Identifying With the Turtles

The weather was so warm that I decided to walk home from work instead of taking the bus. It's about a three mile walk and I really enjoyed it - the damp evening smells, the woods on my right and the houses lit up in the dusk - until the last block. They're doing construction and there are chain-link fences barricading off the whole block. I figured I would just walk on the curb between the fence and the street, because I didn't feel like waiting for the light to turn so I could cross and walk up the opposite side of the street.

After I'd gone about thirty paces, the fence suddenly pushed out all the way to the edge of the curb, and there was no place for me to walk at all. Just the street, three lanes of rush-hour traffic barreling past at high speed. I flattened myself back against the fence, figuring I'd wait till there was a gap in traffic and there was room for me to walk. After a long time there was a gap, and I scurried forward to cover as much ground as I could. I only had about ten seconds before cars started rushing past me again, and again I flattened myself against the fence.

It was nearly dark now so the cars couldn't see me, or if they did they made no effort to swerve around me. They were hurtling past literally inches from my face, and some of them were SUVs and other big vehicles. I was sure I would be hit. I felt pinioned against the fence (I know the word is pinned, but I had an image of myself spreadeagled to be as flat as possible, so pinioned sounds better). Again a brief respite, and a scuttle, but I hardly covered any ground at all before the traffic started up again. I was stuck about halfway along the block, too far to go back. If there had been a long gap in both directions I could have just run across the whole street, but it never came. I was desperate enough that I thought of climbing over the fence, or getting under it, but it was really high, came all the way down to the ground, and was sunk in cement holders every few feet, so I couldn't.

I thought about all the millions of animals killed on highways every year in the U.S. Some organizations try to build culverts under the road and direct animals like turtles into them by erecting guidewalls along the sides of roads (they only have to be a few inches high for turtles), and channeling them toward the underpass which is the only safe place to cross. These innovations save many animals' lives. I felt like a turtle, too dumb to read signs, unable to see far enough to understand where to cross - just blindly forging ahead on a disastrous path. Where was my culvert? I thought of how my obituary might read: "Throughout her life, she enjoyed challenging the status quo. Tragically, her failure to yield to authority by heeding the signs that directed her to use the opposite side of the street resulted in her downfall one January evening."

My big fear as I hovered there was that a bus would come along. I was right in the lane it would use, and I know those big suckers take up the whole lane. It was just good luck that during the time it took me to travel the block, no buses went past. Finally, about twelve traffic-light cycles later, I made it to the end of the block, and the crosswalk. Whew!