Because I’m less of a social animal these days, interaction with the itinerant masses is confined to my morning commute. I don’t count social media. The last guy I got into an argument with on Twitter, I’m pretty sure was Russian, or a Russian bot if there’s a difference. Unable to refute me intellectually, he (it?) called me a traitor for positing that China was winning the trade war.
Most of my commute is nineteen miles east on 98. If you look at it from a satellite shot, 98 looks like a cool throughway near water. In patches between trees and subdivisions, it is. You can see across the Sound, to hilly dunes with green vegetation, white sand like scoops of vanilla ice cream, the vegetation like candied syrup ladled atop. Or depending on the zoom, a long, thin, grainy line of blow.
Once I pass the causeway to the beach I know to be in the right lane, during heavy traffic season, which is the school year less holidays and summer vacay. Kids here get way more time off than I ever got. Christmas vacation is a month. They get the entire week off for Thanksgiving.
In the faster moving right lane I feel better about being mired in traffic. The left lane is intended to be faster, and yet it moves slower, reliably. If pressed to explain this phenomenon, I’d say we’re creatures of habit, slaves to our routines. Clinging to the way things were when we formed our habits, always struggling to adapt to change. The left lane is for faster moving traffic. When there isn’t congestion, it normally is. What this tells me is that many of the drivers battling rush hour traffic are my peers. Millennial or Gen Z drivers have no such preconceptions about the left lane.
I’ll settle on a vehicle in the left lane and watch it in my side-view mirror, to validate that the left lane is the slower, reveling in this knowledge. Today I choose a Honda Element ahead of me. A tannish color, but not tan or khaki. Verve-less, primer beige. I pass it, I’m ahead of it now, watching it recede in the driver’s side mirror, disappearing behind a growing line of vehicles.
I’m east of the Tom Thumb light, where traffic thins out. From here the left lane can be, and often is, the faster of the two. We’re east of the Hurlburt Field overpass, old, overgrown trees with Spanish moss hanging over the road. On the north side of 98 are houses almost anyone can afford. On the right, behind the old trees or interwoven with them are houses on the Sound, big houses with an old Southern feel that almost no one can afford.
In the right lane, I consider changing lanes then don’t, figuring a truck ahead of me in the left lane will clot the lane. I move ahead of the truck. The truck moves ahead of me. I move ahead of the truck. The truck moves ahead of me. It’s a big truck, with a four-poster bed, a Pod truck. They’ve dropped off a Pod, and free of this burden are anxious to rejoin the traffic flow. Pass other vehicles. A shackle removed, a burden unshouldered, free and easy down the road they go. It speeds up close to the vehicle in front of it, tailgating, so if I wanted to change lanes there would be no room for me. Not in front of the Pod truck.
We’re coming up on the Doolittle light. To get to work, I can turn left at this light or proceed through the light and take the next left on San Cristobal. The Pod truck gets in the left turn lane, to turn onto Doolittle, I get in the left lane it just vacated, where the Pod truck would have been. Through the light, take the next left on San Cristobal, no impediment. I glance back, the Pod truck stuck in line, waiting for the green arrow granting permission to turn left. I win.
***
In traffic. Trucks pulling enclosed trailers for Quality Plumbing, Clean Dog LLC (portable dog grooming). Plumbers keep their wares under wraps, unlike landscapers or home improvement contractors. A tacit understanding exists, that all things plumbing are best kept unseen and not contemplated. Like what happens to all the excrement. When Tropical Storm Nathan passed through the local wastewater treatment facility dumped one hundred thousand gallons of ‘partially treated’ sewage into the Sound, where there are now relatively high levels of enterococci, bacteria that inhabits the intestinal tracts of humans and animals. Which sparks an idea for a sci-fi novel: The waste management division of NASA blasts so much shit into space that a more technologically- and morally-advanced species is deeply offended, collecting our septic rockets, prying them open, and raining all the shit back down on us. Shit Storm is the working title.
***
Commuting, early on, still west of the Navarre Beach causeway. A white truck passes me on the right. A white Dodge Ram, and on the sides right behind the cab and on the tailgate it says Power Wagon. In front of me is a silver pickup, Super Duty across the tailgate.
I find the hyperbole to be patronizing. Wagon I associate with station wagon, a fake-wood paneled family transport from back in the day, littered with wrappers and discarded toys, children screaming at each other, parents slumped dejectedly in the front seats. Or a little red wagon for pulling your toddlers and their toys around. Power and wagon are dissociative. And Super Duty, your seventy-thousand-dollar employee capable of pulling something twice its weight.
There’s no way I’m letting Power Wagon get where it’s going sooner than I get where I’m going. I move to the right lane, and sure enough, as dependable as the sun rising in the east, the right lane moves faster. As I’m closer to the Tom Thumb light, about two-thirds of the way, I get left. Power Wagon is lost behind me. I sleep on my advantage, remaining in the left lane as the right lane moves faster again, and there it is. Power Wagon is a tenth of a mile ahead, two-tenths. I stay left, and sure enough, the right lane bogs down. But then Power Wagon gets in the left lane, four or five vehicles ahead of me. We climb the Hurlburt Field overpass, and I get in the right lane, the ‘slower moving’ lane. Soon the left lane will bog down, as we get closer to the Doolittle turnoff. It always does. Sure enough, I pass Power Wagon. It’s a tenth of a mile back, two-tenths.
I turn left, off of 98, and it’s over.
King of the road, yo.
