A seasonal disorder returns

If not for the fact that their cars bore Maine license plates, I’d have sworn that half the driving population in Bangor had just moved to town from Southern California over this past snowy weekend.

How else to explain all of the knuckleheaded drivers carelessly slipping and sliding through the streets during the early-winter storm, oblivious to every hazard signal that Mother Nature could throw in their paths?

Those white flakes swirling around the sky and blanketing the landscape should have been a dead giveaway that driving conditions would not be quite the same as they were a couple of days earlier when the roads were bare. If not the snow, then surely all that icy rain pelting their windshields should have tipped them off that perhaps they might want to change the way they navigated their cars through the mess.

Apparently not, however, judging from the comedy of driving errors I saw on display throughout the weekend.

The woman cruising down my street, her car throwing up a rooster tail of icy slush, was obviously not some inexperienced kid commandeering her first set of wheels. She looked to be a woman who has seen plenty of Maine winters in her time. Clearly she had driven in these same road conditions before – just last winter, I would guess. Yet as she rapidly approached the stop sign in front of my house, it was evident that while her eyes saw the signs of winter all around, her brain was still somehow firmly locked into Indian summer mode.

When she finally decided to hit her brakes just a few feet before the corner, causing her to sail right through the intersection as if on a toboggan, her expression registered genuine surprise. I could imagine the woman mumbling to herself, “Now, what the heck could have caused that to happen?”

I saw the same curious phenomenon everywhere I went. People blithely pulling out of side streets and directly into the paths of cars that couldn’t stop in the snow if they had to. People zooming up to red lights and sliding right through them – whoops! – while wearing that befuddled “How did that happen?” look on their faces.

People who managed to forget over the last few short months that they actually need more than 10 feet of braking room on black ice if they hoped to avoid ramming the rear end of the car stopped at the light up ahead. People barreling along at 70 on the slush-rutted interstate without a clue in the world as to why that big yellow sign might be flashing the number “45.”

Since Mainers should be among the most skilled bad-weather drivers in the country, it would appear that some of us suffer from acute short-term memory disorder as the first significant snowstorm of the season blows through. Every safe-driving technique we managed to master by the end of last winter is mysteriously forgotten by the onset of the next, and must be relearned as if we had just graduated from driving school. None of the familiar sensory data seem to trigger a change of seasons in the brain and the need to adapt accordingly behind the wheel: not the plunging temperatures, not the premature Christmas displays in the stores, not even the sight of people bent over their snow shovels.

This same seasonal memory disorder will soon afflict Maine’s fishermen, too. In spring, when fishermen are eagerly awaiting open water on which to float their boats, a string of warm days will send a signal to the brain that suggests the ice is eroding nicely. In early winter, however, when they have ice fishing on the brain, this same melting weather will be thoroughly ignored. As a result, each year a new crop of ice fishermen will stare dumbfounded as their trucks break through the ice and settle to the bottom of lakes across the state.

If experience really is the best teacher, there are certainly a lot of slow learners out there.