HOW TO BEHAVE IN PUBLIC
No. 6
The Highway
By Nathan Floom
Somewhere along in my education (probably in a history textbook) I learned that the highway was created to better move land armies from one area of the country to the other. It was for planes to land in the event of an emergency. It was created to help the country move from one place to another as fast as possible. Whether this is completely true or not, I do not know. I see the highway as just another place where people are surrounded by each other. Separated by lane and car, yet still forced to interact and behave in their own way.
Anybody who has driven at night knows the feeling of freedom, of mobility. The road ahead, wide, flashing in the headlamps, a wide birth on each side. A sense of possibility flowing through the sound of the engine and the tires on the asphalt. Other times it is a lonely feeling, sometimes a crowded one.
The speed is the essential part of it all. We speed from one place to another as fast as possible. That’s partly the reason it was created after all: to speed along from one city to another, one state to another. The speed limit is designed to keep us safe, to tell us what is acceptable and what is not. The variations in speed occur in each and every one of us. As we move on to where we are going it changes. People behind us ride our tail. Push us to go faster or get out of the way. We must go the speed that is dictated by choice or move over. It is a personal choice, a sort of risk, about how we choose to get from one place to the next and how others around us push us to go the speed they are going. The highway is the place where the fast live faster and the slow can get left behind.
The highway is a sort of place where those going somewhere and going well on their way will fly, and others will be left by the way side. Where, exactly, are we going? The timid, the weak, the less fortunate, perhaps even the mild mannered—the right lane is for them. It is a sort of segregated land of those that know where they are going and what they are driving. Should those that live in the slow lane wander to the fast, they find it a place of hostility
Even worse than the speeders are the reckless. Those that text on their phones hurtle ahead like restless asteroids catapulting down their path oblivious to what is going on around them. Self involved and self important they look at their phones instead of what is all around. A denial of what is happening in the world or an indifference to the journey.
Around us are people doing other things in their cars—listening to music, changing the radio, drinking their coffee. Things that maybe we ourselves do sometimes. Attentiveness to the road is spread thin over a multitude of activities until the vehicle becomes something else, an office, a lunchroom, a smoker’s lounge. We try to focus our senses everywhere on the road by paying attention, but is it towards the right things? There is sometimes simply too much and distraction cannot be helped. The music, the drink, the text. The attention is not given to the fellow driver next to us, perhaps not given to the route ahead. It’s given to ourselves. Our rising impersonal actions towards our fellow beings are projecting themselves on the road and the way we drive. Inside each car is a person. A stranger we have no idea about or even what they are truly capable of.
All around us people fly by and we don’t know who they are or where they are going. Perhaps don’t even know ourselves. What have we forgotten while we are going to wherever we are going? What choices, methods, habits of driving, help us get there? We don’t know anything about anybody on the road. We only know as much as they let on. The highway allows us to go on our way side by side with people trapped in the cocoons of their cars. People just like us. We’re all heading somewhere, and we would do well to remember that the destination is just as important as the manner in which we arrive.
