Stupid Summer People
After having lived here for a few years now, I can safely say that there are two speeds at which everyone in rural Maine drives: either twenty miles per hour over the posted speed limit, or twenty miles per hour under.
Here where we live, in Stephen King country, there are no local police doing traffic monitoring, not until you get into the larger towns. On the roads then, the only thing that tempers your speed is how safe you feel at whatever speed you are doing. For most of us, that means you’re doing about 65 miles an hour in the 45 zones (except at dawn and dusk, when deer are more likely to be wandering across the road; you don’t want to hit a deer going at any speed, but especially not 65 miles an hour). That’s what we locals do, anyway. During the summer months, when the tourists are all in the area (“summer people,” we call them), that’s when you encounter all the cars crawling along at 25 miles an hour, and you are trapped. All the roads out here are curved, lined with trees, with no passing zones anywhere to be found. You get behind a summer person, and that’s it for the next million miles.
Trapped.
I’m a calm man, naturally mellow. Even I, though, have been known to yell at the car in front of me (usually one with a kayak on the roof, or two or three bicycles on a carrier over the bumper; my wife has made the observation that the more things a summer car is carrying strapped to it, the worse is the driving of the person behind the wheel) because it just won’t… speed… up… at… all.
We have about one more week until the summer people leave for the year.
I cannot wait to have the roads open again.
Stupid summer people.
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