RAH RAH RAH !

Not a week goes bye, not one, where in the course of my driving to and from work, I do not encounter the sight of an automobile accident. It's thirty miles one way and thirty back. Three-hundred per week. Many weeks, three-sixty. I don't care to figure what a year adds up to exactly, but I bet it's more than one-thousand miles. Maybe two-thousand.

All those miles assure me that I will encounter the results of people and their poor driving skills. I see it all the time. Whether the weather is good or bad, sunny or dark at night.....I ride amongst the idiots. Every time I see a crack-up, the first thing that occurs to me is how these liabilities to the insurance companies affect me. I see an accident and I take it personally in the form of a rise in my rates.

Wednesday night was one of those rare occasions that an accident directly affected my commute. It was also one of those rare occasions that I could have been part of the accident itself.

It happened on the Pulaski Skyway. The Pulaski Skyway is deemed one of the most dangerous roads in America. It is a divided, two lane roadway, elevated at some points over 500 feet off the ground, above a highly industrial area of New Jersey. It is about five miles long. It is impossible for law enforcement to physically patrol this road because there is no pull-off lane. The infrastructure of the bridge-like roadway are the edges of the road itself for five miles. There are only a couple of exits along this stretch that exit left and descend down below onto areas with smelters, scrap yards and rail yards. How it is that The Pulaski does not create more NASCAR style pile-ups, I do not know.

I believe that I perhaps missed being involved in a significant accident on The Pulaski just by chance. I hesitated merging onto the roadway by one opportunity. That was all the difference it took to be just six cars removed from the four car mangle that occurred in front of me about two miles down that road after boarding it. There are no other merge opportunities after the one I boarded on.

Approximately six cars went by after I passed up a merge. It involved four. There was the requisite smoke and the sound of metal crunching about one-hundred yards in front of me. Enough to block the unforgiving two lane motorway and create a queue behind me that stretched for miles. My delay and a few thousand others' amounted to an hour and forty-five minutes.

Emergency vehicles are forced to approach the accident going against the direction of the two lanes whenever something like this happens because there is no other access. It was of that kind. Can't go around it. Gotta say, that although two ambulances took away two people, it was only because of injuries suffered to the lower legs. They appeared to be injuries to the ankles. The medics applied braces to those lower extremities. One of the fellows actually got out of the car and hopped over and onto a gurney.

What was the cause? As is the case many times, it was "Driving While Idiot". Car service arrogant SOB believes he is immune to anything and anyone. He may have just walked off the proverbial boat, got the most entry level job available to an immigrant, finally got to see his first Steve McQueen movie and wanted to see if there was a future for him in Hollywood. Why else would he have been weaving in and out of traffic at a high rate of speed, enough to clip a car's front end and sent both of them into the guard rails and two ensuing vehicles onto them?

Ring.....ring.......ring.....Hello, Kearney Police department......I'd like to report an accident by an idiot on the Pulaski.

There are hundreds of thousands of people in the New York area that drive for a living. Many of them are good professionals. A small minority of these drivers are transient in that craft and it is this minority that affect much of the fluidity in traffic. These jobs are held by newly arrived immigrants, and many possess few other skills to forge a better living.

True story. I once got into a New York City taxi after leaving work at 2 a.m. Except for Friday and Saturday nights, 2 a.m. in New York City is pretty much a dormant city. It's fairly easy to navigate around. If you lived in Manhattan and wanted to learn how to drive, learning in the overnight hours is really a good time to do so. It really is.

Guess what? That's what the cabbie who's car I got into was doing!!!

The guy could not have been more than twenty-five years old; had been in New York only two weeks; had just moved from Moscow and was trying to gather enough money to continue on to Norman, Oklahoma to work with a professor at the University of Oklahoma. A professor that had taught him at the University of Moscow. That he was hoping to get there soon.

Yes, I managed to glean all of that up about him in between me saying .....whoa whoa WHOA!.....Slow down!.......Stay in the lane!....You have to work on turning corners!!......I'm not in a rush!!!!.....It's OK. I'm not nervous!!!! No really.

It was almost like a comedy skit now that I look back on it. To his credit, he felt he was invincible, but I was helping him believe that. As he would have said..."It was crazy ride". I hope he made it out to Norman where he is perhaps riding a horse there these days.

Driving is something that I seem to judge about others all the time. I can be a snob about other people's driving skills and habits. I would rather drive myself than be driven. I'm even critical about Wifey's driving. I do not like the way that she participates in traffic and do not like the way that she uses the brake. I am very critical about driving as a skill. Many times I won't utter a word about anyone's driving, I'll just make a branding mental note that such a person is an idiot.

It's like riding a bicycle. You can tell that some people have that panache attributed to experience. Others, are able to ride a bicycle but you can see that they wobble a little and their cycling is very deliberate. Rough, not brisk and not fluid. Many times they are unaware about it.

I find myself making broad conclusions about people's little things. Dumb little things sometimes. Like the way people use a knife and fork. Or the orthodontia on an adult. I notice the way that some people after a drink or two transform. Whether they bite their fingernails. Other little things and that include how one drives a car.

I was forced to do one day of jury duty a couple of weeks back. I was herded into a room with about 120 other people. When the jury coordinator came out to announce the "random" names of who would have to interview for a jury, I was left out of that litter. I was left out with about thirty others. We thirty were all told we could all go home. This "random" choosing did not lump me with the types that included the overly tattooed, soul patch wearing, skin head who sported a shirt that read "Cannibal Holocaust". Morris County needed to assemble a jury of someone's else's peers and I did not fit that mold.

Snob.

Wifey once made the observation that the only time that she ever remembers me not having to drive were on two occasions. The week that we were out on our honeymoon in Puerto Vallarta nineteen years ago. The other, was three years ago when we all went out to Disney World and stayed at The Contemporary where the monorail arrives in the lobby to take you to the park. I did not need a car for both those occasions.

Wifey mentioned, that when I was at both those places, and not driving.....That, I wasn't such an idiot.

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posted by JerryNJ @ 1:45 AM