Civility at the Crossroads

Last week I was driving Interstate 95 through Massachusetts and Rhode Island, on my way to New Jersey. Giant big rigs consumed the road, and most of the drivers—truckers and commuters, even plain old travelers—seemed to think they were the most important ones zooming along the tarmac, or, at best, they were lost in their own private bubbles.

One guy rides my tail for miles; another rages in and out of the speeding stream, passing on the right even when no one’s in the left-hand lane.
Good thing I love to drive—although I’m hard-pressed to figure out where I got that gene since my mother never learned to drive, and didn’t want to, and my father was a terrible driver, who swore right up to his last driving days that he didn’t need to use a blinker.

But Dad was raised in a time when the world wasn’t driving 75 miles an hour or more, talking on cell phones, and listening to the radio, while drinking coffee.

I learned to drive in a large city, taking lessons at a driving school—not from my dad. I got a few years of urban driving under my belt and then moved to a no-stoplight town, where, I’ve always said, you needed to teach kids to drive one-handed because they would be waving at almost every car or truck they passed. It’s also likely that they’d know the person sitting behind the wheel. It made everyone acutely aware that how you conducted yourself impacted others. When you chose to cross the line, you knew it was a choice.

Recently I was reading an op-ed piece that described how George Washington copied out a list of 110 rules of civility and decent behavior. It said that some of these rules had to do with the etiquette of dinner parties and meeting people on the street. No cars then, or driving would definitely have been included. The article went on to comment that basic courtesy is becoming a thing of the past.

Each of us probably has our own vision of how to correct that—and I’m sure we’d all want it corrected if we thought about it. Here’s how I’d start: I’d send everyone to the intersection of Garland and Essex Streets in Bangor. It’s a four-way stop without a light.

This morning I slid on up behind a pickup truck at the stop sign. It was raining. Again. A city bus idled at one corner, and a spiffy little black sports car at the other. Each of us knows the order in which we have arrived and has calculated the order in which we must depart. It’s amazing. When someone doesn’t take right off, no one honks. No one jumps the gun.
Drivers at this crossroads seem to understand that when we respect others we respect ourselves. I drive this route multiple times a week—and I have never been disappointed.

The rain is pelting our windshields, the wipers are furiously at work, and each one of us may be in our own worlds—of music or conversation, perhaps reviewing the business of the day. It’s likely that I don’t know any of the people in these vehicles. Actually, I rarely recognize anybody here.

But no matter our other needs, we all step outside our personal bubbles and do what we know is right, taking our turn. Politely.