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It’s a customary practice to tell people to be safe around the holidays. And of course road safety is especially important. I’m going to encourage you to be safe on the roads by telling you three true tales of less-than-safe road behavior. Fortunately, no one got hurt. And I can’t help if the stories are somewhat amusing.
Let’s start with something small. Decades ago, a college friend and housemate of mine, Robert, owned a VW beetle with a defective headlamp. His passenger-side headlamp—not the lens but the bulb and its housing—was loose. While his driver-side headlamp always aimed straight ahead, the defective headlight, being loose, occasionally beamed off-target—maybe a little down or to one side or another. What was most disconcerting, though, was riding with Robert at night in town when the light would sometimes aim up high and a little to the right. When that happened, his loose beam was illuminating the tree foliage above us. Strangest of all was when the headlamp drifted to just the right angle and we were driving past a line of street lights. Then, when the beam struck each light, the street light would blink off. You see, street lights have light sensors in them that turn them on when darkness falls and turns them off when daylight arrives. We’d be going down a city street and turning off every streetlight on the block, without meaning to.
Now something bigger and a bit less safe. There was an occasion when I, as a young(er) adult, had joined my mom and dad on a camping/fishing outing. We were at Lake Texoma, on the Oklahoma side. It was time for everyone to pack up and go home. I was bound for Texas; they were bound for their Oklahoma residence. Dad hooked his pickup to his RV trailer—about a 24-footer, as I recall. But behind that, he hooked up his boat trailer. This was new to me. My mom was not all that enthused about it. I supposed it was legal, but it wasn’t exactly common practice, But it turns out there was something else Mom knew. When Dad was occupied with some task or other, she stepped up to me and whispered, “Don’t you ever tell Dad that I told you this.” Then, when I nodded, she told me a story of their last episode of going home from the lake.
Dad had then hooked up the trailer and then the boat behind it. They were headed home and the first town they came to was Kingston, Okla., entering from the east side on State Highway 70. Dad slowed his speed on the outskirts. There was a gas station on the right—one with a graveled lot. As Dad braked, the boat passed him and my mother at somewhere between 40 and 60 miles an hour, shooting the gap on the gravel between their moving pickup and the stationary gas pump island of the gas station, finally grinding to a halt in a lot that was, thankfully, rather large.
Dad and Mom are both in heaven now, so I can say that I honored Mom’s wish to not repeat that tale in front of Dad.
Now, one more tale, and this one is the most unsafe of all. I was a young adult driving at night in Oklahoma City on a divided six-or-eight-lane interstate. I noticed, in front of me, a pickup that was being driven erratically. The driver was weaving on the road, at times going all the way into an adjoining lane, before weaving back into his own. I kept back, not wanting to get close to the vehicle. This was back in the days before widespread cell phone availability or usage, and, not having one, I could not call the highway patrol or otherwise alert anyone. I think I flashed my brights a few times. But I was holding back and so were other drivers. He sort of had the road to himself in front of us.
This driver eventually wove over to the right and went onto the shoulder, still maintaining his speed. Then, amazingly, he was driving over and flattening steel highway reflector posts. Just mowing them down. No kidding. Each post was laid over, bent horizontal at a height matching the clearance of his undercarriage. But the strangest thing was those little reflector caps atop each of the posts. What I’ll tell you now has surely been witnessed by only a rare few, if any. As he knocked the posts over, his front bumper would flick off the little round reflector cap at the top of each post. When struck, they all shot straight up, into the night sky. When they rose, they were spinning. As they rotated in air, each would catch the gleam of trailing headlights of other vehicles (his followers), and they flashed when that light caught them. So each flashed in series—flash, flash, flash, flash, etc., on the flight upwards, and flash, flash, flash, etc., on the way down.
Thankfully, the driver braked to a stop, finally, and the bizarro scene ended.
There you go… three cautionary tales. Keep your vehicle in good working order, don’t take risks in towing, and most of all—don’t drink and drive! Keep yourself and us on this side of heaven. We’ll get there soon enough without help, thank you!
Jesse Mullins, Editor
Jesse Mullins, editor of Permian Basin Oil and Gas, once buried one wheel of an Isuzu Trooper in quicksand in the Big Horn Mountains and spent the night there with four kids, half frozen, hiking out the next morning.