That's not to say Indiana drivers are without fault. Their proclivity to drive in the center of the road on narrow two-way rural routes is mystifying. And the equally mystical and disturbing affliction that renders turn signals useless seems to occur at a higher rate among Hoosiers.
"Traffic" to a Hoosier usually equates to five cars at a four-way stop. To a Chicagoan, the term "traffic" is not applicable until roughly 500 cars create a delay of at least three hours. And even then, they'll say, "Eh, I've seen worse."
(Side note: It is explicitly Illinoisan to create traffic jams by ignoring the dozen or so warnings that your lane is ending in order to claim your birthright of advancing by two spots in that line of 500 cars.)
"Traffic," wherever it is found, doesn't exactly bring about motorists' "better angels." Yet the manifestations are decidedly different. To a Hoosier, particularly one of, shall we say, "agrarian" stock, traffic is an imposition on the lean, mean performance machine in which one sits. The inability to cause widespread hearing loss and property damage from the sonic waves emanating from your chassis is a personal affront to your manhood, your family name, and the Confederate flag you display so proudly in the form of fuzzy dice dangling from your rearview mirror. (Yes, I've seen them on the road.)As a result, the first chance the stereotypical Hoosier gets to put to use the hours of work that has gone into making his truck an audiological Armageddon, he will take full advantage - even and puzzlingly if that "chance" is the simple advancement of the line of cars, the movement of 15 feet to claim the place once held by the car in front of you.
While Hoosiers think of traffic in terms of a mechanical imposition, it is clear Illinoisans absorb the blow of traffic quite personally. At the risk of overstating the point in what to now has been a lighthearted post, allow me to share an example of this drawn from my own experience.
It was a Saturday morning, and I took the girls for a drive while the wife cleaned house. We took the long way through our connected towns, and eventually found ourselves stopped by a funeral procession leaving the parlor. We stopped, of course, which immediately angered the person following dangerously close behind us.
The procession was quite short - only about seven or eight cars, perhaps - which only made me feel for the family involved even more. As the caravan approached a stoplight, the hearse, limo and approximately two cars made it through on green before the light turned abruptly red. This was a personal affront to the obviously uber-critical business every other motorist on the perpendicular road was conducting on this Saturday. Though their cars displayed the clear markings of a funeral procession - an indication they were going to bury a friend or family member - the people in the remaining five or so cars were subjected to yells through rolled-down windows, obscene gestures, horn honks, and general abhorrent behavior because they had the nerve to want to stay close to the vehicle carrying the body of their loved one.
Admittedly, I don't know the exact rules of the road in that situation. Perhaps the funeral-goers were in the wrong. But no driver - not one - seemed willing to give these people the benefit of the doubt. And this on a Saturday morning, approximately 10 AM. Not exactly rush hour or the time most people conduct business of any importance, let alone in the order of that somber drive to the cemetery.
This is an extreme example, but it serves to show what anyone who has lived or worked in Chicagoland knows: Each person views their own destination as the most important and will show disdain for common decency to get there. Hoosiers, on the other hand, may be comparatively crude and absent-minded, but I have yet to see the kind of personalization of the phenomenon of traffic here as in Illinois.
It's just another example of the sometimes extreme differences that exist in different spots in a relatively small area.
Just one question remains: How is it that everyone seems prone to make mistakes on the road but me?
You feel me?
AF
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