The final event

Today we highlight the final major event in the Oella Olympics, Getting Home at Night. This event generally does not begin until the early evening hours, when everyone is coming home from work. The majority of competitors can thus rather easily make it out of their neighborhood in the morning to get to work, but getting back home is a challenge fit for only the best and bravest drivers. This is intentional, because if the Get Home competition was called Get to Work and was held in the morning, and people found it too difficult, they would just stay home. But of course everyone wants to get back home in the evening.

Before competitors even reach the Getting Home at Night course, there are practice courses along commuter routes, such as interstate lanes that suddenly disappear under a bank of snow. Olympic officials no doubt feel that we Maryland drivers are getting soft, and that we need forced driving exercises so we can stay competitive with colder nations, such as Pennsylvania. They must know we have no real hope of standing up to places like Minnesota, or New York City, where kids have had a mere three snow days in the last six years. Maryland kids graduate without ever having to go to school when it's below 58 degrees outside.

Let the Games begin...

Getting Home at Night

Around 3 or 4 in the afternoon, officials start preparing the Getting Home at Night course. Scouts identify every possible avenue into a neighborhood, and put up diabolical obstacles to make it more difficult for participants to get to their destination in a timely manner. For instance, a participant may be driving home, whistling, pleased that he or she is almost home and has met with no major impediments, when suddenly the participant's street is blocked by an enormous delivery truck. The participant is waved away, and immediately hastens to find an alternate route. He or she carefully negotiates the treacherous mountain terrain, strewn with the wreckage of other competitors, and several minutes -- or hours -- later, triumphantly turns onto the other end of his or her street, which consists of a steep hill leading into a blind s-curve, affectionately known as Suicide Curve.

But before the competitor can even reach Suicide Curve, he or she is stopped short by a car wildly backing down the hill in the face of an oncoming vehicle. As it is apparent that the car is not going to stop, the competitor hastily pulls into a narrow space off the road (although "on the road" and "off the road" are used loosely in this competition). The competitor quickly notices that the car backing down has no idea how to do so, and briefly imagines that this may be the last event he or she will ever compete in, because if the backing-up car slams into his or her car, he or she is going into the river.

Even with "lifeline" bystanders helpfully assisting the driver to back down the street -- by throwing stones and branches at the car, for instance -- it is several agonizing minutes before the car is safely out of the way and the participant can resume trying to get up the hill. Assuming this is accomplished, the participant creeps along on that "road" we discussed in connection with an earlier event, until he or she comes to a narrow pass that must be negotiated on two wheels.

Other obstacles encountered may include a plow, which sat idle all day while everyone was at work, and whose driver now seems bent on causing maximum chaos for participants. Some competitors, in desperation, abandon all attempts to reach home by car, and decide to parachute in. If by some Olympic miracle they do not land in the river, or in the trees, they are greeted by one of the neighborhood's many dogs, whose job it is to lick the competitors silly.

Competitors who persevere are rewarded with a warm home and satisfying dinner, and the thought that tomorrow the course must be negotiated all over again.