On a trip to the grocery store, I stopped at a light at the corner of Washington Street and Arlington Avenue. When the light turned green, I proceeded across the intersection. Behind me, I heard the full-throated roar of someone’s muscle car, the screech of tires as it banked around the corner and the howl of an unmuffled muffler as the driver gunned eastward on Washington.
When I was a young newlywed, my bride taught me to drive an automobile. I learned on a 1963 Volkswagen Bug, a 4-speed, stick-shift car. One year after our marriage, we put that Bug on the road to California, where I was to seek my artistic fortune on the streets of gold. One of the first things we learned about California was the speed with which cars travelled: It was much faster than what we had known in Pennsylvania. Some of the merge lanes onto the highways in Pittsburgh require drivers to come to a full stop. (Yes, a FULL STOP.) One must then scan for oncoming traffic before entering the highway. In the Los Angeles area, the merge lanes are miles long, which gives drivers the opportunity to reach the merging speed of about 120 mph. That speed philosophy was a hard-earned lesson for me as I putt-putted my Bug into the steel stream of blazing fast cars.
Indiana does not require automobile safety inspections, unlike California and Missouri, two of the other states where I have put cars onto the road. When I lived in the Los Angeles area, I found that one can be ticketed if one’s automobile muffler is too loud. A muffler with a hole in it will pour pollutants into the atmosphere while blatting and roaring. You could also be called to account for an “unnecessary display of speed,” such as that exhibited by the Indiana driver I cited above. In a city with more cars than insects, it was important to insure the public’s (relative) safety. But one could be called to task for unnecessarily stomping on the gas. There was not much screeching and squealing of tires. Even when I was briefly the happy owner of a canary-yellow 1972 Triumph TR6, with a 4-speed gearbox and electric overdrive, I neither sped nor squealed. I do admit to a frisson of excitement when I stomped on the gas and the rear of the car squatted down onto its leaf springs, then leapt into the freeway’s traffic flow. But I never felt the need to stomp on the gas while travelling city streets.
Indianapolis is home to “The Greatest Spectacle in Racing”; perhaps that “zoom zoom” is the inspiration for so many people who buy or modify mufflers so that they can emulate the roar of the cars that turn left on the oval for 500 miles, roaring. I have no way of knowing if the drivers who speed past and around me are on the way to the hospital with a sick child, spouse, or parent, but I hope that is not the case, though it would appear that there are a lot of muscle cars carrying sick people to hospitals. Of course, the brisk transportation of critically ill people does not usually occur on the back of bellowing motorcycles, so I don’t know why that group is honking and howling up and down the streets.
In five decades of driving, I have received 3 moving violations and only one of those was for speeding. My eldest child mocks me, saying that I drive “like an old man.” This old man has no need for speed.
cjon3acd@att.net