That Was You From The Future, Coming To Save You From A Ticket!

About twenty-one years ago, I was making my bi-monthly drive from Duluth back to the Twin Cities. The drive up and down I-35 is boring. At the time, the speed limit was sixty-five miles per hour, and it was a solid three-hour drive from Duluth to the Twin Cities driving at this speed. My car at the time was a 1989 Ford Tempo and the color was called “almond,” but it was really an off-white/tan looking color. The car wasn’t fast, but it was awesome with getting high miles per gallon, and it got me from A to B without issues. The speedometer only went to eighty-five, but on a few occasions I buried the needle and I’m sure I was flirting with 100, but I didn’t make a habit of it.

It was Sunday, early morning, and I was about halfway home from Duluth. The speed limit was sixty-five miles per hour, but I was cruising at eighty-five. As I came around a bend in the highway, about a good mile down the road on the straightaway I saw the glimmering of a car sitting in the median.

I thought to myself, “Crap, a state trooper is sitting there.”

I killed the cruise control and let my car slow down closer to the speed limit, and I continued on. As I passed the trooper, he was not moving, and I impatiently watched in the rearview mirror to see if he’d come out. I got maybe half a mile past him and started to feel relieved that he didn’t follow me, but that feeling of relief soon vanished as I watched him pulling out of the median.

I thought to myself, “Son of a b****. I’m screwed.”

I rounded a bend in the highway, and the trooper was far enough behind that he was no longer in direct line of sight in the rearview mirror. I was in the right lane, and I was coming up on an exit off the highway. I passed it, and a car was coming up the onramp. I got in the left lane to allow this car to merge onto the highway.

The car merging onto the highway was the exact same make, model, and color as my car, had Minnesota license plates on it, and had a single male driving the car — just like mine.

I’d been checking the rearview mirror this whole time and the trooper hadn’t come into view yet, so the trooper never saw this other car merge onto the highway.

About ten seconds later, the trooper came into view, and he had picked up speed to catch up to me. About thirty seconds later, he was right on the tail of the guy driving my cloned car in the right lane, and I was driving along next to him in the left lane. The trooper hung back behind both of us for a couple of minutes, and then he dropped back and went into a cross point in the median on the highway.

My best guess is that the trooper didn’t know which of us had been speeding, and after pulling up our license plates in his system, nothing came back to give him a reason to pull either of us over.

The rest of my drive home was much closer to the speed limit.