Doing the wave

Usually, it’s not a full-blown wave.

Most times the hand never comes off the steering wheel.

When Lincoln County Assessor Frosty Freeze does it, he just lifts one index finger.

But the tradition of drivers on farm-country back roads acknowledging one another in passing isn’t about style. It’s about connections.

“I see it as a friendship sort of thing,” said Steve Crider, a 56-year-old farmer in Whitman County. “I grew up with it. I can still remember my dad waving.”

The custom itself isn’t fading away, he said. Sometimes, though, it seems as if farmers themselves are. “There are fewer and fewer of us,” said Crider.

Maybe that’s all the more reason to exchange salutes.

Often, the two drivers know one another. But the rural-roads wave isn’t restricted to acquaintances.

Joanne Buck, a store clerk in Davenport, Wash., said many times she has asked her husband who it was he had just waved to and heard him reply that he had no idea. “You wave to everybody,” she said.

Now different people have different informal rules about where they wave and to whom they wave. Still, a case could be made that this is always more than just a casual gesture.

“To me, it is a signal, a symbol of a common tie to the area and a sign that people watch what goes on,” said Kenneth Pigg, a rural sociology specialist at the University of Missouri.

Pigg hasn’t actually studied the rural wave. But he has thought about what it implies. And he believes it communicates the message that the two drivers, alone way out in the country, would be willing to help one another.

“Whether you know someone well or not is not a requisite for being available and willing to acknowledge another’s needs and to assist when someone’s cattle stray through a broken fence, a structure burns down and needs to be rebuilt, a family member is ill and the family needs some outside support … using a flip of the hand on the steering wheel is a pretty good sign of your willingness to be part of the community and abide by the norm.”

Of course, all that doesn’t necessarily flash through the minds of practitioners each time they greet an oncoming pickup.

“It’s a reflex,” said Dawn Bennett, a convenience store manager who lives on a back road between Davenport and Reardan.

But Dick Warwick, a farmer and poet in Whitman County, agreed that it really does mean something.

“It is another tiny fiber that helps hold society together, even in the face of the ripping and rending done by politician/celebrity bad examples, media amorality, fundamentalist intolerance and malignant commercialism,” he wrote in an e-mail.

To Spokane-based truck driver Ken Stout, the wave is emblematic of the distinctions between urban and rural life.

But perhaps it’s no big mystery why many people do this out in the country.

As David Givens sees it, the wave is sort of the logical flip-side of classic big-city behavior where people avoid eye contact and personal recognition in crowds.

Givens is a Spokane anthropologist who has researched and written about nonverbal communication. He is the author of “Love Signals.”

He likened the back-roads wave to a handshake or a meeting of two hikers on a remote trail.

Rural life has changed in countless ways over the years. But a fortyish man refueling his hay-laden truck in Davenport the other day said he thought he could put his finger on the single biggest threat to the tradition of the wave.

“People moving out here from the city,” he said. “You don’t see them waving unless they know you. No offense.”

None taken.

For lifetime city dwellers, more accustomed to roadway gestures of another ilk, the wave might seem quaint, maybe even corny.

But those who grew up in the country understand.

“It just means you were glad to see them,” said Bob Gunning, 84, who farmed in Lincoln County for decades. “You were glad to know your neighbor was doing OK.”