South of Mammoth, the road was closed, as a crew worked hard to get a few patches in before the first snow, which at that elevation (5,000 to 11,000 feet above sea level) could have arrived anytime. Even in September, a line of twenty or thirty cars had formed. Two thousand miles from the Washington beltway, I had still managed to find a traffic jam.
But something curious was happening. Instead of grumbling, cursing, and honking, most of the drivers (including me) got out of their cars and took advantage of the downtime to enjoy the spectacular roadside vista of valley, pond, forest, and mountains beyond. While up ahead the road crew poked and pitched and patched, we joked and waited and passed the time with the ranger who was stuck just like the rest of us. If I wasn’t in Kansas, the congeniality of our little corps of explorers proved I wasn’t in DC anymore either.
After an amiable quarter hour, we got back in our cars and slipped by the smiling construction crew. Beneath his hard hat, the gangly worker directing traffic might have had hair the color of straw.
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