Vehicular Pac-Man
To the editor:
I used the Caribou bypass for the first time recently on my way from Presque Isle to Cross Lake. Very nice!
Presque Isle should do the same thing but not do what Caribou did to its downtown. Whoever designed that vehicular black hole must be the same guy that designs ant farms. From the air on a busy Saturday night during digging it must look like a bunch of chimpanzees playing Pac-Man with their bumper cars.
The next time I visited Caribou I decided to try my luck at going from one end of Sweden Street to the other but had to take three laps around the perimeter before I was able to penetrate the maze. I felt like Clark Griswold trying to get off the rotary in “European Vacation.”
I came to an intersection where everyone was ignoring the yield signs and displaying driving techniques that they don’t teach in driver’s ed. I came to a halt trying to figure out what to do next. A woman behind me in a ’91 Dodge Dart laid on her horn, stuck a beefy arm out her window and gave me what I, at first, thought was a left turn signal. Confused and terrified — my hair now looking like an electrocuted porcupine and my white-knuckled hands at 10 and 2 on the steering wheel, I burned rubber out of downtown Caribou and headed for a place where this sort of thing didn’t happen. Like downtown Tokyo!
Nathan White
Ashland
