This morning, a radio ad began, “Now that the beautiful spring weather is here in New England…”

Ha! Good joke! Especially for April Fool’s. That made my day.

You see, God sometimes has a bizarre sense of humor. One year, for April Fool’s, he allowed me to get laid off from my job, and so began my end in that industry. (Seriously.)

This year, on April the 1’th, he sent snow. Actually, more like slush falling from the sky. It collects on the trees, which then take great pleasure in shelling you with it as you pass under. So, all of nature is in on the joke. They got me really good this morning, hit my car dead-on with a slush-balloon, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.

“Hit!” I swear I heard them laugh in the distance.

So today, I thankfully reproduce the speech of Mr. Samuel L. Clemens on New England weather, as reported by the New York Times, December 23, 1876.

-TimK

The situation is exacerbated at rotaries. For those of you who may not be familiar with the Boston rotary, it is a complex, multilateral intersecting way, with no stop signs, at which everyone goes at the same time, and the biggest vehicle always wins. This is why so many Boston drivers, especially those from the suburbs, drive SUV’s.

A rotary usually has three to five entrances, and up to 30 exits, depending on how many times you go around before getting dizzy. This is usually only a problem for out-of-towners, who get on a rotary and then frequently get lost. So they go around and around and around, always looking for the right exit to take, but never finding it. I once heard of a man from Nebraska who couldn’t find his way off a Boston rotary and continued driving around it until he grew old and died.

Then there are traffic signals.

Nothing requires so keen a notice, so focused a concentration, so large and intimidating a vehicle, as does driving in Boston.

When we first moved to Boston from western Pennsylvania, we were both intrigued and horrified to see public roadways under construction, with potholes dug the size of the Great Lakes and manhole covers raised as tall as Flathead Mesa. Well, since I was just a boy at the time, maybe the potholes and manhole covers seemed a little bigger than they actually were. But the roads were conspicuously marked with signs–and this is actually true–“Danger! Proceed at your own risk!” Well, perhaps the signs didn’t have exclamation points, but they might as well have, because they made me feel as though we were about to drive off the edge of the continent and might fall into the ocean. (I had heard that Boston was close to the ocean.)

(As I’m sure someone is going to mention, these signs are only posted in some areas on New England, such as Connecticut. In the Boston area, the roads and construction and possibility for automobile damage is the same, but the explicit warning is missing.)

I recall my father oh so cautiously proceeding down these roadways, carefully weaving between potholes and manhole covers, the tires grinding against the unfinished roadway as we putted down this dangerous avenue. Meanwhile, the native Bostononians flew by us at highway speed, cursing us as they went, clearly unafraid of falling into the ocean. But then again, having grown up in the area, they probably intuitively knew where the edge was.

That was almost 25 years ago, and since then I’ve gotten my own genuine Massachusetts driver’s license, learned how to navigate the roads here, and even how to assert myself behind the wheel of a car. And in the process, in all my years of driving in the Boston area, I’ve only gotten into five accidents.