Sometimes it’s better to just write about it! Come take a ride with me from the safety of your computer. Greg
The margin of error was way too small and totally unacceptable for strangers in 2000 pound metal chariots traveling at highway speeds. He was driving a light pickup and came steaming up from behind my compact SUV with no intent to ease in line behind as I focused on passing the tractor trailer to my right who was traveling about 70 miles an hour. I was doing 73. The guy in the pickup was probably pushing 80. I can imagine he made a split-second decision that there was enough room to make it around me, if he swerved into the right-hand land and went for the closing gap between me and the truck. That’s exactly what he did and, he made it, narrowly missing both my front right bumper and the rear left of the truck’s trailer.
There are crazies on the road whose intent is to drive in their own world regardless of who else is on the same path. I don’t have a problem with speeding, but I do have a problem with completely acting like you are the only one out here. Get over yourself! Go find that desolate stretch, like I-10 heading to California from Arizona. Plenty of room, no cars, go fast, drive straight, challenge yourself. Put yourself, alone, at risk.
However, when you put me at risk, without asking me to participate in the challenge, that is unacceptable. It might be called reckless. For the reckless driver who targets someone trying to get down the highway who happens to have a short fuse, it might be called life threatening. And I don’t mean just the possible outcome of a high-speed collision. I am talking about finding your life threatened and, possibly taken, by someone, like me, who does not tolerate stupid, selfish asshole drivers. If you take your safety seriously, and that of your fellow travelers, then perpetrators of dangerous driving might take a lesson from the end result of my experience.
I chased the guy who cut me off and murdered him. Yea, I snapped.
I’ve been run down, raged on, beeped and flashed, fingered and followed by the best of the worst. They are dangerous drivers, stupid, inconsiderate and arrogant to a mortal fault. I’m sure we’ve all had our share of crazy encounters. Just minding your own business, keeping up with the flow and here comes “Mr. I’m in a hurry fuck you”, carving his path in whatever lane keeps him moving forward.
I had enough of it.
So, I honked at the pickup, flashed my lights and flung a middle finger through his rear window as he squeezed his way in front of me. I made a mental note of the company name splashed across his tailgate. “Shandling Siding Installation”. Then I triggered my Cronus .68 caliber paintball marker gun mounted behind the front grill of my car, connected with an electronic trigger mechanism that allowed me to fire off single round shots of paintballs at nearly 200 miles per hour. I hit the trigger three times and connected with the first two shots. Splat! Splat! Stained on the tailgate in yellow and red! The third shot, a blue ball, missed, as the pickup, fighting for control after the surprisingly successful move to cut me off, swerved to the left. The shot bounced along the right side of the vehicle, falling in a harmless splatter on the roadway.
The pickup’s swerve elicited a big blast of the horn from the trucker who was not happy with the close quarters, vehicle to vehicle skirmish that was breaking out right next to him. The guy driving the pickup was able to get control of his path even as he flashed a finger back at me. I gave him another beep and that pissed him off enough to have him slam on his brakes for a split second, forcing me to jam up the binders to avoid smashing into his paint stained rear.
He then sped up and cut in front of the truck in the right lane and accelerated for a second or two. I was back on the cruise control and we traded more finger salutes as I continued on, passing him in the left lane and extended away from the asshole. I was pretty hot, but settled into a soothing mood, smiling as I anticipated what his reaction might be when he discovered the paint stains on the back of his truck. Marked for madness!
Then his grill filled my rearview mirror. He was not done.
He pulled close, not touching because we were still rolling along at 75 miles per hour but, any action by either of us, slower for me, faster for him, would have likely been catastrophic. I clicked the cruise control twice to increase speed and reached for my other surprise next to the trigger for the paintball gun. A simple switch turned on a 16,000 lumens modified strobe light in a PVC housing attached to the roof of my SUV just forward and above the back hatch. The light flashed 60 times per minute, or once every second. The first blast caught my deadly driving dope by surprise and blinded him. The second, third and fourth disoriented him.
I followed the strobes in the next seconds with one shot from a paintball marker pistol mounted on its side under the hatchback’s spoiler, sitting level with the windshield of a light pickup should it be following about six inches behind. The air compressed pistol shot a red paint ball over the hood of the pickup and splashed the windshield dead center. The deadly driving dope, momentarily blinded by the strobe, was now blinded by the paint covering most of his vision. He made a fatal, yet inevitable, mistake by letting up on the gas.
The tractor trailer, the original obstacle our pickup buddy attempted to squeeze past, now became a skidding, sliding wiggle wagon that drove up from behind on the suddenly slowing pickup. The locked brakes and the swerve by the truck driver caused the trailer to fishtail in the righthand lane while the truck cab moved into the passing lane. The forward momentum of the trailer quickly caught up to the blinded pickup and slid over the rear bed. However, the pickup cab was too high and as the trailer continuing on its inexorable path, it ripped the passenger compartment open from behind with a sickening crunch.
It is not clear if the pickup driver had a moment for a final thought. He certainly could not see the tractor trailer catching him from behind, although when he hit the brakes upon the paint ball splat, he might have remembered that the speeding truck was behind him. I am inclined to think he was thinking forward, intent on harassing me in my SUV with intense tail gating. There probably wasn’t time to think much between the initial blinding strobe light and the splush of paint obscuring his vision. Maybe he heard the crunch of the trailer as it ripped into the rear of the pickup cab, but even that sound would not have been completely understood before the lights went out and our deadly dumb driver was turned to a bloody mess in two pieces.
I kept on going, catching a glimpse in my side view mirror of metal fragments, road dust and other debris flying into the air at the scene of the impact. I wasn’t going back.