For the week of November 19 - 24, 2003

Put body heat
in the right seat

Commentary by Betty Bell

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While I headed south to Hailey during the heavy commute a couple of days ago, I pitied the pilgrims headed north. While they were stuck in a serious stop-and-go shuffle, I tried to keep my speedometer from obscenely exceeding 55. I imagined looking down on the scene from a helicopter: half the highway an unbroken line of northbound lights, only a few southbound lights, and on the sides only widely scattered lights to mark humble and not-so-humble abodes. From up there we’re a small collection of humanity, but still we’ve pulled right alongside L.A. and Atlanta in transforming even our biggest and most powerful intimidation machines into docile snails.

I think a major reason we’ve turned into snails is because we won’t look straight-on at a simple and cost-free shuffle-cure, a cure that already we’re likely peripherally aware of. Looking straight-on is too uncomfortable, so we look at it from a slant, sort of like an Emily Dickinson poem, even when slant translates to seeing the cure as more lanes … more buses … more bikes … a train or two. The straight-on simple truth, pilgrims, is we need a community hitchhiking program. But we’ve been life-long conditioned to see a hitch-hiker as either some desperate soul shuffling away from a dust bowl, or Charles Manson in disguise. And when we dig these awful images out of storage we use them to justify our collective determination to keep the right door locked, the right seat empty, and our personal space sacrosanct. "It’s my quality time," we whine.

Quality time? Humbug. Private time, yes, but when you break down how that quality time is spent during an average commute, it probably divvies like this: 42 percent sort-of-cussing the driver ahead and beside and behind; 24 percent fretting about the latest and most pressing family catastrophe; 19 percent rolling that reel of yourself in the lightest and deepest powder when your very survival depends on perfectly timed leaps to suck air; and finally, woefully, 15 percent and expanding, earnestly speaking into your personal chatter-box. Obviously, only about 7 percent of such quality-time thoughts would be interrupted by a body on the right side.

Back in the 70s I tried to get a hitchhiking program going even though the slow shuffle commute had yet to become life as we know it. On my early morning commutes to Hailey there was so little northbound traffic it was hard to see the right edge of the road, and I’d make occasional gravel-slinging boo-boos onto the shoulder. Though I was prescient, I didn’t foresee that soon enough there’d be an unbroken line of lights in those dark commutes. But since that’s now the way it is, why haven’t we already figured out that only the first driver should use headlights—the rest of us, latched onto the taillight ahead, would save our eyes a world of glare.

I dubbed my 70s hitch-hiking plan The Alpha Bus Company, and I spent hours drawing and cutting and coloring decals that seemed sure to please everyone. During the eight weeks I worked at getting the ABC going I picked up 11 hitchhikers—seven to Hailey and four back. Not one carried the official ABC card—they even asked what the one in my windshield meant. Regrettably, the Alpha Bus Company never took off, it merely petered away like a roll of Las Vegas nickels. That whole effort was a larger than average disappointment since I’d devoted two columns to education and promotion and didn’t for a minute think there’d be a soul in the valley not wildly enthusiastic.

With such a resounding rejection on my record, I’m not the one to initiate a plan for today. What would work, I think, is to give the responsibility to the high schools—the Wood River High School, The Community School, and the Silver Creek Alternative School. When we pit those budding brains against each other we can just stand back and wait for their lightening fast neurons sort and collect big bold thoughts and soon enough come up with the perfect plan. I can just see the proud winning team featured on Peter Jennings’ "Persons of the Week."

Figuring out the I.D. thing won’t be hard. Every personal tidbit you think is yours alone is already on file with Ashcroft & Co.—the kids can subpoena these snoop-scams, file them with the local gendarmes, and then we can register as official non-criminally-intent hitchhikers.

Maybe there should be odd and even day schedule—A-M drives on even days and N-Z on odd, and if the kids want us to use our first names instead of last, why not? As to where to put "hitching posts," I hope they’re placed so a driver can slickly load or unload in 11 seconds tops. And I’m thinking that a driver who doesn’t want to haul a Chatty Cathy can have her car designated a "Library Car," and anybody who accepts a ride will keep his lips zipped.

A hitchhiking program won’t replace RideShare. Kudos and kudos and kudos to every schedule-adhering pilgrim who makes that commitment and lives up to it. Hitchhiking is for the rest of us, floaters all. But floaters have the power to put a body in the right seat, and every time it happens it’s a Patriot Act—the real McCoy.

 

The Idaho Mountain Express is distributed free to residents and guests throughout the Sun Valley, Idaho resort area community. Subscribers to the Idaho Mountain Express will read these stories and others in this week's issue.