ROSNY-SOUS-BOIS, FRANCE — Frederic Arnold never met Julio Cortazar, but they would have appreciated each other's work.
Arnold is a French public servant, a quiet, compact engineer who wears black and an air of patient resignation. He oversees the National Center for Highway Information, which is grappling with an annual vacation exodus of potentially apocalyptic proportions.
The late Cortazar was an Argentine author, a playful, lanky globe-trotter who lived in Paris for years. In 1966 he wrote a short story, "The Highway of the South," which imagines a monster traffic jam near the capital and takes it to surreal extremes: The stranded drivers organize mini-communities, forage for supplies, make love, fight and even die in the steel sea of vehicles.
"The engineer decided not to get out of his car anymore, hoping that the police would somehow disperse the bottleneck. The heat of August combined with a passage of time marked by tires so that the immobility was ever more exasperating. Everything was the smell of gasoline, rowdy yells from the youths in the Simca, the glare of the sun reflecting off glass and chrome, and to top it off the contradictory sensation of being trapped in the heart of a jungle of machines designed for speed."
Four decades later, Cortazar's vision remains relevant.
As usual, the first weekend in August was the dark vortex of the summer stampede. On Saturday, French highways experienced a total of 434 miles of traffic jams. Government transport analysts designated the day with the worst level in the color-coded hierarchy of congestion: "Black Saturday."
"That means the traffic jams start at 3 a.m. and keep going," Arnold said with a wry grin. "Black Saturday is black all day and all night."
It's hard to imagine a vacation period worse than last year's. The troubles started in May, a month filled with long weekends thanks to obscure religious and national holidays. On Sunday the 20th, the drive from Toulouse to Paris took about 10 hours rather than the normal six.
It was Hobbesian. Gas stations were besieged, pumps mobbed, toilets unapproachably foul. Rest stop eateries were so full that families were reduced to munching stale sandwiches as they stood next to overflowing garbage cans.
