious instances of this, they should do something about it. Instead of say, standing on the corner chatting to each other. (Possibly reword to eliminate the word egregious, lest they don't know what that means. Snark.)

I'm going to wear my horn out long before I stop driving this car. I just know it. In the meantime, I'm back on the bike.

Highland Road

The house was a combination of beautiful and eerie. I whizzed by it on my bike, headed down Highland Road, deciding not to stop and take photos although both of us were yelling about how beautiful it was and how we wanted to own it. It was early in the ride and we had another 28 miles or so in front of us. That and it had begun raining a bit and the group was mostly still together. Stopping would have been all kinds of a mess. And so we rode past.

Another bend in the road and another small hill found green rolling pastures and rolled bales of hay on either side of us. Again, beautiful, but the stop was not happening. Instead I told Deborah the story about the time on the Amazing Race when the teams had to unroll bales of hay looking for the next clue and one pair looked for 8 hours or more and finally Phil just came out in the dark to tell them they'd been eliminated. It passed the time as we waited for the rain to stop. But it reduced the pleasure that this road could have brought us in all its rural glory had I remained silent and listened to it as it spoke.

We carried on, in and out of the fingers of this part of the coast of Maine, supported by the LLBean van following us to replenish our water and give us snacks and meet us for lunch at mile 19. We stopped to check out a vista point and watched a cormorant, surely a male, stand on the end of a canoe and hold his wings outspread, perhaps to impress the others around him.

Our bellies were still full from the blueberry pancakes that were our breakfast after a night of what can't rightly be called camping since, even though I did sleep in a tent, it was on a cot with a mattress on a wooden platform with a bedside table. Deborah noticed a swimmer way out in a bay and awaited his return to ask him about his workout. We visited with turkeys and goats and ducks at a farm. I stopped to take a photo of a tiny yellow, wooden, painted shed at an intersection in the middle of nowhere with a sign proclaiming it Symphony Hall.

After lunch, Deborah asked the guides about making a sidetrip back to Highland Road before returning to camp. She got directions and told them we'd be late. Off we went.

Amazingly, although it had only been about 4 hours since our first foray down the road, neither of us really remembered the lay of the land all that well. We were surprised by the first steep-ish hill and got confused by the first edifice we saw, unsure what it was. We stopped to take a few shots of the rolled bales of hay against the green of the grass. We had no sun, but also no rain, and the lighting was perfect to capture the colors.



Another bend, another hill and around the corner was the house we remembered. We stopped on the road to get a few shots, and then Deborah headed up the grass path towards the front door. I remained on the road, liking that Deborah was bonding with the house and got her in the frame, listening to the story it was trying to tell us.



The grass path looked freshly driven upon. The roof was newish. Almost no window pane had glass remaining. The wooden slats that made up the outside walls of the house were there, but the wooden siding slats were falling every which way in many spots. The front door was almost entirely covered by a large, unruly patch of blackberry bushes. The wildflowers were taking over in every direction.



I approached. I squatted, I listened to the house. I saw the light through one window and through another to behind the house. I wondered what had happened here. I hoped I wasn't going to get ticks when I kneeled in the brush to get a different angle. We were silent mostly, but also wondered some of this outloud.



We turned around and rode back towards a hot shower and the car to take us back to the city. But I looked back over my shoulder one last time at the house as I hit the first downhill and anticipated another uphill to get us to the end of Highland Road once again.

We noted the address. Deborah wants to know who owned this place and when. An advantage of a really good zoom on your camera is that sometimes you can see things in the photos that you couldn't even make out when you took the picture. I looked slowly through the images when I got home and suddenly stopped short, afraid that I'd see a face or a ghost or something else I couldn't explain in one of the shots. Alas, this doesn't end with a ghost story.

Instead it ends with the willingness to take some time to revisit somewhere that spoke to us and listen. The house was clear with us. It has a story. We may never know what it is, but now we are part of it. We didn't just whiz by on our bikes. We didn't just assume it was abandoned. Because I have a friend who, like me, is willing to wonder.

Dead Woman's Pass

Dead Woman's Pass is at 4200 meters (13,860 feet) and it lies in the middle of Day 2 of hiking the Inca Trail.

It is imposing as hell as one stands at the rest stop below, the last place to buy anything until the end of Day 3. Each day, two local Peruvian/Quechuan women hike up from the village way below to sell Gatorade, M&Ms, snickers, bottles of rum, cans of Cusquena beer and more to those of us hiking up beyond this point.

As I look up, I can see the line of porters dressed in blue (ours) and the line dressed in red (another group's) hiking up towards the pass. They are impossibly small. I wonder how I will ever make it up that high, up that far on a day when I am already exhausted from lack of good sleep at altitude and winded from my lungs' constant request for more oxygen. We head off, following our Peruvian, tri-lingual guide through the valley, even though everyone else was headed up the trail.

We hike along the valley, through the scrubby brush-like grass amongst the llamas for a while. Dead Woman looms above us in one direction; over to the right, a huge craggy mountain top brushed with snow; and behind us, a huge, glacier-topped mountain that's been following us for two days already.

Suddenly, we stop short as an Andean deer, endangered/vunerable, and not seen all that often appears. She's a bit away from us, and decides not to make a run for it. Our guide, knowing I have a camera with an amazing zoom requests I get some shots. When your local guide reacts to an animal as special, chances are it is. I take it out and begin snapping. And then the buck appears. Runs to her and whispers sweet nothings coupled with a warning against humans, perhaps, because they take off together as quickly as he had arrived.

We make a sharp left and scale the side of the valley wall to reunite with the trail everyone else was on. And the worst huffing and puffing of my entire 4-day trip begins. Our group had naturally split into three during the first day and we remain this way on Day 2. There are the youngsters, those with super clean, super capacity lungs and strong legs and ligaments yet to be destroyed with the continued dawning of another year. They stay with our lead guide in the front of the pack, hiking in a neat line along the trail. Then there are the middlers, those of us in our late 30s and early 40s. Fit and able, to be sure (I mean, we WERE doing this after all), but a little worse for the wear. Lungs perhaps compromised by some early-90s college smoking and knees that'd had seen a fair bit of action over the years. And then those behind. A couple of older folks needing to be sure of footing, a couple of less-fit folks determined to enjoy their vacation instead of killing themselves, and the poor youngster with three-year-old knee surgery. It was a clear and natural split.

I find myself gasping for breath in a way that scares me. I don't have any lung issues, but as a scuba diving professional in my late 20s, I had a number of incidents where I got out of breath underwater which is the scariest thing in the entire world, because if you can't catch your breath and calm down underwater, there's a good chance you'll die. So when I get really out of breath, even on land, my brain sometimes automatically tells the rest of me that if I can't get it under control, we'll die. Some super-id part of me must know this isn't true, because my brain and I have an understanding where it listens to reason. But it takes a moment.

As I gain on the top of the pass, named because they found a mummified woman at the very top when they cleared the trail after Machu Picchu was found by the outside world in 1911, I realize I can't just keep walking. The trail isn't a trail, but a massive stone staircase. I am not just putting one foot in front of the other up a hill, I am stepping up each time onto a new stair. It's hard. Very hard. It's worse psychologically than physically.

I set a goal. Take 25 steps up and then stop and get my breath back. It takes only a few seconds to regain my breath and wonderfully (and due to some serious exercise regiments), my quads are not complaining in the least. So again, 25 more steps up. Breathe again. Good. Keep going. I catch up to another "middler" and share my methodology with him. He decides to join the 25-at-a-time club because his own 100-and-stop method was beating him down. Together, we make the summit.

It is cold. Colder than I had anticipated, especially now that I've stopped moving after so much effort for so much time. I have come to 4200m completely ill-prepared. I have no fleece, no hat or gloves (the porter carrying my sleeping bag, mat and other clothes has those things and he's long gone). I have only my rain poncho, which I don since it's sort of spitting and it offers me a bit of warmth. (I am still better off than my new Kiwi friend who is shivering in his t-shirt and board shorts.)

We wait for those behind to join us to make our group whole again, and together, we each take a capful of rum, let one drop fall to the ground to honor the Earth and drink the rest in a toast to our accomplishment, to this mountain and to the nature around us. It warms our tummies from the inside, a welcome phenomenon.

The descent begins now, our biggest yet (our first real one). Down, down, down into another valley. Steps again. Big, stone steps and with each one I wonder if my knees will survive this, as I wondered about my lungs. And I also wonder about the Incas and how they did this. And I wonder about the porters, who make quick work of what is so difficult for me so when I arrive hungry for lunch, they already have it cooked. And I look around in wonder really, of it all. For a Pantheist, there is no place more hallowed than the top of a mountain in the crook of a pass with my lungs burning or my knees aching as yet another hummingbird flutters by and yet another, different colored orchid peeks out at me.