Is it weird that I think of mortality — transience and permanence — whenever I drive my car on the New Jersey Turnpike? You do get the sensation of taking your life into your hands, flying off the Goethals Bridge from Staten Island and through the toll plaza, your hands gripping the wheel as you pilot south past the industrial parks and “executive” hotels of Edison and Amboy.
A few years ago, on the road to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia with my two young kids in the back of our Honda, only a minute or two after we’d passed through the Elizabeth Toll Plaza, an 18-wheeler moving at 70 miles per hour ran us off the Jersey Turnpike. We were driving in the slow lane, and he didn’t see us: The 18-wheeler pushed over from the center lane, right on top of us, and it was only because I somehow managed to calmly glide over onto the shoulder of the road — still going 65 myself — that we weren’t killed in a fiery wreck. I slid the car over, avoiding the speeding hulk of the Mack Truck, and smoothly braked to let him move past. No one skidded or was maimed. The silver lining of that hair-raising few seconds was that my kids still believe sincerely that I am a champion car driver; a veritable Danica Patrick. Let them continue to think so. I lecture them frequently about safe driving practices. (South Fork traffic over Memorial Day weekend offered ample opportunity to point out bad drivers who don’t understand the logic of maintaining a decent following distance.)
On Friday, I again was piloting my two kids in our Honda CR-V down the Jersey Turnpike — this time, we were en route to my niece’s graduation from boarding school in Maryland, on the balmiest, blue-sky-est of weekends — when an ear-splitting emergency tone blared out from all of our many GPS-equipped electric devices at once (three iPhones, one laptop, and the digital screen on the dashboard): A sound like “bee-dook! bee-dook!” came screaming out, followed by the message that a severe thunderstorm capable of producing a tornado was .2 miles from our location, and we were urgently to seek shelter in a basement or, if traveling in an automobile, to turn off the road and find shelter from flying debris.
We joined a stream of cars exiting the turnpike at Bellmawr as the sky turned black and the rain began to fall. A half-dozen fellow travelers parked in the half-empty lot of a Red Roof Inn as the thunder crashed and the lightning flashed, and the kids, semiscared out of their wits, asked if the car was about to be lifted away by the twister. We didn’t see a twister, which was both a relief and a disappointment.
All things age and decay. Even the Joyce Kilmer Service Area near exit 8A, where you can buy Burger King Whoppers from under a heat lamp at a cafeteria-style self-serve. The children — my own two plus my nephew, Ellis, who is 12 and rode home with us from Delaware on Sunday — judged the Joyce Kilmer rest stop to be “skeezy.” The Joyce Kilmer Service Area is a way station with stained acoustic tiles in the ceiling, 1980s-look yellowing-beige ceramic tiles on the floor, and a smell of urine and fries. A thousand people were in various states of milling, rushing, jostling, and complaining in the Joyce Kilmer Service Area along with us — hungry, thirsty, and punchy to the point of giddy giggling — after having (all of us) spent two hours of our beautiful Sunday afternoon in a stand-still traffic jam. A box truck carrying Sealy Posturepedic Mattresses on the outer lanes northbound had smashed through the guardrail and collided with a Jeep and then a blue sedan traveling in the inner lanes, stopping the flow traffic all the way to exit 7A, a distance of six miles that we covered at a rate of three miles an hour.
We became familiar with the cars alongside us during the traffic jam. The kids rolled down the windows and stuck out their stocking feet, daring other motorists to smell them. I rolled down my window to ask another driver if she had any snacks. She looked like someone who would carry Chex Mix in plastic baggies, but she said she didn’t have anything. We had a moment of excitement when a young man in a champagne Corolla opened his driver’s-side door to angrily confront another young man, in an electric-blue Civic, who had tried to escape the jam by driving along the shoulder.
After the box truck, the blue sedan, and the Jeep had been cleared from the accident site — and all that was left was a large pool of sawdust where the Robbinsville and Hightstown fire departments had covered a slick of spilled motor oil — we still had four hours to go before home.
My daughter looked on a website called conversationstartersworld.com for interesting questions we could ask one another: “If you could change one thing about your childhood, what would it be?” she asked, and, “What is the closest thing in real life to magic?” and “Would you rather have the body of an 80-year-old with the mind of a 30-year-old, or the body of a 30-year-old and the mind of an 80-year old?” I, the only person in the car old enough to have any fear of brain diminishment, shouted, “Mind, obviously! Mind!” The kids shouted, “Body! Body!”
Other than a vivid stain on the upholstery of the leased Honda CR-V from a spilled blue-raspberry Freezy (a Delaware version of a Slush Puppy) no harm befell us on the Jersey Turnpike. Some grow old waiting for traffic to clear, and some are born anew on the Jersey Turnpike. We spent an hour trying to come up with names for Ellis’s new puppy, which is coming home on June 9, but we couldn’t agree. The puppy has a silver-gray fur, Ellis said, with a body like a Labrador retriever only leaner. We thought of gray names, icy names, foggy nautical names.
“Ash,” suggested Ellis. “Smog.”
“Ashtray,” suggested Nettie.
The rest stops on the New Jersey Turnpike are named for writers and great men: Walt Whitman, Joyce Kilmer (who wrote the immortal “Trees,” which we are not supposed to laugh about), James Fenimore Cooper, Vince Lombardi. I am sure Walt Whitman would have appreciated the motley flow of humanity that passes daily through the Walt Whitman Service Area Plaza near Mount Laurel — “Cross from shore to shore, countless crowds of passengers!” — though I’m fairly certain he would not have liked the globalized homogeneity of the snack items available for purchase in the bus stops or, other than its thrill-ride aspect, the turnpike’s average rate of speed. The poet prefers the walking pace.