The race is on. It began shortly after the new year arrived. Slowly, at first, the numbers began moving. But suddenly, about three weeks, ago they really began to pick up speed.

I’m talking about the race for a record - the price of gasoline.

We had been spoiled for several weeks as the price of gasoline hovered at the $2.99 figure. That is, if $2.99 a gallon is something to be spoiled about.

About three weeks ago all he-dbl-k broke loose. The 25 cent-a-gallon per week increase has the price, as this is written, at $3.59 a gallon. Just how can it happen? We’ve been down this road before. Every kind of reason is given. You’ve heard them all. Some may be explainable; others defy logic.

Many years ago, I began taking pictures of the price marquees at local service stations. The first one was on March 10, 2005, when the unthinkable price of $1.99 was posted. We thought that was high. Things rocked along from the low $2.00s up to about $3.39 in May a couple of years later as prices bumped up and down until the spring of 2008.

That’s when things began to resemble the current spike, with the all-time high in Gravette reached shortly after the Fourth of July that year. The photo on July 14, 2008, showed $4.15 a gallon. By November, the price dropped to $2.09.

What happened next was unimaginable - but welcome. By January of 2009, the price of gas was unbelievable, just $1.49 a gallon. The cutline under the photo we ran in the paper then reported an upward climb of 30 cents in just one week. Sound familiar? By June of 2009 it peaked at $2.68.

As the price showed bumps up and dips down, I stopped taking pictures until last March when the annual spring bounce occurred and the sign listed $3.59. During the intervening months, the price finally settled in at the comfortable $2.99 figure in January of this year.

But what has happened during the past three or four weeks is another of those unexplainable surges in price - up to $3.59 a gallon as this is written last Friday. Thirty cents a month during the first two months of this year. At that rate, can we expect almost $7 a gallon gas by next January? That would top California - and possibly England or Germany.

That won’t happen, of course. Things will settle down and we’ll see what “they” call “more affordable petrol” in the lower three buck range. But until that happens, will it flirt with that record $4.15 that occurred during the summer of ‘08? Let’s hope not!

In the meantime, now that we have struggled through the price fluctuations of the past seven or eight years, let’s mention there is one other gas pump price picture in my file, taken in January 1980, when the price was 99 cents a gallon. Weren’t those the good old days?

Not to old timers, like the writer, who remember when you could fill up for about a couple bucks or so with the 19-cent petrol.

Then we weren’t bankrolling the oil sheiks or price manipulators. “Those” were the good old days.

Would that 19-cent figure be a new record we should shoot for?

Dodie Evans is the editor emeritus of the Westside Eagle Observer and may be contacted by email at [email protected].

Opinion, Pages 4 on 02/27/2013