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Sentence CommutedNovember 11, 2005 I'm looking after two barns at the moment, not including the one Allie lives at, so I'm spending more time on the road than usual. The live-in gig started Wednesday afternoon and runs through Sunday evening; the drive-by started this morning and runs through Monday evening. Result was that I was on the road at 7 a.m., having fed three horses and two dogs, and since 8:45 I've been here at the computer, having fed three more horses, mucked two stalls and two paddocks, and tied out two more dogs (who barked so incessantly that I finally shut them back in the house). I'm generally well up by 7 but I'm very rarely out -- Rhodry Malamutt is not a morning dog, at least not an early-morning dog. When he wants out, we go out, but that's rarely before 9 a.m. and on overcast or rainy days it isn't much before 11. The morning light really is glorious this time of year, at the same time delicate and extravagantly rich. At 7 a.m. there were very few vehicles on the road, partly because I went the long way around: right on Barnes at the blinker, right on the Edgartown-West Tisbury Road past the airport, up Old County before the reduce-speed sign was blinking at the West Tisbury School -- there wasn't a single vehicle in the school parking lot -- to State Road and shortly a left turn down the dirt road to job #2. I came back via the short route, the one that skirts Vineyard Haven center; that and the later hour probably explain why the SUV behind me took it personal when I signaled a left turn onto the road that I live off. Beeeeep! it screeched, passed too close on my right and peeled off down the road. My longest commute was about an hour each way: I lived in D.C.'s Mount Pleasant neighborhood, on the backside of the National Zoo, and worked in Alexandria, Virginia, for a little more than two years. Three or four days a week, I biked it; when the weather was bad or I didn't feel like it, it was bus -> subway -> bus. Either way it took about an hour. The biking was good, especially on the way home. I liked that job, but my supervisor's supervisor was a conspicuous asshole and I was just learning how common these animals are in big businesses and organizations (a big reason why that was my last corporate-type job, and why for the last 20 years I've lived on Martha's Vineyard, where there's no such thing). You could tell how pissed off I was at the end of the day by how fast I made it home. My record was just over 45 minutes, which included the hair-raising rotaries at Memorial Bridge and the last mile from the Rock Creek Park bikepath, which was pretty much straight uphill. The ride discharged most of the day's accumulated adrenaline, which meant (a) that I could be reasonably civil to my housemates, and (b) that I didn't stroke out in my mid-thirties. Can't think of much else good to say about commuting, though. Since then I've generally managed to live within about 15 minutes of wherever I worked; for the last 6 1/2 years I've worked at home -- clear evidence of my extremism on the subject. If more evidence is needed, well, I live on Martha's Vineyard, where you can't drive 20 miles in a straight line without plowing into the ocean, and after you've been here a while you start thinking that 10 miles is a very long drive. I know people who have two-hour commutes, 80-mile commutes -- each way. I think they're nuts. Sure, those long-distance commuters can read or listen to books on tape; if they're lucky, they get to commute with brilliant thinkers and conversationalists. As a chronic pedestrian and bicyclist in Washington, D.C., I wended my way through countless traffic jams, though, and most people weren't doing anything more creative than filing their nails, flipping through the newspaper spread out on the empty passenger's seat, or just staring out the window. Come to think of it, it's not the long drives that bother me; it's the speed-ups, the slow-downs, the being stuck in traffic. The going-nowhere, the being enclosed in a little steel box that is neither here nor there. Sounds like purgatory to me, no matter how you dress it up with cell phones and four-speaker stereo systems and a fully stocked bar in the back.
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