Driving in to work, circa 1991

We often think that being stuck in traffic is a modern invention, that our ancestors enjoyed empty freeways and limitless bursts of speed toward the horizon. Nothing could be further from the truth, as the follow first-hand account can attest. Bear in mind that this was an age when traffic was not constrained by any regulations: with no rules about which lane of the highway to drive on; no road-rage shootings to keep tawdry Fitipaldis in line; and worse yet - no dashboard cams to record the ensuing chaos, commuting was a simpler, more brutal affair.

found written on parchment in the glovebox of a latter-century Buick Century heading for the crusher, considered an entry in a mileage diary:

A Description of Ottawa in winter, 1889

"The going of the sun was attended by so much glory that the whole weight of my situation and the pressure of my solitude did not come upon me until his light was gone. The mighty Ottawa river ran athwart his mirroring in lines of molten gold; the sky was a sheet of scarlet fire where he was, paling zenithwards into an ardent orange. The splendour tipped the frozen coast with points of ruby flame which sparkled and throbbed like sentinel beacons along the white and silent range. The low thunder of far-off Parliament hill bursting against the projections rolled sulkily down upon the weak wind. Just beyond the edge of the slope, about two miles to the south of my little haven, stood an assemblage of exquisitely airy outlines—configurations such as I have described; their crystalline nature stole out to the lustrous colouring of the glowing west, and they had the appearance of tinted glass of several dyes of red, the delicate fibres being deep of hue, the stouter ones pale; and never did the highest moon of human invention reach to anything more glorious and dainty, more sweetly simulative of the arts of a fairy-like imagination than yonder cluster of icy fabrics, fashioned, as it entered my head to conceive, as pavilions by the hands of the spirits of the frozen world, and gilt and painted by the beams of the setting sun: the First Glebites, frozen on the canal."

- A Frozen Man from Ottawa, 1889