DRIVER'S SIDE DIATRIBE
By Al Vinikour    

Recently we had a lot of rain. I started having flashbacks to those thrilling days I spent on Guam during monsoon season. (And no, no matter what the locals think we weren’t seeding clouds with B-52s from Andersen AFB.) As luck would have it we had to drive about 40 minutes to the home of my beloved twin-grandsons for a Memorial Day cookout.

Along the way we encountered some areas with power outages. There are a lot of major intersections on our drive route and luckily, with few exceptions, the stoplights were still functioning. However some of them weren’t and were to be treated as four-way stops.

I have no problem with that because it’s a safety issue. The law is basically “here we go round the mulberry bush.” Each person takes turn in a counterclockwise rotation because traffic to the right generally, if not always, has the right-of-way.

No problem with that, either — at least for me! Try telling that to those waffle heads who see the car in front of them go and try to draft it like they’re in a NASCAR race so they don’t have to wait any longer to make it across the intersection. People like that should be stripped naked and forced to perform community service picking roses and trimming cactus.

I try to come up with an answer as to what could possibly cause someone to act that stupidly and I keep coming up with the same conclusion: they’re stupid. Just once I’d like to see this Fraternal Order of Jerks board member try this stunt when there’s a Western Star 18-wheeler to his right; an 18-wheeler Freightliner to the right of the Western Star; and an 18-wheeler Peterbilt twin-stack diesel to the right of the Freightliner. A quick turn by any of the three Knights of the Highway and this guy’s next interview will be with St. Peter. And heaven help (pun intended) this idiot if St. Peter belonged to the Teamsters at some point during his mortal lifetime.

Another phenomenon I noticed while driving through this heavy rain was how many drivers are oblivious to driving directly into puddles you could launch the U.S.S. Michigan in. Unless you’re driving an Amphicar…and just who is anymore?...your ship isn’t going to sail…and all those behind you aren’t going anywhere that doesn’t involve making a U-turn, either.

Outer lanes tend to gather water and when there’s no place for them to go they head towards the center. If you can see water build-up in the center lanes then you can bet your wet ass you’ll have to slow down dramatically or face being a prospective target for enemy U-Boats.

Even if someone is lucky enough to ford (no pun intended) a stream, most aren’t smart enough to test their brakes when they emerge on “dry land.” The first time they go to stop quickly they’re going resemble my neighbor’s horny dog as it proceeds to hop on any living “vehicle” he stumbles upon. Personally, I don’t see anything exciting about the ass of a Buick…but try telling that to your brakeless Honda.

There was something else I watched during that deluge and if I didn’t have compassion for all those poor bastards who are in the wrong place at the wrong time I would have by the end of the day. Even as heavy as it was raining, some were braving the downpour to walk on the sidewalk or side of the road to run errands to the supermarket, convenience store or wherever else they needed to go sans car. Those people who continued driving at a higher rate of speed in the right-hand lane experienced the vehicular equivalent of flying an F-4C napalm strike.

At least a dozen times I saw water swoop off the street like a wave on the north coast of Hawaii. I can only hope that all of them didn’t have original copies of the Declaration of Independence in an envelope they were taking to Show and Tell because they might as well have been diving into the YMCA swimming pool.

Nothing within 10 miles of them remained dry. The pedestrians could all have had beach umbrellas and they still wouldn’t have remained dry! I could relate to those poor people because once when I was a teenager I was walking to a friend’s house and was wearing a brand new pair of white jeans (which were in style then…they helped camouflage one from dinosaurs). Just like a heat-seeking missile, some guy aimed for a mud puddle and hit me amidships. I never did find out who did that but I could only hope he was the guy struck and killed later that day by a Grand Trunk Western locomotive.

The point of this rant, boys and girls, is to suggest all of you use common sense when it comes to weather. Other than pickups driven by Helen Hunt or Bill Paxton, I don’t see anyone rushing towards huge funnel clouds; People are in no hurry to drive willy-nilly through a winter white-out; and I don’t see drivers hurtling themselves towards close-by lightning strikes.

What do all three of these examples have in common? Common Sense! Why should rainy-day driving be any different? Wise up, the world is your oyster…so don’t shuck yourself.