Gene Weingarten Below the Beltway
Flight of fantasy Gene’s delusions of grandeur get Sullied
which you see that it’s all even worse than you thought. For example, I recently found myself at the
I
University of Massachusetts, speaking to an auditorium filled with intelligent, engaged, sophisticated, accomplished individuals, most of whom, I realized, were born in … 1991. Nineteen-ninety-one was the year I started taking pills to shrink my prostate. At moments like this, I long to become a real-
life romantic action hero, someone like Chesley Sullenberger III, the laconic, silver-haired, preternaturally patrician pilot who successfully landed a disabled airliner in the Hudson River last year. I was thinking about
Chesley one day not long ago while driving alone on the Beltway: how, the instant after his engines failed, he seized the stick with a masterful, karate- chop command to the co-pilot: “My. Aircraft.” Then, in a sure-handed triage of unequally bad options, speaking in sentence- fragment hiccups to save time, he made a series of split-second decisions that saved 155 people. Would he return to LaGuardia? No time. Try for Teterboro? Might make it, might not. Unacceptable risk over land. No. Bing, bang, bing. The Hudson. Going in. Brace for impact. Chesley. The Man. Lost in this reverie, I casually looked down at my dashboard. As befits the rest of my weenie life, I have a generic, late-model car in that ubiquitous cranberry color, a car filled with all the sterile, pointlessly modern digital instrumentation, including a gas gauge that is not a needle but a picket fence of bars, like the battery indicator on a cellphone. As I watched, more in fascination than horror, the gauge went from one bar to zero.
f you are like me, your life is a daily drone of pedestrian chores, banal events and assorted other reminders of your pathetic irrelevance, interrupted by the occasional, startling moment of crystalline clarity in
Officially, I had no gas. At 70 miles an hour on the
Beltway. Did I panic? I did not. To men like Chesley and me,
crisis brings only clarity and a steely sense of calm. My. Vehicle. Signal right. Ease across lanes, hug shoulder for
emergency glide-off if needed. Kill heat to conserve power. Kill radio to focus mind. Scan signage. Next exit, half mile. Inventory memory of neighborhood: likelihood of gas station, low. No. The next exit: amenities unknown but apparent
uphill gradient. No. Stay alert to subtleties of highway topology. Anticipate downslopes and shift to neutral to catch the crest, like a spacecraft using planetary gravity for a slingshot effect. Third exit: area that is
familiar to me. Nearest gas station at roughly a mile, largely downhill through residential community with speed bumps that can be adroitly negotiated with sum-zero momentum change. Proceed accordingly. Eliminate any idling. Alertly run two red lights, risking citation but not loss of life. Chesley’s adventure took
three minutes, 20 seconds. Mine was a half-minute
longer. I believe I know Chesley’s euphoria on gliding to a safe landing in the water without a single injury in what could have been a mass fatality. I believe I know it because I felt it myself, every throb and pulse, on gliding safely up to the No. 3 pump outside the Exxon Auburn Tiger Mart on Old Georgetown Road in Bethesda. After filling up, I consulted my owner’s manual and
deducted the number of gallons I had purchased (11.7) from the total capacity of my tank (13.2). It turns out that, even with its gauge showing empty, a Honda Civic still has about 60 miles of road left in its tank — a full circle of the Beltway. It was my startling moment of crystalline clarity. I
drove to the mall to complete my morning’s errand. I needed socks.
E-mail Gene at
weingarten@washpost.com. 36 The WashingTon PosT Magazine | december 12, 2010
Chat with him Tuesday at noon at
washingtonpost.com/magazine.
ILLUSTRATION BY ERIC SHANSBY
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164 |
Page 165 |
Page 166 |
Page 167 |
Page 168 |
Page 169 |
Page 170 |
Page 171 |
Page 172 |
Page 173 |
Page 174 |
Page 175 |
Page 176