MOTOR MOUTH
Sticking to the speed limit: is it folly or virtue?
A.J. Jacobs is a self-proclaimed Know-It-All who’s lived the last 15 years “as an experiment” in the hopes of gaining some modicum of insight into what makes the world tick. Essentially, he completely immerses himself in extraordinary circumstances — living, in his own words, as “a human guinea pig” — in an attempt to understand the ordinary world. And while I can’t say the month where he practised Radical Honesty — having to tell people, yes, they were fat (“probably the worst month of my life,” says the author) — held any allure, outsourcing every single aspect of his existence, including birthday cards to his parents and love notes to his wife — “probably the best month of my life” — did tempt me to ring up Your Man in India, Jacobs’s preferred sub-continental valet.
It also made me wonder what might happen if I turned my life — or at least the Driving.ca portion of it — into a similar experiment. For instance, what if, in a quest to keep my driver’s licence squeaky clean, I spent an entire year obeying each and every traffic law? Could I really maintain 100 km/h on the four-lane for 12 whole months? Or come to a full and complete stop at every red light I encountered? Would I be feted as a model law-abiding citizen or exorcised as a traffic-impeding slowpoke? Would some magical driving fairy come by every night and change whatever I was driving into a Buick so I was in the right mindset to obey each and every traffic law? And, what if I managed to convince others of my demeritsaving virtuousness? Indeed, what if we, the morally righteous, convoyed along the highway hogging all the lanes at an exactly legal 100 km/h? Oh, wait a minute, that’s already been done and the exemplars/role models/perpetrators were hauled off to jail. It would seem that, just like Jacobs’s evangelicals in The Year of Living Biblically (in which the author explains, among other things, how to inconspicuously go about stoning adulterers), the proponents of traffic laws seem more interested in prosecuting sinners than actually living righteously.
Then I thought, with driving and dialing (cellphones) causing such a media furor, what if I spent an entire year inside my car without distraction? I wouldn’t turn on the radio because, inveterate channel changer that I am, it would mean taking my eyes off the road. I wouldn’t play with my navigation system while moving, read a newspaper (at a stoplight only, really officer!) or, in the most egregious example of distracted driving I have personally witnessed, edit a movie manuscript, complete with copy editor-approved red pen, I might add, while weaving in and out of rush-hour traffic. In fact, I wouldn’t even allow any talking in my car, the University of Ari- zona finding that one’s conversation doesn’t have to be cellular to be distracting. Wait a minute, my uncle, once a chauffeur for Supreme Court judges — seemingly a taciturn lot — already tried this; he forbade his wife to speak to him in the car. My aunt and uncle no longer take any vacations by automobile.
And, boy, wouldn’t it be great if I just rode my motorcycle all year round? I’ve never hidden the fact that bikes are my first love. Besides feeling the wind in my face all year round, it could be my way of reducing my environmental footprint, motorcycles nothing more than bicycles with a motor, right? My gas bill would be reduced, I’d feel more in touch with nature and I might even get to work on time (yet another virtue — timeliness — resolved). Ah, but I’ve been down that road, my poverty-stricken unable-toafford-four-wheel-ambulation youth forcing me to two-wheel through entire winters. Yes, the Canadian winter. Indeed, on one particularly frozen ride from Ottawa to Toronto in late November, I frostbit a part of my anatomy that doesn’t react well to cold. The instinct for the preservation of penis now precludes me from riding bikes much past Oct. 30.
But, if I can’t ride motorcycles all year long, then perhaps the next best thing would be to drive the world’s best sports car for an entire year. Who wouldn’t want to spend all their time behind the wheel of a Ferrari 458? Fast, furious and oh-sospectacularly red, this would be the automotive nutter’s ultimate dream, no? Of course, it would mean having to make four trips to the supermarket just to provision a backyard barbecue. And what of my previously stated ambition to be a speedabiding citizen? Seriously, though, driving one of these beauties all the way from T.O. to Ottawa and fighting its constantly darty steering (the very quality that renders the 458 the ultimate four-wheeled back-road weapon) would try Job’s patience. Why, it might even be enough for me to contemplate Toyota Camry ownership.
And thus I come to the same conclusion as Jacobs does in The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment. Moderation is not to be condemned for keeping “the good parts” of a principled life while rejecting those extremes that “descend into insanity.” Being able to tell when to be principled and when to be pragmatic is why absolutely no one, not even Buick drivers, adheres to every traffic law, why even the hardiest onepercenter doesn’t ride a motorcycle when its 40 below and why, of all the things I proposed to do on an exclusive basis, the only one that made any sense at all is driving a Toyota.
Would I be feted as a law-abiding citizen or exorcised
as a slowpoke?