Letters to the Editor
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Wonderful!
A wonderful reminiscence of bygone days. Thanks for the memories. I wonder how many of the complainers are driving 5 star crash rated vehicles, and if they aren't why aren't they?
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Gotta agree with the people who are telling you to slow down.
I work in an ICU unit of a trauma hospital. Every day I see the long and sad consequences of people driving stupidly. It's not just if you kill someone. The people who live because of someone's stupid decisions have a long and hard road back to any kind of normal life. Yes, the writing is good, but your actions are not.
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JQuest
Why do you wonder if the complainers are driving 5 star crash rated vehicles? Why should that matter?
Some people can't afford newer vehicles with great safety features. My car has the best safety features I could get in my price range, but other more expensive cars are far superior. My old used car was probably a deathtrap, but it was all I could afford at the time.
Regardless, I think anyone driving or riding in a registered vehicle has the right to be on the road, and that if a reckless driver plows into them and kills or injures them, the fault is with the reckless driver, not with the victim who didn't have top-of-the-line safety features.
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A Celebration Of Arrogant Irresponsibility
This article took me back to my adolescence, riding in a friend's '59 Buick on back roads at night with the speedometer playing tag with the century mark and the gas gauge almost visibly dropping. But those were the days of 27.9 cent/gallon gasoline and we were immortal. The play against death is thrilling, even when one doesn't really believe that could happen. And we never considered that possibility that we could be the cause of someone else being injured or killed. We were arrogant in the application of a power we had not earned and it had control of us as much as or more than we controlled it.
There are still plenty of people who race down our highways and back roads as if they enjoyed perfect safety and the fuel resources they were expending were nothing less than their birthright as Americans. However, we live in a world were we are increasingly confronted with the consequences of our arrogance: depleted resources, global warming, expanding population spreading out over former farmland.
Yesterday one such oblivious speeder rear-ended and possibly totaled my darling '72 Karmann Ghia coupe. The offender's vehicle, built to higher safety standards, got off with a scratched and slightly dented bumper. There is always a price to be paid for cheap thrills and the arrogantly irresponsible are not always the ones to have to ante up the largest share.
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cognitive dissonance
Like you, Susan, my favorite memories of my brother include him in the driver's seat - of a my mom's Malibu, of a semi truck he drove for a while, of the bumper cars at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk when we were kids. And then there is the memory of the night in 1999 when he died, after flipping his company car into an irrigation ditch. He had been at a new job as an agricultural chemical salesman for a week after a year of unemployment, workers comp, low self esteem, growing debt, fights to keep his three daughters from their crazy mother. Not surprisingly, he drove back home to the country after a night of celebrating in town, at a high rate of speed, windows down, flying along the asphalt next to the vineyards. And the car apparently went off the pavement into the dirt, and he overcorrected, flipped, flew out the window, hit his head and was gone before he landed in the ditch.
Like some of the other letter writers I could be (and I guess I am a bit) pissed at bad drivers who raise insurance rates and don't wear their seat belts. I could be, and have been, pissed at my brother for leaving us at the tender age of 43 just as he was about to start an exciting new phase of his life, and just as his three lovely daughters were entering the prime of their young lives. My brain tells me this.
And yet I know in my heart what freedom he felt speeding down the backroad with the wind in his hair. Probably the first such feeling he had experienced in a very long time. So how can I continue to be mad?
When we were in high school one time he flipped a car next to an irrigation ditch. Landing right on the damned roof. He and his buddy lived to tell about it. I guess I should be grateful I had another 27 years with him after that.
And when the full moon shines, I feel him and I talk to him. The moon was bright the night he felt so free, tearing down the dirt road. Love you, baby brother.
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Good writing, high risk
This is the best non-political piece I've read in Salon in years. Please try to publish more writing of this caliber.
While I don't have a brother or any dead siblings, and I didn't grow up in California, the writer spoke to the part of me that loves to drive fast (see Tom Petty "Running Down a Dream"), and also to another part of me that misses all the open and natural and unpopulated places I enjoyed the first half of my life, but which have succumbed over the years to over-population and over-development.
The writer obviously knows and accepts the risks of driving fast, but risk is very unpopular in our culture these days, so it's no surprise that people are freaking out about it. We seem to be willing to do anything, at any cost, to allow ourselves the illusion that our lives are risk-free, or at least low-risk - airport "security", gated communities, bicycle helmets, "health insurance". But an illusion is all it is. You can make your kid wear a bicycle helmet, but you have no way of controlling, or even knowing, if her school is the next Columbine. I'm all in favor of not running over children and pets with our cars, but you can do it just as easily backing slowly out of your driveway as you can speeding down a back road.