In which GC and I don uniforms

The turkey’s in the oven, and I’ve got a few hours of relative quiet time before I have to get to the veggies and cranberry sauce and stuff.

Yesterday GC and I were volunteers in the Beat Beethoven race, which is a half-marathon fundraiser for the Shepherds of Good Hope. We were road marshals. As such, we were vested with the authority to keep vehicles off the west-bound Western Parkway. We were also vested with vests. Reflective vests. And a road barrier. We were stationed at Parkdale and the Parkway.

“Don’t let anybody on the road, no matter what they tell you,” said the guy who dropped off our barrier, “They’ll come up with all kinds of stories, especially the cabbies, but don’t let anybody through under any circumstances.”

GC and I suited up in our reflective vests, and had a strategy-planning discussion. We thought a good-cop/bad-cop routine might be the best way to go, but we nixed that idea since neither of us could pass as a credible bad cop. We settled instead for a good-cop/good-cop routine.

We turned away cars, trucks, horse trailers, bicycles, motorcycle gangs and media vans. It was interesting to see the variety of reactions people had to a closed road. Some people took it in stride, smiled, shrugged, and set off in search of an alternate route, while other people got angry and squealed their tires. A few people felt compelled to tell us why they needed to get on that road. They were going to a christening, or shopping, or to the beach. GC and I were very helpful in suggesting alternate routes.

Lots of people wanted to know why the road was closed. We explained, over and over again, that there was a half-marathon on the Parkway. You could tell some of them were a bit disappointed. They wanted it to be something more dramatic. A major accident, perhaps, or a movie being filmed, or a police chase. We toyed with the idea of making stuff up for them.

“A race?” drawled one man contemptuously, “There’s always a goddamned race on this road. Every time I want to go somewhere, there’s a goddamned race on this road, isn’t there?”

“The eastbound parkway is open,” I said brightly.

“Well I sure as hell ain’t goin’ east now, am I?” he replied.

Blocking traffic wasn’t quite enough to keep us fully entertained for hours, so we played the alphabet game with license plates, read the newspaper, and I taught GC how to knit. We thought about how much fun it would be to live-blog our road marshaling experience if only we had a live-blogging device. (If we had live-blogged it, we would have implored the blogosphere to bring us coffee and snacks around 11:00, since we were rationing the last handful of Altoids by that point.)

Eventually a truck pulled up and the driver told us he needed to go through. We said no, we couldn’t allow it. He said he was a law enforcement officer with the National Capital Commission, and he showed us his badge and said his authority superseded ours. I didn’t even know the NCC had law enforcement officers, did you?

GC cheerfully acknowledged that we were outranked, and was going to let him through, but I decided this would be a good time to pretend to be the bad cop. I said we’d need to call the Shepherds Base and request special dispensation for him to pass through our barrier. GC called and they said yeah, let him through, so we did.

Moments later he circled back to us and informed us that the race was actually over and there were cars traveling westbound on the Parkway. So we removed our barrier, packed up our knitting and newspaper, and went in search of coffee, food, and afternoon adventures.

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