You Know Who You Are

During the snowfall, with accidents dotting the traffic map and people slewing about the road like open auditions for "Bullitt II" were in effect all over town, you came sailing up behind me, going a good twenty miles per hour faster than me, as I pulled up behind a line of stopped cars on a local arterial.

You were waving your arms and gesticulating like the crack-sotted cabbie you may have been in a previous life - or may be in your next, with the karma you generated yesterday - but you're driving a Blazer, and the outline of a tie was silhouetted against the angles of your white dress shirt in the rear-view mirror, so you don't have that excuse.

As I started going through the light, you swerved around and passed me on the right, sailing down the slushy morass of a semi-open lane as if it were mid-July and you were driving on roads baked for weeks by the summer sun, dry enough that your spit would stick.

The biggest irony, I thought, was that in what passes for your "mind", you probably consider yourself a "good driver" - in fact, the very miserable driving habits you exhibited probably contribute to your vehicular id, creating the exaggerated sense of confidence in your own ability - no, in your competence as a driver that bids you to drive like such a completely irredeemable moron.

Watching you sail around the ramp ahead and slosh to a shuddering halt two inches behind a minivan 30 yards in front of me, I remembered my most wonderful encounter with a driver just like you...

< harps and fuzzy flashback graphics >

It was after the Thanksgiving Blizzard of 1991 - which was a doozy, but has been largely forgotten since it followed four weeks after the memorable Halloween Blizzard. I, my wife (at the time), stepson and infant daughter were driving back from an anniversary party. It was -15, late at night, with a bitter wind, and the roads were still atrocious, with even the "passable" lane on 694 feeling a little tender. I was doing perhaps 45mph, like all of the sensible traffic that night.

A driver in a Ford Bronco came sailing up behind me, doing at least 60. It slowed down behind me, flashed its high beams a few times - and then swerved into the passing lane.

It blew past, gunning its engine petulantly, and sailed about a quarter of a mile ahead of me - up to behind the next car, also doing about 45. The Bronco started repeating the drill - the dramatic slowdown, the flipping high-beams, the acceleration...

...when he got to the swerve, though, things went drastically wrong. He caught a bit of ice, swerved to the left, caught just enough pavement to allow him to lurch back to the right, where he hit ice again. He spun 360 degrees to the right, and kept going as he skidded over the icy shoulder, turning end-around again as he plopped into the snow-clotted ditch.

And I'll bet anything that, as he sat there in the ditch, he was bitching about all those other crappy drivers...

< end flashback >

So, to clarify:

• No, you are not a good driver.
• You are, in fact, merely working out some form of personal crisis or inadequacy via your behavior on the road.
• That being said, you are still scum.
• If, by some chance, your behavior should cause you to slide into my back bumper, they will find the long, thin strips into which I will have torn you, arranged to spell "BAD DRIVER" on the pavement next to your vehicle.

That is all.

Posted by Mitch at January 28, 2004 06:02 AM