There are 16 traffic lights in the 47 mile stretch between my home and work. I have, on more than one occasion, caught all of them green except the last one, which doesn't really count since I turn there and the turn signal is on a sensor and won't change until there is a car waiting. I have, actually, been fortunate enough to roll through it on the skirts of the car that triggered the signal, but never on a morning when I'd made all the other lights.
Of course this only happens in the morning, between three and five o'clock; possibly five thirty. They are all trip lights, you see, like that last one; only there I'm the trigger. The lights will all stay green until someone comes along to alter the equation. The trick is to watch for the “changer,” and then to know how the light behaves once it's been tripped. They turn green again pretty quick, but they'll change back red quickly too, if someone else comes along. So it's balls out, pedal to the medal the whole way, until you're actually close to the light.
The character of the traffic changes each half an hour. You see; I don't have the same schedule every day. Sometimes I have to leave the house at 2:30 or 3:00, I usually leave around 4:00, but sometimes I get a break and don't have to leave until 5:00 or 5:30 (it's not a matter of sleeping in, I just stay up later the night before). Once I didn't have to leave the house until 7:00, but that was an anomaly. As the half hours progress there is more and more traffic. We used to say that in the wee hours there were only drunks and cops on the road. Once I started driving a truck I amended that to “drunks, cops and truckers.” Now I know that isn't true either. I'm a trucker still, but I'm not driving a truck at the time, I'm just on my way to work and it could as well be screen printing that I do. There is never a time without traffic in America.
The trip lights are pretty sophisticated and behave differently at different hours of the day. For instance: the left turn signal from IN 67 onto Ameriplex Parkway will interrupt oncoming traffic to give me a green arrow while keeping the cross traffic light red, if there isn't anyone waiting there, but only before 5:00. After 5:00 it changes to a cycle that necessitates a green for the cross traffic before I'll get a green arrow, even if there isn't anyone there. Likewise the two main lights in Mooresville are trip lights until 5:00, then they turn to a standard cycle and will turn red for me even if there isn't anyone waiting at the intersection.
Sometimes the lights malfunction, or seem to. There is one light at the entrance to a business park that will sometimes be on a standard cycle even in the wee hours of the morning, and it changes quickly. Usually lights like that allow for an extended green on the heavily traveled highway side, but not this one. It changes so quickly that it's nearly impossible to time it accurately to roll through a green, and there isn't even any traffic coming out of the business park. There's another one that I truly hate. It's at the entrance to a large strip mall, Heartland Crossing. When it malfunctions it goes to rush hour mode and makes you wait minutes while it gives a long green for the cross traffic, and then an extended green turn arrow for the oncoming traffic, all while there's not another car in sight. I have seen people run this light when it behaves like that. I've certainly been tempted to, but with my luck a cop would suddenly appear just as I did.
The first “malfunctioning” stop light is the last one before Mooresville and I have sometimes wondered if they aren't trying to break up traffic through town into discrete packs. But it's still miles from town and only happens every once in awhile. As far as what could be a purpose for the Heartland Crossing malfunction the only reason I can fathom is that it's somebody's idea of a cruel joke. Especially since I later realized that the light actually cycles through quite quickly during rush hour, it never acts like that except when I'm on my way to work in the wee hours of the morning.
It's a whole different ball game in the afternoon.
Back when they were repaving the White River bridge outside of Martinsville, a process that reduced the bridge to one lane for over a month, I used to wish that I knew of another way over the river other than going all the way down to Spencer. It obviously wasn't too inconvenient since I never brought up Google Maps and tried to find a way. Later, when Morris was in the hospital in Spencer and I went that way to visit him, I realized that IN 67 passes through Paragon.
Traveling north on IN 37, on the other side of the river, I always hail the sign that says “Paragon, so many miles that way” because once, long, long ago, I had a job out in the country on the other side of Paragon. I was working for Parker Pools and we were installing the very first of those one piece fiberglass, in ground pools to be sold in Indiana. My cars were all (junk) on the fritz at the time and Tom Parker, my boss, would pick me and my house guest Ed Slicer up at home. Ed and I would jump in the back of Tom's pickup truck full of tools and ride with the wind our hair all the way to the job site.
I remember that as a glorious summer; happily married and living in our own home beneath the eaves of a mature hardwood forest in the hills of Southern Indiana, with a beautiful two year old daughter and another child in the oven; working out doors with my hands, more physically and mentally fit than I'd ever been in my life. Getting to ride to work in the back of a pickup truck through the magnificent countryside was just icing on the cake.
So when I passed through Paragon again I said to myself, “Hmm, file that away until I need another alternate route across the White River.”
There was an accident in Martinsville today on my way home from work. There was a cop parked in the median with his lights flashing before the turn where IN 39 crosses the bridge, and traffic was backed up past the extensive turn lane onto the highway itself. Ah, a perfect time to explore that alternate route.
I hadn't remembered it being such a small, winding road; or the wonderful old architecture along the way, passing through townships that predate the great depression; it must have been a river thing. As for the river itself I thought it interesting that on the eastern side, just before the hills start there is a gate that can be shut to close the road. I imagine that the long piece of bottom land on the western side sometimes floods. Once over the river and into the hills it was so windy, with other roads branching off at organic angles, that I eventually got lost and ended up back north, almost to Martinsville again. I certainly didn't save any time and would rather have made it home sooner, but it was a beautiful, interesting drive and I don't regret it a bit. I've since been online and traced the route so I know how to do it next time, but regardless, the entire experience just brings home to me again how lucky I am to live in such a beautiful area.
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