It’s not so common these days to have a minute to stop, to listen, to sit. That is, unless you’re driving out the highway this summer, in which case it’s quite common to not just have a minute, but 10, 15, or 25 minutes, all without cell service.
As another summer of highway construction goes by, drivers are figuring out how to pass that time. And though everyone is stopped at the same points along the road, everyone has a different routine.
A comprehensive sample of drivers Tuesday afternoon revealed a number of trends, including that the most common genre of driver was the podcast listener. Podcasts playing in cars included the Lex Fridman Podcast, the Theo Von Podcast, Dr. Phil, and an unnamed French soccer podcast.
The Lex Fridman and Theo Von listener was Haines mailman Mark Finley, who drives from the post office out the road in his maroon minivan three times a week. In the back on Tuesday were the packages and postage; up front was Finley, a bag of chips, a bucket of salsa, and a cold red Powerade sweating in the cupholder.
Finley said he knows he needs a snack for the stoppages and stocks up before he leaves, but usually it isn’t salsa. “I really like the jalapeño chips from Olerud’s,” Finley said. “But then I can’t touch the mail with my hands because you can’t give someone jalapeño on their mail, so I bring paper towels and hand sanitizer.”
Nearby, the French soccer podcast listener was a man road tripping from Washington state named Joseph Dahan. Dahan, traveling partner Patricia Dahan, and the driver behind them, Jim Solvedt, stood between their two vehicles chatting with one another. “I’m from an older generation, and we don’t go on our phones as much,” said Solvedt. “So I get out of the car and talk to people.”
“Everyone is going somewhere, doing something,” added Patricia Dahan.
At one recent stop, the Dahans met a family in a Sprinter van that had started their road trip two years earlier in South America. On Tuesday they met Solvedt, who was also road tripping from the Pacific Northwest. Conversation seemed to help time go by for Solvedt and the Dahans, so much so that when traffic came through in the other direction they were still chatting in the road. That earned them a series of honks, and a “get out of the road” shout from Cami Fullerton, parked behind them. Solvedt and the Dahans did not acknowledge Fullerton. But they did climb back into their vehicles, no longer smiling.
Fullerton, who works as a flagger for HiEx in town, drives through the stoppages twice a day. While waiting, Fullerton listens to country and plays an iPhone game called “screws.”
There were other gamers besides Fullerton, including Vera Gibson, of Sitka, who was working on level 10,292 of Candy Crush. But a surprising number of drivers took a different approach – an unplugged approach.
“It is what it is; I just wait,” said Casey Rard. Rard sat staring straight ahead, no audio playing, one elbow resting on his open driver’s side window.
In the car behind him was father Dale Rard, who said he listens to music on the radio when it’s classic rock—Creedence Clearwater Revival especially. But onTuesday, he chose to turn the radio off and share the silence with his son ahead of him. “I like listening to the wind,” Rard said.
Kathy Benner was another with her driver’s-side window down, even as her passenger-side window was up. “I like to hear the sound of the river,” Benner said, over the rumble of heavy equipment up ahead and the swollen Chilkat just to Benner’s left, running nearly over its banks.
For all the activity going on, some drivers chose to fast-forward through the wait by simply falling asleep. Benner said recently, a driver in front of her slept through the signal to start driving and had to be woken up by the flagger. Off-duty flagger Marnie Rasmussen was awake waiting in line on Tuesday, but said she has taken naps on other days. Rasmussen said her naps have all ended in time. Her trick, she said, is to leave the window open so traffic heading the other way wakes her up. Besides Rasmussen, other nappers on the road Tuesday were underrepresented in interviews due to the fact that they were napping.
On-duty flagger Piper Geary said her first summer on the job has been more interesting than expected. She has friends in the pilot car who deliver snacks, and drivers near the front of the line often make conversation. Like British Columbian Barrie Bateman, dressed in clothes covered in a week-and-a-half’s worth of dust from a motorcycle trip through Alaska and the Yukon. Bateman, at the very front of the line, got off his bike to stretch, chat with Geary, and punt rocks off the side of the road. When asked by the reporter if punting rocks was part of his road-stoppage routine, Bateman demurred. “No story there,” he said. “You kick rocks, don’t you? You just kicked one.”
Geary said she’s seen a lot of crazy things this summer as cars go past, north, south, and north again. Recently, three Florida men drove past on three tiny dirt bikes and said they were going to ride on the trails out the road. When they came back a few hours later, there were still three men, but only two bikes. The third bike, they said, drove off a mountain.
But by and large, the regulars – the locals – seem to have their routine mostly figured out. They listen to the wind, or the river, or Dr. Phil. They eat Olerud’s jalapeno chips. Yes, there is frustration and controversy about the length of the stoppages, and some locals time each wait on their phones, down to the second.
But that’s not everyone, and some measure the stoppages in other ways, like Hannah Bochart, Garland Bishop, and Yarona Jacobson, who count butterflies out the window. So far, they said, their highest mark is 35 butterflies in one stop. Which is maybe an even more impressive number than Candy Crush level 10,292.