I was cruising along Interstate 10 through Louisiana, headed home after spending a few days helping move our mom to a new place.

Tired but happy we’d accomplished so much, I didn’t think much when I came up on stopped traffic a few miles short of the Texas border.

Traffic on I-10 is always heavy, plus there was ongoing road construction. I wasn’t too worried. I had just finished lunch and was listening to my brother’s podcast. Probably they were moving trucks from one side of the interstate to the other, I thought.

After about 20 minutes of not moving, I checked online to see what was happening.

Google Maps showed an accident ahead. Not a big deal, I thought. Make sure everyone’s okay, clear the wreck off the road, and we’d be on our way.

I turned off the car and picked up a paperback book I keep in the car for emergencies.

An hour later, we were still stopped.

I tossed the book in the back seat and walked around the car to stretch my legs. I propped open my door, opened an audiobook and listened to that for a while.

Then I checked my phone for traffic updates but didn’t find anything new. Frustrated, I chunked the phone in the passenger seat, feeling my anger building.

Two hours later, we were still stopped. A man walked past on the shoulder of the road and I asked if he knew anything.

He’d heard two 18-wheelers had collided, and they were having trouble clearing the road because other cars were involved.

He also said the backup was 13 miles long.

My heart sank. We were trapped. There were concrete barriers on both sides of the interstate and no nearby exit.

Traffic is often frustrating. Besides traffic jams, there’s a variety of scenarios on the road where you want to take a baseball bat and bash in someone else’s taillights.

Like when you’re stuck in traffic next to someone blaring their sound system so loud, your teeth rattle.

Then there’s the person who tailgates your vehicle, believing they can bully you into moving faster.

It’s extra frustrating, as a friend posted to my Facebook page, when you’re stopped in traffic and when things start to move, there doesn’t seem to be any reason for why everything came to a complete halt.

Or when people finally get to the reason the traffic is stopped, they rubberneck, adding even more slowdowns.

At one point, the traffic started to move, but we went 10 feet and then came to a full stop again. It was like the traffic gods were dangling a candy bar in front of us and then yanked it away.

Frustrated doesn’t come close to describing how I felt at that point.

I was looking at the cars racing along on the opposite side of the road, seething inside because every one of them knew why we were stopped but they couldn’t tell us.

When people started moving – three and a half hours later – nobody touched their brakes until Beaumont where, oh happy day, there was another wreck that blocked all but one lane of traffic.

People zoomed past that wreck and the police cars without a backward glance.

I made it home as the sun was setting, 10 hours after starting what is normally a six-hour trip.

Then I found out my sister caught an early afternoon flight in Baton Rouge and was back home in Virginia before I’d made it to Houston.

Patience is a virtue, my mom keeps saying. All I know is the next time I drive to Baton Rouge, I’ll take my chances on the back roads.

 

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.