Only Mostly Red

As he fell slowly into sleep, Pippin had a strange feeling: he and Gandalf were still as stone, seated upon the statue of a running horse, while the world rolled away beneath his feet with a great noise of wind.
-The Two Towers, J.R.R. Tolkien




I am a lousy driver, but unlike most of my fellow Americans, who are pretty much all lousy drivers, I know I’m a lousy driver and that makes me an excellent driver. At least that’s the way I see it.

You see, we are taught defensive driving; to look out for the other guy. But that’s only half the job. I do look out for the other guy but I also look out for yet another guy who while driving has little use for lane management and an attention span shorter than Michael Jackson’s restraint at a Cub Scout swim party. (Too soon?) This other guy I look out for is me. So I’m doing twice the work out there and I think that makes me a better driver. It certainly makes me a snobbish driver. Yes, I’m a lousy driver but I good at it.

I’m writing about driving because I think about it a lot, especially when I’m driving. I wonder why there is traffic. Why do we group together like packs of wandering, colliding dogs who weave back and forth from one dumpster to the next, from one odor to the next, instead of like school of fish who move in perfect synchronicity without so much as touching, just inches from one another? Why is it that on the highway we change from a smooth-as-silk flock of starlings into a mosh pit as soon as someone puts out an orange cone? And of course I wonder why is it that the last guy to see the red light turn green is the guy at the front of the line?

My commute is 22 miles. About 13%, just under 3 miles, of it is urban. The rest is rural. The urban part, the part with traffic lights, is on one road in a straight line. There are 14 traffic lights along this 13%. I can’t remember ever hitting two green ones in a row. I’d bet good money that I hit at least 10 of them red every day. I can get to work in 25 minutes, but 10 of those minutes are spent on lucky 13.

Then one day something changed. One morning I was rolling along, fully expecting to be brought to a halt at the first of my 14 intersections where a blackjack dealer traffic light would be dishing out reds, yellow, greens, and LED arrows like cards from the bottom of the deck. I expected to be sitting at the limit line of the crosswalk seeing red and seeing red. But when I got to the light it was only mostly red. What I mean is it was flashing red.

Suddenly the place that up until that moment had every morning been a noisy, helter-skelter, mishmash of steel and exhaust, brake lights and turn signals, and angry, frustrated drivers, had turned into quite, self-organized, self-governed crossroads. You stop first, you go first. What could be more democratic, more just plain fair than that? I waited my turn and then went.

I made my way to the next intersection refreshed and with a renewed faith in my fellow man. Then surprise number two reared up. The next light was flashing red too, and the next, and the next, and so on for eight lights. Gone were the malevolent traffic dictators, hanging over each junction like Wells’ Martian tripods, judging who will stop and who will go. Banished to a dull memory was the technology that enslaved us to the rule of the painted line and the clicking workings of the steel box on the corner that held the antiquated computer system. Released into the wild were the wolf packs. Erased were the short attention span exploiting mash of static reds, greens, and yellows that held prisoner those unlucky enough to be caught third, forth, or worse in line.

Every intersection had magically become a four way stop but the magic didn’t stop there. Through this same magic I became the sleepy 7-year-old in the third seat of my father's Bel Air station wagon, rolling through flashing red lights, as all lights became after midnight back then, coming home from the drive-in after seeing Ice Station Zebra.

Like a teen-aged virgin with his new license, alone behind the wheel for the first time, the world was open for me through my windshield and all possibilities presented themselves with abandon. I had no past as a motorists, only a future. The road became a faint, smooth black river without rapids or rocks, flowing out behind me.

The Taco Bells, McDonald’s, IHOPs, bus stops, and motorcycle shops blurred into a Monet’s Lilies pastel slurry of colors and streaks across my side windows. My grip on the wheel became loose and comfortable, like a batter just before he hits a solid single just over third base, allowing my knuckles to regain some of their color. I had reached the Zen of the commute. A place I only dared conjure up in my most fog-addled dreams. A place that has no place in the California Vehicle Code.

But alas, my Shangri La was gone on the return commute. The immortality it brings only lasting for a short while. When I got back to what now was the final 13% of my drive, all the lights had been “repaired” and everything was too large, too loud, and too much. Had anyone else seen what I had seen? Were the people locked in their “shiny metal boxes” all around me feeling as violated as I from having that all too brief glimpse of paradise stolen from them while they toiled away the work day?

The row of flashing reds has not returned. Whatever work was being done that necessitated their existence has most likely been completed. Now it’s back to a stressful commute that kills me a little every day. Now I am detained at nearly every intersection like I’m a traveler in a totalitarian regime where at any moment there might be a knocking on my window and a dark and shady man saying, “Papers please.” Now the radio seems to only play lousy Aerosmith elevator songs and the CD player only plays the soft beep that alerts me that it isn’t working.

Please bring back the flashing reds. Please return me to the mystical land of stress free driving and a surprise Jeff Beck song on the radio. Tear out the skulking traffic lights and replace them with zero-energy stop signs, not just on my 13% but around town, up and down the State, and across the country. Let us rule ourselves, for we have seen the promise land and it is Shaw Avenue from Fruit to Golden State.