Flashes of Panic

…would not be anywhere near enough on the Maine Turnpike this afternoon. Portland to Kittery flowed with all the ease of cholesterol-choked blood vessels, and there was no escaping on nearby capillaries, unless you wanted to go overland to New Hampshire and head down 93, which was probably no less congested.

Our own damn fault, of course, or probably just mine.

I’ve read, perhaps in the days when I had the time to read magazines and got Discover and PopSci, some theories from traffic engineers that suggested applying fluid dynamics science to traffic. The idea was that traffic resembles molecules in a container, and therefore echoes some of the normal rules governing pressure, volume, temperature, state, etc. So a certain volume of traffic can flow as a gas, but the addition of one or two extra cars will create a state change to liquid, and you’re crawling. Or the addition of a catalyst—someone taps the brakes, and the chain reaction stops traffic half a mile and three hundred cars back.

When I was voting in Maine, I voted at least once for the widened turnpike (which, by the end of this summer, is supposed to be, finally, three lanes each way as far north as Portland.) As a native in exile, I’ve suffered through the traffic and reveled in the ease by which I can move closer to home on the widened parts. It’s easy to understand the opposition; many in the state saw the two-lane road as a deterrent, and the three-lane road as a tailpipe spitting the human exhaust(ed) of Boston out wherever it ends (formerly between York and Wells, but now just South of Portland, where 295 forks off.)

Maybe they’re right. And maybe I’m part of that pollution now that I’m coming up in Yet Another Car with plates bearing neither lobster nor chickadee. (The chickadee, by the way, gets big thumbs up over the boiled crawdad featured on the so-called “lobster” plates. I still have the crawdad plates worn by my first two cars, and the Keystone State tag from my years there. Speaking of plates, in Pennsylvania I missed both the “You’ve got a friend in…” silliness, which might have forced me to buy a sticker bearing the words, “Not You,” and the later state website URL, which apparently was directing you to where you could file a complaint…)

Still, no matter the state on my license, it’s still home.

I won’t go in to the detailed reasons why I’m typing this from a Starbucks in North Chelmsford… we’ll just call it traffic frustration reaching critical mass, and leave it at that.