VOICES | Rules of the road

It happened while I was out walking over my half-hour lunch, around 1:30 on a weekday when the traffic was light. A large, navy-blue SUV made a quick, wide right turn on a red light at the metered intersection as I was crossing the street.

Like any sensible walker paying attention, I startled and reacted by leaping back towards the curb.

The large vehicle skidded to a stop, tires screeching. Then it backed up, to a pre-turn position, and a tinted window rolled down. The driver was a man, who impatiently motioned for me to cross.

For a moment I was genuinely surprised that he stopped, blown away that he even saw me (he was going fast). But by midway through the crosswalk, I didn’t feel he was overly generous or observant with his allowance of letting me go first-after all, I did have the right of way as a pedestrian. I was following the rules of the road.

I must have looked as disgusted as I felt as I hurried across the remainder of the street between the safety of those white lines, cursing under my breath about the now-flashing DON’T WALK sign, hoping the car wouldn’t move until I made it to the opposite curb.

Then something totally unexpected happened. The man leaned out the window.

“No need to look so offended,” he scolded from the safety of his vehicle. “I didn’t hit you.”

I was completely taken aback by the confrontation, by the fact that he chose to engage. But what caught me even more off guard was that it felt as if he were trying to turn me into a guilty party, to put me in the wrong simply because I had reacted.

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I thought in broad terms about who walks and who drives. I thought about how powerful the driver’s seat can seem, and how small you can feel on the road, on foot, alone.

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“You’re sitting in the driver’s seat of a really big car,” I stammered from the other side of the road, now trying to justify my reaction. “It didn’t look like you saw me from the speed you were going. And I did have the right of way. Sorry.” (And why, I would think later, was I apologizing?)

“You’re overreacting. I didn’t even come close,” he insisted, continuing the conversation.

“Sorry,” I apologized (again-later-why?). “But I’m on foot a lot and I really don’t relish the thought of getting plowed over.”

“No need to get angry at me for that,” he said, still scolding. “And maybe you wouldn’t be on foot walking so much if you stopped giving people dirty looks-it’s bad karma and won’t solve anything for you.”

I stood there, dumbfounded, for a moment. Overreacting? Angry? Bad karma? Where was this going?

“I don’t believe karma has anything to do with the fact that I’m walking,” I said, now very much done with apologizing. “I also don’t think that I overreacted to the possibility of being hit by a huge vehicle.” But he blew me off with a wave of his hand, done with our exchange, done with me.

I got back to my desk, sweaty, shaken and more than a little charged with adrenaline. I imagined and re-imagined the scene. I saw myself, a woman on foot, skirt blowing in the wind, hurrying back to work. And this gentleman-obviously in a hurry, too-but in the front seat of a very large vehicle.

Suddenly, the whole thing seemed to have been an altercation of stereotypes at its worst, a horribly clichéd show of power and its flip side, a lack thereof, that left me disturbed.

I began to think about the real “rules of the road” that were being observed-both literally and figuratively. I thought in broad terms about who walks and who drives. I thought about how powerful the driver’s seat can seem, and how small you can feel on the road, on foot, alone.

I thought about my own almost-unconscious shift into an outdated mode of cruise control, using apologies in an attempt to smooth things over. And while I’ve always believed that there is an exaggeration of differences between men and women, it gave me pause to consider those as well and wonder: If I had been a male runner from one of the suburban office park buildings crossing the street, would the driver have reacted in another way? If the driver had been a woman with a child in the backseat, might I have seen things differently?

And more disturbing to me was my response; that day, for just a moment, I believed things might have been very different indeed.

Tami Mohamed Brown lives in Bloomington with her family.