A Traffic Jam of Unusual Nature

There is no polite way to say this.  The streets in Helena and most of the highways leading into Helena are awful.  They range from sheer ice cover to rippled snowpack.  Traffic flow, in general, has slowed greatly.  Intersections take longer to clear when lights change.

Yesterday, while driving out of town on Eleventh Avenue, I came upon a traffic jam of unusual nature.  While the lane of traffic in which I was driving flowed in a fairly normal fashion, the other lane was filled with a very long string of cars and trucks moving along at a crawl.  My line of cars quickly overtook the slower, tightly spaced line.  When I finally reached the apparent front of the slower line, I saw a man riding a tiny motorized scooter of some type.  The man was dawdling along at perhaps four miles-per-hour.  He was wearing a reflective high visibility vest and had a traffic warning triangle affixed to a three-foot post attached to the back of the scooter.

He was holding his place—right there in the middle of the lane—carefully creeping along in single digit temperatures at a single digit speed.

Later in the day, I bumped into a friend of mine at Costco.  We exited the store into the parking lot at the same time. I had taken no more than three steps before he nudged my shoulder and pointed immediately across the traffic lane in front of the store.  “See that scooter over there?”

Upon glancing in that direction, I saw, parked at the edge of string of cars, the very scooter I had seen earlier in the day.  I laughed.  “I saw a guy driving it earlier today.”

“I did too!”

“Was he causing a traffic jam?” I asked.

“Yes!  He is really brave…or something else.”

-- Mitchell Hegman