Story #1
During one of my many cross-nation wanderings, I had a couple experiences that I never wish to repeat, even though their outcomes were relatively pleasant, all things being considered. On this particular occasion, rather than taking the bus, which remains my preferred mode of transportation, I thought that driving would be better since I had plans to see a great deal and didn’t have the usual three weeks of vacation time available to see everything or everyone that I wanted to visit. Therefore, I gassed up the car, left my cat with a neighbor, and hit the open road bound for destinations unknown.
At the time, I was driving a beat up 1979 Cutlass station wagon with a 305 V-8 engine, a fresh oil change, and 2 missing hubcaps. This was the kind of car that couldn’t look pretty no matter how much you washed it, with its faux wood-grain side panels and the telltale rusting that immediately gives one away as a Northerner. Yet in spite of its rugged good looks (ahem), the car was really dependable and mechanically sound. This heap of shit could go from zero to 90 mph in under a minute, and at very high rates of speed, the ride felt no different than if one was idling through a crowded school zone on a weekday afternoon. In a car that heavy, one just doesn’t feel the road. This first story takes place, however, somewhere well above that 90 mph mark along a flat stretch of highway in the Arizona desert.
Leaving Nevada by way of Hwy 95 south to Hwy 93 south, one crosses right over the Hoover Dam, or damned close to it, on your way into Arizona. This leg of the trip is replete with panoramic visions that include long stretches of sandy desert, tar-black highway, and blue horizons. If images of lush greenery are what you’re after, take the northern route home. There isn’t much vegetation around there or anything else for that matter, unless you consider other travelers or tractor-trailers as sights to see. I don’t know exactly what amenities are available today, but 13 years ago, there still wasn’t much of that either, and refilling the car with fuel at every opportunity was still a good idea, especially if you drove a gas-guzzler like the Olds Cutlass.
It is important to point out that driving long stretches at a time has a hypnotic effect. One loses track of time, space, and the speedometer after spending a few hours on the open highway. One gets lulled into a sense of comfort or meditative detachment from road signs, speed limits, and things found along the shoulder of the road. The only people I encountered driving under the speed limit or even anywhere near it, were old Native Americans in battered old, vintage pick-up trucks that couldn’t go any faster that 45 or 50 mph anyhow without incurring serious motor or body damage. Now, I am normally a very conscientious and defensive driver. I am not wealthy enough to afford speeding tickets, accidents, and the higher insurance premiums that follow. So for me to be caught traveling at unusually high rates of speed would mean that I was under some kind of voodoo spell or somnambulistic trance. That aforementioned hypnotic effect found a willing victim that day on a lonely stretch of Arizona highway.
I really had know no idea how fast I was going at the time. I only remember coming up on a steep incline, arriving at the top, riding the ‘roller coaster’ down as hard as I could, and then and only then spotting an Arizona state trooper, in a supped-up Mustang 5.0, waiting for me right over the next ridge. I knew right then that I was busted, and without hesitation, pulled over even before he turned on his flashers. I must say that police car was quite a sight, equipped with all the latest gadgets and though it was a dark midnight blue in color, the glare of the semi-fluorescent finish was blinding if the sun hit it at just the right angle. One also never fails to notice the shotgun anchored to the middle of the dashboard either. Maybe they do that more for effect than convenience. Maybe the convenience itself elicits the effect.
As far as being pulled over in a strange place while driving a beat up car with out-of-state plates and traveling at an incredibly high rate of speed, things could have gone much worse for me. I have heard some horror stories about traffic stops gone wrong, and I did not want to survive or be killed trying to live through something like those. As it turned out, I had nothing to fear. The officer was very professional and friendly. I think the patrolman was in his late 20s, with a police regulation brush cut, carefully trimmed moustache, and wore stereotypical highway cop sunglasses tinted so dark that even Ray Charles might be afraid to wear them. As he stepped out from his Mustang and walked toward my car, he asked me to have my license and registration available, and then to step out from the vehicle onto the shoulder of the road. Each request prefaced with a “Sir, if you don’t mind” or a “Please” and as I complied with the officer’s orders, he would always thank me for cooperating peacefully. I never got that kind of courtesy from my own family!
It was a hot day. Those are the norm in Arizona, it seems. Just a few minutes in the sun lets you know who is the real boss in the desert, and it is not humanity. Standing out exposed to the Arizona sun has never proven to be an effective means of cooling off, so once the officer ascertained that I was not drunk, nor a physical threat, and had no outstanding warrants, he asked me to sit with him inside the air-conditioned patrol car while he wrote up the ticket. That was very generous of him. I was still very nervous in spite of his professional demeanor and as I am wont to do when highly agitated, I begin telling jokes. I do not remember which jokes I told, but the officer did seem to enjoy the comedy, and remarked that of all the traffic stops he’s ever made, no one had ever used jokes as a defense mechanism before.
I explained to the officer about the hypnotic effect, that I had been driving for several hours and lost track of the speed, and he understood how that worked, being long hours on the road himself day in and day out. He told me that I had been clocked, according his radar, going 123 mph! My speedometer only goes to 115, and I was amazed my old car would travel that fast and not fall apart! Anyway, since I was such a good sport and joke teller, he would write a ticket for going 20 over the limit rather than the 60 over that I was going. The difference was about $100.00 in fines and a possible charge of reckless driving. He offered me a few good tips on where to eat and what to see, and we made some small chit chat about my destination. I thanked him, signed the ticket, placed it in my pocket, and continued through Arizona and most of New Mexico at the designated speed limit. That was, however, until I came to the realization that highway travel always seems to win over even the most cautious of drivers, and my earlier experience in Arizona had taught me nothing in the way of slowing down and avoiding the eyes of law enforcement.
Story #2
Route 40 across the southern USA takes you through New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Tennessee, eventually dumping you somewhere in North Carolina. The Texas-Oklahoma leg of this trip is boring, unless your idea of excitement consists of ‘all you can eat’ steakhouses, oil derricks, the smell of fresh manure, and titty bars. So in a short time, my recent run in with the Arizona highway patrol became completely overshadowed by the tediousness of the Texas landscape, and my psyche once again kicked into that hyper-trance that catches you asleep at the helm and traveling way over the posted speed limits.
Listening to the radio doesn’t help break up the dullness of a long highway. Before the days of 24-disc CD changers and satellite radio, the only other sounds you could get from your car while traveling across the USA were Christian evangelists damning you to Hell, bad country music, static, or a mechanical problem 200 miles from anyone who can fix it. Unless you have a car full of kids to play the ‘license plate game’, or a pretty woman to keep your attention, the monotony of driving long distance will inevitably entrance you into submission. Gallons of coffee will only increase your awareness of this hard fact, refill a freshly emptied bladder, and have absolutely no dampening effect on your susceptibility to its tranquilizing influence. Resistance is futile.
Now somewhere between Albuquerque NM and Amarillo TX, there is a little burg called Vega. This town is so obscure that, even today, 13 years later; Yahoo Maps does not know where it is. In fact, I am not even sure that I remember exactly where it is, but I do remember how I came to be there. I was speeding again and was invariably trapped in the intricate web that is the Texas Highway Patrol. This patrol officer, however, was very different from the professional and educated gendarme I encountered in Arizona, as was the entire experience of this traffic stop overall.
I pulled over at the first sign of the patrolman, and just like in the previous day’s incident, I retrieved my license and registration and waited for the officer to approach the vehicle. Firstly, his patrol car was not the flashy new Mustang with all the latest crime-fighting gadgets available to modern law enforcement that I beheld not 24 hours earlier. This car was a 1974 Plymouth Newport Sedan with the words “Vega Police” hand scrawled over a sun-blotched and badly retouched paint job. There was a loudspeaker in the car, but when the officer spoke into the microphone all I heard was garbled static. There was a single globe atop the car, and since he never used it, I was seriously doubtful that worked either. I started to get a very bad feeling somewhere between my stomach and my testicles. We have all heard stories about Texas jails and country sheriffs, and I imagined myself at that moment caught up in a remake of ‘Deliverance’ or “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” , thinking that those stories are borne out of a sheriff's revenge upon a society unwilling to provide adequate funding for a better car.
Out from this raggedy patrol car stepped a tall, somber looking, leather-skinned man in his mid-50s that had obviously spent too much time in the sun and smoked way too many Marlboros. He was wearing cowboy boots, two revolvers, dark sunglasses, and a cowboy hat with his tarnished silver badge pinned right smack in the middle of it. He strolled in that well-recognized, bowed-legged cowboy fashion up to my driver side window, and as I tried to hand him my information, he said “Foller me to see the Judge”, turned around and got back in his car without uttering another syllable. If the crazy thoughts I was having prior to this weren’t scaring the shit out of me already, following a sheriff off the highway to see a ‘hangin’ judge, in a town with two cows, a lame horse, and three saloons at the edge of nowhere, certainly brought out the dread in me. Normally, the officer issues the ticket on the roadside, gives you some instructions for safe travel, and then you head back on your way to somewhere. I’d never seen this before. I envisioned Rod Serling (of Twilight Zone fame) standing somewhere at the edge of the road, smoking his trademark cigarette and narrating in his off-beat and cynical manner a story of the inevitable and ironic demise of a lone highway traveler along a blistering piece of hot Texas asphalt.
The drive from the highway to the courthouse took about 10 minutes, and most of that obscured by the dust rising up from the road, kicked up by the sheriff’s car in front of me. Never attempt sightseeing from a dry dirt road on a hot and windy Texas afternoon. There isn’t much worth viewing anyhow. Once we arrived at the courthouse, the sheriff escorted me into a stuffy and humid anteroom, handed me a slip of paper and told me to wait until the Judge called for me. He then went back to wherever the Judge was and most likely informed him or her that yet another Yankee scoundrel had been ensnared while violating the good sense of the common folk, and was awaiting a sentence of forced labor, anal rape, or execution in the next room. As I lingered there in mild panic, I finally understood the meaning of ‘eternity’. My only companion was an old steel desk fan that rattled when it began to oscillate back in the opposite direction, and that sound was what kept me grounded in reality for the moment.
All at once, a woman’s voice boomed out from the back room, hurling curses and miscellaneous explicative at someone or something that I could not see from my vantage point. I did hear other sounds, too; a box being hastily ripped open, and the plastic-like scrape and thud that one gets when wrestling with a problem-ridden Xerox machine. As it turns out, my auditory senses were correct and, in fact, it was the Judge who was doing the yelling and stomping because she couldn’t get a copier to work! Apparently, the town of Vega has just been sold a copier that wasn’t cooperating, and in Vega, the first rule of thumb is that one must cooperate fully. My day was not getting any better. Now the judge is angry, too!
I really don’t know what came over me at that moment, but I stood up, and walked right back into the Judge’s office right into the heat of the technological commotion. The Judge didn’t even notice my entrance. She was positioned with her back to the door, standing in front of the copier, checking the outlet, lifting the cover, repositioning the original, and hammering away at the control panel in obvious frustration with the whole process; all the while cursing the womb that bore the crooked salesperson who convinced the Vega City Council to purchase it. She was an older woman, grey haired and sturdily built, with no air of sophistication or pretense about her. I paused for a moment and then spoke up, saying “Excuse me Ma’am. I have some experience with these things. Is there any way I could help?” She stepped back from the machine, waved me along towards it, and went into the next room, where upon I tapped the paper tray into its proper position and the machine began spitting out the copies she had been so desperately trying to produce for the last hour and a half.
I gathered the copies from the machine, straightened them up, and carried them over to the Judge, who was by now, already seated in the anteroom where I had been confined not five minutes earlier, inhaling an unfiltered cigarette, drumming her thick fingers on the desk, and reading the sheriff’s complaint against me. She didn’t smile, didn’t look up, and didn’t say ‘thank you’. She announced in her authoritarian Judge-voice, “Since you helped me, I’ll help you”, and she tore up the ticket and placed it in the wastebasket. “Have a good day.” I thanked her and left, happy to have escaped from the possibility of serving time in a Texas jail or becoming the victim of a real-life B horror flick nightmare.
Not a talkative bunch those Vega folks. Oh well. I suppose it was better to have said too little than too much.
I did not stop for anything else until the “You Are Now Leaving Texas” road sign was well out of sight. The rest of my trip was remarkably uneventful. Thankfully.
