A Mistake I Did Not Make

I almost made a big mistake this week. My shadow side and ego were definitely showing up.

I had work at 11:00 am Tuesday morning. Normally, I leave my house about an hour early, which gives me plenty of time to make it to town, since the drive generally takes only half an hour. Tuesday was not a normal day, though. The first part of my drive is straight down the freeway to the town where my kids went to school; that usually takes ten to fifteen minutes. But Tuesday? It took two hours.

Two hours!

Not surprisingly, I did not make it to work for my 11:00 am appointment. I did not make it to work until nearly 1:00 pm.

Because sometime in the dark of night, a semi-truck jackknifed and turned over, spilling some of its cargo onto the freeway. Lots of semi-trucks move up and down our freeway, and there are areas with surprising curves. Speeding trucks sometimes misjudge these sections; sleepy drivers cause problems, too. It’s not unusual for the freeway to shut down for a time so the authorities can clean up a spill.

Except the spill this week was unusual. It was pigs—hundreds of pigs.

Some of the pigs escaped and had to be rounded up. Others were trapped in the truck’s trailer and had to be rescued. By 7:00 am, the local news reported that “a handful of pigs were let out of the trailer.” By 8:00 am, crews were trying to load the pigs onto another trailer that had arrived to take them away. Not surprisingly, this was not easy, since the pigs were apparently not eager to be transferred anywhere else. Animal Services was at the scene, and “one of its vehicles had at least five of the pigs that ran loose onboard.”

All of this happened while I was still sleeping, and then merrily going about my normal morning routine without a care in the world. Eventually, I had notice that something might affect my drive time, when a friend texted me that she’d heard the freeway was backed up. I was about to take Biscuit for a walk, but thought better of it, and hopped in the car and was on my way. I made it to the freeway onramp and saw that traffic was basically stopped, so I very cleverly got onto the frontage road and zipped along, spying the stopped cars on the freeway and feeling rather pleased with myself. Until the frontage road also stopped.

And that was the beginning of my disastrous morning commute. It was a painfully slow process, moving up a car length or two for close to two hours.

You’ve probably heard of Waze, a traffic app that guides motorists onto side streets and backroads, all in the name of saving time. It’s been helpful to me, especially in areas where I’m not familiar with the roads: think the Bay Area or Los Angeles. I know the roads around here, mostly, but turned it on just to see if it had any brilliant advice.

And actually, it did! There was a smaller road I could access that would allow me to save a significant amount of time on the drive. I finally got close to it and was overjoyed! But then I realized there was a problem. The smaller road was a few feet behind cones and a highway patrol vehicle. The CHP blocked off access to the convenient time-saving road, because if you passed it, you’d be right back on the freeway, which was shut because of the pigs. But couldn’t I sneak over, ask the officer to please scoot the cones over just enough for me to head to the time-saving side street? I was a local, after all, and had to get to work.

I did not do this, and I am glad, though I’m also a little embarrassed that I thought about it at all. It’s funny how ego shows up. Because what I was thinking was that I was special. My needs and my job were more important than the needs of the hundreds of cars inching along with me. Probably hundreds of other drivers on the road had the Waze app and were told that they also could save time and avoid traffic if they could somehow make their way onto the convenient side road. But none of them were trying to do it. They weren’t thinking that they were entitled and deserved special treatment. I was, though. I was.

So I sighed and sulked a little and resigned myself to staying in the line of extremely slow-moving cars that was crawling along the back road. I told myself to sit, relax, listen to my book. Which is what I did for the hour it took to go a few miles to where the freeway was open again. I also talked to a friend for a few minutes on the phone, a lovely chance to catch up. All in all, it was fine. I was fine. There was no crisis. All there was was slowing down.

I eventually made it to work. The freeway reopened a few hours later. The pigs were corralled and transported to their destination. I feel sad for the pigs, though; how frightening it must have been for them to be in an accident like that. Also, how terrible that they probably had a sense that they were not heading anywhere fun; pigs are smart, you know. I was a vegetarian for a short time in college and have dabbled with a primarily plant-based diet over the years. Stories like this make me think about trying it again.

I hope that maybe one of the pigs escaped, that the authorities got tired of trying to track it down, that it evaded capture and somehow made its way to a house in the woods, not far from the freeway, where it was received by a kind family who took it in as a pet. Maybe that could have happened. What I know for sure, though, is that my ego is very much alive, that I can tend toward selfishness, and that sitting in my car for hours on my way to work the other morning was actually a strange kind of gift. There was a lesson for me there; somehow, it turned out to be a very good use of my time.