From: AJordheim@aol.com
Sent: Sunday, December 14, 2003 10:33 AM
To: sstarke@valleycity.net
Subject: a story

Yesterday I had to deliver a load I had picked up in Salem, Massachusetts, at a place in North Bergen, New Jersey.
     I didn't think it would be a big deal. I had both delivered and loaded at several places off the freeway on the Jersey side of the "big apple". I had directions to this facility in North Bergen.
     The trouble began when the directions were from the south, and I had to come from the north. I was to look for an exit 16E. Well, there is no exit 16E marked from the southbound direction. It's called 17 from that direction. The exit says, "To Lincoln Tunnel". I didn't take that one, because I know that you can't use the Holland Tunnel with commercial vehicles. I thought it likely that a similar restriction applies to the Lincoln Tunnel. Access to Manhattan is somewhat more restricted since September 11. Another reason I passed exit 17 is because I thought I would come upon 16E next.
     When I began to see exits marked less than 16, I got off the road to turn around. I didn't really know how far the tunnel was from the toll booth, so I didn't want to get where I couldn't turn back around without going through the tunnel. I just pulled a U-ey the other side of the toll booth, and headed back north.
     With traffic starting to build for rush hour, I missed exit 16E.
     Well, all I could do was get off the Turnpike and try turning back around again. I didn't want to go back across the George Washington Bridge again, because the toll is exorbitant in a semi, so I took I-80 W looking for a place to turn around.
     I got off in Hackensack. To make a long story a little shorter, I managed to get turned back around and got back on I-80. The trouble was it didn't look or feel right, so I got off at the very next exit to turn around again. (By this time it was getting to where I would be slightly late delivering.)
     Immediately, the road started to look familiar, but it looked familiar in the wrong way. In other words, I realized that I was going the way I had come earlier to turn around.
     I got off at the same exit in Hackensack and got turned around again.
     This time I got off at exit 17 on the turnpike.
     Now I ran into trouble in that the directions I had didn't take into account road construction.
     I managed to find Paterson Plank Road with no trouble, but I couldn't find West Side Avenue. By the time I found a sign, it was too late to take that street. I drove on looking for a place big enough to turn around in.
     The only place was a parking lot for a U-Haul place. This wasn't the best deal though, because there was no traffic light near and the traffic was really starting to build.
     I probably pissed off a few people because all I could do was wait for a break in the traffic coming from the left and get my nose out there and wait for a break from the right.
     I managed to get turned around and found my way back to where I had seen West Side Avenue. There was a long, sharp curve involved here, and when I got to the end of the curve, suddenly there was a guy knocking on my driver's side door. This was sort of unexpected to say the least, in the middle of the street in heavy traffic.
     It turned out to be a recent immigrant from south Asia, judging by his very heavy accent. I set the brake and jumped out to discover what he wanted, because he seemed to be very animated about something.
     We walked back to his jalopy and I figured out that he was trying to say that I ran into him. He pointed to his passenger-side mirror which was duct taped on, (quite obviously some time ago), and said that I had hit his mirror.
     He said, "Hey, you needing the glasses or what?"
     I pointed out that the mirror had been duct taped for some time, (thinking to myself, hey what's the loss? Especially since the mirror was still attached as firmly as it had probably been for quite a while).
     I tried to say that when the rig is bent for a sharp curve like that, I can't see the back of the trailer in the mirror, even if I had been not needing of the glasses, but explaining anything was impossible with the language barrier and his arms pinwheeling in the air in his agitation. Also I got the impression that he had a somewhat limited ability to understand things in any language, to put it kindly.
     He finally kind of shrugged his shoulders and effected sort of a resigned expression, which I took to mean that we were just forgetting the whole thing, which I thought appropriate since with him at my rear whatever had happened had most likely been his fault anyway. I hated to run off without completely understanding each other because I like a challenge like that of making us understood to each other by whatever means I can, but I was late already.
     I got onto West Side Avenue not knowing if I was going the right way or not, but at least if I didn't find the place, I could turn around and come back the other way looking for it.
     The directions I had to go by started to make sense, till I came to where I was supposed to have gone over some railroad tracks and made a left and the place was right there on the left, right?
     It didn't work out just like that, but I was in luck because this was a warehouse district. I knew I would have no trouble getting into and out of someplace and could make an easy turnaround if I needed to.
     I made a left and pulled up to a guard shack and asked if the guard knew of the place listed on my bills. He didn't, but he offered to make sense of my directions. I didn't have complete confidence that I would be doing the right thing by taking his advice, so I ran into the office of the place I made my turnaround just down the street.
     This guy knew where the place I needed to be was, and told me how to get there from here. What a relief! I got there only two hours late, having paid only three or four times the tolls on the turnpike that I should have.
     Lucky it was a sort of small operation and being late was no big deal. They backed me into a door right away, but when they had done that, the guy who was to unload it said it was time for his break.

     When I was unloaded, I was to make a pickup in Brooklyn. I was to cross the GW bridge again and take the Deegan Expressway across the Tri-borough bridge to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, etc.
     Upon looking at the map I saw a way that would cut off a mile or two if I took US-46 to the GW.
     Upon approaching the bridge I was careful to look for the way to the upper deck as I knew already that semis were prohibited from the lower deck since September 11th.
     I didn't see any signs going to the upper deck. As I got closer I began to get a little worried about that. I came right up to the bridge and saw a road that looked like it would go the right way, but there was a sign saying something like, "no access to bridge".
     I didn't want to get off somewhere where I couldn't get turned back around, so I just continued toward the toll booths. I was at the entrance to the lower deck.
     I pulled over to the side and set the brake, when I was approached by a soldier dressed in full battle gear carrying an M16 coming right at me. I thought, Oh no, what have I gotten myself into now?
     I jumped out with my hands up and explained how I had come to be in this situation, and he said, "come with me. The state troopers want to talk to you."
     There were three cars full of them parked just after the toll booths. I explained myself again, and the one I was talking to said, "let me see your license." I showed him, wondering if I was going to Guantanamo bay now to live in a cage. He asked what I had in the trailer and I told him I was empty.
     Apparently I have an honest face or something, because he never even looked in the trailer. He just handed back my license, (which carries the Haz-Mat endorsement by the way), and said I was to follow him. He would escort me through a special bypass that would take me around to the upper deck.
     When I got on the other side of the bridge, after sort of a paperwork hassle that ended up in me not having to pay the toll twice, I might have taken Harlem River Drive down the east side of Manhattan and crossed the bridge to Wards Island in other circumstances, just to have been on Manhattan, but I thought I had had enough adventure for a while so I just went the way I had been told.
     The place in Brooklyn was much easier to find than that place on the Jersey side, but it was a very narrow street. The area would have been called Chinatown I suppose. The warehouse was an importer that reshipped goods by semi. They had no dock to back into, so they just had me pull to the side of the street with all the other trucks, semis and straight-truck six-wheelers, and they lifted a pallet jack into the trailer and had me arrange the freight in the trailer while they forklifted it onto the back. (I would have done that differently if I had known how much each pallet weighed, but that's another story. The bills didn't list any weights and it was all in Mandarin Chinese anyway.)
     The whole street had sort of a ripe air. I noticed a few pallets of frozen chicken sitting thawing on the sidewalk, with trails of interestingly colored fluid running to the gutter. There was heavy forklift traffic crossing the street both ways between the regular traffic. When I was about half loaded, there came a streetsweeper going about 40 miles an hour. I wondered how many people were killed each day on that stretch of street. I was careful to look both ways before I made any moves whatsoever out of the trailer.
     After I was loaded and had my Chinese bills in my hand, I was told that if I went to the end of the street to the light and made a right, I would find it easy to get back to I-278.
     The trouble was that the street being so narrow, and there being parked cars on the cross-street, I didn't find it easy to make that right.
     I got about half-way through the turn, paying close attention to the mirrors when I realized that I wouldn't be able to do it. There was a light-pole that wouldn't be there anymore if I did, and who knows what I might have done to the trailer. Of course by this time, in addition to the parked cars, I had built up a line behind me and a line on each side on the cross street.
     I managed to back up again, by going a few inches at a time and jumping out to check clearance a few hundred times.
     It seemed possible to make a left instead of a right, and since I had already been a similar way getting to the facility, I figured I could maybe get back to the Expressway by doing that.
     Well, to condense the story a little bit, that worked.
     Now I was headed around the bend past the Brooklyn bridge toward Staten Island. I had been that way before and thought from the map that I should be able to see the Statue of Liberty from there. I had not seen it before, because the traffic was always flowing well enough that all I could do was glance in the right direction and I was never able to see the statue.
     This must have been a good day for me however. The traffic kind of bunched up just before the foot of the Brooklyn bridge, affording me time to look for lady liberty.
     Guess what. There she was, just where she should be. I was so excited!! Finally I was seeing the Statue of Liberty with my own eyes. I had never exactly doubted that it was there or anything. It's just neat to actually see it.
     From the foot of the bridge it looks so huge that I was amazed I had missed it before. I even saw it again as I was passing the upper thirties. I lost it after the exit for 39th street.
     I looked again from the Verazanno Bridge, but wasn't able to see it. Besides, the traffic was traveling well enough here that I couldn't exactly look very long at a time, along with a little bit of road construction.
     Either the day had been long already, or I had forgotten my lesson about striking out in my own directions, because I figured I could cut off a couple of miles by getting away from the familiar blue shields of the interstate system and taking highway 440 across something called the Outer Bridge to get to Staten Island.
     This adventure actually worked the way I wanted it to. Soon I found myself west-bound on I-78 toward Pennsylvania to make my next pick-up in Hanover. A couple "wrong turns" later (I won't bore you with the story), I was loaded and headed to the truck stop for some fuel and a little rest. The last eighteen hours had seemed like about a week.
     The most exciting thing about it all was finally getting to see the Statue of Liberty, although it's always a little exciting to be led away by a soldier carrying an M16 and a few grenades. (Good thing I had decided to shave off my beard the day before, and my turban was in the wash.)