North Carolina Chronicles, Chapter 1: The Cop
Protection and service are hard, and you should never do things that are difficult
Some personal news, I guess: my fiancée Leah and I just moved from Raleigh to Minneapolis.
I, of course, am no stranger to this city, having attended the University of Minnesota from 2016 until my graduation in 2019. After I got my bachelor’s degree, I went straight to the University of North Carolina for a master’s. I lived in Chapel Hill for 15 months, then moved in with Leah in Cary, and the two of us lived there for 16 more months before moving to Raleigh, where we lived for another 15 months.1 That brings us to the present day.
But a whole bunch of other stuff happened in those 46 months. A lot of it was mundane—I did live in North Carolina through the entirety of the emergency phase of the COVID-19 pandemic—but quite a bit of it wasn’t: I met a few wonderful people who I hope will be in my life forever (including Leah, of course), finished that master’s degree, and watched my alma mater end Coach K for good.2
In the past four-ish years, I’ve made several memories I won’t soon forget, and though I’m now back in a place I feel much more natural calling home, some part of Carolina will always be with me.
Over the next few weeks, I’d like to share that part with y’all by telling a few stories about how I’ll remember my second home. I’m not gonna go in any particular order and I’m not even sure how many of these there are gonna be when all is said and done, but I think this is the best way for me to close the book on my time in the Old North State and mentally move on to my second stint in the Mill City.
Without further ado, enjoy the first installment of North Carolina Chronicles.
I’ve driven more miles in my 11 years behind a steering wheel than a lot of people drive in a full lifetime.
I was born in Pennsylvania and my immediate family lived in the Lehigh Valley until just before I turned nine. My maternal extended family has been settled in North Dakota for well over a century and pretty much every Christmas in my youth was spent in the small town of Parshall. Mom didn’t like to fly, so we drove 52 hours round trip between the Delaware River and the Missouri River almost every year.
On those marathon car rides, I fell in love with the open road. Some of that was the mere prospect of adventure fascinating an impressionable young mind that clings to novel experiences. Just as much of it was the tranquility of cruising on the freeway, talking to my family, listening to music, and seeing acres upon acres of the country’s natural beauty (and also Ohio).
Of course, I wasn’t the one doing the driving—and I now recognize just how hellish it must have been for my dad to drive I-90/94 through Chicago during the holiday season—but this passion for road trips led me to get my license as soon as I could. In South Dakota, where I graduated high school, that’s age 14. By 16, I was basically the family’s primary long distance driver. By 18, I was on my own and had long since discovered the internet, so I was driving all over creation (as Dad describes it) to meet friends I’d made online, visit family across the country, or even just because I could. Before I turned 19, I’d visited all of the contiguous 48 states, and by some point between then and now, I’d driven in all of them myself.
And of those 48 states, I don’t think a single one takes speeding less seriously than North Carolina.
If my memory serves me right, I’ve been stopped for speeding seven times in my life. Some of these were because I was a 15-year-old operating heavy machinery despite not really knowing how to use it and some were because of bad-faith speed traps,3 but some were because I was simply driving too fast, which is bound to happen every now and then when you drive so many thousand miles. Only two of these stops did not result in a ticket. Both of them were in North Carolina.
That’s not for no reason. North Carolina is one of very few states with a law that disallows police from claiming traffic violation fines for themselves. Per the North Carolina Constitution Article IX, Section 7, money from “all civil penalties, forfeitures, and fines which are collected by State agencies” is put into a fund that is “to be used exclusively for maintaining free public schools”. Cops can’t directly benefit from over-enforcing speed limits, so they don’t. North Carolina gets a lot of roads stuff wrong but it absolutely gets this right.4
On a Sunday night in February of this year, I was driving Leah and me from a weekend trip in Knoxville back to our home in Raleigh. That’s essentially a straight shot on I-40, so the drive is pretty much six hours on the same freeway. It’s the type of drive on which you can pass a slow-moving truck, stop for gas a few miles down the road, and then pass the same truck an hour later.
In our case, it was the type of drive on which a particularly erratic driver could speed past us and slow down to fall behind us several times in less than an hour.
The speed limit on rural interstates in North Carolina is 70 miles per hour. In these scenarios, I will normally go 7-9 miles above the limit. This is fast enough that it results in a significant time save on long trips but not fast enough to alarm most police.5 You might say this is unsafe or whatever but these freeways are almost universally built to handle speeds much faster than 79mph and a lot of people still pass me doing exactly that.
Among those people is the aforementioned erratic driver, who piloted a black minivan. I have never met this person and do not know his name, but let’s call him Mark for the sake of convenience.
About halfway through the trip, east of Asheville but west of Winston-Salem, I was doing my normal ~78mph when I came up on Mark doing ~70mph. I wanted to pass him, but he was driving directly on the dotted line separating the two eastbound lanes. I honked at him; no effect. About a half mile later, I think he realized you’re not supposed to drive in two lanes at once and moved over to the right. I merged left to pass, but just as I switched lanes, Mark swerved halfway into the left lane before returning to the right lane. I couldn’t tell if this was out of malice or incompetence, but at that point, I didn’t care. I sped up to pass him as quickly as I could and got on my merry way at ~78mph.
I assumed that would be the first and last time I ever interacted with Mark on the road. I assumed wrong. About five minutes later, he came up on my tail like a bat out of hell. He passed me on the left at what must have been at least 90mph and sped off into the distance, swerving as wildly as he was when I passed him a few minutes earlier. Before I even had time to process what had just happened, he was already out of sight, hopefully never to enter it again.
That hope proved unfounded, as some ten minutes later, Mark had slowed down to maybe 65mph, possibly slower, and I was right behind him again.
This cycle continued for a little while. I’d come up on his tail and wait until he was done swerving up a storm to pass him, then he’d kick it into hyperdrive and pass me with reckless abandon ten minutes later. Rinse and repeat. It was clear that every minute Mark remained on the road was a minute putting others, and especially himself, in grave danger.
After a couple more cycles, I deemed it unsafe to pass Mark again. In my umpteen thousand miles on the road, I’ve encountered several bad drivers but not too many I actively assumed were under the influence; at this point, Mark fell firmly into that second camp. Perhaps I’d already given him too long a leash.
As I trailed Mark just west of Winston-Salem, I started to consider doing something I’d never done: I thought about calling the cops.
There are two main reasons I had never called the cops at that point in my life, approximately three months after my 25th birthday.
The first is that I grew up pretty sheltered. Upon leaving Pennsylvania, my family moved to a suburban area of Grand Forks, North Dakota, for two years before settling down in Brandon, South Dakota, a suburb of Sioux Falls. These are places where nothing happens. The biggest controversy in Grand Forks is whether the University of North Dakota should have been made to retire their Fighting Sioux branding (yes) and the biggest controversy in Brandon is whether the 2014 State Farm Celebrate My Drive contest was rigged to rob us of a private concert by The Band Perry (also yes). I lived right across the street from my middle school and right across a different street from my high school. I spent most of my free time at my house, my friends’ houses, or the local state park. Then I went to university, where I spent most of my time on campus and would have gone to any number of hyperlocal resources before even considering the police, not that I ever needed to.
The second is that when I have interacted with law enforcement, the experience has been overwhelmingly negative.
Of course, I’ve gotten stopped for speeding, sometimes completely unnecessarily.
I’ve been given a phantom warning for running a stop sign because a power tripping cop was upset I cut him off when I turned out of my parents’ apartment complex.
I’ve had a cop accost me for ever-so-briefly parking illegally while I delivered a pizza to a Minneapolis apartment, then demanding to know which Papa John’s location I worked for and threatening to get me fired.6
I’ve been detained and berated by TSA for over 15 minutes because I don’t fly very often and simply forgot you’re not allowed to bring regular-sized shampoo bottles in your carry-on; this caused me to miss my flight by three minutes.
I’ve been detained by Border Patrol at the checkpoint on I-10 near Van Horn, Texas, because the officer didn’t like my tone when my answer to “Are you a United States citizen?” was “Yes.”, apparently thinking my South Dakota driver’s license was a fake.
This is maybe half of the negative interactions I’ve had with law enforcement, but this list is already way too long. Suffice it to say that I don’t like talking to cops and I wouldn’t wish it on just about anyone. Not to mention all of the other, much worse outcomes that could come from an interaction with the police.
That said, at some point, I couldn’t live with myself if Mark was in the ditch the next time I passed him, especially if he dragged another car down there with him. And with the large urban area just a few miles away, the stakes could be much higher than they were in the middle of nowhere. After probably too much hemming and hawing with Leah, I finally had her dial 911 on my phone, which was connected to our car via Bluetooth.
I told the dispatcher what was going on and they connected me to a local highway patrol unit. I was really doing this. No turning back now. At least I felt good about it. The pros outweighed the cons. I was doing something that needed to be done.
The highway patrol officer picked up the phone as I trailed Mark at ~78mph.
Officer: “What is your emergency?”
Eli: “I’m on I-40 eastbound, mile marker 180, and a driver near me is endangering everyone else on the road, driving recklessly and seemingly impaired. It’s a black <make and model> minivan, license plate <number>.”
Officer: “Got it. Can you describe this driver’s behavior?”
Eli: “He’s traveling at a high and inconsistent rate of speed, sometimes speeding up to what looks like 90mph or more as he passes me and sometimes driving about the speed limit, allowing me to pass him again. He’s swerving between lanes all the time and often just driving on the lane marking. He’s almost run a couple cars off the road doing this, including me. This has been going on since, like, Hickory. He’s either very tired or he’s under the influence. Either way, it’s dangerous for him to remain on the road.”
Officer: “How have you kept up with him?”
Eli: “… … … what?”
I couldn’t believe what I just heard. Was this man really going after me while I tried to report a reckless (maybe drunk) driver?
Officer: “You said he’s going at a high rate of speed. How have you kept up with him if you’re not also breaking the law?”
He was. Wow. I had even explained that Mark and I kept playing leapfrog and passing each other at varying speeds, but I hadn’t told him how fast I was going. I could tell the truth and say that I was going slightly above the limit, but I had the feeling this guy would hunt me down if I told him I was going 70.1mph. I froze.
Eli: “… … … I plead the fifth. Sir, that’s not the point. This person should not be on the road. He might kill someone.”
Officer: “What kind of car are you driving?”
Eli (immediately): “I’m not telling you that.”
Officer: “You have a good night, sir.”
Eli: “Thanks for nothing.”
Officer: “You’re welcome!”
The officer hung up.
Leah and I sat there in stunned silence as Mark sped up faster than we’d seen him drive all night and took the bypass around Winston-Salem. Not wanting anything more to do with him, I remained on the freeway that headed into the city, continuing at a reasonable rate of speed through Winston-Salem, Greensboro, Alamance, Chapel Hill, and Durham. Near the very end of our trip, midway between Durham and Raleigh, Mark returned, bobbing and weaving through traffic at what looked like 100mph. I hope he made it home without hurting anyone.
After the shock subsided, Leah and I couldn’t stop talking about this. Of all the negative interactions I’ve had with law enforcement, including the ones I mentioned earlier in this piece, this one was the most baffling by a wide margin. We couldn’t decide if we thought the cop actively wanted to book us or if he just didn’t feel like sending someone after Mark and knew aggression was the easiest way to get us off the phone. Either way, someone didn’t want to do their job. Maybe it wasn’t that baffling after all.
During the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 and 2021, Twitter discourse about the usefulness of the police to everyday citizens became ubiquitous. It was commonplace to see someone argue that people need to be able to call the police in case of emergency, then get ratioed by someone else arguing that the police don’t actually do anything immediately useful in response to most emergency calls.
At the time, I was already firmly on the side of the ratioers in these arguments. I hadn’t had an experience quite like what the argument was describing—something like the cops showing up four hours after the call, taking information, and then leaving, never to be heard from again—but I’d had enough unnecessarily negative interactions with law enforcement and had heard enough secondhand stories from trusted sources that I knew the argument to be based in fact.
That night in February 2023, I finally understood firsthand what Twitter was talking about.
North Carolina Chronicles
Chapter 1: The Cop
Chapter 2: The State Fair
Chapter 3: Job #1
Chapter 4: Fast Food
Chapter 5: Job #2
I legitimately didn’t realize the time split up that evenly until I wrote that paragraph. A clean three-act play.
I also founded this blog, but y’know, small fries.
I got got for 63 in a 60 in Nebraska. They must have been trying to hit a quota.
At least, this professional transportation planner thinks so.
Nine you’re fine; ten you’re mine.
My manager told her to pound sand and encouraged me to continue breaking local traffic laws.
1: What the hell, police
2: What the hell, MARK
3: the drivers license age in south dakota is 14?!?!?! as a person who is 14 surrounded by 14 year olds every day, that is the dumbest government decision i've heard before. and the government makes a LOT of stupid decisions.