My cars are not horny enough.
“Excuse me,” my cars’ horns say to impeding traffic. “Could we peacefully share the road? It’s just a thought. Have a nice day and please don’t hit me.”
I recently drove to a family birthday party. On the highway, a car nearly swerved into me from the left. I spotted the car out of the corner of my eye and honked my horn as if I was a sugar-laden toddler playing his first game of Whac-A-Mole.
I pounded the steering wheel, resulting in nothing more than a series of faint wheezes resembling those an asthmatic person makes. The driver of the other car appeared unfazed. The fact that he drifted back into his own lane was coincidental.
Through the years, I’ve commanded mostly small and midsize sedans with weak horns. Even the six-cylinder, all-wheel-drive SUV carrying my family at the time of my most recent encounter with a comatose driver offers one-tenth the decibels that today’s professional female tennis player expels during her ground strokes.
General horn etiquette suggests that we use our horns as a way to alert others of danger, such as when we notify fellow drivers that we have screaming kids on board or that a giant car-eating alien is gaining ground on everyone. Etiquette also allows for us, after a reasonable pause, to politely beep at the driver in front of us to signal that the light turned green yesterday. By those guidelines, the soft, summer breeze of my horns is adequate.
But everyday driving is an act of survival. Now more than ever. There are more cars on the road, more distractions, more anger. My horns are too polite to save me in today’s jungle of cars that are too often operated by people who have no business sitting behind a wheel of cheese, never mind the wheel of two-plus tons of murderous metal. My horns whisper, “Go ahead, cut me off. Finish that text to your friend whom you’re going to see in two minutes. Run me into a ditch and take my life while you’re at it.” That’s not the representation I’m looking for.
Christopher Walken wants more cowbell. I want more car horn. I want a pride of lions to roar from under the hood.
Dealers should offer a variety of horn tones as standard equipment. Selecting a horn should be no different from picking the car’s color.
Today’s roads are too dangerous for cars with horns that wouldn’t cause a librarian to flinch. I want other drivers to think my car is howling as if it were passing a golf ball-size kidney stone.
I want my horn to give the texting, tweeting s.o.b who shares the road with me the same feeling I enjoyed when I listened to my father’s response after he learned that I, a know-it-all college graduate with zero nautical education, had borrowed his boat for a weekend of trips that would twice take me and my friends through one of the most dangerous entries to the Atlantic Ocean along the East Coast.
In case that story wasn’t enough of a welcome home, I had decided to borrow his beer that weekend, too. Forget that I didn’t replenish the entire inventory. I left him with not one beer.
The power of my dad’s parched voice violently vibrating through me is the power that I would like my car horn to have.
© 2012 by Mike Farley
