Florida Diary, Day 2

LAKELAND, Fla., Monday, June 6 --- I had only been on the ground in Florida for about two hours before someone gave me a two-fisted middle-finger salute, rode the bumper of my rented Monte Carlo for 30 seconds with his high-beam headlights on, and then blew past me.

I'm used to people taking a dislike to me, but usually they don't express it so vividly for at least a day or so.

As he passed, I noticed he had a Tampa Bay Buccaneers vanity plate, so I guess he can be forgiven, considering his obvious history of mental illness.

At the time I spotted the Florida State Birds in my rear-view mirror, I was doing about 75 miles per hour in the slow lane. The speed limit was 70.

Anyway, I've been driving for something like 15 years, and I've logged something like 150,000 miles behind the wheel, but I've never, ever seen anything like Florida drivers. I'd estimate that maybe 10 percent are fully qualified to operate a motor-vehicle and are in complete command of their faculties. Of the rest, I'd say something like 25 percent are road-raging maniacs in sports cars and imported SUVs, 20 percent are punk kids and rednecks in clapped-out piece-of-krep trucks, and the remainder are nonagenarians heading for the early bird specials at Denny's at 40 miles per hour in the passing lane with their turn blinker on.

The next time I complain about Pennsylvania drivers, someone, please, slap me. I have never seen anything like this. People passing on the shoulders and medians, taking right-hand exit ramps from the far-left lane, backing up on an Interstate. I hadn't been driving for more than 20 minutes before I saw my first near-serious accident, and it didn't take long before I came across the real thing on I-75 south of Bradenton. Three vehicles were spun out and mangled along the side of the road. About a mile down the road, there was another serious crash.

I had dinner Sunday night with an ex-Pittsburgher friend and his wife, and was telling them about my experience on Florida freeways. They had some advice for me.

"If you're the first car at a red light, do not try to make a 'Pittsburgh left' when the light changes," she said. "You will get killed. Also, when the light turns green, don't pull out. Look both ways first. Nobody down here stops at red lights."

I laughed, but on the way back to the motel, I started watching at red lights. She's right. And it's not like people just get caught going through yellow lights that turn red; they don't stop even for "hard" reds. Sometimes, they pause at a red light and drive through anyway.

Driving like a bunch of maniacs is bad enough, but having four lanes of traffic in each direction, with on- and off-ramps every half-mile or so adding a fifth lane, and boosting the speed limit to 70, only adds to the potential for disaster. At any given moment, I feel like I'm in an episode of "CHiPs," at the moment right before the Pinto collides with the VW Bus and a Honda motorcycle goes spinning, in slow motion, off into an embankment.

Also, everybody tailgates. Everybody, everybody, everybody tailgates. I'm not exactly Captain Safety, but I do try to leave at least two Mississippis between my car and the car in front of me --- you know, you start counting "one Mississippi, two Mississippi" when that car passes a point, and then stop counting when your car passes the same point. In Florida, that doesn't work, because one car will immediately squeeze into that gap, while another one will change from the far left lane to the far right lane using the remaining space in front of your car.

It doesn't help that Florida has no mandatory state safety inspection. The Pennsylvania state inspection process can be a pain in the keister, but at least it usually keeps the rolling disaster scenes confined to farms, and ensures that most of the cars around you have brakes. Here, about one in 10 cars is a junkyard refugee, and they're passing you on the right, doing 85 miles with a temporary "doughnut" spare and with a garbage bag taped to the passenger side door to cover up the missing window, flapping in the wind.

And another thing: Despite the snow and salt in a typical Mon Valley winter, it's not uncommon to see '70s and '80s cars around. I don't see many old cars in Florida --- perhaps they all get destroyed in spectacular collisions before they get more than 10 years old.

Instead, the junkpiles I see are late-model cars with dents on every visible body panel, rear-bumpers dragging the pavement because of broken springs and shocks, and loud, loud, loud mufflers.

Speaking of junkpiles, that brings me to the 2005 Chevrolet Monte Carlo that I've rented. After 500 miles behind the wheel, I can safely assert that the current Monte Carlo is a perfectly despicable little car. If this is typical of the kind of krep that General Motors is forcing onto its customers, then they deserve to have their debts lowered to junk bond status, because they are, in fact, building junk.

Both outside and inside, the design is utterly graceless. I could forgive the cruddy styling if it was at least fun to drive, but this Monte Carlo wanders all over the road. The brakes have little or no pedal travel --- you don't come to a stop a little at a time; the brakes are either on or off. The arm rests are in the wrong place, it's impossible to comfortably hold the steering wheel at the time-honored 10 and 2 positions, and there aren't enough positions on the tilt-wheel to find a relaxed angle. Slam the doors, and they rattle hollowly. Try to slam the trunk, however, and you'll find you have to force it down. I'm not saying my sleek, gray Mercury is the pinnacle of the automotive builder's art, because it isn't, but this Chevy makes my six-year-old Grand Marquis look like a Rolls-Royce.

Maybe I'm letting this miserable, unloveable Chevy color my entire perception of Florida motoring, but I doubt it.

By the way, for those of you who read a lot into these kinds of symbols, I've been taking careful note of the decorations on the cars I see. If there's one common theme, it's "W'04" stickers, yellow magnetic ribbons, and Jesus fishes.

But perhaps the classiest vehicle I've seen so far in Florida was a brand-new black Ford F-150 pickup truck with a pair of pink plastic globes hanging from the trailer hitch. It took me a minute to realize they were supposed to represent testicles.

No, he didn't also have a Jesus fish. Good thing, too, because it would have opened an irony black hole that would have sucked in everything around it.