One-Way Sprague Way Too Befuddling

Some years ago, I read about an experiment to prove the adaptability of the human brain.

Some scientists took a group of average people and issued them special eyeglasses, with instructions that they be worn during all waking hours.

The glasses performed the extraordinary function of making everything viewed through them appear upside down.

After about two weeks of fighting nausea and barked shins, the subjects’ brains threw in the towel and turned everything right side up again.

Well, it’s been more than two weeks and my brain is still fighting the new Valley Couplet.

My wife, a woman of redoubtable courage, begins to tremble like a chihuahua on a fudgecicle whenever we get within a mile of Sprague Avenue.

The place has become a destruction derby of misdirected cars. I still suffer bouts of momentary vertigo when confronted with one or more sets of headlights closing head-on in my lane. Before taking any action, my mind must first confirm if I am driving on Two-Way Sprague, or One-Way Sprague.

After that, it is vital to determine if it is me who is in the wrong lane, or that confused loony up ahead.

Sometimes my wife assists with a safety tip she picked up on a month-long road trip we made through Britain some years ago.

“LOOK OUT!” she will scream in an operatic soprano that would send Lazarus jackknifing from his deathbed.

While this blood pressure-elevating assist has occasionally sent us careening obliquely across several lanes of honking traffic, the embarrassment is lessened by the number of times it has kept us from becoming smoking debris on that part of Sprague Avenue I now call the “Red Zone.”

Each time we enter the Red Zone, she recites a litany of well-considered instructions: “Always turn west when entering from cross street or parking lot.”

“Always look to the east when doing so.”

“Never drive in the diamond mystery lane.”

“We were supposed to turn back there!”

“Driving is not a competition!”

“Remember, the other lane can turn here, too!”

And my personal favorite: “That light was red!”

Merchants along this hazardous corridor willingly confirm most people’s suspicions, with grisly tales of the daily crashes and near misses by drivers befuddled with the adventure of it all.

Some of these same merchants have begun to complain of lost business, with good reason. If the spatially challenged shopper should miscalculate vectors by as little as 50 feet, he cannot correct the mistake with a simple turn to right or left, but instead must often drive a mile or more in a great square route to backtrack for another try. Some folks have taken to shopping in less complicated areas.

Requests to the county for more warning signs and directional arrows have been met with the “too expensive” excuse, leading some to suspect them of using the auto manufacturer’s ploy of weighing the remedial costs against the expense of projected lawsuits.

At first, the Valley Couplet sounded like just the ticket to get traffic moving faster along the crowded south side of the Valley. Our hopes blinded us to the fact that these projects are often designed by the same sort of people responsible for the Broadway cloverleaf.

A good rule of thumb for any new traffic revision might be that a tourist from the Outer Hebrides should be able to navigate the thing without getting killed or maimed. As it is, vacationing in Chernobyl is a safer bet than driving through the Red Zone.

Maybe the county is waiting until everyone has been sufficiently frightened to learn the necessary degree of hypervigalance required to survive a trip through the couplet corridor, or maybe they’re hoping Glenda, the Good Witch of the North, will make it all better.

On the outside chance they’re willing to listen to suggestions, I have one they might try as a lark; and they can have it in the form of an appropriately bad poetic couplet:

If you’re looking for a new way,

Make each road a two-way.

In case anyone is interested in what happened to those people whose brains righted an upside down world, here’s the deal: When the eyeglasses were removed, they saw everything upside-down again.

LOOK OUT!!