A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine got picked up for drunk driving.

If only there had been a way for him to drive from point A to point B via gravel roads, he would still be one of the few, the proud, the licensed.

When I was in high school, I think my truck spent more time on gravel roads than it did in my own driveway. Since my friends and I were too young to get into the bars, and too cool to just sit at home and watch Saturday Night Live with Mom, every weekend found us heading out to find some fun.

For us small-town schoolkids, “finding fun” meant piling into a vehicle with a 12-pack of Old Milwaukee Light (hey, it was cheap) and crisscrossing Sac County on those hallowed Level B roads.

Of course, we never actually meant to GO anywhere. We might put 200 miles on the truck and never see another soul — but we sure got to feelin’ good.

Gravel roads have always been an absolute mecca for underage alcoholics. Since the County Mounties pretty much never traveled them, you could go as fast (or as slow) as you wanted (or needed). You could drive right down the middle of the road to avoid slipping into the unwanted depths of the ditches, and you could stop to chat with anyone else cruising around without having to worry about finding a parking lot or dead-end street.

But without question, the best thing about gravel roads was that whenever nature called you could just pull over and break the seal right then and there.

Sure, occasionally some fool would put their car in the ditch or roll their truck, but those incidents were few and far between. Generally, someone in the group would stay coherent enough to take over the wheel when the pilot got too woozy.

When I look back at how we existed back then, I’m a bit surprised that we and our vehicles survived as well as we did. I have a few fuzzy memories of some of those nights, and they aren’t too pretty.

There were a few nights when my best friend and I drove home in shifts, because while both of us were coherent, neither could stay that way for very long.

There were also many mornings when I’d wake up, see my truck in the drive, and have absolutely no recollection of how it got there. In fact, mornings like those, I usually didn’t remember much past 11 p.m.

Then there was the time that my friends were car pooling home and came across another guy’s car in the road. He was still in it and passed out. Scary, huh. Someone was looking out for us, and we owe him a lot.

Someone was looking out for my roommate Jeff, too.

On the first day of spring break last year, his brother, a friend, and Jeff were heading home from a night of merrymaking. Jeff, who was driving, saw a car up ahead with its lights turned off. The car was swerving all over the road, and there was no way they could avoid hitting it.

They did, head-on.

Jeff and his passengers were lucky; besides the fact that the car was totaled, they just had a few bumps and bruises. The other driver didn’t make it.

Jeff had only had two beers, and when he took a breathalizer, he blew 0.0. The insurance companies and police refuse to tell him whether the other driver was drunk, but Jeff’s sure that he was. As he put it: “Only a drunk would swerve like that.”

Now, when my friends and I go out at home, we hit the bars. And, we have a designated driver. Even though the main reason we have a D.D. is that we have to drive through town and don’t want to get picked up, at least we have a sober person behind the wheel. Hey, whatever works.

When my roommates go out here, I’m perfectly content to drop them off and pick them up.

In fact, I usually insist on doing it. I’m not 21, so I couldn’t get in anyway, and I’d rather be a sober (but a bit sleepy) person behind the wheel than sober, sleepy person sitting at home, wondering why her roommates aren’t home yet and worrying about if they got picked up, or worse.

Besides putting themselves at risk, drunks also endanger the lives of everyone around them — other drivers, small trees, road signs and pedestrians.

A lot of people live within walking distance of the bars, and people crawling home probably don’t have the catlike reflexes to jump out of the way of some drunk running a red light, or ramping the sidewalk. It would sure be a sad sight, seeing a poor, inebriated frat boy splattered all over the front grill of Jim Beam’s truck, just because Jimmy had to be Mr. Cool, and couldn’t call a friend or a cab or take the fabled Drunk Bus.

There’s nothing wrong with admitting that you’ve had one too many. Admitting that you killed someone because you were too stupid to call a cab, though, is worse than wrong. It’s dumb.

And, it’s murder.

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Holly Benton is a sophomore in animal science from Early..