Drive (25 page)

Minutes before, while driving north on Highway 400, I'd passed two cars that had been pulled over by cruisers. The first, I later learned from Woolley, received a $150 ticket for speeding; the second didn't slow down and move out of the right-hand lane before passing an emergency vehicle with flashing lights at the side of the road—a lapse in both consideration and the rules of the road that cost him $490. And at the service centre, officers dressed in mechanics' overalls were soon checking the roadworthiness of rusted-out vans and pickups. One of the first to come in was a red Ram 350 van with bad brakes, a blown exhaust, no signals and holes in its floor. After another officer removed its licence plates, Woolley—who expected to see about fifty such vehicles over the weekend—did a live hit with a local television crew using the van as an example.

By 7:30, the OPP had given the first Breathalyzer of the day; the driver failed. By mid-morning, Dave Potwin had stopped a woman in a black Taurus station wagon after he noticed her badly smashed windshield. She handed him a handwritten insurance card. It didn't take long for the constable to prove it was fake, give her a ten-thousand-dollar fine and take the plates off her car.

I joined the thirty-six-year-old Potwin in his cruiser just after that. A slim, fit man with light brown hair shorn short on the sides and chiselled good looks that make him appear younger than he is, he wore five-hundred-dollar Oakley sunglasses. Seven years earlier, while working as an insurance adjuster, he'd realized he wasn't cut out for a desk job and decided to become a cop. Now, he spends most of his time on the road—but doesn't consider himself a car guy. Like any red-blooded male, he'll drool over a sleek Ferrari, but he drives a fire-engine-red Toyota Tercel and worries about the environment. Potwin, who maintains a letter writing correspondence with Canadian author and conservationist Farley Mowat, shakes his head when he sees how many people drive up to the cottage alone in their Escalades. “Future
generations are going to judge us harshly for our overuse of resources,” he said. “The environmental costs are staggering.”

Initially, we headed north on Highway 400 as he kept his eyes out for anything out of the ordinary. “So many things stem from an expired licence sticker,” he explained. “The devil is in the details.” Sure enough, he pulled over a brown Chevrolet Celebrity with a licence sticker that was still valid but in the wrong corner of the plate. Potwin got out of his Ford Police Interceptor, a law enforcement version of the Crown Victoria, and walked to the passenger side and knocked on the window, clearly surprising the long-haired driver. Potwin always goes to the passenger side because that element of surprise means he often can spot any trouble—in this case, there was a large dog in the back seat but nothing else to worry about—but also because it's safer. “I've already been hit once out here,” he told me, “and it will never happen again.” He'd been investigating a collision when a young woman in a Honda Civic hit his cruiser at a hundred kilometres per hour. The car was totalled and he was off work for six weeks recovering. (Such collisions aren't uncommon; in fact, target fixation—or the “moth effect”—is the tendency for some drivers to involuntarily steer, like moths to a flame, into a vehicle on the side of the road because they're looking at it instead of where they're driving.)

After getting the driver's licence, registration and insurance from the man in the Celebrity, Potwin used his radio to call in the details. Everything checked out, so instead of issuing a ninety-dollar fine, he let the man off with a warning. He issued another warning to a driver in a black Chevrolet Silverado pickup with a cracked windshield. As he pulled back onto the highway, Potwin floored it and moved over to the far-left lane. He'd spotted a dark grey Hyundai Accent that was speeding and following too closely behind a Jeep: “That's aggressive driving and needs an intervention.”

The twenty-two-year-old driver, who was in his father's car, shook as he spoke to Potwin and admitted that the police had
never stopped him before. Figuring the young man would have learned a lot just from the experience, the constable let him off with a warning. The kid was so relieved that he started breathing again, though that didn't seem to be the source of any great amusement for Potwin.

Riding in a police cruiser offered me a different perspective on the highway. I wasn't surprised by the deference other drivers showed the marked car—at one point, a line of vehicles in all three lanes followed at a more-than-respectful distance behind us, everyone afraid to accelerate in plain view of the OPP. But I was intrigued by Potwin's approach: rather than simply enforcing the law by handing out tickets at every opportunity, he aimed to improve road safety by managing behaviour. Sometimes that meant pulling someone over and having a chat; other times he would drive up beside a speeding driver and with a look get her to slow down. “As a rookie, I was constantly surprised at what I saw,” he admitted, adding that it came as a total shock to him that people would get drunk on a Sunday morning and then go for a drive. “My eyes have been opened and I've learned to expect the unexpected.”

BY THE END
of the weekend, Woolley had put in sixty hours over four days and done countless interviews, while the close to two hundred officers who'd taken part in the blitz across the province had a staggering ticket tally: 6,316 for speeding, 633 for failing to wear seat belts, 177 for failing to stop at a red light or a stop sign. In addition, they'd charged 133 motorists with drunk driving and another 80 with careless driving. And still, 4 people had died on the roads.

Those numbers frustrate Woolley, but he was confident that some people were getting the message. “The whole idea is to make traffic safety marketable or interesting to the public,” he said. “If it's just some traffic cop telling you to obey the law it's not very newsworthy and it's not very credible, so I try to use a bit of
humour and a bit of newsworthy stuff. Sometimes the silly stuff people do is kind of funny even though it was potentially dangerous. But that gets people talking and thinking about safety.” (In January of 2007, the new commissioner of the OPP, Julian Fantino, put an end to the highway blitzes. His announcement seemed to suggest that Woolley's use of humour undermined the seriousness of the carnage on the roads. More than a few people speculated that what the commissioner really didn't like was the idea of anyone else being the face of the force—especially not some lowly traffic cop.)

In movies and television, a common punishment for cops who get in trouble is to be busted down to traffic, but it's actually becoming a more prestigious assignment, in part because police forces are putting more resources into traffic than ever before. Also, far more people die in cars than in murders, and for all the glory the homicide squad garners, most cases are straightforward, not the complex whodunits of television and novels. But the accident reconstruction team often investigates difficult how-did-it-happen cases.

Woolley is passionate about safety and has been able to make a difference. In fact, the OPP's officer of the year in 2005 has had high-profile success in pushing for legislation, including laws to hold truckers accountable for flying wheels and detached parts. Even people he's stopped for an infraction ask for his autograph: as he writes out the ticket, he tells them, “You're gonna get an autograph.”

During his years on the force, Woolley has seen a huge shift in attitudes toward driving. “When I joined the OPP, collisions were considered inconvenient and accidents were accidents,” he said. “You didn't wear seat belts, drinking and driving was kind of funny and when you're number was up, it was up. That's the way it was.” Today, drinking and driving is no longer socially acceptable, while accidents are now called collisions and they are predictable and preventable—and people won't stand for them.
“If a loved one is injured, people don't have the attitude that it was an accident. They want somebody held accountable.”

That doesn't mean he doesn't think some attitudes still have to change, as all the tickets handed out during the highway blitz attest. In addition, street racing remains a huge and deadly problem. And despite his otherwise conservative views, Woolley sounds like a lefty when he talks about auto advertising. “Driving is still marketed as carefree and exciting, and I think that's a mistake.” He cited SUV ads as some of the worst offenders. “We see guys wiping out all the time in SUVs. They're going too fast because the TV ad said they could go up and down mountains. But you can't go the speed limit on Highway 401 in a snowstorm or you're going to find the nearest guardrail. I've had SUVs since 1976, and in the words of the great police philosopher Clint Eastwood, ‘A man's got to know his limitations.'”

12
Colorado Springs
“More Than

I Need, Less Than I Want”

“SO ANYWAY,
the garage day is typically a tour to three or four club members' homes where everyone who is interested in attending hopefully drives their Mustang if the weather cooperates,” Neil Case explained to me in an email. “We include a progressive lunch during the tour, where at the first stop the host provides an appetizer, and most everybody congregates in the garage to discuss any Mustang project that may be going on. After about an hour, we all jump in our ponies and head to the next stop, where we typically have a salad and most everybody congregates in the garage to discuss any Mustang project that may be going on. After about an hour we all jump in our ponies and head to the next stop, where we typically have the main course and most everybody congregates in the garage to discuss any Mustang project that may be going on. After about an hour we all jump in our ponies and head to the next stop, where we typically have dessert and most everybody congregates in the garage to discuss any Mustang project that may be going on. We will have our club meeting during that time as well, during one of the stops. Sometimes we may skip the appetizer so the day does not get long for everybody.”

Though Case was the one who responded to my request to ride along on garage day, his wife Jamie was actually the president of the Rocky Mountain Mustangers, a car club in Colorado Springs. The members take part in car shows, go on cruises, hold a swap meet and attend a monthly meeting. They also share restoration and maintenance tips with each other.

Most car clubs are social organizations as much as anything else, but all of them bring together people who share an interest in
automobiles. Many clubs, such as the Mustangers, are devoted to one marque, but others welcome anyone who's interested. (Variations on the theme include the Car Club for Men, a humorous website for those with an automobile that's at least ten years old and has at least 160,000 kilometres on the odometer. My Maxima became eligible shortly after I left Toronto.) For most members, this hobby is a healthy, if expensive, passion. But some people cross the line into obsession. My friend Mike Harper, a Toronto advertising consultant, owns two Porsches and races his 911 with other members of the Porsche Club of America (Upper Canada Region). He's seen marriages break up and people spend their way into bankruptcy. “Cars,” he said, “are like crack cocaine for some of these guys.”

The garage day in Colorado Springs was one of the few events I'd planned before I started my road trip; after all, it combined Mustangs—not just an iconic car but my favourite (along with the Galaxie 500) when I was a kid—and the Rocky Mountains. It had to be done. Beyond following my own whims, I hoped to glean a better understanding of at least one side of our love–hate relationship with the car.

Ask serious car aficionados what they hate about automobiles and they're not going to start whining about sprawl or fretting about the environment. Instead, they'll complain about the hassle of gas prices and speeding tickets and traffic jams—and about the headaches and heartaches that go with fixing, restoring and customizing their beloved cars. As for the love, I'm not sure it's much more complicated than a kid's love for a puppy: it's wideeyed and unconditional.

LESS THAN AN HOUR
south of Denver, Colorado Springs is home to the Garden of the Gods, a park full of stunning red sandstone formations in the shadow of Pikes Peak, one of the best-known mountains in the country. Originally a resort community, it has since become home to several military bases, including the United
States Air Force Academy, as well as defence contractors and hightech firms. Now the second-largest city in the state, with a population of about 370,000, the growth has been rapid, much of it taking place in the last couple of decades, and some of the people who moved here are now complaining about big-city problems such as crime, homelessness, high house prices, traffic and even overcrowding (although the density is under 2,000 people per square mile).

Colorado Springs also has a reputation for being extremely conservative. The population is 80 percent white, and evangelical Christians abound; Focus on the Family is just one of the many religious organizations based here. So I didn't expect to see a Jeep with a bumper sticker that read, “If you aren't a race fan, blow me (kneepads optional).” I got over my shock—and my giggles—and found my hotel just before Jamie and Neil Case showed up in their 2005 Mustang GT.

Four decades before that car rolled off the line, the original Mustang was as much a cultural phenomenon as it was an auto industry sensation. In 1960, Lee Iacocca became the vice-president and general manager of the Ford Motor Company's Ford Division. While the colossal failure of the Edsel in the late 1950s was the case of a car in search of a market, he saw an emerging market in search of a car. Not only would the number of people aged twenty to twenty-four increase by 50 percent during the 1960s, but a larger percentage of this generation would go to college than any other—and college grads bought more cars than those without higher education. The company's research also suggested that older consumers' tastes were shifting from practical economy cars to sporty and luxury models, more and more families were buying second automobiles, and women, who liked small, easy-handling vehicles, were buying more cars. Iacocca was particularly interested in the blossoming youth market and figured he could capture it with a product that combined style, performance and price. But it had to be more than a sports car. In
Iacocca: An Autobiography
, the father of the Mustang wrote, “We wanted to develop a car that you could drive to the country club on Friday, to the drag strip on Saturday, and to church on Sunday.”