The Little Frog and Duck Boy In The I.E. Part 5

A note here about California highways and driving: apparently since Erik Estrada hung up his mirrored sunglasses and knee-high CHIPS boots anything goes out there speed-wise . At one point as my foster car was rocked in the backwash of yet another barely sub-orbital SUV I thought I must have been crawling along at way below the speed limit. I looked down at my speedometer to find I was doing 85 mile per hour. I haven't driven that fast since I reached voting age.

Although I was the three legged stray in my traffic pack, at least there didn't seem to be all that many people telling me I was Number One so I must not have been doing that badly. It is nevertheless highly intimidating to be a freshly whelped highway cub in a pack of 3000 pound automotive alpha wolves.

Each of the cars that passed me must have had a steering wheel and a driver with at least one finger on that wheel but there was something subtly different about the way they moved down the highway, a sort of ballistic quality to their guidance, like a SCUD missile.

After all the ominous predictions about California traffic I had been given I was happy to find myself in actually moving on the highway. Every comment I had heard up to that point was that the difference between rush hour and non-rush traffic was that non rush traffic actually moved. In contrast, cars emerging from the morning and evening Cal-Lock were reported as being covered with something looking oddly similar to lichens or moss.

So as I rocketed down "The 15" or "The Whatever" I found myself beginning to relax a bit. I had made it through a couple of fairly risky multi-lane changes without becoming a statistic and the miles were ticking off on "The whatever-the-hell-road-number" I was on. I was seeing the same town and exit names on succeeding signs with shorter and shorter distances to the points they marked. That was a good thing it seemed and so I let my mind wander a bit and began to ponder why Californians refer to the state and interstate highways as "The ###"…The 15 or The 415.

Back East we refer to Interstates 95 and 64 as "95" and "64". Adding that extra word, "The" changes it somehow, elevating the status of highways to a sort of imperial level akin in a way to the royal "we". We don't revere them here like they do on the Left Coast. Californians' fondness for the cult of the car is well known; perhaps this little colloquialism is consistent with that.

By the time I headed back to Virginia I was prefacing every highway number with “the” but I got over that as soon as I pulled on to Interstate 95 on my way home from the airport. I also left behind my speed demon alter-ego and became once again, a good citizen of the highways. I drove home at a reasonable enough rate that a couple of passing cars even gestured to me that they thought I was the #1 citizen of the highways…that is what they meant, right