Red State Road Trip - Part 1

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold...

Oops.  Sorry.  Wrong road trip.

I was just outside Childress, TX, when the Red State Road Trip really got launched, but maybe it's worth going back in time a little to, um, set the scene.  If this were a movie script, maybe we could use some flashbacks:

[INTERIOR- KITCHEN]

Andrew: Honey, we're moving to Canada. . .

Sylvia: Yikes!

[EXTERIOR - BEST WESTERN SUITES, THREE MONTHS LATER]

Andrew: Bye, Sylvia and Cathleen - see you in five days. . .

Sylvia and Cathleen: Yikes!

As I wrote in an earlier post, a transfer from Houston to Calgary gave me the chance to take a 2300 mile road trip through the spine of the United States, and possibly see and play some tennis along the way.

I left on a Saturday morning: for many years, I'd played doubles from 9am to noon, and my old crew from Lakeside Estates were there to see me off.

Five hours later, I was flagging: only 250 miles done, and 350 to go before I reached Amarillo, my first night stop.  I've had a soft spot in my heart for Amarillo since Emmylou Harris' "Elite Hotel" album, where she lost her baby to a jukebox and a pinball machine in that Texas town.  But I caffeinated up and pressed on, and by about 6:45pm I'd reached Childress, about 110 miles from the B&B I'd reserved.

I had to stop for gas, and asked a couple of locals where was the best place to get something to eat.  Turned out they weren't local, but actually came from Amarillo, and they recommended the "Big Texan" steakhouse in Amarillo, where they apparently ferried you by limo to try out 72-oz steaks.  Fair enough: a little bit of mental arithmetic told me that I could cover 110 miles at 75mph in about 90 minutes.  So off I set.

I was a mile or so out of Childress when the whomp-whomp-whomp of the flashing blue-and-red lights of the police vehicle u-turning onto my tail lit up the night (not quite as good a line as Hunter S Thompson's, and there was one other crucial difference too, as you'll see).

I pulled over, and was mildly disappointed that the police car didn't continue on after some other miscreant.  It looked like my 30 year record of never getting a speeding ticket was gone before the first day of the RSRT was done.

I waited for the officer to check in, then walk up to my vehicle on the passenger side.  He was young, short and earnest: I asked what the problem was, and he told me he had me on radar doing 75 in a 65.  It was a fair cop.

Then he saw the cooler on the floor of the passenger seat, and asked what was in it.  There was some ice, some Ozarka water bottles, and three bottles of Hacker-Pschorr Weiss.  Three bottles of beer, he mused.  What happened to the other three?  Well they were in the trunk.  My sweetie had put them in the cooler earlier in the day, but I didn't have a bottle opener, so the beer had been untouched.  I hadn't had a drop of alcohol all day - If I'd stopped in Childress for dinner like as not I'd have had a glass of red wine with the steak, but I was clean as a whistle.  So I had no objection whatoever when he asked me to step outside the car to check me for intoxication.

A tennis board isn't necessarily the place where field sobriety test experts gather, so I'll assume you're not all up on the subject.  I was asked to perform three tests: follow his thumb with my eyes only, head tilted back; walk heel-to-toe for nine steps, turn around, walk back counting out steps "one, two,..."; stand on one leg, lift other to forty-five degrees, balance for thirty seconds, arms by sides.

Then he told me he wasn't satisfied with my performance on the tests. I demurred, as politely as I could - I'd had nothing but water and two tylenol.  Plus some coffee at the "Java Junkie" in Henrietta, Texas about three hours back (I winced when I pronounced the cafe's name).

He had me blow in a meter, but this didn't conclude matters.  He said I didn't have any alcohol, but he thought I "had something in my system."  Did I have any objection to his searching my vehicle?

None at all, I said.  Go ahead.  He pulled on some leather gloves, and told me to sit on his right headlamp.  As he moved towards my car, he told me to be sure not to shift off the headlamp.  "If I see movement, I'm coming back there with my gun out."

Now, I thought, I might be in trouble.

The search took about 6 or 7 minutes.  After methodically going through the front and back seats, the officer opened the overloaded trunk, and for the first time he seemed really nonplussed.  I think it was the blanket and the bottom half of the birdbath.  He asked me what I had in the trunk.  I told him I really wasn't sure what all the contents were - my wife had packed it, and I was taking the contents and the car up to Canada.

I think by now the officer was out of his comfort zone, and genuinely not sure what to do next.  He told me that he thought it was 50:50 that I had something that was messing me up, and didn't seem to think that Tylenol taken seven hours earlier would account for what he thought he was seeing.  So we were on to some more sobriety tests.  He had me move my thumb across the other fingers of my right hand, counting 1-2-3-4, 4-3-2-1.  He had me tilt my head back, shut my eyes, and silently count out thirty seconds (Andrew, VOICEOVER: One-thousand-and-one, one-thousand-and-two...).  He asked if I knew the alphabet, and told me to give him the letters from G to P.

I thought I'd suggest some more tests, as a good faith effort to convince him of my sobriety.  Some times tables, perhaps?  But he'd made up his mind.

"Look," he told me, "I'm on a knife-edge here.  A lot of guys would just run you in and keep you overnight to be sure.  You say you're going to Amarillo?"

I assured him that that was the case, and he said "Well, I suggest you pull over the next town you get to and splash some cold water in your face.  I'm still not sure I'm doing the right thing having you go back on the road."

I told him that I appreciated that he was concerned for my safety, and the safety of the other road users.  He told me to go and sit back in my car.

When I got back in the car, I had five minutes more to wait while he radioed back to the dispatcher.  I was about to put my insurance card back in my visor, then I had the nasty thought that the officer might not appreciate my reaching for something in my car.  So I waited with my hands in my lap, until he came back to the window, handed me a slip of paper, and told me that he'd issued a warning, not a fine, and had checked off the speed violation and the consent search.  I thanked him, pulled off, and drove extremely carefully for the next two hours, checking my rear view mirror for the next 20 miles or so.

So, all was well that ended well.  I preserved my record of never getting a speeding ticket.  For the rest of the road trip, I didn't touch any alcohol during the driving stages.  I kept within 5 mph of the speed limit.  And officer, should you by any strange chance read this blog - you made the right call.

-- Andrew

[[Ed. note - Man, no alcohol and keeping within 5 MPH of the speed limit the entire trip: As Sylvia might have said, Yikes! Andrew, have just defined Highway Hell. BTW, everyone, this is the first of three parts. The other two will include RSRT Battlefield Reports as Andrew slices and serves his way up the Rocky Mountain front toward his new home in that frozen wasteland north of the US. We'll post them next week, after the smoke and din of Davis Cup have subsided --- Pete]]