My mistake was turning onto Poplar Hill.
But it’s the route I take to my part-time job, so I didn’t think much of it, although I should have. Two or three cars, waiting to turn onto Merryman’s Mill, that’s one thing — but a line of ‘em, stretching around the curve and behind the tree line?
That should have been a screamed warning to me. “Don’t turn here! Go the long way!”
But I turned anyway. Habit, I suppose. There was no wait heading north, but the line of cars headed south continued damn near all the way to Paper Mill. And there … well, someone wasn’t having a fun day. All traffic was blocked by the firetrucks, ambulences, and police cruisers. There was a black sedan sideways on Paper Mill, glass shattered, all fucked up. There was another sedan on the eastbound side, similarly smashed. There was a school bus pulled across both lanes - had it been involved, or just moved by the police to block traffic?
There were two cars ahead of me waiting to turn onto Paper Mill. The police were trying to motion us westbound, towards Cockeysville. The driver in the lead car did that. The woman in the purple cavalier in front of me, however, insisted on argueing with the officer: “No, I have to go to Phoenix.”
Nevermind that there are smashed up cars all over the place, like a kid who forgot to clean his model-car street playset. Nevermind that there’s a big yellow school bus blocking the entire road. No, she’s so damn important, she’s got to go right!
I didn’t hear the conversation, I should note, so maybe she was just deciding to waste everyone’s time by asking the police officer how many people died, or whose fault it was. But from his increasingly aggrivated body languages and motions, I think what he was saying to her was something along the lines of, “Listen you nosy bitch, make a fuckin’ left and go the long way, you’re blocking cars behind you!”
The detour added fifteen minutes on my trip to work. Backed-up traffic heading towards Phoenix backed all the way across the Paper Mill bridge into Hunter’s Run. I had to run Paper Mill all the way back to York, then up to Phoenix, and then that back to Paper Mill. There were cars waiting to make a right hand turn onto Paper Mill, four deep on Phoenix. Are they blind? From what I could see, the accident still occupied both lanes, and didn’t seem to have decreased any.
I swear, some people are just content to sit and wait for an accident to be cleaned up than to take any proactive action of their own — like, y’know, finding another way to get where they’re supposed to be. They’d rather whine about the police who inconvenienced them.
Except, y’know, it wasn’t the police who inconvenienced anyone, it was the idiot yahoo who decided to drive like an idiot yahoo.