Large Fierce Mammal

Source here.

“Hydroplaning, or aquaplaning, is a dangerous driving condition that occurs when water causes your car’s tires to lose contact with the road surface. Whether it lasts for an instant or several seconds, hydroplaning is a jolting indication that you’ve lost all the available traction. In those moments, you are for all intents and purposes a passenger ….” ~ Why Your Car Hydroplanes, and What to Do When It Happens

Highways these days are paved in such a way that the centerline is higher than the shoulder, directing rain water across the pavement of each lane and off the edge to prevent pooling; the development of puddles that, when run into by one or more tires of a motor vehicle moving at speed, may lead to the kind of passenger in the driver’s seat experience described above.

At least that’s the way it’s all supposed to work from the road’s point of view, and tends to hold true when the whole thing is young, fresh, and new. But for the most part, roads are built by the lowest bidder, and looked at over the long term, tend to age a lot like people. How that goes depends on the quality of work put into building and maintaining them, and over the years of hard use and the realized effects of conformity with the lay of the land, tend to settle under the weight of their own existence into the most oft travelled ruts where the pools collect when it rains.

For such roads, dilapidation comes to define them, laming and killing the iron horses of those who travel the route they trace so that their builders come to be ridiculed and cursed even as the purpose, destination, and promise of their making fade into obscurity and forgetting. Voices are raised for new roads that can be travelled faster and straighter, bypassing the old ones. And those destinations whose shining futures were thought assured the day the ribbon was cut come to whither and die, their oldest denizens unable to remember the last time they saw a strange face that didn’t come looking for votes or waving the offer of a vaccination needle.

But a road’s very reason for being is the service of those who ride upon it, and what can be said of them is spoken aloud by the road one finds them on. United in their purpose to reach a desired destination in safety and with minimal delay, their experience en route will for the most part diverge between smug self-assurance of achieving desired outcomes on one hand and hopelessly lost on the other, with a broad and populous band we will call “Hoping for the Best” in between.

The first group rides upon a cushion of treasure, their spirited mounts fresh from the stable that reared them, promised to compensate in their power, smartness, and agility for any shortcomings manifest in their riders, and anything Reality may have to do with any of it. As with roads, what part of this promise comes true will prevail when the steed is young, fresh, and new.

Source: Audi.ca — Click to enlarge.

To guide such a factory tight and perfectly aligned mount as this along a road deemed worthy to bear it offers an opportunity to make an interesting observation. On a straight stretch, bring your vehicle to the center of the roadway so that it straddles the center line and remove your hands from the wheel. You will find that in the few moments required for this experiment that the vehicle continues to track straight and true, showing only such propensity to deviate right or left as may be explained by imperfections in the road itself. Now moving the vehicle back into its proper lane and repeating the experiment you will quickly find that it now wishes to follow the gentle slope of the road bed from centerline to shoulder, steering ever more to the right so that if left uncorrected it would leave the road entirely. What this exposes is that to safely traverse the route necessitates continuous application of a tiny compensatory correction in steering over and above any grosser changes in course demanded by navigation, and that this is accommodated absent conscious thought.

“No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.” ~ Gregory Bateson – Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Worldly Wisdom Wednesday — The Way of the Wild

To discover this and to understand its significance are not the same thing.

The group falling at the opposite extreme, the hopelessly lost, will notwithstanding their title usually know exactly where they are and how they got there. While adept with maps and more than able to urge their limping saddlebacked nags from here to there, these weary travellers live in the knowledge that “there” as the first group knows it is more accurately named “too far”. They ride upon no cushion of treasure, but such decidedly uncushioned treasure as they possess includes the ability to  keep an aged mount alive by harvesting organs from carcasses of its long dead brethren kept on hand for the purpose, and while the fates holding sway over daily life may decree sharing of many a thoroughfare with riders of the other degrees, they will most often be found on the old roads where the low lying catch basins are well known. They know how to drive to avoid them night and day by only hitting the high spots, and when it rains hard they slow down or stay home. From the vantage of the high road with its scenic views out to a glorious horizon, much in between is lost to sight and memory making it easy to forget this group exists. This should come as no surprise. It’s the view that was asked for when the old road was being abandoned.

And what of that most extensive middleground demographic herein aforenamed “Hoping for the Best”? Their number can be found abroad in the land on any road, anywhere, and at any time, upon mounts stripped by the first group of their thoroughbred status, but not ridden quite near enough to death to pass into the hands of the hopelessly lost. This group understands how many alignments and tire rotations it takes before even the smallest adjustment in steering becomes a conscious decision, and how to test for the degree of an incremental buildup of “pull” to one side or the other by heading down a straight road, closing both eyes for two seconds, and then opening them to see what’s developed. They know how much life remains in an automobile for which all care of ever running it absent a lit “check engine” light has been abandoned. They keep both hands on the steering because of that time a wheel came off on the way home from a brake job.

So Goode Reader, if you’re not sure what to think about Canada and your place in it on this day of days, I strongly suggest you could do far worse than to cast aside all the rhetoric and hyperbole, and just go for a little drive to see what the road has to say.