The Road to Portsmouth Is Paved with Good Intentions

Esmerelda is my girly green Ranger, all tricked out with a matching cap, a.k.a. the Mobile Executive Doghouse. She's shown below having a grille-to-grille rendezvous with a studly Rolls in the Walmart parking lot. Yep, that's a Pizza Hut across the street. Only in Newport.

But sometimes duty calls me to one of the other island communities, or even (gasp!) across the bridges to The Other Side. Today I was en route to a meeting in Portsmouth, on the North end of the island, about 20 minutes from my house. Esmerelda was purring along on East Main Road, keeping me amused with the latest from NPR. A light rain dotted her windshield, so she swatted it away with her wipers. The midday traffic was light to moderate as we neared the Middletown-Portsmouth line. We were cruising in the left travel lane, since I planned to hang a left at Union Street fairly soon.

Then the small black SUV up ahead of me in the right lane busted a move that jolted me out of my comfort zone. With plenty of room, it drifted into the left lane in front of me - and kept on going until its driver's side wheels were on the wrong side of the double yellow center line. And stayed there for a few ticks. Then drifted back until the vehicle was straddling the lane divider. Then back to the left lane for a bit, then back over the center line again.

I punched the radio off and patted my Bluetooth earpiece to be sure it was well seated. With left hand firmly on the wheel, I dipped into my pocket, pulled out my trusty iPhone, and thumbed up the phone keypad. 911, then Call. I'm not too sure whether the black SUV had picked up speed, or I had slowed down, but the gap between us had grown too wide for me to be able to read the license plate. While I was squinting at it, the 911 operator said something, so I announced that I was following an erratic driver on East Main Road in Portsmouth. Just for emphasis, the black SUV crossed completely into the oncoming lane - all four tires rolling in the wrong direction. "Oh crap!" I explained calmly. The operator promptly patched me through to the Portsmouth police.

The black SUV blew through the light where I'd planned to turn left, so I stayed on its track, reeling off a play-by-play color commentary to the Portsmouth dispatcher, punctuated by landmarks: "He's in the middle of both northbound lanes . . . We're just passing Rocco's Pizza . . . Moriarty's Invisible Fence . . . Over the center line again . . . I'm at the fire station . . ." As we crested Quaker Hill and started down toward the fork at the bank, one car, then another pulled into the left lane between me and the subject of my phone conversation.  I described Esmerelda to the dispatcher and counted out my plate number. The light at the intersection turned green as the black SUV took the left fork, followed by - now - three cars, then me in Esmerelda, still talking to the dispatcher. As I cleared the intersection, I glanced in my rear-view mirror for the first time in I don't know when, and saw that I had a cruiser right on my tailgate - yay! I got eyes front just in time to see the object of our pursuit go all the way into the oncoming lane again, even as I was wondering if the guy was gonna make a liar of me now that the cops were there. My escort hit his lights and blew past me in the breakdown lane, followed by a second cruiser that I hadn't even seen.

"They've got him!" I yelled to the dispatcher, who politely thanked me for my help and let me go without asking if I was using a hands-free device. As we passed, I gave a conspiratorial wave to the two officers who were directing traffic around the stopped SUV and the two police vehicles. Then I noticed that Esmerelda's inspection sticker is out of date. I gave her dashboard a pat, promised I'd take care of the sticker thing this week, and grinned the rest of the way to my meeting.