I have a lot to learn about cars—and can’t get enough time behind the wheel of one.
When you move to a new neighborhood, as I recently did, you get to know your neighbors by their cars. There’s a lot you can tell about me from my car: that I have a car seat-aged child I allow to carpet the backseat with graham cracker crumbs, board books and half-gnawed plastic animals; that I still listen to CDs by artists who haven’t been popular since 1998; that, for having never repaired the hood dents from a two-by-four that flew into us off the back of a semi, I don’t overly concern myself with aesthetics.
I’m making it sound like I don’t love or care about my car. I love my car. I love driving. I’ve been driving since I was 11 years old, when my dad used to take me out practicing in empty parking lots.
My parents are no fools—they didn’t buy me a car when I came of legal driving age. But I never expected them to buy me one or cared that they didn’t. None of my friends’ parents bought cars for them, either. We all got hand-me-downs our families had been holding together with duct tape and a prayer for the express purpose of passing them on to us. Julia Rickey outfitted hers with a hula lady and rearview-mirror furry dice; Sisqó’s “Thong Song” bleated tinnily from speakers older than we were. How did I feel putzing around Manassas in her mom’s 1988 Volvo station wagon? Like a freaking rock star.
Julia and I both drove stick, which is important to me in ways I can’t fully articulate. A cultlike culture surrounds that engagement of your lower left quadrant as part of the experience of the drive. It was a pain in the ass to learn. When I finally did drive an automatic, it ticked me off knowing how much harder I’d had to work than everyone else. My dad justified it: Imagine an accident on a ski slope. Someone’s hurt. The only way down the mountain’s a stick shift. Who’s going to drive the car? I was a hero, practically, for having learned stick. Maybe other people’s parents qualified it the same way. It would go a long way toward understanding the cult.
For someone who loves cars, I should know more about them. I like to think it says something about me that I enjoyed driving my dad’s rusted orange pickup and that I can’t imagine ever dropping significant money on a vehicle.
Still, I’m a good driver. Poor parker—but I’ve never had an accident. Many a speeding ticket, but only because I have places to be and my dad taught me to keep up with the flow, which is good defensive driving and something you should never describe as such to a cop.
My husband doesn’t think I’m a good driver, and I can’t prove him wrong because I am a good driver, except when I’m with him. From the passenger’s seat, he navigates and monitors oncoming traffic with a consistency that’s become a crutch, one I’m always trying to swat off by insisting on driving, further feeding the problem. It’s kind of my husband to let me drive. We both do it for pleasure and talk about retiring to an RV. On the one hand, there’s enormous appeal to a decades-long road trip. On the other, I worry whether it’ll permanently brand us as white trash.
In some ways, how much I like driving doesn’t make sense: I get lost so much I felt compelled to disclose it on an online dating profile. I hate the smell of gasoline. When I was very young, I suffered intense bouts of carsickness. Emergency pit stops bookended most beach vacations, eventually earning me permanent front-seat privileges (sorry, Mom). I still can’t sit in the back for more than 20 minutes without getting queasy.
At 19, my parents let me take their car on my first big solo one—to Michigan, where I had a summer job at a camp—prescheduling my overnight stop in Oberlin, Ohio. What I remember of Oberlin is that half the town population is made up of its arts-school student body and the movie theater, which was built before WWI and looked like the only place to get in trouble, for necking or sneaking in candy bars.
Something important I learned that summer was how much better everyone drives in the Midwest, according to everyone in the Midwest. Driving is a real point of pride for those people. It’s something they can’t stop talking about, especially when they’ve been rudely supplanted from their native land—say, by a D.C.-region job they accepted voluntarily—and made to share lanes with us miserable street slugs. It has to be one of the greatest threats posed by global warming, that one year Michigan won’t suffer as many feet of snowfall and be able to lord it over the rest of us how much better that’s made them at navigating the roads.
I will say I did some great driving on that trip. There’s no logical route from Virginia to Michigan that doesn’t include significant swaths of road in Pennsylvania and northern Ohio—neither of them beauty queens, on the face of it. But that’s what makes the road time so good: There’s not much tourism clogging the arteries of Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. Three years later, a friend and I did a road trip down the coast of the Pacific Ocean. There’s jaw-dropping scenery, but you take your life in your hands on that drive. If, on rare occasions, you’ve been known to exercise a lead foot, or wanted to, winding cliffside drives affording views of mating sea lions may not be for you.
Our present-day car has to be relocated to the West Coast this winter, so my husband and I pulled straws for who gets to drive it cross-country. For winning, he has to suffer my sulking the next three months, despite both of us knowing it won’t do any good. Fair’s fair. I wouldn’t give it to him. Here’s what you can do with a week and a half’s worth of road-trip food, anonymous highway motels and roadside attractions that are breathtakingly kitsch: pry it out my cold, dead hands.
He’s headed due south on that trip, so he won’t get to witness Midwestern drivers on ice. There’s so much their cars tell you, right off the bat. That they’ve spotted your East Coast plates and aren’t happy about it. That they are, almost certainly, better drivers than you. That at some point they’ve gunned it down a desolate stretch of I-80—skimming, perhaps, just north of Oberlin, where they rack the same street cred I did in Julia’s mom’s navy Volvo. … Freaking rock stars.
( November 2015 )