I had an odd experience. I went to Oregon. I thought, innocent me, that I was going to the Pacific Northwest. I thought, ignorant me, that I would be visiting rugged terrain, raging rivers, the ghosts of beneficent cowboys, fresh air, independent spirits, and vigor. Westward Ho the Wagons.
Was I ever wrong.
Know what I found in Bend, Oregon? Are your ready for this?
Traffic circles. That’s right. Traffic circles.
Lest you suspect confusion on my part, I am not talking about clover leafs. Clover leafs are familiar to all experienced travelers, and even make a graceful kind of sense as they swoon over rapidly moving cars. Nor am I talking about jug handles. Even they, after we grasp the concept of turning right to go left, have a cockamamie kind of logic. Particularly since road signs alert us well in advance, “All turns from the right.” In fact, after our initial baptism of perplexing traffic patterns, exiting from a cloverleaf or a jug handle is no harder than flicking on a turn signals and aiming at a ramp.
Not so with … even thinking about it gives me a headache. Traffic circles.
My associate and I had met up in Oregon to put on a presentation about analyzing fire scene photographs. The deal was that I would drive our rental car during the four-day conference, and Jim, much smarter than I, with Ph.D.s in just about everything, would sit in the passenger seat and navigate.
Each day, after we had settled upon our objective (supermarket, restaurant, coffee shop), I would hunch behind the steering wheel, knuckles white, foot on gas pedal, and Jim would be shouting—hands over his face to protect him from shards of windshield glass resulting from an anticipated collision – “Yield! Yield!”
Sheesh. Traffic circles. They are stupid. They are counter-intuitive. They are frustrating. They are dangerous. Round and round we went, in a land without corners. Round and round, passing streets with signs cleverly hidden by foliage to baffle those who had rashly come here from Outside. In this context, please remember that Oregon is the only state whose governor has ever publicly declared, “Visit us again and again, but for heaven’s sake please don’t stay.” Obviously, they had never wanted us there in the first place. Round and round, with no clue to navigation other than one barely perceptible sign echoing Jim’s panicked instructions to “Yield! Yield!”
Yield to what? From where? Where the heck were all of the cars coming from? Where were they going? And why was everyone driving in the same direction? Round and round, like an anti-gravity centrifuge threatening, after dozens of incomprehensible revolutions, to launch our rental car into outer space.
