We camped overnight at Salt Creek last night, and although it rained lightly most of the time we were there and awake, the tide pools were beautiful and filled with interesting creatures to watch. Despite the weather, a good time was had by all, and a great deal of recreational reading got accomplished, to my lasting joy.
Despite two days of peace, calm, and natural beauty, however, one of the greatest moments of surprise and delight arose not from the tide-pools, but out of the behaviour of our fellow humans as we drove back across the Olympic Peninsula toward home. After a tasty dinner at Gordy’s in Port Angeles,* we stopped along the freeway in Sequim to fill up a thirsty camper with gasoline. I started the pump, and was washing off the windshield while it ran, when the gas station and much of the surrounding area lost power. And I don’t mean just a little flicker, either; the whole place went dark, including the store, the gas pumps, and the traffic lights regulating the interchange between the divided freeway and the local turnoff for the station.
Those of you who live on the east coast, or have done so in the past, will know the vasty depths of terror such a situation should inspire, especially to someone who is driving a somewhat under-powered RV and attempting to make a left turn onto the eastbound section of the freeway from the local road, across three lanes of westbound traffic. Hell, in the greater Boston area, even when the traffic lights are working, this can be a scary and intensely frustrating experience, as drivers never fail to fill the intersection after the lights turn yellow, often backing up crossing traffic through several cycles, and sometimes indefinitely.
But here, there wasn’t even a hiccup. Nothing got backed up; the intersection did not snarl with traffic, and nobody sounded their horns. No firearms were pulled, no middle fingers raised, and no beet-faced yuppie SUV drivers shouted racist imprecations out open windows. Without a hint of the infuriatingly amoral blind self-interest that is routine fare on the streets of Boston and Cambridge, the drivers in this busy interchange quietly began to treat it as an ordinary all-stop four-way intersection. One layer of vehicles from each direction would cross, unmolested, and then the row behind them would stop and let the next group have a turn. It proceeded in this round-robin fashion for at least ten or fifteen minutes, including the time it took us to finish our transaction, get the camper through the intersection, and continue on down the road. The lights were still out by the time we got through, but even though it was a busy Friday afternoon, nobody panicked or freaked out or did anything stupid during the entire time we were observing.
Total involvement by law-enforcement officers: Zero. This wasn’t just co-operation, it was unmediated co-operation, and it was truly delightful to see.
Among other things, experiences like this really drive home the point that a culture is more than just a set of abstract conventions for determination of kinship and establishing dominance. It’s also a kind of “higher mind” in which our own individual selves each take part, just as the neurons and ganglia in our brains work together to form our individual minds. Some of these higher minds are calmer and more rational than others, and so the individuals who take part in them behave in calmer and more rational ways. Other such minds, as we have experienced in the past thirteen months, seem to comprise the aforementioned beet-faced, self-serving, impatient, hyperaggressive, and rabidly emotional personality types that dominate around our home in Massachusetts.
These überminds, if we may call them such, have a life of their own and impose their general shape upon the individual minds they contain. I assert that if you were to take a typical individual from a calm and cooperative culture such as we experience in the Pacific Northwest, and stick him in among the froth-mouthed maniacs of Middlesex County, MA, you would soon have just another seething exemplar of entitlement and ego just like the rest of us. Similarly, with the possible exception of attorneys, a Masshole transplanted into a bucolic Northwestern community would likely become a much more cooperative and patient citizen given enough time to practise at it.
I found it both pleasing and gratifying to have this moment of delight in my fellow humans. I’d almost forgotten how nice it can be, when the social animal works together as a unit, rather than tearing itself to pieces over trivialities.
Filed by Michael at 20:16 under Political, Quotation 
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