Small Gestures Carry Big Message

Fred First
Fred First

It was only after we moved from the big city of Birmingham to the small town of Wytheville in the mid 70s that I began doing it myself. I really didn’t think much about it until one day my three-year-old son asked me:

Daddy, who were you waving at?” By then the two-to-four-finger wave to passing drivers was as automatic as scratching an itch. I’d never seen it done in Birmingham, but almost never failed to receive the wave driving the back roads of the county and even the main streets of Wytheville.

“It was just a neighbor” I told him, though I didn’t recognize the car or know the driver I howdied on our back-road ramble that day between Rural Retreat and home.  Frankly, I didn’t know why it was common practice, but I had a gut sense that it had to do with the smaller scale and slower pace of country living that made every passing driver no more than a few degrees of separation removed from me.

I grew to like it, and missed “the wave” when we moved back to Birmingham, a city with so many drivers and not one who seemed like a neighbor in the speeding (or gridlocked) traffic. I was pleased to find the friendly wave was the rule of the road in Floyd County when we moved here a dozen years ago.

Today, maybe not so much. I thought it was just my perception that fewer and fewer people exchanged the spontaneous gesture at the wheel, but in a recent conversation with others, it is a common concern: the howdy-wave might just be a natural expression of neighborliness threatened and at risk of becoming extinct.

Beyond the fact that a driver’s hands and senses are so often distracted these days with cell phone and text message chatter or that we are ear-budded to books on tape or Podcasts as we drive, I wonder if the creeping erosion of fellow-connection comes from today’s drivers’ altered perceptions about association and belonging. Do we feel less connected today than in the days of sidewalks, front porches and open windows in our houses and our vehicles?

Despite what I’ve heard some people claim, southwest Virginia and the South are not the exclusive domain of the Neighbor Wave. But across the whole of the states where it happens, it has been country places where the odds were greatest that a stranger would be the recipient of a driver’s salute. “We share this road like we share this community, and we both belong here” the gesture hints at.

Perhaps it has already disappeared from the roads of suburbanized former farmland and strip-malled access roads across America. Maybe it’s an antiquated vestige of simpler times, like tipping one’s hat or opening the door for the ladies, and we should let it go.

But what is at risk if this driver to driver acknowledgement is extinguished ultimately from our shrinking repertoire of small-town social courtesies? Does “the wave” say something about who we are (or were) to each other and who we see ourselves to be collectively?

Can we keep the HowJaDoo Wave on the map of southwest Virginia roads? Granted, it’s a small thing; but then, small is beautiful.

By Fred First
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