For Wilshire Baptist Church
We didn’t have any damage from the brief but violent storm on Sunday afternoon, but we certainly felt its fury and have witnessed the aftermath. The wind shook the house enough that we opened the door to the under-stair closet in case we needed to jump in. And in less than an hour we had two inches of water in the rain gauge and 50 gallons in the new rain barrel that we set up the day before.
But we know that tens of thousands of people didn’t fare so well with power out, trees split and serious damage to their homes. And, of course, there is the tragedy of the crane collapse near downtown. Our biggest inconvenience – if it was even that – was the time and patience it took to get on with our business.
Monday afternoon, LeAnn and I drove separately from downtown Garland to a meeting at Greenville and Royal, and then I went on from there to another meeting near the Lakewood Theater. Both drives and the drive home left me mentally frazzled, because at intersection after intersection, the traffic lights were not working. And that meant a slow stop-and-go crawl to every intersection and the mind-numbing game of “Who Goes Next?”
Some people know how to play that game, but many do not. It’s actually no different from what you do at any four-way stop in a residential neighborhood: you wait for whoever arrived before you to take their turn and then you go. But at behemoths like Greenville and Royal, Abrams and Northwest Highway, Garland and Buckner – where there are three to four lanes in each direction and turn lanes on top of that – it becomes a battle of wills that is not helped by heavy doses of testosterone and jacked-up pick-up trucks.
The chance for a safe crossing is greatest when a whole side of the intersection moves together. If one person jumps out ahead, it throws off the rhythm and that leads to confusion about whose turn it really was. The next thing you know, you have vehicles blocking each other in the middle of the intersection. And in some cases, as I saw several times yesterday, there are actual collisions.
Like I said, it works best when folks in the two or three lanes parallel to each other move together as a team. That doesn’t require telepathy or even looking at each other and nodding that it’s time to go; it just requires each side being patient and taking their turn. And to know when it’s your turn, you have to be engaged. You can’t be in a hurry, you can’t be distracted on your phone, you can’t be thinking only about yourself and whatever all-important meeting you need to get to. You have to be mindful that everyone in that intersection has the same goal: to reach their destination safely.
And you have to be ready to do it again and again. Yesterday I had to do that in every intersection I came to – dozens of them. The relief of every successful crossing was brief because there was a new intersection to cross just a few blocks away.
By the time this gets posted many of the traffic lights will be fixed and so this ramble of mine may be obsolete. Or will it? There’s a lot to be learned in the chaos at the four-way stop.