Yesterday morning, the driver in the lane to the right of me decided to turn left - and did. All I saw was a flash of turquoise as it cut first in front of me and then in front of the car in the lane to the left. But, hey, that's OK - what's a little heart-jolting fright among your fellow drivers, when you have this very important need to make that left turn, right this minute.
On Sunday afternoon, I was driving up I-95 and, this time, the flash was a beige one. Impatient with the seemingly brisk, 70-plus mph flow of traffic, Beige on Wheels weaved across the lanes, nosing into the smallest of openings that would propel him toward his destination, oh, maybe three minutes faster.
Here is the super power I most want to have: The ability to cast a net around such drivers and drag them to the side of the road until the rest of us can get far, far away.
What is it about cars and stupidity?
Is it the gas fumes?
What explains the carnage in southern Prince George's County last weekend, where eight spectators were killed during a drag race on a dark rural highway?
Of course speed kills - everyone knows that. But what was so bizarre and troubling about this particular incident was that it wasn't one of the drag racers who was killed. If one of them had skidded off the highway and into a tree, that would have been horrible, but predictable. No, the racers themselves sped off into the darkness, and, as of yesterday, police were saying they hadn't been located.
All weekend, it was all anyone could talk about, turning the details over and over as they emerged, searching for something that would make some kind of sense out of it all. It was spectators who were killed, not the drivers? And they were watching on the side of the highway, but then walked right onto it to get a better look? In the dark? At 3 in the morning? It was a third driver - not even involved in the race and perhaps blinded by the smoke and dust kicked up by the revving cars - that plowed into them from behind?
It wasn't teenagers? Ellen Peters asks me when I call her, in Oregon, to talk about the accident. Nope, apparently they were old enough to know better, men mostly in their 30s and older, one accompanied by his daughter and his granddaughter.
Peters is a research scientist who specializes in risk perception, a psychologist who works for a think tank called Decision Research that studies, basically, why people do what they do. I had called seeking wisdom on why someone - or many someones, as it turns out - would gather on a dark, desolate highway in the middle of the night and wander onto it to watch people drive like maniacs.
