The Road Ahead: Bear Essentials

So there I was, at the wheel of a big red Peterbilt 379 with 600 strong horses under my foot. A sunny day in Columbus, Ind., with a morning’s driving behind me. In the company of three affable Cummins engineers, two of them sitting in the bunk with laptops buzzing as we played with a new engine-programming feature (sorry, can’t tell you about it yet). For a sometimes driver and all-the-time torque junkie like me, life doesn’t get much better. I was smilin’.

And then the Indiana State Trooper’s face loomed large in the window inches to my left.

Mean and nasty, he clearly was, complete with the aviator shades that are part of the bad-ass trooper mystique. Turns out he lived up to the image and then some.

Let me set the scene a little more fully. I had just signaled right and pulled up on the side of four-lane state Hwy. 46 outside the hotel where my faithful van was parked. My test drive was done and I was about to roll on home, just clarifying a few technical details and saying goodbye before I hopped out. Trouble was, there’s no shoulder at all right there, so I was in a sort-of fifth lane that’s really an entrance ramp to the hotel and the gas station further back, neither of which I’d blocked. And, OK, if you’re stretching the point, it’s a short driving lane too.

Anyway, with the devil hanging on to my mirror bracket and staring at me hard, I eventually found the window switch and dropped the glass to be met with a dramatic silence. Mr. Trooper Sir was playing this for maximum effect, continuing the stare without speaking a word for probably 30 seconds. That’s a long time, so I was wondering what the heck I’d done. Maybe run over a whole herd of old ladies on their way to a knitting bee?

“You gotta be able to read to get your CDL, right?” the cop finally asks in the nastiest of tones.

“Yes,” I say hesitantly, remembering that short answers are best when dealing with uniformed officialdom.

“Well, what the hell’s that ahead of you?” he says.

I looked west and, sure enough, there it was. Not a pile of dead old girls as I’d feared. It was much worse. Infinitely worse.

Not 200 feet ahead of me was a No Parking sign.

I’d parked where I shouldn’t, and now I’m looking at a cop in a lousy mood. My mind raced A mild-mannered Canadian — albeit a guilty one — executed in front of a not-very-good Holiday Inn on the outskirts of a nice town in middle America. Guess I’d have deserved it.

“Oh, shit,” I say, with a marked lack of imagination. Not my best turn of phrase, I admit, but geez, I figured I was about to bite a real bullet. “Sorry.”

“We were just doing a road test,” my Cummins friend starts to say, intending to explain further that I was just being dropped off.

“You mean you’re a driving instructor?” the trooper says incredulously, breaking in, implying that there could reasonably be two roadside executions if it were proven that a teacher had let this awful crime be committed.

“Hey, I’ve had my CDL for 20 years,” I blurt out, deeply insulted by his misunderstanding but forgetting that one-syllable answers are recommended in such situations.

That merits another long and silent stare from Ol’ Black Eyes, while I struggle to resist the journalist’s urge to explain things ad nauseum.

“Move the damn truck,” he finally says, hopping off the Pete and swaggering back to his unmarked silver Camaro (remember that, folks).

It was over. My brush with capital punishment had come to an abrupt end, leaving me scarred and quivering. And promising any god who might be listening that I’ll never park where I’m not supposed to again. Well, if I do, I’ll definitely remember to use my four-ways.

Anyway, kidding aside, I’m well aware that some of you folks face this kind of harassment often enough that you expect it. Yep, I was in the wrong, though nobody had been even vaguely endangered and my “crime” was mighty minor. But it still engendered an ugly and entirely unnecessary response.

I often say that a good attitude can turn a bad one right around, but this idiot didn’t give me the chance to be my charming self. It looked as if, in his eyes, I was a trucker so I automatically deserved a hard-nosed approach. Nothing would have been easier than to argue with him, but obviously, nothing would have been less constructive.

If there’s a moral to the story, that’s it: keep your cool, boys and girls, and remember the beauty of simple answers.


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