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Staying in a 'Dead-End Job' – That Can Be Reached by Bike As the deejay on 103.7 FM rushed to catalogue the morning's traffic woes, Jay Fields took another sip of coffee. He pried open a toasted cinnamon raisin bagel plied thick with cream cheese and calmly perused the morning newspaper. He took a minute to chat with Sid Drazin, who owns the Comet deli near his condo in Adams-Morgan. At 8 a.m., he checked his watch, zipped his blue parka, buckled his red Bell bike helmet and backed his black and silver Specialized Hardrock bike out the door into the icy streets of Washington. The streets were a sloppy mess, blockaded here and there with mountains of snow, but his ride to work was no less exhilarating for it. Still, the chance to make a quick zip down 19th Street NW – while others sit and fume in traffic – comes with a price. In a city where people often define their worth by what they do, Fields is staying in a $67,000-a-year GS-13 job that, though it isn't bad, is far less than his dream. His personal vision statement: "Technological visionary." His current job description: "High-tech janitor. Others make messes. I clean them up." Why? He says he can't tolerate the commute. As the high-tech industry has exploded, Fields, 46, has turned down higher-paying jobs in Reston, Bethesda, Arlington, Tysons Corner and San Francisco. Fields is one of a growing number of urbanites who have been burned out by the daily grind of to and fro. He chose to drop out of the rat race, forsaking personal ambition, and the slog of a commute it often requires, for a life. "Intellectually, it's a dead-end job. Intuitively, something is making me stick to it," Fields said, hauling the front tires of his mountain bike over a mound of ice at Dupont Circle. "The white space in my life is important now. Because of the damage stress has done, I had to get to the point where there was silence in my life." For seven long years, there was no silence. And any spare time was spent stuck in a car, heading north at a crawl on Interstate 270 to Gaithersburg. He and his wife bought a house in the 'burbs because it was affordable and they liked the pastoral feel. But their lives soon became circumscribed by a commute that on many days ate four hours. "It was hell. You know the story of the guy who pushes a rock up a hill for all eternity only to have it fall back down? That's what it felt like." The former marathoner put on weight. He couldn't sleep. He became depressed. And his marriage strained as each stayed later and later to avoid traffic. For some, a particularly bad day in traffic is all it takes to break. For Fields, it came on a business trip to Korea. He stayed at a hotel and walked five minutes to work. All of a sudden, he had time. "I realized I'd had more fun in three weeks in Korea than I'd had in years." His marriage ended. He moved to Adams-Morgan. Bought a bike and a one-room condo near the zoo. Now the time he once spent in traffic is consumed by visits to the Corcoran, a stop at Franklyn's for a bowl of chili. It's spent at lectures, in meditating and feeding the homeless at his church. Minutes after his morning coffee yesterday, Fields veered his bike into the State Department office complex at Columbia Plaza. Yes, he says, his job means "stagnation" and "continual frustration," but "I've got a life to look forward to now. I'm not going to get home, eat dinner and just go to bed. There's space there now that I can be creative with." Hopping Among Metrobuses and Sitting in Traffic He calls it bus hopping, and it gives Grayling Reaves the illusion of action, of progress, of doing something at a moment when everyone and everything around him has come to a dead stop. Reaves, 36, sat in an idling K-12 Metrobus in Southeast, his eyes shifting between his silver Jovial wristwatch and this view out the bus windshield: Pennsylvania Avenue, clogged with cars, trucks and a conga line of Metrobuses coughing black smoke that clouded the red taillights. Maybe, he thought, he could walk ahead and hop aboard another K-12 that was on the front end of the line, putting him a bit closer to his goal. But maybe it made more sense to stay and ride it out, hoping for a break in the congestion. "It's like playing chess," Reaves said, eyes darting from watch to window and back again. "You gotta feel how the traffic is moving, and you gotta be patient. If you act too fast, you might find yourself in a worse situation." The buses that travel from Prince George's County along Pennsylvania Avenue into the District follow the worst routes in the Metrobus system. On these lines, traffic is so unpredictable that officials have abandoned hope of adhering to schedules. These are the routes where traffic can get so bad that buses arrive an hour late at a bus stop. Folks either give up and go home or, sometimes, they walk on the side of the highway and hoof it into the District. Reaves rides this route every day from Suitland to his job at the National Gallery of Art. He lives 5.9 miles from work, but the trip can take an hour and a half. He has no car; he has no choice. In the end, living relatively close to work, as Reaves does, and leaving the driving to others, as he does, gains him little, because buses on his route become frozen in a sea of cars, trucks and SUVs coming from the far-out suburbs. Last year, he was late so often he was docked 40 hours' pay, a whole work week. "I used to run as soon as I got off the bus, trying to get in faster," Reaves had said on an earlier morning. "But I don't anymore. I'm used to it. It becomes routine now. And then you say, "God, some things you don't have control of. What is a man to do?'‚" Inside the K-12, no one was speaking. The only sound was the high-pitch screech of the brakes, which was constant as the bus rolled a few feet and stopped, rolled and stopped. Several men and women were rocked to sleep by the subtle swaying, their eyes shut, mouths open. Suddenly, a woman got up and out of the bus. She walked briskly along the road, past the unmoving cars and trucks, and boarded another bus farther up the hill. But Reaves stayed put, until he spotted a 36 bus two lengths ahead. The 36 is his transfer bus. Usually he catches it at a major bus stop at Minnesota Avenue. But this 36 was just ahead, and if he hopped out now, while the traffic was stopped, he'd save himself a wait at the bus stop. In a flash, Reaves was out of the K-12, running ahead to catch the 36. He flashed a paper transfer to the second driver and settled into a seat. His dash helped to ensure he would be only five minutes late. "This is a gift," Reaves said, letting out a small laugh. "This bus was a gift." A Trooper's Morning: A Crash, a Shooting and Irate Motorists Donning his Virginia State Police trooper's hat, Ed Cochrane pushed the speedometer to 110 miles per hour. Seconds earlier, the state police radio had squawked about a possible fatal accident on eastbound Interstate 66, the dispatcher saying the cause might have been a "10-71." "What?" Cochrane had said, quickly checking a list of radio codes behind the car's sun visor. "Oh. That's a shooting. That's very rare." Cochrane was speeding toward a serious, unusual accident and away from a mundane one he said typifies rush hours: a three-car chain-reaction crash sparked when a truck came to nearly a dead stop in the middle of the Capital Beltway's outer loop.
The first two cars were able to brake in time, but a third plowed into them, causing thousands of dollars in damage. After rescue crews blocked a lane, traffic backed up as passing motorists slowed to gape. "We figured that getting into an accident was just inevitable at some point," said Cara Jordan, 24, of Vienna, who was riding to work with her husband, Jeff, when they were struck from behind. "It's one of those things you just accept about life in this city. There is nothing like D.C. traffic. It's kind of scary, but what's really scary is that I had a dream that we got into an accident last night." The Beltway accident was cleared within an hour and had but a minor effect on the morning commute. But now Cochrane was racing to something of far greater magnitude, the I-66 shooting, which would disrupt the commute of thousands. As Cochrane drove west on I-66 and approached the scene, eastbound traffic was thinning to almost nothing. The cause: emergency vehicles blocking the eastbound lanes, surrounding the pickup truck of a lone driver who authorities believe tried to kill himself in the middle of the morning commute. "You know traffic isn't moving on the other side of all that," Cochrane said, nodding toward the police cars, firetrucks and a helicopter, which had landed to evacuate the critically wounded driver, "and it probably won't move for a while." Cochrane pulled to a stop and got out. A police sergeant told him to create a breach in the dammed traffic by using his cruiser and orange cones to form a single lane around the accident scene. For his efforts, Cochrane was greeted with staccato honks, yells and a long line of upset faces, many of whom, he said, seemed annoyed merely by his presence. "It gets dangerous out there," Cochrane said. "You've got angry motorists who aren't necessarily paying attention. And there are plenty of angry motorists today. They don't care why traffic isn't moving. They just want it to move." For 500-Mile Weekly Commuter, Life Is Frustrating, Frazzling After 90 minutes behind the wheel, Beverly Barth was growing a little frazzled. She had dodged potholes and construction cones and swung around double-parked delivery vans, and now here she was muttering at a pedestrian moseying her way through an intersection. "Come on, toots," Barth said, "get out of the road." And this was on a good day. No gridlock. No detours. No cabs cutting her off. Her 48-mile commute from her home in Prince Frederick to her secretarial job downtown would take an hour and 45 minutes. But it was only the last half that was grueling. The final eight miles inside the city would take almost as long as the first 40. During the 20 years she lived in Washington and walked to work, Barth had no idea how much time and energy go into commuting. Then, six years ago, she bought a house near the Chesapeake Bay. She considers it her retirement home. But for now, the trade-off is driving 500 miles a week. For now, she spends $600 monthly for parking, gas and repairs. For now, commuting eats up the equivalent of at least 40 full days each year. She leaves too early in the morning for breakfast and arrives too exhausted at night to do more than microwave a baked potato or leftovers and fall into bed. "I count the days until Saturday, when I can sleep late," said Barth, 53, as she sat immobile in traffic inching across the Frederick Douglass Bridge. "Sometimes it takes all your strength just to get to and from work." Just 10 blocks from her office, she passed an apartment building advertising vacancies. "Hmmm. I wonder how much it is," she mused. It's not the first time she has considered selling her house and moving back into town. In the end, she makes the same calculation all commuters do and decides that the benefits of living far from town outweigh the disadvantage of the numbing hours spent getting there and back. "I guess I've gotten used to the fresh air and the sunshine and the flowers and the nice neighbors," said Barth, who spends many weekends knitting afghans and baking snickerdoodles that win prizes at the Calvert County Fair. "You have to give up something to get something." The distance doesn't bother her. It's the congestion she encounters in the last few miles inside the city. To cope, she brings audio books, music cassettes and a backup plan for days when she hears on the radio that her usual route is jammed. Still, she often spends three hours or more creeping and crawling her way through gridlock. Yesterday was a relative breeze, but it didn't relieve her. It only added to her foreboding. "Usually if the morning is uneventful, the night is a nightmare," she said in the tone of a jaded veteran.
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Alan Sipress
