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Honolulu Lite Charles Memminger |
Virtual walk around
Oahu still dangerousSINCE the beginning of February, I've walked from Kaneohe around the north and west shores of Oahu all the way to Barbers Point, and I've nearly been run over a hundred times. The scary thing is, I've walked all that way and had all those close calls without ever leaving my neighborhood.
Confused? Me, too. Here's the deal: I decided to start 2004 by walking entirely around Oahu. I figured there was no way I could walk around the island and not shed a few pounds.
But the logistics of actually walking around Oahu were staggering. Say you walk 10 miles in one day. When you're finished you are 10 miles from your car.
So you have to walk 10 miles back to your car. The next day, you start at the 10-mile mark and walk 10 more miles. Then you have to walk back to your car. So you are actually walking twice as far as you want to go and getting nowhere. Plus paying for gas. And looking stupid.
So I decided I'd walk three miles a day, just in my neighborhood in Kaneohe, and plot my progress on a map of Oahu. It would be a virtual walk around the island. That worked out much better because I basically walk a 3-mile loop and end up back at my house. Which is handy. In February, I walked more than 60 miles, taking me from Kaneohe to Kaena Point. So far this month, I've gotten to Barbers Point.
WALKING GIVES YOU a lot of time to think, and what I usually think about is that automobile drivers are knuckleheads. Dangerous knuckleheads.
A few days ago, I had to dive off the sidewalk when a car jumped the curb and hurtled toward me.
The driver wrenched the car back on the road without slowing down or even flashing me a "sorry, brah" shaka sign.
I don't know how many times people have almost backed their cars into me out of driveways and fronted their cars into me out of parking lots.
A gigantic side-view mirror on an even more gigantic SUV actually brushed my arm as it sped past on a road with no shoulder.
A few inches more to the right, and I would have been knocked into Kaneohe Bay.
The one unifying factor to all these near hits and nearer misses is that the drivers seem to think they have more rights than I do.
Like the right to drive on the sidewalk I'm walking on. It's as if simply being in a large machine makes them superior to the common pedestrian. The knuckleheads forget that when they're not in their machine, they ARE pedestrians.
If one person has this many close calls walking in one little neighborhood, then thousands of pedestrians must face peril around the island every day. A perpetual flower memorial at a certain deadly crosswalk I pass every day sadly confirms that is the case.
I just hope that as I pass Pearl Harbor on my trek, the virtual Honolulu drivers are more alert than the virtual country drivers are.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com