Chances are that, as with me, you regularly have your own reminders of how fleeting this life truly is.

In traveling from Harrison to Fayetteville along U.S. 412 the other day, I rounded a curve to find an oncoming motorist squarely on my side of the road. I’ve never understood how any rational driver is incapable of keeping their own wheels inside the boundaries of a relatively wide, well-marked asphalt pathway. But then I read the papers and realize how many are long-gone because of such mindlessness.

But suddenly there he (or she) was, smack-dab on my designated side of the highway. My only out was the relatively shallow ditch to the right and as I began to swerve in that direction, the inattentive moron finally came to his or her senses and yanked back into his own lane. Whooooosh! The vehicle swept past in a blur. The life-threatening moment passed.

Yet it left me breathing hard and realizing yet again how many die on our roads each year from just that kind of idiocy.

Please folks, just keep your left tires well on your side of the center line. Power steering being what it is these days, it’s just not that difficult.

I stood in line at the Sam’s Club members’ desk in Fayetteville waiting my turn when an elderly gentleman who was stooped and wearing a hearing aid ambled up beside me. I figured him to be in his late 80s. Employees summoned him to the side as an one wearing the familiar blue vest pushed a cart containing a big-screen television set beside him. Another worker handed him some paperwork to sign. He gingerly scrawled his name on the document.

“OK sir, now I’ll need to see your driver’s license,” the employee said. The man seemed bewildered by the request, looking down at the paper he’d just signed, then back at the worker. “Well now, sonny, I’m wonderin’ why you need to see that seeing as how I plan on watching this thing, not driving it.” Easing to the drive-through at the KFC in Fayetteville, the window opened and a welcoming young female handed over a sack containing my order.

“Sir,” she added in a voice as pleasant as her smile, “I’d really appreciate your taking a minute to respond to the company’s phone survey on the paper with your order. I’m trying really hard to become the Employee of the Month here and hope maybe you’ll vote for me.”

I couldn’t help but grin. Back home I did make the call. And at the appropriate place in the lengthy survey, I explained how I thought “Jeraldine in Fayetteville, Arkansas” richly deserved to be their Employee of the Month.

Here’s to your helpfulness, Jeraldine, and I hope your dream comes true and you finally do become Employee of the Month.

SWEPCO’s backstroke

Let’s see if I have this straight. SWEPCO wants a limited rehearing where the electrical utility hopes to persuade the Arkansas Public Service Commission to overrule the decision to grant one of six specific routes SWEPCO had requested in order to stretch its 50-mile-long mega-transmission line across Benton and Carroll counties.

But instead of the approved Route 109 that runs northeastward and across southeastern Missouri for about 26 miles, SWEPCO now seeks to revise aspects of its rejected Route 33. That’s the shorter but stunningly disruptive path it always preferred, but which would cut a wide and ugly herbicide-laden swath through the Ozarks (but denied by an administrative law judge for that very reason).

The approved route has drawn substantial resistance from lawmakers in Missouri who filed bills hoping to prevent that from happening.

So SWEPCO hired the PR firm Capital Results in hopes of stopping the Missouri legislation while lobbying the press and legislature to convince them the power line is so very good for that state, although SWEPCO hasn’t a customer in Missouri. And now SWEPCO itself is trying to overturn this Route 109 it once deemed an acceptable alternative?

Every lawyer I know understands the practice of trying to make black appear white, but I’m not sure it’s possible to make an enormous electrical beast cut through the forests and private properties of another state look attractive to residents of the Show Me state. That could especially prove true when so many Arkansans remain firmly convinced such a massive transmission line is wholly unnecessary.

Hoggish nightmare

On Earth magazine reports the enormous nitrate pollution of two Iowa streams caused by runoff waste from hog factories in their watersheds (the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers) have steadily overwhelmed the Des Moines Water Works to the point of turning off its intake valves from the rivers and turning to aquifers and other sources to supply safe drinking water.

One policy analyst there was quoted as saying Iowa politics has been dominated by agriculture regardless of the environmental consequences. The story also quotes Iowa’s Gov. Terry Branstad rationalizing that “the majority of [waste] discharges into Iowa’s waters are accidental spills” and were “caused by Mother Nature.”

Such news is bound to be reassuring to those concerned about that hog factory permitted by the state within our Buffalo National River’s watershed, eh?

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Mike Masterson’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at mikemastersonsmessenger.com.

Editorial, Pages 17 on 03/29/2014