Road construction has turned a usually placid stretch of U.S. 70 between Falling Creek and West Vernon Avenue into a stormy sea of profane phrases and hand gestures. For one woman, it turned into a chapel and maternity ward.
“My boyfriend and I had been dating for about a year when we started carpooling to work,” said Stephanie Cole of Deep Run. “Usually the drive is pretty calm and uneventful, but last Monday the road construction really stirred things up.”
According to Stephanie, as she and her beau motored down U.S. 70 at 2 mph or so, something happened that changed her life forever.
“David (Stephanie’s boyfriend) started talking about how much time is wasted on things that don’t matter,” Cole said as her eyes misted up. “I thought he was going to wax philosophical on the traffic jam as a metaphor of the way day-to-day life can drag you down, but instead he put the car in park, kneeled on the cup holder and asked me to marry him.”
Over a chorus of car horns and lewd suggestions as to what the innocent road workers could do with their hand-held Stop/Slow signs, Stephanie said yes.
“I’d often imagined being proposed to somewhere romantic — like under the pier at Emerald Isle or at a Starbucks,” Cole said. “Hearing David ask me to spend the rest of my life with him while stuck on a major highway in a 1989 Honda Civic with no air conditioning or passenger door was quite surreal.”
After the proposal, the crawling traffic came to a dead stop.
“I’ve seen pallets of bricks in quicksand with more forward momentum,” Stephanie said. “The Highway Patrol dropped leaflets from a helicopter advising us how to have our mail delivered to our cars for the next few weeks.”
As night fell, those with camping equipment in their trunks started setting up tents up and down U.S. 70. Stephanie and her fiancé held hands as they walked around meeting their new neighbors — one of which happened to be a minister.
“Preacher Charlie was so sweet to us,” Cole said. “He told us if we came up with a marriage certificate he’d marry us right there on the highway.”
Cole’s fiancé quickly whipped out his phone and downloaded a marriage certificate from LegalSchmegal.com. Within minutes, a wedding was being planned.
“The ceremony was beautiful,” Cole said. “The guys working on the road made David a tux by tying together a few orange safety vests. I used a discarded Chick-fil-A bag as a wedding veil.”
After the ceremony, the couple and their entourage walked a few miles down U.S. 70 to Buddy’s Grill at Falling Creek for the wedding reception. Much fried chicken and fountain sodas were reportedly consumed, with the happy couple feeding each other pieces of honey buns and Moon Pies.
As the weeks passed with no sign of the traffic jam coming to an end, the newlyweds decided it may be time to abandon the car and go on their honeymoon.
“I would have been fine waiting a few more weeks for the traffic to ease up, but for some reason David really, really, really wanted to go on a honeymoon,” Cole said. “As luck would have it, our car was stopped just across the road from the West Parke Inn. David made a reservation for their honeymoon suite with extreme prejudice.”
After a three-day honeymoon, the couple returned to their 1989 Honda Civic and set up house. David eventually got a job with the road construction crew, while Stephanie started organizing Thirty-One parties along a two-mile stretch of U.S. 70.
“It was cramped — the two of us living in a car, but we rose above the stank and made the best of it,” Cole said.
When the traffic jam entered its third month, Stephanie realized she was with child.
“We were so happy,” David said. “With a baby on the way, I knew we had to find something with more room, so I bought a 1990 Chevrolet Suburban from a guy stuck about 400 yards behind us. It had more square footage than a $2,000/month New York City apartment and had higher emissions test scores.”
After nine more months of living on U.S. 70 East, David and Stephanie Cole (along with about a thousand other motorists) were overjoyed to see traffic finally starting to move again.
“It was great,” David said. “After a few miles, the orange barrels disappeared, but as we merged over into the left lane we were waived back over to the right by the road crew. I’m not sure why the barrels were removed if we couldn’t drive on that side of the road, but I didn’t have time to think about it because Stephanie went into labor just as traffic came to another stand still.”
Not knowing anything about birthing a baby, David decided it would be a good time to panic.
“Traffic was so congested a helicopter couldn’t even make it to our location,” Stephanie said. “We turned on the radio to stay calm. Everything was fine until a Bon Jovi song came on. The contractions stopped and the baby started tapping out Morse code on my stomach that translated into ‘turn it off or I’m not coming out’.”
Eventually an EMS crew made its way to the scene, and mother and child came through the experience with flying colors.
“We’ve added that Bon Jovi thing to all our pamphlets,” said Jon Hughes of Lenoir County EMS. “Anyone about to have a baby should keep a copy of Bon Jovi’s ‘Slippery When Wet’ in all their vehicles. We’d advise against one of Jon Bon Jovi’s solo albums, as that could lead to a Jaws of Life situation.”
Jon Dawson’s columns appear every Tuesday and Thursday in The Free Press. Contact Jon at 252-559-1092 or jon.dawson@kinston.com. Purchase books, music and ‘Bad Medicine’ pill dividers at jondawson.com.