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Hand signal while driving3/20/2024 Even with all that, though, I use my whole R arm to wave at approaching cars. We face traffic I wear a big loud neon yellow vest with lots of reflective material on it, and if it’s darkish, I wrap blinking LED light strips around my sleeves. Every time I walk the dogs, I feel that it may be my last day of life, as there’s no alternative to walking in the street. It’s a sidewalk-free community and in my view, being sidewalk-free is detrimental to BEING a community. I married into the house, and it’s lovely out here in many ways, but utterly hostile to pedestrianism. I live in rustic Deephaven– right on its absolute edge, abutting Highway 7. I asked Craig later if he’d noticed anything similar from walkers he’d pass, and he more or less confirmed the technique. This seems to have done the trick (which is to say, nobody stopped and asked me if my car had broken down). It looked a little like the two-finger wave sitcom characters give when they’re in a restaurant and signaling to the waiter for the check, or like a flashing a half-hearted peace sign, but with only the index finger instead of two. What I settled on was a sort of adapted one-finger wave, suitable for the pedestrian. It makes you seem a little too desperate, a little too eager to please. Lifting your hand all the way up to give a standard wave exerts much more energy. When you walk, your hands are at your side. The whole idea is that it takes a minimum of effort – you flip up the finger in a friendly way, because the finger is right there anyway. The hi sign requires a hand on a wheel, raised to the chest level, as a starting position. You can’t really replicate the circumstances while standing upright. In your own wave, you can’t really give back a standard hi sign. There’s already maybe a question in the driver’s mind about what exactly you’re doing all the way out there in the first place, especially if the driver knows every person who lives within walking distance of where you are. You want your wave to convey, “Hey, doin’ OK, thanks for waving, have a nice drive,” and not “help, my car broke down, I need a ride to the gas station, can I use your phone.” The latter is a scenario that’s entirely plausible. Anything too overstated, and it may appear as if you’re signaling for help. A full-bodied wave to an automobile doesn’t always signal casual sociability. “I’d never seen it before I came up north.”īut when you’re on foot and you’re waving at cars, there’s a certain restraint you need to have. “We were in Chaska before we were up here,” said Craig. ![]() “We invented the one-finger wave!” exclaimed her aunt in the background. When the topic came up, everyone at her table chimed in. Coincidentally, she was visiting family in Grand Rapids when I called, and she put her uncle Craig on the line. Body language for “howdy,” the hi sign is the simplest of waves, merely the raising of the forefinger of the driving hand, which does not budge from its draped position across the top of the steering wheel, the attitude struck by most long-distance or travel-wise drivers … It wastes no energy it is a model of efficiency, like all nonessential movements by country folks who must save their labor for the land.įor some regional perspective, I called my friend Shanai Matteson, who grew up in Aitkin, Minnesota. A person on horse or on foot raises his whole hand, but the demands of travel on wheels dictated a specialized wave. The hi sign is strictly a highway courtesy, an automotive gesture developed for a modern age. … By using it, we convey our goodwill to our fellow drivers and reaffirm our reliance on each other during long trips across isolated country. The gesture is usually reciprocated.Īnne Dingus sums it up nicely in Texas Monthly: When, while driving, you pass someone on a country road, friend or stranger, you raise the forefinger of your driving hand in a quick salutation as you pass. ![]() You can also find it referred to as a “hidy sign,” “trucker’s wave,” “Texas finger wave,” or even “Texas two-finger” (everything, as you know, is bigger in Texas). It’s not necessarily specific to Minnesota, but rather binds the entirety of rural America together, at least in the middle of the country. You may know this gesture, if you’ve spent any time driving in the rural parts of the country. I’ll write a bit about the physical landscape, but it’s one particular aspect of the social landscape I’d like to have a look at: the “hi sign,” also known as the “one finger wave.” It was that second day, which began in Farmington, which really put me in the middle of some remarkable landscapes, both physical and social. ![]() Last fall, for the purposes of art and the furthering of the glories of pedestrianism, I walked from Minneapolis to Northfield over the course of a day-and-a-half.
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