At the ripe old age of 26, I moved my young fiancee and I, sight-unseen, to Merida, Mexico, a jewel of a practically landlocked city in Yucatan. And like so many people in their mid-twenties, convinced of our own immortality, I remember that I smoked about 1000 cigarettes per day at the time. During those first few days exploring our new adopted home on foot, I remember making a very conscious decision: Every time I finished a cigarette, I would deposit the stinky crumpled butt neatly into the coin pocket of my jeans, even though it was gross, until I could find a suitable trash can.

Why? It seemed like basic courtesy. We were already very conscious of fitting into the “ugly American” stereotype, and I didn’t want to be another thoughtless foreigner trampling through somebody else’s culture, scattering the detritus of my filthy habit all over their sidewalks and beaches. It seemed like a way of saying, “Hey, you’ve got your own thing here, and I respect that it’s yours and I won’t muck it up with my soiled freedom filters.”

Fast forward to yesterday, where in two completely unrelated incidences, I found myself overcome with sputtering bouts of convulsive road rage. Road rage, by the way, is entirely a young man’s game; borne from the deep instinct we all have that hurtling two tons of machinery up and down the road at 60 mph is inherently foolish and dangerous, and that the whole system basically hangs together through a combination of dumb luck and a shared agreement to follow the rules. Allowing yourself to get angry about it is best reserved for younger folks with energy to burn on such nonsense, and it’s something I resolved long ago to put away.

And yet.

The first instance, early in the day, was manageable. Driving between Nobleboro and Waldoboro on one of my multiple trips back and forth to shuttle the kids this way and that, a black BMW with those distinctive blue-and-white New York plates came boiling up into my rearview mirror, a harried driver with clearly a very important afternoon ahead of him frustrated by my totally normal and appropriate speed, he executed one pass, then another, then a third. Of course, as tends to happen in the big valley that makes up that stretch of Route 1, he got trapped at the light in Waldoboro, his breakneck maneuvers not getting him any farther along in his day than those of us behaving normally on the roads. I rolled my eyes; another impatient out-of-stater driving a car that had clearly never seen a Maine winter, who clearly had Places to Be.

The second instance happened later in the day. I was picking my wife up from her twelve hour shift as an R.N. at Pen Bay Medical Center, now MaineHealth in Rockport. We merged from Route 1 onto Old County Road at the fork, as we do over and over and over again as part of the daily mundanity of our lives, cruising along at the 40 mph prescribed by the signs in that zone. It’s an area I’ve been stopped before for going a little too fast; locals know it’s a favorite spot for local cops to bust anyone who may be trying to get home just a little too quickly, desperate to make the 30 miles we drive each time we want to do anything vanish more quickly. A black Ford Explorer with Connecticut plates hung off of my rear bumper for what felt like inches for about two miles, even though I was obeying the speed limit. Finally, overwhelmed by his frustration, he decided to not just blow past me in a no-passing zone, but he ALSO decided to blast his horn while passing, and somehow give me not one, but two middle fingers, all while somehow still maintaining control of his car, even though all of his hands were too occupied to also grasp the steering wheel.

Now, look. I was raised by a not-always stable man who taught me many unstable truths that only he understood, but this is a big one: You never give someone the finger, unless you are prepared to kill them where they stand. It’s a serious gesture that should only ever be issued with deadly serious intent. I know this is a crazy attitude, and that there are people out there walking around every day both giving and receiving The Bird without giving it a second thought or letting it impact their day in any way. But for me, a person with certain ideas raised by people with certain ideas, it’s nothing less than a declaration of total war, and anything that happens next simply isn’t your responsibility.

I’m not proud of it. But I had no choice but to reciprocate, returning the gesture, certain of the fight to the death that was to be forthcoming.

Instead, as anyone who lives here knows, his wild maneuvering and gesticulating didn’t get him anywhere. He ended up, inevitably, slowing at the curve by the golf course, before finally getting stuck at the light by Hazel’s Takeout, just like the rest of us. I pulled up smoothly behind him, satisfied that he was overcome with remorse and felt truly silly, and we both carried on with our days.

I was frustrated. Where was the basic courtesy I would expect from a visitor to a new place, who might not be aware of the local customs and culture? As folks that live here year-round, we know every one of these highways and byways like the backs of our hands. We know not just the law that governs each tiny strip of road, but also which spots are likely to be monitored by police, which spots have tricky blind curves, and which intersections are governed more by custom and courtesy than by strict laws, like the one at Birch and Maverick streets in Rockland, near Hannaford, where I spend all summer watching tourists make truly bizarre maneuvers at this unusual stop.

As motorists here in Maine, we’re generally pretty capable. We get through most winters only occasionally driving into ditches, even when there are no traffic lights because someone took out a friggin’ pole again, no electricity, fist-sized snow blowing sideways, with six inches of packed permafrost on the road, no lane indicators to reference, no streetlights to guide us, four wheel drive that only works if you hold the shifter like THIS, balancing a 200 degree cup of coffee on our laps with a dumb Black Lab staring at us. We communicate with each other silently and constantly; it’s why a courteous local will flash his lights at someone going a bit too fast, if he’s spotted law enforcement nearby. It’s why we pull over for ambulances, or change lanes if a policeman has pulled someone over. It’s why if someone needs to get hauled out of a ditch or have a road cleared, and another of us has a winch or a plow, we’re usually happy to help. It’s a system that we’re all used to, driven almost entirely by the local hive-mind knowledge of the driving customs of the region, and with a few exceptions, it works for us almost unreasonably well.

If you’re lucky enough to visit our region during the six weeks we have when it’s gorgeous, please do so with just an ounce of humility and respect for OUR local culture, customs, and standards for driving. We see and respect how important you are; it’s likely the reason you get to have a house that you don’t have to live in for most of the year. And I know you have those legendarily brutal 40 degree winters in Maryland too, and know better than us rubes here on the coast. But please slow down. Eat a lobster roll. Contemplate a lighthouse. Buy a souvenir buoy. And please consider, just for a moment, that maybe we know what we’re doing out here on our own roads, too.