Drive, she said

I suspect Maine has the politest drivers in the country. They are forever stopping to let people in (indeed, I sometimes get annoyed with this gallantry. ‘Come on,’ I’ll fume, “let’s get on with it.’ But then, I’m probably the rudest driver in Maine.) They don’t honk, or yell out the window at you, or shoot you the finger. They stop if a pedestrian even looks like s/he wants to cross the street. I compare this last quality with the drivers in Boston (possibly the country’s worst), who seem engaged in a perennial war with pedestrians.

You encounter relatively few people driving around convinced that they have the god-given right to inflict there music on the rest of the world, and most of them are in the “big city” of Portland. It used to drive me crazy in Colorado Springs, in San Antonio, in Abilene (God, especially in Abilene), all the jerks so damned indifferent to the concept of consideration for others. You could hear the bass from their car radios blocks away. I'm sure wherever you live you get treated to this sort of thing all too often.

There isn't even very much traffic to contend with here in the great state of Maine. Indeed, the fact that traffic is relatively light throughout Maine is one of its attractions for me. I’ve long held that traffic is one of the true curses of modern life. It frays our tempers, raises our stress levels, eats up great quantities of our valuable time, as well as great quantities of that oil that has gotten so expensive. (Aside: I can’t help but feel the silver lining to the rise in gas prices situation is that it has forced many people to reconsider their gas-guzzling SUVs that should never have been invented. Actually, there are two silver linings: people are now taking the concept of alternative forms of energy seriously.)

But what's a body to do? We have to drive, immerse ourselves in that monster, Traffic, in order to get to work, to school, to the store, the doctor's office, our parents in the old folks home, etc., etc. Admittedly there is that wacky concept, public transporation, that I am such a big supporter of, especially the kind, like subways and trains, that do not add to the traffic on the streets. But not everyplace in the U.S. was foresighted enough to build those kinds of systems; and even places that do have public transportation, usually have a lot of traffic anyway. There are just a whole lot of us, and we all have cars, and we all have lots of things to do, lots of places to go. Wherever you live, you probably have to contend with heavy traffic some part of every day.

I'm lucky; I don’t. A number of things wrong with my life these days, but that ain’t one of them. Oh, being the demon of impatience that I am behind the wheel I may get irritated on my ten-minute commute from Gardiner to Hallowell, if I get stuck behind someone who insists on going the speed limit, but that doesn't always happen, and I can always take the back roads between here and there, that tack on three or four minutes, but are aggravation-free because nobody but me is usually on them.

I’ve been in Maine this second time around almost three years now. And slowly but surely the penchant for driving with courtesy is rubbing off on me. Today I even let somebody in.