What if you run a stop sign, or maybe even run into a stop sign?

I was driving in upstate New York a month ago with my wife and adult kid, on our way to visit a waterfall. It was a hilly area and the county roads twisted and bent. Unlike in the midwest, few of the intersections were at right angles.

There weren’t a lot of towns, houses or other drivers. We chatted and joked as we made our way, listening dutifully to the GPS’s directions. “Stay on County Highway 14…Turn left at Schroedinger Road…Continue straight on Cow Teat Way.”

As we approached an intersection going up hill, I glimpsed a stop sign but the angle of our road intersecting the cross road was so acute it didn’t register as being meant for me to stop. Of course that makes no sense, but in that split-second of decision making, I was late to react.

We merged into the other road. My wife shouted, “Stop!” and I saw the approaching car, swerved and avoided it. No harm, no foul, as they say, especially when there’s no cop around to write you a ticket.

It all happened in a matter of two seconds. I suspect the other driver didn’t fully realize what almost happened until it was over.

In Soviet Union, Stop Sign Runs You

42 years ago, I was out walking with my friend, “E,” after a party at Chuck’s house. We’d been drinking, couldn’t sleep, and E wanted to take one last look around our town before we departed for college.

At three o’clock in the morning, in a quiet, safe city, you feel like you own the place. We were lucky to avoid the local cops, who actually owned the place and certainly would have challenged us in the middle of the night.

We walked through the city park, out to the beverage store that sold us beer despite being too young, and back into Chuck’s neighborhood. It was serene and comforting. Mercury vapor street lights exposed the structures otherwise hidden by shadow.

“I need a souvenir for my dorm room,” E said.

“What’d you have in mind?” I asked.

“A street sign.”

We were back at Chuck’s street and E tried to shimmy up the pole to remove the green street sign. Even if we were sober, I don’t think we could have shimmied up that pole. I had made it through high school without doing a single pull-up, and never once lifting myself off the ground when we had to climb the ropes in gym class.

E was in better shape than I was, but the last time he was on a rope in gym, he fell and knocked himself unconscious.

E crossed the street to the “STOP” sign. “Let’s get this,” he declared.

I don’t know if you’ve ever checked, but they tighten the bolts on Stop signs pretty hard. Maybe if we had a socket set we could have made progress, but with our bare hands, nothing was happening to that sign.

“Let’s pull it out of the ground.”

E grabbed the steel stake and pushed and pulled it, moving it back and forth. The ground was giving way, but it seemed hopeless.

“I don’t know man—”

“I can do it.” E threw his entire body weight at the stake and pushed the sign a few degrees closer to the ground. Then he gripped it with both hands and pulled back, moving it a few degrees in the other direction.

Picture a huge tennis racket being swung back and forth, with a 180-lb high school graduate using all his energy to swish it through the night air. I had to admit that this push and pull method showed promise.

E kept it up for a couple of minutes, so close to the ground when he pushed forward that he could grab the lawn with his hand, and so close the other way when he pulled that his back brushed the ground.

I don’t know if it was the lack of sleep, or the creeping realization that our childhood of innocence was gone and we must soon act as adults, or maybe it was the case of Stroh’s, but, at last, E grew exhausted.

With his hands clutching the sign’s steel stake in a white-knuckled grip, and his ass so close to the grass that if he farted a nightcrawler would certainly suffocate, E said, “Fuck it.”

The sign lifted E enough to find his footing and he released the sign. Remarkably, the energy stored in the steel stake swung the sign away from E and towards the ground on the other side.

Maybe we both should have paid more attention in Physics class, but that energy in the sign was not yet fully dissipated, and it snapped back up almost as fast as it had descended. Before either of us could move, that Stop sign smashed E in the face.

He was knocked backwards and his head cracked down on the curb.

E lay there motionless as the sign’s vibrations slowed and, eventually, came to rest. Once again, the silence of the night enveloped us.

My Writing Career and Stop Signs

Back at the University of Michigan, as I studied Engineering, I also wrote stories. I won’t go into the gory details of how I desperately wanted to study writing but succumbed to my father’s insistence I stay in engineering, but I approached one of the country’s foremost authorities on Hemingway and showed him my short story about a talking rat.

Professor Weeks returned it to me a week later and in an admirably gentle way told me I should probably stop writing. One thing I remember him saying was, “It’s incredibly difficult to write a really good short story. It takes years of practice. There’s not much here to work with.”

That was his way of telling me it would be okay to stop. But he also gave me two volumes of short story collections. It was kind of a mixed signal: Here’s a stop sign, and here’s a way to deal with it. At least, that’s how I took it.

Tools to deal with stop signs

I’ve since learned that if you want to steal a street sign, you need the right tools. I’m not advocating this, but I saw it in a movie once that these operatives used a grinding tool with diamond tipped blade to cut through a street sign and throw off their adversary.

You could pick up that stuff at Harbor Freight tools for about $100.

Again, I’m not advocating anything like stealing signs. I’m making the point that E and I were way out of our league trying to steal signs with our bare hands. You need the right tools. But there are consequences.

I mean, look at my college classmate, Jim Harbaugh, who is dealing with all kinds of grief over alleged sign stealing.

And consider what happened to me when I disregarded a Stop sign. I was flirting with disaster right there.

Back to E on the ground

E eventually got up after being knocked to the ground by that Stop sign. I helped him, of course, once I stopped laughing. He may have had another concussion, but it is hilarious to see someone smack themselves in the head with a Stop sign.

We made our way back to Chuck’s house where we finally passed out. We awoke in the morning and went on to confront that pesky thing called adulthood.

Meanwhile, at My Writing Desk…

I’m thrashing away at this new novel while slowly querying the other.

The thing about being a writer is that it’s assigning yourself homework every night for the rest of your life. Maybe I should have heeded that Stop sign from Professor Weeks. I don’t know anymore.