on the road

Driving home today from running errands with Oona I came up a narrow road along the side of a big hill right before home, the way I usually do. I'm always commenting to Toby that I don't like driving the road because it is narrow and so many people cross the solid yellow line and drive in both lanes hogging the road. Well, lo and behold, I'm a quarter of the way up the hill when down comes one of those super-sized SUVs and the guy is driving in the middle of the road using up both lanes. I've slowed down waiting for him to either move back into his lane or contemplating whether I should drive into the hilly brush on my side when he looks up from punching numbers in his cell phone and swerves into his lane about 8 feet before hitting me head on. So it got me thinking about when I first learned to drive. I loved, absolutely thrilled to get in a car and drive around. My friend Christina and I did this frequently when we had all of our driver's permits, in fact I think we even snuck out a couple of times before we had permits. So, suffice it to say that I loved to drive. Even after I was involved in a nasty car accident my senior year of High School, which left me shook up a bit, I still didn't get freaked out about driving. I drove from NJ to San Diego in 4 days by myself so I didn't have a problem with speed or highways. No. The thing that started the end of the affair between me and the road was when I was driving back East from California. I drove from LA to San Francisco. Up to Crater Lake in Oregon and then Portland. From Portland to Seattle and then I finally decided to head East instead investigating British Columbia. I crossed the Cascades in Washington without chains on my Volvo when there was a ton of snow and I was skidding like crazy, still I loved the whole driving experience.

The beginning of the end was after a long day driving through Montana. It had all started out so nicely. I was staying in a bed & breakfast in Great Falls, Montana which I had visited because my ex-boyfriend, whom I was still friendly with, and I both l liked Richard Ford's 'Rock Springs' and one of the stories in the collections was 'Great Falls'. What an awesome double entendre name for a town! The woman who ran the bed & breakfast was so sweet, she had never been to either coast, I thinkshe might never have been outside Montana. But she was kind, she made me French toast and gave me a hug before leaving, saying that she would pray for me on my ride home. I had a great day driving through Montana, it was sunny and not too cold for the Northwest in November, they day really showcased all the beauty of that state. By early evening I had crossed into Wyoming and after an hour, I was thinking I'd need to stop for the night soon. I pulled into the fast lane to pass someone when before I knew it my car was sliding backwards across the highway’s lanes and down snowy hill. It all happened in a few seconds but my thinking slowed to such a point, I heard myself saying in my head 'Uh oh, I think I'm going to die.' Then the car stopped halfway down the hill, I could still hear Tom Waits singing, if you can call what he does that, in my tape deck and I popped out 'Bone Machine' and haven't really been able to appreciate Tom Waits since - just a bad connection in my head. A bunch of cars stopped and a man offered me a ride to his house at the nearest exit, this being 1992 before cell phones were big. Since it was also the Northwest? Midwest? (not sure where the delineation is) the nearest exit was about 20 minutes away. It was funny, the first thing he said when helping me up the snowy hill was 'you should have mittens on in this weather.' It was oddly touching in a way. I was 23 at the time and should have been concerned about kidnapping or rape but back then my mind didn’t worry that way. He drove me to his home where his wife was tending to their baby, called a garage for me and they were able to get my car back to the road and tow it to his house without incident. The car was in perfect shape.

I stayed in a hotel in town overnight, not nearly as nice as the bed & breakfast of last night, a small paneled room with thin walls, so I could hear the next door ‘neighbors’ talking about hunting in the morning, and a black and white tv with awful reception. I got up early and started out on the road a little wary but after a couple hours I was feeling my driving confidence returning. Then wouldn’t you know it, my car did a 360 and skidded into the wide grassy median dividing traffic. How could this have happened again?! But once again I was pleasantly surprised by how many cars stopped right away to help me. By now you’re probably thinking ‘she’s a god-awful driver’ which I was thinking as well, until a trucker stopped to help me and he wiped out on stepping out of his cab. A very nice older gentleman who had been hunting that morning and had shot a deer offered me a ride to the nearest exit, this time a half an hour away, in his white truck, with the cold and bloody doe in the bed behind us. He was a retired schoolteacher and was so gracious, he invited me to his home for Thanksgiving the next day but I demurred not wanting to intrude on his family’s celebration, I wound up having chili at the hotel I stayed in. As he drove us along toward the exit his trucked almost skidded off the road a few times and when we got to the garage they said I’d have to wait awhile, since a dozen cars had gone off in the same area as me. Apparently I had hit black ice twice. Black ice is virtually undetectable on a highway and is extremely slick, apparently more slick than your typical run of the mill ice. Black ice is noted for making for extremely treacherous driving conditions. I white knuckled the rest of the trip back to New Jersey so nervous that I could feel the car skidding underneath me at the slightest wind or turn in the road. My hands would ache at the end of the day from gripping the steering wheel so tightly. Thus my love affair with driving was ending.

The final straw in liking to drive was when I drove down to Austin, TX on my own and got caught in a thunderstorm that came on so sudden & fierce, apparently they call them gulley washers down there, I couldn’t see out of my car windows at all and, yes, this happened while I was driving on I-40! Remarkably, I was able to pull off the highway onto a stretch of land and wait it out and until it calmed down to a normal drizzle.

Since having children I feel so responsible for their safety I don’t even want to chance being on the road in inclement weather, which, in my mind, means anything heavier than a few drops of precipitation in the air. Any steep drop off or vertiginous expanse of road will make me blubber and plead for my life while I’m on it, as either a driver or passenger. Irresponsible drivers; the speed demons like I used to be, the people on their cell phone or blackberry, basically paying attention to anything but driving, are anathema to me. The followers of the ‘Pittsburgh left’ (essentially believing that turning left has the right of way over those going in a straight line) those that pass me on the right and speed through the red light I stopped for (another common occurrence here in Pittsburgh) I spit at their feet and wish them horrible, protracted deaths. How dare they put my precious cargo at risk?! I have violent, angry, kick-filled dreams where I exact my vengeance on these menaces to the road. The irony that I now loathe driving and there is a Nascar driver with the same, very rare, last name is not lost on me.