The Right Direction

Last month, my parents came from Australia to spend a couple of weeks with us in St. Francisville. We had a great time with many adventures but for them, none was more thrilling than the one I’m about to share. I would have written about it earlier if I hadn’t promised to wait until they’d left the country (and the jurisdiction of the West Feliciana Parish Sheriff’s Department). 

Arriving on a Wednesday, Mum and Dad picked up a rental car at the Baton Rouge airport and made their way to our house by concentrating fiercely on the taillights of our car. We live twenty miles northeast of St. Francisville, the last few miles of which involve a filigree of rural laneways that are a bit of a labyrinth even when you don’t have jetlag. So that first evening my folks were glad to come in convoy and arrived without mishap for a celebratory supper. Around 9 o' clock, when the time came for them to make their way back to St. Francisville (where they were staying), they waved away the offer of a return escort. Confidence bolstered by an incident-free outbound trip (and possibly a couple glasses of chardonnay), they clambered into the unscathed little Chevy they’d rented and disappeared into the night. The next morning they complained loudly about the craziness of Louisiana’s nighttime drivers, insisting that several times during the trip home, cars had “driven straight at us, flashing their lights and swerving all over the place!” 

What went wrong? 

You probably know that in Australia they drive on the left-hand side of the road, which is to say the steering wheel is on the right side of the car. According to Wikipedia, only about ten percent of the world’s total road distance carries traffic on the left-hand side of the road, almost all of that in island nations and former British colonial territories. So for Commonwealth citizens and former colonists accustomed to driving on the left—and who like to travel—ambidexterity behind the wheel is a skill worth acquiring. Driving on the “wrong” side of the road is a bit like trying to write with your non-dominant hand or kick a ball with the opposite foot; spatial disorientation is also at play because when you first get behind the wheel, the bulk of the vehicle feels as if it’s on the wrong side of your body. Stop concentrating for a minute and your personal auto pilot tries to place the car where it feels most comfortable. Unhelpfully, this means putting most of the vehicle outside of your lane, which alarms fellow road users and makes other occupants of your car very nervous indeed. Still, since my folks had done a certain amount of driving in parts of the world with right-hand traffic (continental Europe, for example), I had assumed that they would adapt pretty quickly. That wasn’t entirely the case. 

Much of the southbound trip between our house and St. Francisville takes place on U.S. Highway 61, a federal four-lane highway with a forty-foot grass median to separate my beloved parents from oncoming traffic. Speaking from experience, I would say that being confined to your side of the road by a forty-foot grass median is an excellent way to keep yourself on the straight and narrow, but what no one considered was the possibility that, upon reaching the intersection with Highway 61, my folks might make their left turn without ever crossing that median, failing in the dark of a Louisiana country night to notice that they were turning onto a four-lane highway at all. 

Mercifully there weren’t many drivers northbound on U.S. Highway 61 that evening; but the few that were had the thrilling experience of encountering a small rental car being driven purposefully down the wrong side of the road. For fifteen miles! When I wondered aloud whether my parents could possibly have been on the wrong side, they insisted that they had been driving “in the right lane the whole time.” Which, since they were unaware of the existence of a whole other “right” side of the highway, I suppose that they were. The reality that the “right” lane in which they were driving was in fact the northbound left lane dawned later that day, when they set out on 61 again and, to their horror, discovered twice the highway they had perceived the night before. 

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“Trying to keep moving in the right direction.” That’s my motto for the month, which seems as good a premise as any for revealing that, come January, Country Roads is going to look a little different. After decades of faithful service, our venerable design will be undergoing a gentle facelift, presenting new page layouts, an updated cover treatment, and a significant improvement in paper quality. And although there will be some new features, the types of stories we tell will remain much the same. In other words, the journey to explore our region’s inimitable culture will continue in much the same direction. We’re just switching to the fast lane. Hope you’ll ride along.