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Big bugs, big rigs: Welcome home Saturday, Jun 30, 2007 By John Brummett "And I didn't slow down 'til I was almost to Arkansas. I think I'm gonna reroute my trip. I wonder if anybody'd think I'd flipped ... If I went to L.A., via Omaha." - Charlie Daniels in the song, "Uneasy Rider." This is not about my vacation. It's about returning from vacation. It's about being greeted at the eastern Arkansas line on Interstate 40 by two-inch bugs committing hari-kari on my windshield in such vast numbers and with such ferocity of pace that, within a mere mile, the rat-a-tat spattered remains had severely impaired my vision. I could scarcely see the big rig ahead of me, the big rig behind me and the big rig beside me. It's about pulling into the brightly illuminated island of a service station to clear the windshield of this fresh, yellow-red carnage. It's about getting swarmed about the head and mouth by scores, indeed hundreds, of these elongated, grayish, tentacled atrocities. If they'd been mosquitoes, they'd have left me blood-dry. If they'd had magnetic properties, the number perched on the hood of the Jeep, upon flying away simultaneously, surely would have taken the vehicle with them. A farmer friend told me later that in the region these are colloquially called pterodactyls, because of their wing span and crazed swarming of bright lights. I wondered what the two young women in the car in the other lane - with the Connecticut license plate - could possibly be thinking. This is no one's fault, of course. It happens that this was early summer. It happens that the moment you leave Memphis, cross the mighty river and enter Arkansas, you've left heavily populated urbanity for wide-open farmland. Farming is virtuous, important work, and, from May through the summer, bugs simply come with it. If you've shown the bad judgment to enter this region on or about 9 p.m. on a late-June Saturday night, shortly after darkness' fall requires the use of headlights, then you simply have designed a perfect storm. I told Randy Ort, public information director for the state Highway Department, that I wasn't blaming him for the bugs. He said thanks. But this also is about the frustration of encountering - upon re-entry to Arkansas - the only bumpy stretch of freeway in nearly a thousand miles. We'd driven from Washington, D.C., through Virginia and across Tennessee. We never hit a significant bump, certainly nothing that rattled our teeth, until shortly before the White River bridge. I asked Ort how it could be that we'd incurred all that voter-approved debt to rebuild our interstate highways, and, still, we'd bounced our way toward the White River. It turns out that three stretches of our interstate highways were left unimproved by that bond program, owing to a finite sum of money and that those stretches weren't in that bad a shape at the time. One was that very section just east of the White River bridge on Interstate 40. The others are near Russellville and Malvern. Ort said those were first priorities as money becomes available. I'm reminded that Virginia and Tennessee are larger, richer states than Arkansas. Their finite sums are less finite. One other thing: The big rigs multiply the moment you enter Arkansas on the east. That's because Interstate 40 intersects with Interstate 55 and, from Memphis to Little Rock, also serves as a collector of Interstate 30 traffic headed to Texas. If a trucker is trying to get from the Southeast or the Midwest to Texas or California, you're probably going to get passed by him on Interstate 40 between Memphis and Little Rock. Ort told me that Saturday night was the worst time to be out there. He said the truck traffic is heaviest and the regular vehicular traffic lightest at that time. So let's conclude with this reader service: When it comes to driving a regular-sized vehicle on a summer Saturday night along Interstate 40 in eastern Arkansas, don't. ------- John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699. |
