Published: April 18, 2008 12:06 am            

Road warrior or just plain not prepared?

Kinnamon's Toast

“Proper preparation prevents (blank) poor performance.”

The 6 P’s, they’re called.

I thought I learned how to practice them when I was in the Army, but apparently the notion didn’t stick.

On Wednesday morning, on my way to the newspaper office, my 1997 Ford Taurus ran out of gas about a half-mile north of the Chisholm schools’ marker on Oklahoma 45. (I had been headed southbound on U.S. 81.)

The young trooper from the Oklahoma Highway Patrol who stopped to help me merits a well-earned toast today. This young man looked fresh out of the highway patrol academy. His noble appearance inspired immediate confidence; the trooper appeared similar to an Army Ranger: crew cut, perfectly creased uniform, perfect shine to his footwear and zero body fat.

Unfortunately, highway patrol troopers do not carry extra gasoline in their patrol vehicles nor do they carry siphoning hoses, as they used to do, the trooper said.

So off he drove, south on U.S. 81, leaving me impressed with the caliber of young people the patrol hires these days but completely empty-handed relative to gasoline.

If President George W. Bush doesn’t coax, cajole or con his good Arab buddies —he and Daddy Bush’s best friends — into lowering the price of oil per barrel soon, I fear the U.S. may begin to take on the manners and appearances of a “Mad Max” movie, starring not Mel Gibson but Joe T. Citizen (T. standing for “Typical”) of the U.S.

Americans soon might begin to shoot, steal and plunder gasoline from one another in wicked scenes seemingly culled directly from the scripts of “Mad Max,” “Road Warrior” and “Beyond Thunderdome.” For example, a perfectly genteel, law-abiding and respectable middle-aged man in a starched white shirt and gray flannel suit might soon find himself detouring from his normal route to the office and bee-lining to Barter Town in order to trade treasured family possessions for “petrol,” as the Aussies call gasoline.

Gratitude and good manners demand I also toast a co-worker in the newsroom who valiantly drove up to my location with a fifth-of-a gallon of gasoline, which he had stored in his garage for lawnmowing. The young man just casually, even in a friendly way, handed over a whole fifth-of-a-gallon of gasoline, which during these strange economic times, seemed to me almost like pristine U.S. dollars or water in the desert or Foo Fighters tickets. I greedily snatched the red plastic container out of my co-worker’s hands and began, in hunched over fashion, pouring the gas into my Ford’s tank with paranoid furtiveness — like an undertaker making “social calls” at an elderly persons’ assisted living facility.

I bought my buddy three sausage breakfast burritos from McDonald’s in a well-meant gesture to re-pay him for doing me the solid. The breakfast burritos cost $1 a piece. As I exited the McDonald’s drive-though and began running the numbers in my head, I realized the repayment for my buddy’s kindness did not even equal the cost of one gallon of precious, precious petrol.

I handed my friend his “re-payment” and attached this awkward spoken rider: “I’ll have something else coming your way, like a Starbuck’s coffee — venti size — in the next day or two.” (I felt like a huge heel.)

My little, mint green Ford Taurus, with 184,653 miles logged on her, was parked on the southbound shoulder of U.S. 81. It was approximately 7:45 a.m. when I allowed her to run out of gasoline.

Many commuters on their way to work drove past. I did not even attempt to get out of my vehicle, wave my arms around and make a goofy face in a pathetic pleading for roadside assistance. I simply whipped out my cellular phone, and I dialed up my reliable co-worker.

Many people would have been embarrassed had they been in my Wednesday morning predicament. But I wasn’t embarrassed.

I would like to be able to say Wednesday morning was the first time in my life I have allowed my vehicle to run out of gasoline while I was on the road driving it. There’s just something so satisfying to me about using a complete tank of gasoline and not stopping every two days to fill it up. The key is to allow a margin so you don’t run out and create an inconvenience to yourself, your co-workers and the local trooper from the state highway patrol.

Proper preparation prevents (blank) poor performance.



Kinnamon is online/special projects editor of the News & Eagle. Contact him at davidk@enidnews.com.