What Were They Thinking

 

On one of my trips down to the farm, about four miles from where I turn off the highway to start heading down the gravel back roads, I was following a semi and two other vehicles as we all passed a white construction truck driving along the side of the highway with flashing lights and a huge orange sign that said "wet paint". I started focusing to stay between the lines and indeed in another mile or so, I could see the white paint glistening in the early morning sun.

About then, I noticed the dark colored pickup truck in front of me and behind another car and semi, start to drift towards the freshly painted white stripe. Driving my new vehicle with it's beautiful Blueprint Blue paint job, I immediately slowed down and built up some space in between him and I. Sure enough, the dark colored pickup drifted over and started driving on the white line. I could see a white stripe immediately form on his passenger side rear tire and I could see a mist of white paint aerosolized by the tires mush like what you see following vehicle driving in the rain. Since my turn off was only a couple miles away, I followed behind by a good distance and watched the truck drive on and off the white line the entire way. There was so much paint on the passenger side tires that whenever he veered back into the road away from the line, he was painting a faint stripe of his own. 

Eventually I made it to where I turned off and was hoping that they hadn't painted the area but they had. It was painted in white dashes but were so closely spaced that there wasn't a tire's width to get through it and by then, we had caught up to the actual machine doing the painting so it was quite fresh. There was nobody behind me so I slowed way down to make sure I didn't aerosolize the paint like the dark truck in front of me had been doing and drove a few dozen yards down the gravel road very slowly to make sure the dirt and dust had absorbed any paint on my tires before proceeding on my merry way. What I really would have liked to do though was follow that dark pickup to where ever they were heading just to see how much white paint he had on the passenger side of the car. I imagine it had to be a fair amount.

Returning home later the same day, I could see literally many dozens of similar spots where others had drifted over into the wet paint and got enough on their tires that it tracked out into the lane of traffic. I'm not sure why the county or state doing the painting hadn't picked a hotter day in the summer so the paint dried quicker instead of ending up with at least three miles of wet paint at any given time. The highway looks like a preschooler painted the lines and kept smudging them with their sleeves for the entire fifteen or so miles I travel down that highway.