TIM BELFORD

Nearly sideswiped by a house

A funny thing happened the other day. A house nearly fell on me.

Well, actually it was more like drove over me. And, in truth, it was really only half a house.

Over some time now I've become more and more concerned about the driving habits of my fellow Canadians.

This didn't help.

There is an increasing tendency, it seems, to treat the rules of the road as not so much as hard and fast regulations but more in the line of general guidelines.

Sort of suggested behaviour, in the manner of choosing the correct fork at dinner.

How this came about I'm not sure.

Perhaps it has to do with automobile itself.

Our parents and grandparents drove vehicles generally designed to get them from one place to another in relative comfort at a reasonable speed.

And they were driven over two-lane byways often badly paved, if paved at all.

These roads tended to reduce the speed at which they could travel. At the same time, they also engendered a communal feeling, a feeling of sharing in an activity.

Today's vehicles are designed to rocket along at speeds just above what the average driver can competently handle.

They move along highways that are anywhere from four lanes to eight lanes wide with extra feeder lanes for commuters.

This, in turn, changes the social activity of driving into something resembling the World War Two dog fights that highlighted the Battle of Britain.

It no longer suffices to get where you're going. Today's driver has to get where he or she is going in advance of everyone else on the road.

"Yield" means "merge", "merge" means "get out of my way." And lanes? Lanes are for sissies!

The other day a car passed me on the inside lane of the 401 outside of Toronto doing about 160 kilometres per hour. The driver immediately cut across three lanes of traffic all the while talking on a cell phone and drinking a coffee.

If he'd been wearing a helmet and shouting Tora! Tora! Tora! He could have had a starring role in "Pearl Harbour."

Anyway, back to the half-a-house.

You see, I came upon two flatbed trailers each toting a section of a prefab home.

Not wanting to follow them from Montreal to Toronto I pulled out to pass.

I got by the first section just fine but as I started to pull even with the cab of the second truck he lost it.

The back end of the trailer -- and what appeared to be two bedrooms, an ensuite bath and a broom closet -- swung wildly to his left.

In an obvious attempt to recover, the cab went to the left as well.

Which left our car as the base of a 100 kilometre per hour equilateral triangle.

It was close. So close that it left some white paint on the passenger side mirror and took an equal amount of paint off the right rear fender.

Figuring it wasn't a good idea to drive with my heart just under my Adam's Apple, I pulled over.

And the trucks? They just kept going. And I didn't try to catch them.