Two hours is far too long to spend driving from Santa Rosa to Vallejo, partly on a single-lane highway with your tires at water level.
Halfway home, Robert Donohoe had suffered enough. He really needed to pee.
Parking his truck at a turn-off called Vista Point, he got out and shaded his eyes. It was a scorching June afternoon, wind whipping the thistles and cordgrass on a spit of land that dipped into San Pablo Bay. Traffic had slowed to a glacial crawl on Highway 37, the artery that carries Donohoe to his hospital job, alongside thousands of other people bound for schools, construction sites, pools that need cleaning or gardens that need landscaping…