The road to perdition may be only four lanes, but at least it’s paved.
The speed limit is 65, You’re driving 68, but traffic passes you on all sides like you’re stuck in subwarp. Cars and the occaisional motorcycle streak by with the rest, but the real low flyers are pickups piloted chiefly by men who, one cannot help but surmise, work more with their hands than with their minds.
Pickups loaded down with sacks of cement and mortar, stacks of sod, bricks, piles of sand, 4 x 4 fence posts and pickets, lumber and PVC pipe, electric welders, cement mixers, ditching machines, wheelbarrows, wood-chippers, lawnmowers and yard tractors, Bobcats, chain saws, ladders, shovels, rakes, hoes, pickaxes, aluminum windows, car hoods, rolls of barbed wire, chain-link fence, cabinets, small trees, bales of hay, statues of the Virgin Mary, and tombstones of shiny black granite. All of it shagging down the highway at 80. Sometimes more.
The dreadnoughts of the road are huge super-sized diesel pickups with double cabs and tandem rear wheels locally referred to as “doobies”. They bully their way along the lanes menacing cars in front of them with imminent mounting-- doggy-style. But it’s not all just testosterone. Young women fly by piloting low-flying SUV’s in a manner that is shockingly ballistic. You can see the infants stuffed in trapeze-like car seats and the cabbage-round silhouettes of older siblings popped up like toast in the seats. Can it be they’ve not heard of the instability of SUV’s when swerving or braking at high speeds? Are they suicidal? Are they trying to bequeath some beloved survivor a multimillion dollar wrongful death settlement? Or is it just that being late today is a matter of life-and-death?
Lately known as Bubbas, lightheartedly referred to by Jerry Clower and others by the traditional name of Rednecks, these are my people. I grew up with them, live among them, am kin to them, but I cannot vouch for them as motorists. The most I can say is that they don’t suffer so much from stupidity as from a consistent weakness of judgment at points where their desires come into conflict with petty legalities. To them traffic laws are just another type of odious bureaucracy, like fishing licenses, hunting restrictions, and impediments to urgent marriages or divorces.
Who does not remember with opprobrium the hated double nickel speed limits of the Granny Carter gas shortage epoch, the CB radio and radar detector days when life was an ongoing road war against Smoky lying up in ambush under the overpass with a radar gun aimed at your grill? Insurance companies and consumer safety lobbyists be damned to hell, Texas will secede before it goes back to double nickels.
With the new automatic lights on in daylight making the stream of traffic resemble some kind of mass funeral procession on amphetamines, it all seems somehow surrealistic. I have been on the Autobahn at super-centennial speeds with maniac Germans, and even worse ridden with a Spaniard once in Madrid, but this is something else entirely. The Autobahn is the Bonneville Salt Flats compared to Redneck Highway; on Redneck Highway things are intimate, like at Taladega or Daytona. Those Dale Earnhardt memorial decals are not on there for laughs. We are talking about a belief system here, a code. If God had meant you to poke along at 65 MPH he wouldn’t a given you all that horsepower, now would he? If you don’t want to go fast, then get out of the way. That’s what they make service roads for. Not shoulders though. Those are for passing.
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