Goines On: Reporting drunk drivers

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The Goineses were in a rental car heading south on California’s Hwy 99, along the eastern side of the long, wide San Joaquin Valley, now dry and dusty from lack of rain and the consumption of river and ground water by the growing number of orchards of tightly packed almond and pistachio trees.
    They were going to spend a couple of nights in Tulare, visiting a friend their children’s age the first evening, and the next day visiting Mrs. Goines’ 93-year-old cousin and his wife of 72 years, and then the town cemetery, where their parents were interred.
    Mrs. Goines had been born in Tulare, and Goines’ parents and he had moved there from Petaluma the summer before he entered eighth grade. Goines had attended Tulare’s original high school, and she a high school begun his senior year, where they met a few years later, in the office of the Dean of Girls, a woman who had taught both of them at their respective high schools before joining the new school’s administrative staff. Their visits the day they met were entirely coincidental. He was at the school to teach a class in driver education; she was there specifically to visit her teacher. Their attraction was mutual on first acquaintance, and they wed exactly six weeks later.
    Goines suddenly swerved their car to the right. The maneuver was reflexive, the product of decades of driving, including thousands of miles on freeways at relatively high speed (Goines disliked exceeding posted speed limits) – cross-continental, north-south, for trip after trip of normal modern life, commuting to work, visiting their son or daughter when they lived practically close, going to the beach or mountains, or just to Costco or the pet spa or doctors’ appointments in nearby towns.
    Goines had swerved in order to avoid a car wandering into their lane from the left before its driver realized what was happening and moved back into his own lane. Mrs. Goines watched the vagrant car as it slowly distanced itself from them, continuing to sway left and right between its lane’s boundaries. “You think he’s drunk?” she said.
    Half a mile farther on, Goines harrumphed. “Did you see that sign? ‘Report drunk drivers.’ Timely.”
    “What?” she said. “How could we tell that?”
    Goines thought she must have misheard the sign’s second word. “Well, you know, drunk drivers would be driving erratically.”
    “But how would we know they’re Trump drivers?”
    Goines laughed before enunciating even more carefully this time: “The sign said drunk drivers, not Trump drivers.”
    “Ah,” said Mrs. Goines, nodding her head contemplatively. A thousand feet farther along, she pointed towards the shoulder. “Another ‘report’ sign!”
    But they had already passed it. “Report drunk drivers,” Goines said again.
    ”It actually looked like report Trump drivers to me,” she said. “I know it couldn’t have said that. Could it? Weird.”
    “It’s been a long day,” Goines said, “you’re tired. We got up at 3, the flight, the plane change, the drive from San Jose.” He exhaled deeply. He rarely drove this far without their switching drivers.
    “But,” said Mrs. Goines, “if the sign did say to report Trump drivers, I guess we could spot them by their stickers. ‘Make America Great Again’. ‘Trump/Pence 2020’.”
    “Or ‘Devin Nunes for Congress’,” Goines added. “He went to my high school, you know...Or by their red baseball caps...It would be a full-time job to report them, though. There are so many.”
    “I never thought the people here were like that,” Mrs. Goines said. “I thought they were smarter than that, better.”
    “Maybe we were too young and naive to know about exclusive self-interest, tribes and racism and nationalism,” Goines mused.
    “Or have things just changed that much in 50 years? Growing human over-population. Competition for dwindling resources... Depletion of ground water.” Mrs. Goines waved a hand at the terrain.
    They drove on in silence for a while, the dry, dusty landscape seeming to express the pall that had fallen across the valley where they had once been young and idealistic and full of hopeful expectation.

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