In Massachusetts: Hard Driving

Those of us who wander across this country -- hard-core itinerants, escapees from a Stanley Elkin fiction, a ragtag of peddlers, truckers, journalists, compulsive tourists -- meet in flyspecked cafes off the interstates and gossip about the cities that are our temporary destinations.

Manhattan, the island borough of 34 square miles, the city that gave us gridlock, each day invites in 877,000 motorists and then does not let them park. Over our coffee we trade hints on what it is not too illegal to do with our delivery trucks there. We tell tales of cabbies and their refreshing obscenities.

Outside Dallas, Interstate 35 splits into two identically numbered segments, differentiated by a tiny W and E, which run north and south. Lulled by interstate monotony, the unwary sometimes fail to notice the split, and circle the city on the 35s and their various permutations until they give up and opt for Waco. That furnishes the underpinning for the legend of the ghost of I-35. It is said in Western truck stops that once a young couple with a small child (some versions claim twin children) circled Dallas in July until their auto air conditioner failed and they died, and that on still nights when the moon is full and there is a lull in traffic, you can hear the wail of a child.

Some say Nashville is the most testing city to drive in, but most say Boston. Boston because of its streets. Boston because of its drivers.

"Ah yes, Boston," says Mark, a photographer just returned from a job there. "Boston, the city where green means go and yellow means go a little faster."

A man from New York, a city not noted for its gentle traffic manners, tells of the time he lost a muffler on Storrow Drive to a Bostonian aggressively merging onto that thoroughfare. The Bostonian, despite the fact that he shed his own bumper in the clash, never glanced to either side and sped on when the New Yorker pulled over to exchange insurance information.

Boston drivers are steely, quick, opportunistic, decisive, but above all they do not look another driver in the eye. They probably do not drive as fast as we itinerants claim they do. A recent comparison showed that motorists in Columbus drive just as fast. However, in Columbus, everyone, including the outsiders, knows where he is going. In Boston, only the Bostonians do. That makes them seem to be going faster.

"The day is past when the out-of-town driver, lost on Boston's streets, was a good joke," said the Boston Globe in a recent series on traffic. "That confused visitor, halted in the middle of an intersection, is likely to be the - direct cause of a traffic jam that extends several blocks . . . Get some signs up -- and make sure they are readable and make sense."

There are those who claim that Boston is a city designed by M.C. Escher, its maps labeled by Italo Calvino. Bostonians speak of a Central Artery that does not appear on maps or signs, of squares that are not square, not labeled and not acknowledged by Rand McNally.