Mile Marker 52.0

somehow, i managed

P’s been gone for almost three weeks, the longest we’ve ever been apart, and I’m driving to see him on Sunday, four days later than I was supposed to. I tried to go Wednesday. I had the best plans: leave at 6AM to beat the traffic, make it to Charlottesville to stay with my friends A and K, and then continue on to Penland School of Craft, where he’s halfway through a six-week jewelry-making/metalworking residency. I left at 6, got through the city almost without incident, except I can’t see very well in the dark, so it was hard for me to gauge distances of cars behind me, and it was still dark at 6:20AM, so someone almost ran into me coming off of the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan. They honked a lot and got really mad, and I thought, wow, I really don’t like driving, this is scarier than I remember. Then it got light, and I could see better, and the moment that I turned my headlights off, the car started making a weird noise, and I realized I’d probably gotten a flat. I pulled across four lanes and onto the shoulder, got out of the car and saw that the front left tire was flat. I called P and said I was sorry to wake him, but I’d gotten a flat and didn’t know what to do. He said to call Triple A, stay in the car, lock the doors, and put my seatbelt on. I asked why I should put my seatbelt on. He said, in case something happened. 

It hadn’t occurred to me that something could happen. I put in a service request through Triple A’s website and locked the doors and put my seatbelt on. I was thirsty but scared to move and get water from the back. Triple A said it would be eighty-five minutes, which seemed like a long time, and after sixty minutes they called and said, we can’t go on the turnpike, are you on the turnpike? You have to call the Turnpike Authority. So I called the Turnpike Authority, whose pre-recorded message said the offices didn’t open until 9am (it was 8:15), but I just stayed on the line and eventually pressed the number for “report a disabled vehicle” and a very nice dispatcher said that she’d send a tow truck and that I should stay in the car with the doors locked and my seatbelt on. 

I hadn’t thought to be scared of getting hit while on the shoulder, but now I spent another hour sitting there, being scared of getting hit while on the shoulder. The cars were going by at eighty miles an hour, and every time a car went by the whole road shook. I kept turning around to make sure that a truck wasn’t going to crash into me, which it wasn’t, because I was on the cars-only part of the turnpike. 

I had a deadline. I’d done the interview already, so I just pulled out my laptop and drafted a magazine story. I was pretty tense. Boo was being great, just sitting there patiently. After a while, M called me to tell me a funny story and the minute she called a tow truck pulled up, so we said our usual joke — blessed day — and said how of course her call had materialized the tow truck, and then I got towed to a Mr. Tire in Burlington, New Jersey. 

The very nice guy working there said they’d fix it or replace it and that they probably had the tire in stock. Then he said they had to replace it and that they did have the tire in stock. Then he said they didn’t have the tire in stock, but that he’d drive to a nearby Mr. Tire to get one. I looked over the story I had drafted on the side of the turnpike and made a couple changes for clarity and then figured it was pretty good so I sent it to my editor. Then I texted a friend, A, to ask for advice about applying to a job. She called, and while we talked I walked Boo along a stretch of grass and absorbed my friend’s very good recommendations. I felt pretty calm and good. I texted my friends in Charlottesville and told them I’d be arriving later than I’d anticipated. I had a really important 2PM video meeting for an awards program for an architecture firm. I felt really committed to going to this meeting because the person who had invited me to do the awards program had really suddenly died maybe the week after he had set the awards program up. It was an incredibly tragic situation, and I think we all felt like we should show up. So I was worried about that. 

P and I were simultaneously trying to figure out where to stay once I got there, because our plans to have me stay with him were falling apart. So while I was filing the magazine story, taking care of Boo, walking around, I was also switching between HotelTonight and hotels.com and booking.com and airbnb.com and vrbo.com and GooglH hotels. We kept finding places but then realizing they were booked or didn’t accept pets, and prices seemed to go up every ten minutes. Still, we were committed to seeing each other.  

I realized after a while that it was 12:30PM and that I wouldn’t make it to Charlottesville before dark, so I called P and then said I was pretty stressed out. He hadn’t realized I was still in New Jersey. By this point I’d been “on the road” for six-and-a-half hours and gotten maybe forty-five miles south of New York City. “Oh, turn around babe,” he said. I felt really bad, but we agreed that it was becoming a clusterfuck. We also, despite our heroic efforts, hadn’t been able to find a place to stay besides like, a Holiday Inn Express at the Asheville airport for $409 a night. Apparently it’s “leaf season” in North Carolina. We sort of read the room and decided that I would go back to the city. We could try next week. 

I dialed into a recovery meeting while driving then stopped at Grover Cleveland Service Area, where I got Popeye’s and my first Frappuccino in six years. I asked for a tall but got a venti. It wasn’t as good as I’d remembered, so I didn’t finish it. I kept driving and then drove through Manhattan, which was stressful again — I kept worrying I was going to run someone over — and back home to our street. I found a really good parking spot that was really tiny and did a sixty-seven point parallel parking turn, but I got in finally. While I was parking, Boo was yelping and a lot of cars were honking and some local residents kept staring at my pretty bad attempts to park.

I walked in the door with all the bags I’d packed for the trip, which were really heavy. Boo’s very unwieldy crate was still in the car. I just wanted to lie down, but I decided if I didn’t go get the crate then, I would never do it, so I left Boo in the loft and went outside and got the crate. It was really heavy. I almost dropped it once. Then my glasses fell off my face because they couldn’t stay on with my slippery face mask. So I put the crate down on the ground and pushed my glasses back up and then realized it was going to be very hard to pick up the crate. Somehow, I managed. 

I got everything upstairs and into the door and then I just started crying. Boo saw what was happening and jumped up and licked my face. I tried to explain to her that I was just really tired. Then I cried for a few more hours, sort of intermittently, and took her to the track, because she had a lot of energy to get out. I cried while we were at the track too, because I can’t see very well in the dark. Then my friend C came over, and we ate candy and laughed, and I ate Indian food that I had ordered.

I called P and said that I didn’t think I could drive down at all after all this, and he was disappointed but he understood. I texted J and M about it and they both supported me not doing a thing that just felt too hard. The, and C also all pointed out that what I had experienced — being trapped in a car on the turnpike for two hours — was a big deal. When they said that, I cried again, because it felt right, but I had thought I was just being a baby. Then I slept on it and woke up and realized that I can do the drive a different way than I had planned and do it in the light. I won’t be able to see my friends A and K, which sucks, but I’ll see them another time. I’m glad that sometimes a thing feels impossible until I sleep on it and then realize that I can do it. P and I also found a hotel that’s really close to where he is, and another one that’s really fun that maybe I'll get to write about. It all came together really easily. 

A lot of friends were really nice to me yesterday, and it reminded me of how lucky I am to live the way I do. The hardest things that happen to me now are things like this, getting stuck on a turnpike while I’m on my way to visit a person I love, or having a renovation problem, or being scared of maybe getting pregnant. The whole day I was alone but I didn’t ever feel alone because of P, and M, and J, and C, and A, and A, and of course Boo. It wasn’t always like this. I wasn’t always like this. 

Mile Marker 52.0 is at Mile Marker 52.0 on the New Jersey Turnpike (I-95)