By The Road

(Please click on the title for a reading aloud by the author.)

Long ago I was married to an alcoholic. As a matter of routine, my now x would come home after work and dash upstairs to wash her face and brush her teeth. Then she would come downstairs and give me a kiss hello. She always smelled of alcohol (for hours) and when I asked her about it she claimed it was the clarifying lotion she used to clean her face. At the time, for a while at least, in my ignorance and naïveté I accepted the explanation. Then I learned she would stop at a convenience store after work, get a small bottle of booze, drink it and throw the empty out the window. There were never empty bottles in the car, except once.

Last Sunday, R and I went for a walk on the County Road. Like two old crows we were fascinated by the flotsam and jetsam in the ditches – the brighter and shinier the better. Alas, there were no trinkets worthy of bringing home, but we noticed and were disturbed by the number of empty, small booze bottles littering the roadsides. We were not so much disturbed by the litter factor, rather it was the implication of how much drinking and driving was going on.

After our walk we went to the Lone Butte General Store, about two and a half miles away. R put gas in her car, and then we went into the store to check it out. It is a tidy and well kept convenience store. They sell beer and wine, and behind the smiling clerks at the counter is a dazzling display of small bottles of booze; nips, half pints and pints of all types. The next nearest store which sells booze in these size bottles is in Santa Fe, better than fifteen miles away.

I got thinking about this, so the following day I walked the same section of the County Road, one and a half miles in length and counted the empties. Here’s what I found:

182 - 12 oz. beer bottles

97 - 50 ml “nip” liquor bottles

83 - ½ pint liquor bottles

18 - 1 pint liquor bottles

10 - 750 ml wine bottles

Many of these probably came from the Lone Butte General Store. It takes about four minutes to drive from the store to the area my count, so many of the bottles were opened, the contents were consumed, and the empty got thrown out the window in that amount of time, and the drivers continued on their way. To be fair, some of the drinking might have been done by passengers.

The legal limit for DWI in New Mexico is .08% BAC. According to an online blood alcohol calculator, a half pint of 80 proof liquor consumed by a 160 pound male in four minutes will give him a BAC of approximately .15%. The FAA states a .12% BAC leads to, “mild euphoria, talkativeness, decreased inhibitions, decreased attention, impaired judgment, (and) increased reaction time,” and beyond this up to .25% BAC, “emotional instability, loss of critical judgment, impairment of memory and comprehension, decreased sensory response, (and) mild muscular incoordination.”

A couple of years ago, I was having dinner with friends shortly after a ghastly car crash occurred in Santa Fe, where one vehicle driven by a man with .16% BAC broadsided another driven by a teen who was sober. The teen driver was severely injured and her four teen passengers were killed. The intoxicated man suffered bruises to his chest and knees. We got talking about the accident, expressing outrage and sadness over the tragedy.

The host, a pilot, pointed out, “these kinds of things will continue to happen until we get serious about drinking and driving.” He went on to explain how considerably more strict DWI laws are for pilots and that alcohol-related aircraft accidents are extremely rare. But then typically pilots are a different breed. They are more “by the book,” and given the dire consequences of errors, very safety conscious.

As we sat around the table having this discussion and hoisting glasses of wine, we also recognized most of us would be driving home under the influence. The use and abuse of alcohol in our society is indeed a fuzzy topic and full of double standards.

According to The New Mexico Department of Public Safety, “New Mexico has enacted some of the toughest DWI laws in the nation.” The Department also claims, “Alcohol is involved in 40 percent of all fatal traffic crashes in New Mexico which makes alcohol-related traffic fatalities the single largest factor in this state's traffic deaths.”

Obviously police cannot be everywhere all the time to arrest drunk drivers and judges hand down sentences based on complex sets of circumstances. But it seems there’s a disconnect between tough laws and the likelihood of alcohol-related accidents. Forty percent is terribly high. I wonder, is this the best we can do? You’ll be hearing more from me on this subject.

Gordon Bunker