JOSEPH N. BELL -- The Bell Curve

Today’s column -- which will appear on another Thursday -- was

supposed to be about the rites of passage experienced this week by two

young people who are very important in my life. My stepson, Erik, was

initiated into the Internal Revenue Service. And my grandson, Trevor, was

initiated into Las Vegas gambling. The latter event will explain why I

was driving home from Las Vegas on Tuesday afternoon with my daughter,

Patt, when the Great Traffic Jam took place.

You probably read about it or watched the carnage on TV. A

chain-reaction accident involving some two dozen cars, three big rigs and

a fire engine took place on the hail-slick Riverside Freeway, causing

numerous injuries, none serious. We had just passed through Riverside

when the series of accidents happened. We were feeling terribly pleased

that we had avoided a snow delay on the Cajon Pass, as well as the moral

perils of Vegas (translation: We won). And we chose not to regard the

hail beating on our windshield as punishment for enjoying Vegas, where --

at his urgent request -- we were celebrating my grandson’s 21st birthday.

About 2:45 p.m., our diamond lane came to a grinding halt. As far as

we could see were immobilized cars. It was hard not to speculate that

this might, indeed, be what the end of the world would look like. At

least in California. It was 5:30 p.m. before we finally broke free and

made our way home, wondering in what ways we had been transformed by this

experience.

There is surely no caldron in which to better study human behavior

than the stress of being totally out of control in a traffic jam. There

are those few who refuse to accept this state of things and try to take

control by fighting their way into other lanes, which inevitably move

more slowly than the one they left. But mostly, people -- at least the

ones with whom we connected -- accepted the fact that they were in the

wrong place at the wrong time and would thus have to wait for matters

over which they had no control to change.

The immediate cars around us became a kind of neighborhood. Rather

like the Great Depression when we all -- well, most of us -- were sharing

very hard times. There was the lady in the white Mercedes who would roll

down her window and exchange rumors with us each time we came abreast.

There was the man in the green pickup who was missing most of his front

teeth and was a constant source of new information. Most of it turned out

to be correct, although I have no idea what his sources were.

It was the toothless man who first told us the accident had taken

place at the intersection of the Riverside and Corona freeways, which

allowed us to get out our map and try to figure when we might put this

behind us.

But there were also some problems in our neighborhood. Most of them

involved the two men in a blue pickup immediately in front of us. Their

tailgate was down, and on the bed of the truck were several dead animals.

We didn’t care to examine them closely enough to discover what they were.

But it’s very difficult when you are 6 feet away from the car in front of

you to avoid looking straight ahead.

My daughter nursed a powerful impulse -- growing with the passage of

time -- to get out of our car and put up the tailgate, but I managed to

restrain her. This had nothing to do with my attitude toward animals but

rather toward my own well-being. It’s sobering, however, to know that you

are going to be eyeball to eyeball with a passel of dead animals for an

indeterminate length of time.

We had a bag of leftover food from our birthday party, so we were in

no immediate danger of starving. Barbecued potato chips and chocolate

turtles get a little tiresome, however, after the first hour and are also

probably low on nutrients. Actually, our most serious problem turned out

to be what we didn’t have: a bathroom. The connection between the human

brain and other bodily organs tends to intensify when conditions severely

limit the availability of such tools as bathrooms.

I never fail to require such a facility when there is none around, and

I was rehearsing some rather desperate measures when we finally broke

loose and found a fast-food restaurant. I can only assume there were

similar problems all about us, something the California Highway Patrol

might want to address in future policy meetings about handling such long

delays.

To hurry this along, I called my sister-in-law, Jill Angel, who is a

CHP captain in East Los Angeles. She listened carefully and said she

would make the provision of Porto-potties for traffic delays exceeding an

hour an agenda item for CHP consideration. This left me with the

comforting feeling that our wasted afternoon may have served some useful

social purpose.

I also took away from that afternoon the knowledge that my daughter

and I cannot only coexist but enjoy one another under such circumstances.

And the satisfying observation that people under duress can adjust if

there is no other alternative. I saw no road rage or excessive behavior.

We weren’t happy campers, but we weren’t mental cases, either.

Our dachshund was under a bed upstairs when I got home and refused to

come out to greet me. I don’t know if that was disapproval that I’d left

her to go to Las Vegas, discomfort over the rain and hail, or just quirky

old age. But my wife -- who had flown home a day earlier and thus missed

the Jam -- seemed glad to see me. So I made myself a drink, the dog

finally emerged, the rain finally stopped, and traffic is moving on the

Riverside Freeway. Paradise regained.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.