Stuck in the Middle with You

"It's gonna be an hour or two" the guard called as we filled out the request form to see Alejandro.

An hour or two. We had deliberately left early in an attempt to make the two hour drive to the detention center, visit Alejandro and make it back before the predicted snow storm hit Atlanta.

An hour or two.

There weren't any more chairs left and people were sitting on the floor. "I've been here since eleven" some girl informed me as the clock hit two o'clock. "They've let one group of visitors go back in the last three hours".

The first hour passed and then the second. There is nothing to do in the waiting room. We watched as a guard looked for unlocked visitors' cars so that he could search them. The guards chose not to use all of the visitation rooms available to them, extending the wait. People started making chit chat. "¿De dónde son?" an abuela type asked. "Atlanta" I answered, assuming our drive was the longest. "¿Y Ustedes?", "Hilton Head". In the end, we found out that we had the shortest drive, as the sun set on hotel-less, restaurant-less Lumpkin, Georgia and the winter storm rushed in.

I knew we should have left. They told us all week that a storm was coming. An hour or two wait was obviously not panning out. But we drove over two hours to get there and had already waited hours. Surely we would be in the next visitation group. We had to guess, as we weren't getting any information from the guards.

We entered the visitation area nearly four hours after we arrived and waited in front of the glass for nearly fifteen additional minutes before they brought the detainees in. Finally they arrived, filing through the door in a line. A young man next to Alejandro took one look at his visitor and his face crumbled as he burst into tears. "What happened in Arizona?" Alejandro asked us, "All I heard was Republicans, massacre and Arizona".

The beginning of the drive home was okay. I drove fast, hoping to beat the storm though it was supposed to be hitting Atlanta within a half an hour and Lumpkin even before that. It was already dark.

And then the snow began.

The road was slick and we were in the middle of nowhere. The snow and ice were accumulating. I was driving twenty miles an hour. I slowly made my way north, wondering how many hours it would take us at that rate. Cars were spinning out. Suddenly my car started sliding and I panicked. I got it to stop moving, but sat in the middle of the cars trying to figure out what to do. Every time I took my foot of the brake my car started to slide. I sat there for a few minutes, then slowly started driving again. My windshield wipers clogged with chunks of ice and both my rear and front windows became completely obscured. I was afraid to get out of the car. Cars were sliding past us and my own car had been out of control. The side of the highway was piled high with snowdrifts that were stopping people from hitting the cement dividing wall when they spun out. I drove slowly with my window open, grabbing my windshield wipers as they passed and ripping the ice from them. And then all traffic stopped.

We skipped through the AM stations trying to figure out what had completely blocked one of Atlanta's major highways. Had they closed the road and just left us out there? Hundreds of cars spread in front and behind us. A few emergency vehicles passed. We were forty miles south of Atlanta. We sat and waited.

"Jared Loughner was a liberal!" the conservative commentator chanted on the radio. "He was crazy! Sarah Palin's rhetoric had nothing to do with it! We have never encouraged violence! Barak HUSSEIN Obama uses violent rhetoric! America's prisons are full of LIBERALS that voted for Barak HUSSEIN Obama!" The commentator continued explaining the peaceful and cooperative right wing for nearly fifteen minutes. "Let's take a caller!" he finally announced. A southern woman's voice filled the line. "He shoulda got Pelosi! He got the wrong one!" she howled, before being cut off. The commentator spent the next half an hour reiterating that neither the Tea Party or any conservative had ever espoused violence and did not take any more call-ins.

The snow was piling up and the ice was getting thicker and we weren't moving. A series of gunshots went off beside the highway. No one was coming to our aid and no one was mentioning what the hell was going on. We sat in a weird wintery twilight, surrounded by hundreds of people as the snow rose around us. A plane thundered through snow and sleet onto one of the runways at the airport. Emergency lights flashed to tell it where to go. "This isn't going to end," I told Michelle "we are going to see the sun come up here".

Five hours later, we saw the two jackknifed tractor trailers and a series of cabs blocking the highway as it snaked over an overpass. We also saw an emergency vehicle. "Hey bro!" he called over a loud speaker at one of the cabs "I'm gonna bump you!". The oblivious African driver got in the car and stared forward as the HERO truck pushed him out of the way. People were getting out of their cars. "They're putting sand down" a passing walker told me. We were getting closer. "Keep driving, don't stop!" a man yelled at me as I slid over the snow and sand between the two trucks and over the icy overpass.

And then we were alone. We looked back over the sea of red lights and entered the snow capped city. We were the only car on the road as we slid past the stadium and down toward the park. It was a beautiful, deserted, ice covered ghost town.

We abandoned the car down the hill from my house and wandered through the snow at two o'clock in the morning, having survived the great Southern snowstorm.