Armed Ambulance Escort

In a cab along Jingmi Road.  I’m coming from the northeast to meet someone in the southeast to steward them to a meeting in the northwest.  It all sounded reasonable when I was planning it.  I left about fifteen minutes earlier than I normally would.  Now I am stationary.  We move a few yards 蜗行牛步[1].  We’re about 1.5 kilometers from the traffic light.  I’m envious of the people walking by to my right.  In my mind, we will fly, once we get through.  But it may well be that we don’t.

On the radio, our man Shan Tianfeng is spinning a rough yarn.  The gravel voiced, master storyteller from Dongbei is ordering some bad guys to “halt, halt, halt!”  He helps a little, to cut the helplessness.  But not much and not for long.   From behind is the sound of an ambulance.  God help the poor person fighting for their life inside that vehicle.  My cabby moves over to the center lane of death, where no one is or has been, moving.  A thoughtful, practical gesture on the one hand, but an insult to injury in my objective towards getting anywhere. 

The ambulance-like car passes.  But then behind are six armed police officers in two columns on motorcycles.  And behind them is a sedan with a special red sign on the back.  OK.  So it would appear this is not an ambulance, unless a foreign dignitary has collapsed mid-speech or someone from the top brass is being escorted to the hospital, with his family in tow.  It’s times like this that I wish I could read Chinese faster.  I politely suggest to the driver that he cut his ass over and start chasing these guys, who’ve cut a path through.  But he seems to think its best to stay in the middle lane. 

I ask him about the escort and he suggests, interestingly, that this was a major criminal.  I see.  Well, I’m glad to know he’s getting to his interrogation on time.  I have called my 9:00AM and told them that I will not be able to meet them at the hotel and that rather, they should just go by themselves.  I will talk to the driver.  Now I have just bought myself another ninety minutes.  But we still are not moving. 

For the second time my driver asks me if we should just hop on the dirt road off to the side that runs up towards the subway station.  Instinctively I said “no” the first time.  We might jump out of the frying pan and into the fire of immobility.  This time I leap at it.  Sure.  Go anywhere.  This is ridiculous.  We cut over and flop along, destroying this man’s suspension. 

It works.  For about three hundred yards we make our way along, the envy of everyone over on the left, who remain at a stand still.  Up to a light, that is going to allow us to get back in the main current of things.  Before the next light my driver asks me if I’d be willing to take a hard right and cut into unknown territory, avoiding this road all together along a rough side road.  I know what he’s trying to do, in theory.  In any other circumstance I’d tell him to just ‘stick to the plan’, but today?  Fine.  Off you go. 

We crawl along side roads, passed demolished villages, new half-finished high rise blocks of flats, dormitories that house all the migrant workers who build these projects for the citizenry of Beijing.  In honor of the momentum I have put on my headphones and the Joe Henderson song “Punjab” from the (I guessed the year right!) 1964 album “In and Out” with Elvin Jones rolling away testifies to our new found acceleration. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_'n_Out

Slow, but faster far than what we had a few minutes ago.  I see what he is doing.  Instinctively we’re continuing to move south, move west with every turn.  Then, up ahead is the entrance for the fifth ring road.  Well, there you go.  Up we head and of course there is thick, nasty traffic but it is moving and I am now more confident than I had been all morning of actually reaching my second destination this morning.  It is ninety minutes since I left home.

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[1] wōxíngniúbù:  lit. to crawl like a snail and plod along like an old ox (idiom) / fig. to move at a snail's pace / to make slow progress