The First Die-off (James Howard Kunstler)

James Howard Kunstler -- World News Trust

Aug. 16, 2009 -- Sunday, I got a taste of the oldest established permanent traffic fiasco in America known as Escape From Cape Cod. This is not a regular thing for me. I have no family there and never did. Friends invited us out to an idyllic hidden corner of the place far from the clam bars filled with shrieking babies and other more typical attractions. We arrived in good order at mid-week and had a fine time. Once installed, we didn't get in a car for four days.

Our strategy was to leave for home in upstate New York at 11 o'clock Sunday morning -- a bright, hot day, as chance would have it -- thinking that the masses would elect to remain a few more hours at Vacation Central pointlessly towing the little ones around in circles on plastic inflatables behind motorboats before returning to the real world with all its foreclosure notices, canceled credit cards, re-po men hiding in the foundation plantings, and other woes of the day.

The masses must be more massive these days than I ever imagined. Apparently, you can fill Massachusetts Bay from end-to-end with watercraft and still have enough vacationers left to completely overwhelm the main highway off-Cape, Route 6, where we crawled in first gear all the way from Yarmouth to the Sagamore Bridge.

One couldn't help thinking, of course, how nice it would be if there was a choo-choo train that ran from Boston down the length of the Cape, but alas there is no more. If any public official had entertained vagrant thoughts of re-starting it in recent decades, the idea was apparently dismissed as a species of heartburn. Clam rolls, in excess, will do that to you. Then again, the rail service from Boston to Albany no longer exists, amazing as it seems, so the whole thought exercise was a waste of time. But it explains why we drove there in the first place.

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