Unsafe At Any Speed

I don’t consider myself a slow driver.

In fact, there are times when I’m certain that those tickets the Utah Highway Patrol, Nevada Highway Patrol, New Mexico Highway Patrol, and Colorado Highway patrol have offered me were very well deserved.

I still hate them.

But that doesn’t mean they weren’t deserved.

Still, my morning commute from Bountiful down to the city has taught me that I am probably not in danger of getting any future tickets. Apparently Utahns, more so then Megadeth ever did, like their speed.

That was a little drug/music humor.

Fine then, don’t laugh!

More and more, and not because of my increasing age (Last Day is only 1 year, 5 months and 10 days away), I have found myself moving from the Ultra-Fast-Lane, to the Middle Lane and today I spent the entire commute in the far right lane, otherwise reserved for people who prefer to go ten to twenty miles under the posted speed limit.

I was not under the limit.

I wasn’t even doing the limit.

I kept checking my speedometer to make certain that my velocity was sufficient for the highway, and could only shake my head as Utahns zoomed past me, shaking their fists as if my being far left was somehow impeding their ability to pass on the right.

I’m certain I read that somewhere.

Like in the Utah Driver’s Handbook.

But maybe it’s been updated in the last year. It would make sense, since some people insist on doing ten-under in the far left lane.

You know, the one specifically labeled by Einstien and Evil Kineval for faster then light travel.

I asked a few of my friends outside the state of Utah, and almost everyone agrees that Utahn’s, while also notorious for their strange religious and marriage practices, are also heralded as some of the worst drivers in the nation.

I think most of them are my friends.

I have adopted, while driving with some of my friends, an attitude of the extreme scenery watcher. I have even considered bringing a camera with me to take pictures of the scenery. This way, I can’t see the accident that my friend’s seem to narrowly avoid at every turn and lane-change.

One of my oldest friends, Mandi, once took me around a blind corner, in the wrong lane, at fifteen miles over the speed limit, in someone else’s car. Mandi liked to describe cars mostly based on the speed she felt she could achieve with them; usually around Mach 6.

She wondered why I bailed out.

Hit the ground rolling friends, it does indeed break the fall.

She also seems to like to see if a sixteen-foot car will actually fit into a twelve foot gap, and pretends not to notice when other cars stop in front of her at red lights. What’s worse is that, as she informed me, she feels that her own husband is a worse driver.

Now, I must admit that once I was involved in a car accident. Completely not my fault.

Honest dad!

Don’t all of these stories start out with, “Well, my dad had this new car . . .”?

Sadly, for it offends my desire to be semi-original, mine starts that way. Only my father believed that anything not the size of a small aircraft carrier, wasn’t really worth his time. Dad bought a Ford F-150 SuperCab with an extended bed, thus insuring that the vehicle could affect the tides.

I was 16.

The Ford was a stick shift.

Normally, since I learned to drive in the wide-open and populace-lacking state of Nevada, this isn’t necessarily the instant recipe for disaster and/or comedic hi-jinx that one would think. But then one has never met my family.

Flying in the face of convention, while backing up, I was able to hit a bus.

Pretty impressive eh?

Well, my father, years later, would repay me, by backing my own vehicle off the side of side of a mountain. Depending on who tells the story, we then had to walk anywhere from five to five-thousand miles along the Trail of Tears which aged both my father and the family dog by about ten years.

The dog survived, but was leery about joining anyone except my mother in the car again.