To the driver of that white pick-up

On May 9 at about 4:30 p.m., commuter traffic has begun to fill up Highway 22 between Highway 1 and Bragg Creek.

It’s yet another slow road time of year, this time due to road repairs and spring clean-up teams and other Only-Holy-Highway-Governing-Beings know what-all ways to keep traffic down to a snail’s pace.

It’s been a sluggishly stop and go, section-by-section drag of endlessly interrupted traffic on what you are surely empowered and entitled to roar through at an absolute minimum of 110km/hr unimpeded. (The open-stretch speed limits are normally set at a mere 80 to100 after all).

It’s been this unmorally painful all the way south from Cochrane through the Trans Can junction and I know you’re just so fed up with not being able to hit the gas pedal and get where you just have to go.

I feel your pain, and when that huge, extended flat-bed rig (with a gigantic piece of some sort of field or construction item strapped onto it) comes crawling along behind a ‘slow moving/wide load’ warning-flashing truck, haltingly creeps off Highway 8 and then somehow beats us into the traffic circle I’m cursing too. But hey, I figure... what can one do but slow down in line, practice some sort of yoga breathing and watch out for deer.

You, however, are made of sterner, more daring, more impatient, less lazy stuff than I. When you make your magical first move to pass and then wonderfully gain a whole three car space advantage by sliding sideways into the niche I’ve tried to maintain in front of me in the eight or nine vehicle line-up trapped behind the behemoth. Well, I just figure you for a bit foolhardy, maybe a bit of a fool, but nothing truly stupid enough to worry about.

Just east of Bragg Creek hamlet you prove me completely, under-appreciatively wrong by daringly succeeding in scaring the crap out of me and everyone else on that narrow stretch of two-lane ditch-strip-shouldered roadway. You manage by some sort of miracle to complete manoeuvres which would get a pro tossed out of the Indy 500 but are required (and granted by fate) most immediately after your brilliant, bravado-laced decision to pass four cars, the big rig and its truck in one foul swoop head-on into a line of oncoming traffic, which has absolutely nowhere to veer off to.

Congrats on making it to the four-way stop in Bragg Creek without committing murder on a most grand and tragic scale by the split-second hairs of your, and many other people’s, heads. I must confess, however, that I can only hope you succeeded in getting to where you so desperately and swiftly had to be without successfully slaughtering anyone. I also hope that you just didn’t need to end that tough, dashing drive in a bar drowning the adrenaline rush that left you wobbling a bit in and out of lane as you headed on south.

I so wish I had been able to see your licence plate clearly and had somehow had the time and strength of mind to note the letters and numbers on it. I must confess again that I was a bit too preoccupied with suppressing the impulse to let images of my life and loved ones flash before my eyes and with otherwise not panicking behind the wheel. I really would have loved to be able to enable the police to warmly congratulate you too.

I also have to confess that, despite my unbridled admiration for your achievement in making that wondrous pass, I am so very glad that I and the rest of the slower, less daring beings on that road at that time are alive despite your best efforts to kill and be killed.

My admiration for you would be awesomely, absolutely, unconditionally and everlastingly unbridled from now on if you could only slow down and give way to meekly, even slavishly, coping with the daily, time consuming annoyances of dull, boring, life-saving, law-abiding, common sense driving. I am not perfectly sane, sensitive and sensible in driving within my measly little limited share of shared road space yet either, but thank you. You have inspired me to try harder to be so.

Pam Atkinson, Bragg Creek