The Legend of the Laggard Liberty
In the quaint suburbs West of Philly where I work, there is a black Jeep Liberty roaming the streets. Don’t know the year. It is driven by a middle-aged woman with a vacant expression. She is, quite possibly, the slowest driver in the world, in relation to the speed of those around her. It’s not the car; I know many owners of Jeep Liberties who drive normally. It’s just that this particular owner tends to drive fully half the speed limit. So if it’s 40, she goes 20. If it’s 30, she goes 15. J.C. himself would likely curse his own name in a vain attempt to urge her to get a move on.
The line of cars that forms behind her is so long, you’ll think the President’s motorcade has arrived in town. Mail trucks and cement mixers weave around her whenever a passing lane presents itself. Oversize Load trucks carrying two-storey homes have to slam on the brakes. But on single lane roads, there is nothing to be done. She is apparently deaf, as she hears none of her fellow drivers’ horns or pleading for her to pick up the pace a bit.
She also has no sense of shame or common sense, and almost seems to revel in her slowness, and the considerable inconvenience she’s causing her fellow man. The best strategy for dealing with her is simply to stop and wait for her to drive out of sight. Don’t let her get to you. If you have an in-car entertainment system, you can pass the time by, say, watching Gettysburg, or the uncut version of Das Boot. If you don’t, keep War & Peace and Anna Karenina handy. As long as you’re not a speed reader, you’ll only have another fifteen minutes or so to wait by the time you finish both.
She is dangerously slow. Not necessarily because her behavior can directly lead to accidents, which it can, but because of the way it sucks all the joy and hope from anyone unfortunate enough to be stuck behind her. She’s like the Dementors in Harry Potter, only she happens to be real. All that time waiting for her to get to where she’s going can cause the mind to wander. Dangerous, destructive thoughts can take root in those peoples’ minds. Any affinity or goodwill they had in the human race is slowly eroded away by the soul-sucking wake of the Laggard. Psychosis sets in. Society breaks down. All is lost.
Perhaps I am being too harsh. Perhaps this old lady (or whatever eldritch creature lurks beneath her flesh) simply perceives time differently than the rest of us. There are some people out there whose internal clock is either sped up to that of a hummingbirds (in which everyone appears to be standing still), or slowed to that of a whale’s (in which everyone is zipping by like jets).
Usually, such people are confined to institutions for their own protection, and the protection of others. Somehow, this one escaped, and someone gave her an SUV. If this is indeed the case, I do not envy this poor woman, or the virtual hell in which she lives. She cannot hope to keep up with the dizzyingly-fast world around her. So she doesn’t try.
I don’t envy her, but I cannot sympathize with her; not after what she put me through. The third or fourth time I was stuck behind her – for a combined time equal to the length of several third-world regimes, and in which I grew several full beards and subsequently shaved them off in the car – I initially believed that being stuck behind the Laggard Liberty and its disaffected driver was the worst thing in the world, perhaps worse than wearing a cage of starving rats on one’s head. But there is in fact something worse: I could be her.
