Ode to Driving

Living in the Bay Area, I’ve never met so many people who frown on driving. I notice it because I’m a driver—both here, where public transportation doesn’t get me everywhere I need to go very quickly given where I live, and in general, because I grew up in an all-driving city, Atlanta. If you’ve never been to the South, you don’t know just how car-reliant people can be; but when it’s as hot as hot gets and extremely humid, you’ve got no desire to walk, so public transportation is unnecessary; and when you’ve got no geographic boundaries on your expansion, and when you’ve got a city built largely in the woods, you can just expand the city, take down forest and lay down road after road, build fourteen-lane highways, and enjoy cruising down beautiful streets and speedways at high speeds or low ones—whatever you fancy.

I grew up knowing no other option than the car, so I never questioned its use. When I moved to the Boston metro area, where I lived for a decade, I loved being able to take the T places, to walk a mile or two to get somewhere and pass stores and eateries along the way. But I still used my car to get to different parts of town, to get to the coast, the mountains, the rest of New England. I do that here, too, but it’s different because here I work for myself, at home, and thus have no commute. Suddenly, I live a life in which driving is something I do once or twice a week and generally for short distances—to go to the grocery store or the movies, to go to Target, sometimes to go to the East Bay.

Recently, I’ve been going to Palo Alto once a week for work. I hate the time it takes from my life to drive this route at rush-hour, adding up to two or two-and-half hours roundtrip, and I do sometimes wish I was sitting on a train so I could be reading. But highway 280 is beautiful, and when I get out of traffic, I find myself feeling elated by once again soaring down a highway and seeing what I pass by.

When I was a child, my family went hiking many weekends. We would drive north, through towns and open spaces that are now the metro area, and up to the mountains, the Appalachians. Sometimes we’d hike near Dahlonega, an old gold-mining town, and I would daydream about striking it rich (forgetting, every time, that thousands of people had already sifted the soil, leaving now only the glitter of thin sheets of micah poking out of the dirt). Other times, we’d go to Panther Falls, where we once saw a bald eagle perched at the top of the waterfall and were thrilled when he lifted his wings and flew away overhead. My dad’s favorite was Sweetwater Creek, where the remnants of an old mill blend in with the scenery, the cut-stone walls the same color as the large rocks he liked to jump to and from, trying to reach the other side of the sudsy river without falling in.

I grew up seeing a rich fabric of places in Georgia and got to all of them by car, often on many-hour journeys. On those car rides, while my mom and brother talked, I generally sat quietly, cheek pressed to the windowpane, and watched. It may seem remarkable to people who know me now, but I sat without saying anything on yearly driving trips to my grandparents’ houses in Miami and Rhode Island, on six-hour drives to the coast of Georgia for long weekends, on most every roadtrip we took. It wasn’t that I was anti-social; I was just engrossed in absorbing America. I had grown up in a city that wasn’t really a city; it was residential and wooded, and I had a swamp and a creek in my backyard. But it was not the small towns in south Georgia where people’s cars rusted in their front yards, propped up on metal rims without tires, near metal trash bins in which tomatoes grew or flowers blossomed. It was not the small towns in south Georgia that had streets named Settin Down Road and Jottin Down Road or, less cutely, Jim Crow Lane. Nor was it the Okefenoke Swamp or the Everglades, the homes of alligators and ospreys that we watched for hours; nor was it the transition from southeastern woodlands, dense with thousands of types of deciduous trees, to boreal forests, in which an oak or a maple might be the dash of color in an otherwise coniferous landscape. As we drove in every direction, there were so many changing details for me to see that I didn’t want to miss a single one.

I have often met Americans who have never been outside the part of the country they come from. Some have rarely left their own state. I, on the other hand, had parents who drove us everywhere, having little money for plane tickets. So it was out of necessity that we took long car trips, but I think my parents enjoyed being able to show us so much. Maybe if I hadn’t had such parents, I would have gotten restless spending such long stretches in the car; maybe I would have needed the DVDs and other distractions that kids these days get to enjoy just to drive up the street. But my sense of curiosity had been piqued at a very young age, and I think it is from the first big trip we took that I developed such an attention to detail on all the ones that followed.

I had been one month from turning four when we left Atlanta for my dad’s sabbatical in Davis, California; we had arrived on my birthday. Over the course of the weeks in between and the additional month we later took to drive home—in one direction crossing the country on a southerly route and in the other crossing toward the northern border—I had seen Anasazi ruins in Arizona, Redwood forests in California, gold country (I even found a little nugget in a stream on my dad’s friend’s property, though I don’t think he let me take it home), Canon Beach in Oregon and banana slugs in Washington, bison in Yellowstone, as well as moose and big-horn sheep and Old Faithful. I had seen things so far from the reality I knew that I would never forget them.

Twenty-four years later I would finally retrace our steps, getting in my own car and traveling all the way across the country on wheels for the third time ever, to settle myself on this western coast. In the intervening years, I frequently dreamt of two things: the American frontier—true wilderness—and driving through it. When I was eighteen, I hiked for six days on mountain goat trails in New Mexico, seeing no other humans than the ones I was with, and I summitted at 13,100 feet. I could see four states; I could see the amphitheater-like ridge we had come in on and the path we would take back out. This was the frontier alright, and we had driven straight from Atlanta to it. This would quell my urges to see the unknown for nearly a decade. But some six years later, I would begin writing a piece of fiction in which a character woke up one day and, spur of the moment, got in her car in Boston and drove to New Mexico, seeing all she could on the way; and my wanderlust would reawaken; and I would feel the need to do it all again. To see that changing scenery—to see the way both the natural world and the people within it vary as you pass from place to place.

“La libertad es alas,” the Mexican poet Octavio Paz once wrote. “Freedom is wings,” he would have said in English. I understand the impact of the car on the environment; I respect the need for more of us to walk and travel by train or bus than do now. But the sentimental side of me will never let go of that love of traveling across a vast and changing universe with watchful eyes and learning all its pieces and parts. You might think it’s a funny route to enlightenment, but for me, driving IS freedom. It is both momentum and a moving vantage point.