I hate the winter in Arizona. To get to work, I have to drive through a very large retirement complex, eastbound in the morning and westbound in the evening. The road is very much a public road, but the geezers (I use the term lovingly, of course) who live in said retirement complex treat it as their own private property. Hardly a week doesn't go by without me being involved in a near-accident when one of them does something stupid, and practically every damn day I get stuck behind some guy in a Mr. Howell hat or visor cap going 25 in a 45 zone, and slowing down at every side street as though he intends to turn but psych goes straight.
If you read the letters-to-the-editor section of the local paper, you see a lot of these guys defending themselves in more or less the following manner: "I pay gas and sales taxes for the three months of the year that I live here, so I'm entitled to special treatment from the state, county and sundry citizens."
Got news for you, Slappy. I live here twelve months of the year, and have done so for my entire life, and I pay income taxes, gas taxes, sales taxes and heaven knows what other taxes for twelve months out of the year, and I have to put up with your terrible driving all winter, dodging golf carts and maneuvering around behemoth RVs that weave from lane to lane like drunken sperm whales and fuming in impotent rage as I creep along behind some guy doing twenty-under with his fedora on the package shelf of his car. Why am I not entitled to special treatment?
If you find my attitude ungrateful, you can pack up your stuff and go back to Minnesota and leave the public roadways open for those of us who really live here and need to use the roads to do such irrelevant things as, say, going to work.
I imagine the same thing happens elsewhere. One year my wife and I went to Montana to see her old stomping grounds in the Mission Valley, roughly between Missoula and Polson. Highway 93 in this part of Montana is no great shakes; it's a scribbly two-lane thing on a raised embankment that guarantees that any off-road excursions will require the services of a very large tow truck to make right - you go off the road and you end up in a ditch about ten feet below road level. And that highway is positively foul with RVs and campers hauling ass at high speed (no daytime speed limit, woohoo, we can go 90 miles per hour if we want!) in densely packed convoys as they head for Glacier National Park, awning a-flap and heat-ruined tires flying apart. Driving on that highway requires a certain relaxation in one's sense of mortality - just getting onto the highway in the first place is tricky and requires nerves of steel and lots and lots of horsepower under the hood.
It must drive the locals half-mad, seeing their basically rural highway get turned into a high-speed RV raceway like that.
Is That All?
11 years ago
4 comments:
But those are the locals, sir! Don't you know all us Montanas drive a million miles an hour in big-ass RVs on narrow roads? One false move and you've rolled over into the bar ditch.
I gather you're feeling better. Glad to have you writing so much of late. I'm really enjoying it.
Locals with Idaho, Washington and Arizona license plates, maybe?? We were driving in Polson and some locals in a pickup truck yelled "Go home!" at us. I found that pretty amusing, since I've thought (if not yelled) the same thing many times.
I'm feeling better. Not entirely normal, but much better, yes! Thank you!
Yes, we regularly change our license plates to keep visitors confused. I imagine it will take a bit for you to feel completely normal. Love the whisker pic!
Michael said the folks in the pickup were from the Polson Chamber of Commerce.
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