First Road Trip
June 18, 2009 on 1:38 pm | In Uncategorized | No CommentsWhile cleaning out a bunch of stuff for our garage sale several months ago, I was hoping to come across the journal I kept of my first road trip. Fortunately, I did find it, and it was, well, what you’d expect of a 10-year old kid, but a kid enthralled with the adventure of taking a road trip.I have very find memories of that journey with my Aunt Mart, Uncle Ernie, and cousin Karole.
In reading Andrew O’Hagan’s recent article in The London Review of Books titled “A Car of One’s Own”, O’Hagan touches on some of the thrills and reasons why people, and Americans in particular, love cars. I’ll quote a bit here:
Behind all this stands the culture of driving and the fact of traffic. We love driving and we hate it, we praise it and we slate it, but our relationship with cars is a lively element in our relationship with ourselves and other people. The downturn in the industry chills us, but mainly because – and we don’t feel this way about pharmaceuticals or petrochemicals – it makes us imagine we might have to stop being who we are.
The first long drive I took after I passed my test was a kind of baptism: I put down the windows and let all life’s unreasonable demarcations fly behind the car, enjoying the illusion that I now had a friend who cared for my freedom.
In American fiction, a great number of epiphanies – especially male epiphanies – occur while the protagonist is alone and driving his car. There are reasons for that. One may not have a direction but one has a means of getting there. One may not be in control of life but one can progress in a straight line. When your youth is over and definitions become fixed, even if they are wrong, it might turn out that the arrival of a car suddenly feels like the commuting of a sentence. It may seem to give you back your existential mojo.
Driving was always a covert means, more explicit in the States, of discovering the outer limits of your own character in the act of transit.
I identify with a great many of these notions. Road trips still give me a thrill in a unique way that I’ve never experienced doing anything else. The idea of a warm evening, rock music, windows down, bright sun, and on the road is delicious even to think of. While learning to drive and obtaining a driver’s license in other countries may be important, I do not get the sense (and I could be wrong) that it is quite the right of passage as in the U.S. Why? For me, it began the active exploration of myself. It got me into trouble, but it was one of the most freeing experiences I have ever had.
And I cannot help but think that my love for road trips began so many years ago in 1982. We traveled far. One moment is particularly memorable to me and it captures fully the whole sense of travel and road trips for me: Uncle Ernie drove just a little bit through North Carolina so we could say we had been to North Carolina.
Leave a Reply
