May peace be with you, drivers

Road-construction traffic jams may be among Colorado’s greatest aggravations: blood pressures rise, tempers flare and unkind words are shouted at windshields, provoked by the sheer helplessness many of us feel as our daily lives are delayed.

Then, Valerie Mccarthy smiles and flashes a peace sign at you.

Wait. What?

With her constant waves and smiles and actual eye contact, Mccarthy, a road-crew flagger, has completely won over motorists encountering her in Summit County on a summer-long paving project on Colorado 9.

“Love the girl waving her peace signs,” one person wrote on a Facebook page for local residents.

“I dig that, too! I ‘peace’ them back,” wrote another.

“The peace sign girl is such a cutie pie,” a third chimed in.

If she can’t make being stuck in roadconstruction slowdowns fun, Mccarthy at least is getting motorists to lighten up and smile a bit.

“I believe in traffic morale,” she said. “Let’s spread world peace, one car at a time.”

Mccarthy, 27, got her start mimicking the efforts her mother — Lisa Maybury, also a flagger on the Grand Junctionbased C.C. Enterprises crew — as a friendly way to attract the attention of drivers entering the work zones, recognizing that, in engendering a little goodwill, she also served the ultimate purpose of slowing them down.

“There’s like a transfer of energy from you to another person,” Mccarthy said. “You take a little of theirs and they take a little of yours. For me, it was really hard to get through the day just being a person that everybody hates. So why not be the person that everyone doesn’t hate?”

It’s funny how you can affect human behavior simply by showing a human side: Instead of standing listlessly as the stereotypical disaffected, discontented flagger with a 1,000-mile stare, Maybury and Mccarthy demonstrate that a little personality goes a long ways — even at only 10 mph.

It’s not an act with these two — they’re always laughing and giggling in conversation together — despite that they have perhaps one of the worst jobs in the world: a monotonous task with long hours of standing on hard pavement in all kinds of weather, encountering drivers who may be angry or inattentive, facing the dangers of fast-moving vehicles and slow-moving heavy equipment — all at $11 an hour.

“People may think: ‘She has a miserable job. She’s standing out in the rain, but she’s smiling and waving at everyone. Maybe I don’t have it so bad,’ ” said Maybury, 51.

Although “smiling and waving” is not described in the flagger’s handbook nor promoted in their training, the success of their efforts has encouraged other members of the crew to take up the charge, and they are garnering praise from supervisors and the public alike.

“I really think it’s a positive spin when we are impacting traffic and we’re delaying people,” said Tom Scheuermann, the Highway 9 project engineer for the Colorado Department of Transportation. “When they’re driving by, a smiling face giving the peace symbol really brightens up people’s day.”

Of course, he suggested that what works on lower-speed roads could be a dangerous distraction on, say, interstate highways.

“I don’t really see that it’s causing any safety impacts here,” Scheuermann said. “Our No. 1 goal is just to get people through as safely as possible. But if they can come through with a smile on their face … .”

Summit County always has had its share of roadside attractions.

There’s the life-sized elk statue on the roundabout at the Frisco exit off Interstate 70 that routinely is put in costume for holidays and once got struck and badly damaged by a truck but repaired and replaced amid public outcry.

And “Brother Nathanael,” a frockwearing, cross-bearing Russian Orthodox monastic religious provocateur famously dances in the medians and “blesses” passing cars to the stunned reactions of drivers.

But no one has made being stuck in traffic more fun than Mccarthy and Maybury, whose entire raison d’etre seems to be to make people smile.

“We used to get 90 percent (of drivers) with nobody waving, and now we’re about 90 percent waving,” Maybury said.

Even better, many now are flashing the peace sign, rather than just half of one.

Steve Lipsher (slipsher@ comcast.net) of Silverthorne writes a monthly column for The Denver Post.