Today was spent down at our town docks for Island Cleanup Day, a day for island residents in our town to load up their boats with junk and demo detritus from their island homes and bring it to the town docks for our DPW to offload and dispose of. This is an annual event and one I have volunteered for pretty much every year I’ve lived in my town. I only missed one year – last year – due to a family gathering to celebrate the first birthday of my great niece. I more than made up for it this year.
However, this post isn’t really about Island Cleanup Day as it is about a discussion that took place during the day, that being about whether others have observed more people than ever “driving stupid”. That expanded to also cover people out on boats “driving stupid” as well.
As I have mentioned in a few other posts, since mid-Spring I have noticed a lot of people driving erratically, poorly, or outright dangerously. Too many of them I have found are driving distracted, usually paying more attention to their smart phones rather than the road. More than a couple of people I was working with today have seen the same thing. The other thing that goes with that is there have been more traffic accidents, with more than a few of them being fatal.
Our town saw two fatal accidents within a few days of each other, one being a head-on collision where both drivers died when one car crossed over the double yellow line. No report has yet been issued about the cause, but if it were due to distracted driving it wouldn’t surprise me. The other accident was a hit-and-run which killed a pedestrian, the driver later being found to be suffering from dementia and shouldn’t have been driving in the first place.
New Hampshire has seen a lot of fatal traffic accidents, with one in a neighboring town that was very similar to the one in our town where one car crossed over the double yellow line and hit the other car head on. In this accident an 8-year old girl died from her injuries. Again, no accident investigation report has yet been issued, but again it wouldn’t surprise me if it were another case of distracted driving.
One of the other people I had the opportunity to talk with was one of our town’s police officers. I asked him if he was seeing a lot of people “driving stupid” today and his immediate response was to roll his eyes and say “You have no idea!”. He related a couple of the stupider things he’d seen that day...and it was still well before noon.
A number of us also described some of the stupidity we’d seen out on the lake, and while distracted driving of the kind seen on the roads may not have been the cause of what we’ve seen, there were still too many “stupids” out there. Considering the heaviest boat traffic is during weekends it isn’t a surprise that we see so many “stupids” during the weekend. It’s one reason I tend to do all of my boating during the week.
On those few occasions when I do go out during the weekend it’s usually because I have guests. While I do enjoy the company, I find that I get back to the dock at the end of the cruise feeling exhausted because it takes a lot of work to keep me and my friends safe while we’re out on the lake. Talking with the others working at Cleanup Day, they have experienced the same thing.
How about you folks? Have you been seeing a lot more people “driving stupid”? It wouldn’t surprise me if you have.
