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Home > Archive > Feb 7, 2008

Honk If You Love Commuting
By Sharon May
My daily commute is driving me crazy. It's only 22 miles one way, but a half hour in commuter traffic would make even Anne Frank lose her faith in humanity.
There’s something about being behind the wheel that drives the devil out of hiding in an otherwise civil, good-natured person. You could probably take even St. Peter and put him behind the wheel on the highway, and he’d be driving like the devil with the rest of us.
On the road, I’ve been nearly sideswiped, tailgated, obscenely gestured at and cursed – and all this from my sweet 86-year-old neighbor. Once she tosses the homemade cookies and hand-knit booties for her friends at the nursing home into the back seat and slides behind the wheel, it’s like Linda Blair’s transformation in "The Exorcist." 
I’m not kidding. I feel like either purchasing a machine gun or kissing the parking lot when I get to work without a tow truck attached to my vehicle and a souvenir plastic wristband with my name and blood type.
I wonder if previous generations of drivers suffered likewise. For example, was trail-rage a problem on the Oregon Trail? Did the stagecoach drivers tailgate the slower oxcarts, the stage drivers waving their fists and screaming at the lousy oxcart drivers to crank it up to 4 miles per hour, buddy, or move it off the trail?
I shudder to think of the poor handcart-pushing Mormon pioneers on foot. I can just imagine the impatience of other, wagon-driving settlers, peering angrily around the handcarts, impatiently waiting for a break in foot traffic to gallop past them, dirt flying, horses neighing, drivers hurling invectives.
Trail rage seems to be human nature. I’ve seen all kinds of incredibly insane behavior from the same people who would rush into a burning building to save a scraggly kitten or send their last dollar to a Peruvian orphanage. But not when they’re behind the wheel of a car. 
Something happens in the driver's seat that’s as inexplicable as the Bermuda Triangle.  It’s as though the pounding urge of getting to one's destination as quickly as inhumanly possible overtakes all sensibility, rationality, and decency. Something else emerges, and it’s scary enough to make my vehicle want to curl up into a fetal ball and suck its turn indicator.  
From what I've experienced, the enraged road warrior – often bearing down on me in a quasi-tank pickup truck – would scrape me right off the highway if he could. This, of course, is why regulations don’t let automakers offer rocket launchers as factory-installed optional equipment.
And the cause of all that fury is likely to be something as heinous as your ludicrous practice of driving something approximating the posted speed limit. The enraged speedster will charge to within 1/16th of your back bumper and ride it for three miles until he can whoosh around you at Mach 3 and blast you with a look that could scorch the paint off your vehicle.
Another kind of highway insanity is the ornery driver who insistently putters five mph below the speed limit, despite the 300 cars snaking back and forth like a herd of race cars penned behind the pace car during a caution flag. But the headstrong motorist will mosey on in stone-faced oblivion to the misery in his or her wake. The only thing to do when this happens is to relax and use the time to shave your legs or put on make-up, fill your backseat and take a leisurely bath, or strap your pocket knife to your front wheel and practice your Ben Hur chariot-driving techniques.
Or there you are, rushing to work in the number one lane, doing around 70, when an 18-wheeler going 60 miles per hour pulls out in front of you to pass the semi doing 58 miles per hour in front of him. And the vehicular bully does this without a care because he’s bigger than you. So you slam on your brakes and plod along in fury behind the rude behemoth for the 15 minutes it takes him to overtake the truck beside him and lumber back into the number-two lane.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m an entirely sensible and rational driver, but gosh darn it! Where’s a grenade when you need one!  Maybe if I ride his bumper, he’ll get the point, and – “Hey, buddy, speed that thing up or move it over!”  It’s insane, I tell you.

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