Back in Beirut

            A week back in Lebanon and already the memory of my home planet grows dim. It’s always like this.  As soon as I get off the plane in Beirut my grip on reality begins to slip.  Within a month I’ll only remember Canada as a long-ago dream.

            As we were driving home from the beach yesterday five or six motorcycles swarmed past us, two of them doing wheelies.  This was on the highway to the South -- a frighteningly generous stretch of asphalt by Lebanese standards.  There are a lot of motorists in this country who go as fast as the road will allow them.  On all but the biggest highways the width and condition of the road impose limitations of some kind.  But when this sort of driver finds himself out on a straight, smooth highway he stomps down on the accelerator and hurtles over the road with all the caution of mean kid in a bumper car.

            A lot of drivers don’t follow the most basic road rules, either. And when I say ‘basic’, I mean things like noticing the painted lines on the asphalt that organise the driving surface into lanes.  Or overtaking slower vehicles by moving to the left of them.  Or wearing seatbelts.  Or feeling some stirring sense of unease when piling wife, three kids and weekend luggage onto the moped behind them and going out to the highway where SUV’s are blowing past them at 130 kilometres per hour.

            You get the dangerously slow drivers, too, doing their best to cause disaster by spewing blue smoke and creeping along in the right hand lane (or even the left hand lane) at 20 km/hr.  They often have no working rear lights and sometimes no reflectors.  The entire rear end of the car may be made of duct tape.

            Almost nobody uses signal lights to indicate their intentions.  If anything they use signal lights to distract you --  by leaving the left one on, for example, all the way from Sidon and then suddenly, without warning, swerving to the right across three lanes of traffic to take an exit.  The only light drivers here are fond of using is the headlights high-beam, which they will flash at you impatiently if you are in the left hand lane and don’t get out of their way quickly enough as they approach from behind.

            I saw two men sprinting for their lives across the highway, nearly getting themselves squashed to smithereens, about 200 meters away from a bridge they might have used to cross safely.  It’s been years since a sight like that has surprised me.  It’s how pedestrians cross busy highways everywhere in the Middle East.  I don’t know whether they don’t understand the danger or don’t care. 

            The motorcycles doing wheelies were driven by young men in jeans and t-shirts, the hair on their helmetless heads whipping crazily  in the wind.  Each bike carried a passenger.  As the driver of the closest bike noticed us staring at him he grinned, moved closer to our vehicle and put one leg sexily (or so he must have fancied) on the upper portion of the machine, the better to impress us. His passenger clung on desperately, his face and its expression disappointingly obscured from our view.

            Nothing about this was unusual.  You see it all the time here and no Lebanese person would think it worth mentioning.  I don’t even think it’s worth mentioning, except that I am.