Drive

A friend is thinking about moving to New York, and the other day she said, I wouldn’t need a car, but I’ll really miss driving.

I grew up in a time and place that was all about driving. Not so much the 16th-birthday ritual of the license and the my-own-car visions that come with it, but driving as a way of life. Our city wasn’t big enough to have urban neighborhoods with everything you need in walking distance. The bus system was okay but not great, and there were no subways or light rail. I’d only ever seen subways in movies until I lived in Chicago; although the Busch Gardens Theme Park in Tampa did have a monorail, even before Disneyworld. It’s amazing what makes you proud when you’re eight.

Every adult I knew drove. Some of the cars were old and clunky; some were pickup trucks; some were Porsches (our little city was a pretty big world in certain ways). I loved being taken to school in my dad’s 1960-something black Barracuda; I loved it even more when he bought a (retired) hearse and drove that for a while (much more storage room than a station wagon….). Every once in a while we’d get up early on a Sunday morning and drive to the shopping plaza (yep, this was before the mall, before the internet, before VHS, before CDs, and even before Paul McCartney and Wings — I am practically an historical relic). All the plaza stores were closed on Sundays, the parking lot was empty, and Dad would put me on his lap behind the wheel and let me steer. When I was tall enough to reach the pedals, he let me drive.

My mom and dad were both excellent drivers: smart, safe, fast, precise, full of the joy of controlled speed on an open road. We often spent weekends in auto rallies and autocross: my mom drove, my dad navigated, and I sat in a pillow nest in the backseat and read a book, or watched the road, or listened to my folks work out the clues. One night, after one of these rallies, there was the usual association dinner with door prizes, and I was asked to draw the prize tickets. I think I was maybe nine, and the only kid there… the grownups never seemed to mind because I stayed quiet and still, ate my food, and just listened. It’s amazing what adults will say around a child who is just listening… No one was ever evil or gross, but they were perhaps more revealing than they might have intended. (Never mind about the time we all went skinny-dipping in the hotel pool after the Daytona 500; that wasn’t evil or gross either, but revealing in a whole different way…)

Anyway, this night the group president decided I should draw the tickets. We got to the big prize — a set of four very nice Semprit radials. My dad called out from his table, “Go ahead, honey, win us those tires!” And I said, “Okay, Daddy,” reached into the fishbowl (which was over my head, I couldn’t see into it), and pulled out his name.

What could they do? They gave him the tires. That was a nice night.

Before I drove a car, I drove my bike. I talked about riding it, but in my heart I was driving. I drove with precision and grace. I drove often with no hands up hills and down them, around tight corners, never falling, never being afraid (I was pretty physically timid in other ways, but never on my bike, even with no hands). There was nowhere I didn’t go: huge arterial streets, back alleyways, the best neighborhoods, gravel streets with no sidewalks where big dogs growled behind chain-link fences, commercial strips with bars and auto shops, the 5-mile sidewalk along the bay and the big bridge across the water to the hospital; for a girl on her bike, that busy bridge was the best hill available in three counties. It was Florida: the only hills we had were the ones we built ourselves.

I took my Driver’s Ed in a big boat of an American automatic transmission car, but real driving for me has always been stick. My first two cars were standard transmission Toyota Corollas. Sturdy little mechanically-reliable fast red cars. I felt like the Queen of the World in those cars, and I could drive. I knew how to downshift at the curves, how to upshift by the sound of the engine, how to control a skid, how to change a tire, and (one-hair raising evening) how to escape from a car of drunk men trying to run me off the road. I have driven tens of thousands of miles alone across the US. I know the rhythms of the road at 3 AM, when truckers own the highways and will take care of you as long as you know the rules; at noon in the busy DC – Baltimore corridor where the roads always seem to be under construction; over the Appalachian passes in Tennessee, where you’d better know what second gear is for on some of the steeper grades, and where in earlier days you could find the best breakfasts in America. I know the location of every Burger King between Chicago and Tampa. I can eat an entire meal while driving in interstate traffic. I have slept in my car on the side of the road. I have followed exits just to see where they go: I’ve always liked a mystery drive. I do not get lost for more than a few minutes, ever: not because I’m so brilliantly directional, but because I know I am a driver, and drivers keep moving until they find their way to, or find their way back.

I miss riding the clutch on a hill waiting for the light to change. I miss seeing the surprised face of the guy in the Trans Am in my rearview mirror. I miss the hundreds of miles of open road between me and any of my problems, when the only thing that I can do is put on the music and drive. I miss fifth gear. And I sure as hell would miss driving.