The Novel

THE NOVEL
Last night we went down to the creek. The water smelled sweet and glimmered. You could see the fish darting about. He turned at the sound of laughter and caught a glimpse of three kids, family he guessed, as they plowed into the cool water. He was glad that he lived long enough to see it. Oh how Dad lamented as the fence rows and tree lines disappeared and clear cut farming turned his Indiana into a plains State. How could they let it happen? Didn’t anyone get the lesson of Easter Island? Clear cut anything is bad, cannot be sustained and ultimately leads to ecodisaster. No better way to put it.
On this very spot in 2005 signs pronounced the water unfit for human contact. Unfit to touch. Imagine. He couldn’t. Back then he lamented that there was something wrong with not protecting the watershed from e’coli, accepting old ways and rejecting available new technology because it might mean some change, some inconvenience, some work. How could conservative Hoosiers have been so blind? What could have motivated this largely working class undereducated but ethical demographic to allow the degradation that took so many decades to reach it’s inevitable collapse.
Many say he was lucky, unbelievably so. He fell to the pestilence twice, only to rise and keep going. Now, with pain in every step, and the weight of ten thousand sorrows he had to admit that luck likely did have something to do with it. Splash, and the blue water soaked his back, turning quickly he caught a glimpse of the culprit. But then it was gone. The robots were developed in California originally, an American innovation and some forward thinking individuals found them ideal for surface water management. Enforcers capable of warning and fining, they paid for themselves from the first deployment.
Auto policing of course started with transportation. Genius at work. Amazing what a wire in the road can do. Of course the car computers had been their a long time, measuring acceleration, speed and the like, and of course adding a few sensors for motion and proximity were nothing special, an offshoot of airbag technology. The first experience was a little unnerving, and the first fine maddening. Yet it was amazing how quickly drivers adapted to the new rules.
Drive too fast, follow to close, makes a dangerous lane change and the car and road recognize your action. The first warning was enough for most, but those who wanted to test the resolve of this marvel always lost. In automating traffic enforcement government starting actually getting smaller. Displaced workers found their way into the new opportunities arising from courageous energy and health care legislation that started with Obama. The first glimpse of hope was in the thirty somethings.
Amazing how much better traffic flows if everyone does unto others as. Sadly, it took laws to make it happen. Yet, as he cruised the fast lane at 95 on this clear day he pondered what took so long. It seems so apparent in retrospect. You have the technology, it is a win win, why not use it? The idea that individuals could make their own decisions on crowded highways with regard to basic safety and rules of the road went the same way as Route 66. Scanning his monitor he sees the speed is clear for the next 15 kilometers.
Ah yes, with the automated traffic enforcement came a new set of rules for the road. Since most drivers feared the fines, embarrassment and inconvenience of having a car that won’t start because of repeat violations the roads became a much more civilized place. Usage fees rightly assessed based on size and horsepower helped most adjust to the new transportation paradigm.
Yet now, these 25 years later violators still fill government coffers every year with more than enough money to support the entire system and employ a few hundred nice folks.
Alert, the cruise drops out and speed immediately slows to 50. I steer to the right as directed and take my place in the slow line. Ahead a Violator has done herself in with the guy wire. Having tangled with it several times and tumbles she was made to look like a julienne fry. Traffic somberly rolled passed. My monitor assured me emergency responders were at hand, although I wondered as I passed, for I did not see any, and the poor soul was left to display the product of her foolish behavior, her own demise. As he plodded along thinking of yesterday his mind drifted.
The shuffle of her step on the carpet belies the pace of a driven woman. She is on a mission. With the task of supper on the one hand, laundry on the other and preparing to go to work I marveled at her methodology. Waiting until the last minute to cram as many tasks in as possible does not appear to be a random act, but rather one of some deliberation. Perhaps it is actually a genetic trait relating to the gender. I wonder about other species but lack the enthusiasm to GOOGLE the subject.
“Alright, dinner is ready” she called from the kitchen.
What is it? What matters? It’s just this next step. Thirty minutes seems so unachievable. But wait; there are only 15 to go; now that is manageable. The machine is his great equalizer. An exercise device so eloquent yet serious. He equated it with the weed eater, a job he despised but one that had to be done. The very thing he never dreamed of as a younger man, a spitting image of his old man’s life style. He hoped he could die as well.
The warning light flashed, and he took control of the car as it slowed to maintain distance with the surrounding traffic. With his signal left he eased the wheels into the burm, now travelling at a crawl. Yet he remembered when such a restriction could easily leave him stationary for hours. The intrusion of automatic traffic enforcement, ATE systems as it was called was taken by many as a direct attack on their personal freedom. Of course there really never was any freedom as dreamed of because the overruling law of the land was we must share the road. Never the less, the idea that you could not violate traffic law when someone was not looking without paying a penalty simply did not set well at first. He rolls to the right and finds his way back to his lane, the green signal indicating his rightful place as speed picked up again. Leveling off at 95, clear ahead for 140 miles, he’ll make Chicago in time for dinner.
Ah the vanity of it, how it makes the clock tick. The retro Pontiac fitted with the latest in drive technology still burned gas, or kerosene, or diesel or cooking oil, and at this speed would require about a gallon of the stuff to make it to the City. In a few years even this will be a dinosaur. He wondered how the car changed so little from invention until Obama, and since the soaring technology has created demand for product far exceeding even the most liberal of hopes and estimates. Soon the Chicago trip will require no driving, and soon after the retro Pontiac will be relegated to the old two lane roads. Ah, the price of progress. If people didn’t drive to express their frustrations, their impatience, and anger, how then would those emotions be expressed? That was the question then. Who knows how all of that redirected rage once taken out on those you shared the road with manifested itself when vented on animate and inanimate objects as well. With the regulation of traffic came the end of the myth of freedom to do whatever you want on the road regardless of how it impacts others. It was of course a myth, perhaps true only decades ago, when there were actually rural interstates less travelled.