Scary Stories, Rituals, and Urban Legends

Dont turn on your brights on at night

It is late. I'm drinking what my dear friend calls a poor man's Long Island Iced Tea, which is a storebought Arnold Palmer and copious amounts of vodka. I've done a lot of driving today, trying to get errands done, and it reminded me of something I do my best not to think about. Not to forget, mind you - forgetting is dangerous - just to... not dwell on.

My state is crisscrossed by dozens of highways. In my area, largely backwoods though it may be, you're never more than half an hour away from one. Even so, the older country roads are how you really get around. They're often quicker if you're not trying to visit a city, and there's much less traffic. If you're the solitary type, the relative isolation is a welcome chance to decompress while enjoying the scenery. Avoiding the highways isn't without its drawbacks, though: The country roads twist without warning, occasionally narrow unexpectedly, and seem to attract animals with nothing better to do than wander out in the middle of the road at the most inconvenient moment. These are risks you just absorb if you grow up in the area: watch for flashing eyes on the side of the road, go five under the speed limit unless you've been down this way before, and you should be fine.

Except it's dark as hell on these no-streetlights back roads at night, cutting through nothing but farmland and forested areas that haven't been clear-cut yet, and sometimes, people turn on their brights - high beams, if you like - to improve visibility. These same geniuses never seem to remember to turn off their brights when they see someone coming the opposite way, or when they're zooming along behind another car. As long as they can see better, who gives a damn about blinding anyone else on the road, I guess.

These offensively oblivious drivers are invariably from out of town. You can just tell by the sheer fact that these dimwits have their brights on at all.

Locals don't drive with our brights on at night. Sure, we might claim it's because we've been here our whole lives, so we don't need to, but we're full of shit. We don't drive with our brights on because we know what we'll see.

Years ago I moved about fifteen miles away from my hometown for college. It was the furthest away that my family and I could afford - I wasn't aiming to stay close to home, if you catch my drift- but close enough that I knew some of the back roads in the surrounding area. For the first year, if I had to travel at night I stuck to those roads and the better-lit main streets of that college town, since I'm constantly terrified of getting lost or stranded. I didn't own a smart phone at the time so I didn't even have GPS, and my car is pretty old - so at the time, getting stranded in miles of farmland was a very real fear for me. Actually, I think that fear's universal for every woman who grows up in a town where there are more farms than bars, not just me.

Last year, I started dating a woman who lived a couple towns away. I could get to her place from mine in twenty five minutes, if I took a route that included cutting all the way through my own college town and hopping on a road that was actually part of an interstate.

Or I could get there in ten, if I took a single back road that led right to the back of her development.

When you're young, dumb, and in love, every minute counts, so when I'd spend the night at her place, I worked up the courage to take the shorter route, secretly terrified I'd break down or get lost on the way. I never did, but the unfamiliar roads unnerved me after dark. I love nighttime, but I've never liked the particular kind of darkness that settles on strange less-traveled roads after sundown. It always makes me worry that something might see me - might take an interest in me, might follow me home. In order to ward off that post-sunset paranoia, I took to turning my high beams on during my trips to my girlfriend's house. Unlike the other jackasses I sometimes saw, I'd always dim them once another vehicle was in eyeshot - but the increased visibility helped ward off the nerves, you know? Even after I knew the way well enough, I'd just keep my brights on, and I started doing it on late night drives to other destinations, too, so long as I was taking the back roads.