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By Mina Xavier, November 12, 2008 1:35 am

I had a front row seat last week to the dumbest traffic jam I have ever witnessed.

There is a one lane brick underpass down the road that has been around for at least 70 years. When it was constructed there were fewer cars in existence and they were reasonably sized at that. There is now a mall nearby, hence it sees a great deal of traffic these days. With all those people scurrying through in their ever-larger vehicles, it made me wonder from time to time: What would be the magic combination of fat-ass vehicles that could plug this toilet?

Well, Thursday afternoon I found out. A Hummer H2 and a Ford F350 with a trailer full of landscaping equipment. They didn’t exactly hit one another but they jammed into that tunnel so close and at such unreasonable angles that they simply could not get past each other. I was four cars behind the Ford. I could see the H2 in all of its grotesque glory, its driver screaming furiously at everyone as he was unable to move forward, back up or even open his door to get the hell out of his mammoth.

We sat there for about 28 minutes, waiting. For whom, I did not know. (Police? Fire department? PennDot? Superman?) In the interim, the man in the car in front of me got his dog out of the backseat and leashed it for a walk. Sure, why not? There will obviously not be anyone coming from either direction for a good long time. The rest of us were so bored that we sat in our cars, fiddling with cd players and radios, talking on our cell phones, playing solitaire, making origami with gas station receipts and meanwhile watched this dog walk the shoulder and label the landscape.

Finally an officer arrived from behind our half of the traffic. In my rear view mirror I could not count the cars that faded back into the horizon behind me. After some refereeing and yelling he managed to get a few of us to move perpendicular and scoot back a little. He got the Ford to back up. Immediately the H2 came surging out of the tunnel. The officer yelled for him to stop.

The icing on this cake is that he gave that bastard a ticket. We watched in giddy avarice as he wrote it out and handed it to him, with his license. Apparently he was so concerned about his paintjob that he was taking up too much room away from his side of the wall and was officially to blame for the whole affair. I was late for work but smirking the whole rest of the day.

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By Mina Xavier, October 22, 2008 7:59 am

Officer Paul Wille is one lucky man.

The entire story, reported locally, can be found here.

While responding to a call for backup, Wille was headed south on Old York Road in Mercer County and lost control of his patrol car at a bend in the road. He slammed into a tree and a light pole before settling in a ditch.

What followed is a stunning example of personal heroism.

Lisa Scott had just begun eating dinner with her daughter, Shannon, and her daughter’s boyfriend, Terrence Nish, when they heard the crash. The three ran outside to find Wille unconscious and his car smoking.

Terry tried to get the door open, but it wouldn’t budge. Then smoke started coming out from under the hood and we started to panic,” Lisa Scott recalled. “Then a woman pulled up in a Suburban. Terry took the trailer hitch off her car and broke the (patrol car’s) window.

Their attempt to pull the officer from the wreckage was again hindered when the seatbelt could not be released. Wille regained consciousness long enough to hand over his utility knife, which Nish used to cut the belt and free him. As they pulled him through the window, flames were already consuming the passenger seat.

Nish and several others carried Wille to safety as ammunition in the car began to go off, setting the car ablaze with minor explosions from within.

They’re heroes. What they did was extraordinary. They got him out before the car exploded,” said Old York Road resident Frank Sparacino.

My significant other is from a nearby neighborhood and he knows the area very well. After seeing it reported live on the news we decided to drive past the scene later that night. The powder was still on the pavement from the flares in the road and the smell of smoke and munitions discharge was still heavy in the air.

What moved me to bother blogging this story was the fact that these people had the presence of mind to act rather than flee danger. And after being met with two impediments — a jammed door and a stuck seatbelt — they still lingered within inches of harm to do what was needed to save a random stranger.

This incident has restored much of my faith in the authentic goodness of humanity.