Muttering faces, shaking heads, car windows fogged by stale breath. Young men with defeated looks, young women in need of a bathroom. These were the images of frustration -- with a capital F -- that necklaced Interstate 95 yesterday, inside cars and trucks either frozen on the concrete ribbon or inching forward like a long, metallic glacier.
There were lonely drivers in BMWs chatting endlessly on cell phones as if they were dictating their wills. There were soccer moms in SUVs juggling street maps and throwing murderous glares at their impatient children.
There were drivers who had parked on the side of the highway because their cars had broken down. And there were those who pulled over because their bodies had broken down.
"We've been here for three hours," Anthony Lucas, 32, said, rubbing his sleep-deprived eyes in his gray Buick, parked on the side of southbound I-95. "I was just getting some sleep."
His wife, Tiffany, sat next to him. Their three kids -- ages 4, 6, 14 -- were in the back. They left their home in Brooklyn late Tuesday night, and by now they should have been in North Carolina, where 50 relatives were waiting for them to celebrate Thanksgiving.
Instead, it's 8:30 a.m., and they are sitting on the edge of I-95 south, sleeping and probably dreaming of better places. Ahead of them is the charred, gray carcass of the tanker truck that disrupted their Thanksgiving. Authorities had to partly close lanes on a stretch of the interstate just north of I-495 for eight hours after the truck caught fire.
It could have been worse. The truck driver's fast action in getting the vehicle off the road, the pre-rush hour time of the fire, and the swift repaving of the road made the snarls less frustrating than they might have been.
But while the lanes were closed, cars were filled with muttering faces and shaking heads.
The people inside all seemed to be saying, "Could there be a secret way off the highway? Could we all become Harry Potter, pop through that wall on that bridge, and hop onto the Hogwarts Express to work or to see our families for Thanksgiving?"
Some drivers tried the next best thing. They stopped Russell Lowery, a truck driver for SuperFresh food, whose truck had broken down while idling, near where Powder Mill Road passes over I-95.
A truck driver, they thought, surely must know the way out.
"Everyone is asking me how to get where they're going," said Lowery, a thin-bearded man who seemed bewildered by all the requests. "I don't even know my own escape route. Everywhere you go, it's going to be jammed."
