Lights and Shadows

“Never fear periods of darkness in life. They are the atrium to new phases of life, the threshold to new experience, the invitation to move on from where you are to where there is more for you to learn”  Joan Chittister

I’m not much for driving at night anymore. It isn’t the darkness that bothers me, but the brightness of oncoming headlights. Today’s headlights seem to be a reflection of changing attitudes in our world.

Back in the day, standard headlights were round and held in place by a ring of light aluminum or steel. They were mounted so you could adjust them up, down, left, or right. They had set screws for “aiming” them so you wouldn’t blind oncoming traffic. There seemed to be an understanding that roads were meant to be shared, and as important as it is and was to see at night, it was equally important not to blind those with whom we shared the roads.

In the 1970s, automakers began to upgrade headlights, transitioning from the sealed beam headlight technology that had been developed in the 1930s to halogen and other brighter lights. They were technically illegal when I was a cop, for the state code specifically required “sealed beam headlights” – but that was a throw-back to the days when sealed-beams were an improvement over the carriage lamps cars used to have.

I suppose I could have written tickets to folks with halogen headlights, but I suspect prosecutors and judges would have questioned my sanity before questioning the code, so I exercised the better part of valor (and common sense) and decided to keep legislators in the dark on the matter.

I have no idea if the code has been re-written to permit the various crazy headlights we see “out there” today (I presume it has), but things sure are different.

Headlights now come in every shape and hue imaginable, and I sometimes wonder if many of them do the job they’re intended to do. What’s worse, they don’t seem to be adjustable – there is no apparent mechanism for aiming them as in days of yore. Drivers are at the mercy of engineers. They seem to be designed more to make a car look cool, than to function as illuminators of the night-time road.

It also means it does little good to flick our lights at oncoming traffic at night, for as often as not, they may or may not be running with their high beams on. It’s a sad state of affairs when the automaker is more interested in form than in function, because the driver is at the mercy of the machine and courtesy, as an option, is taken away.

There’s not much we can do, of course. No one wants to spend a fortune buying a motor vehicle, simply to then turn around and spend another fortune reverse-engineering it to be more courteous and kind. And I am certain we don’t want to return to the days where an automobile driven at night is required to have someone walking in front of the car, lamp or lantern in hand, to show the way.

No, for good or ill, we have what we have – and we’re stuck with it until some better option comes along.

Until then, there are several tried-and-true alternatives we can employ when driving at night. The first is simply to slow down. If one is driving a tad slower, one has more time to react to dangers in the road. I know that goes against the grain as we all want to get to where we’re going as quickly as possible, but slowing down works.

Secondly, when cars approach with their lights glaring, look away (toward the fog-line on the edge of the road). This protects your retinal nerves from being overloaded with the light, and allows your eyes to recover more quickly when those oncoming lights have passed.

Jesus once said, “If your eye offends you, pluck it out.” He was exaggerating, but the point he was making was: Take responsibility; be responsible!

We can’t change the auto industry (at least not overnight), but we can change what we do and how we do it, so we may as well use our heads, protect our eyes, and enjoy our nocturnal journeys as best we can in this, our valley.