You Got a Fast Car

“When we get these thruways across the whole country... it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.”
— John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

Since moving back to the wilds of Connecticut from sunny Savannah, I have done a disproportionate amount of driving. I don’t mind the occasional road trip, but, by God, two hours to and from New York City at least twice a week is starting to grate a bit.

There are only so many episodes of Our Paranormal Afterlife to keep me entertained. Only so many cans of watermelon Celsius I can drink to keep me awake. (I have an unfortunate habit of falling asleep while driving.) Only so many “pretend you’re driving a Formula 1 car except you can’t go faster than 55” games I can play.

Driving is an American birthright. Is there any other nation which has given the automobile the same preferential treatment as the US? More than just about any other bit of technology, it was the automobile that informed the American identity in the second half of the 20^th century.

We got our kicks on Route 66 and lost control on Dead Man’s Curve which, as the song informs us, “is no place to play”. This big country, with its four million miles of highways, practically demands the presence of the big-finned Caddy. We invented the drive-thru, the car wash, the gas station.

Cars and American notions of “freedom” seem to go hand-in-tailpipe. Do other countries celebrate “the open road”? Canadians seem like prime targets to share our autophilia but do they? (Canadians, please weigh in.)

I’m not immune from my country’s car culture. I’ve driven back and forth across these here United States about half a dozen times. I’ve done it on the superhighways and on the back roads. I’ve done the Southern route and the Northern route. I’ve stopped at every corny-ass tourist trap on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. I’ve survived one terrible crash in Sonora, Texas around dawn when I drove off the highway at 65 miles an hour because I - you guessed it - fell asleep behind the wheel.

1984 Mercury Grand Marquis Colony Park. Ain’t she a beaut?

During the pandemic, I became obsessed with RVs. And not the little guys, either. The big, honking 40-foot converted buses with the king-sized bed and the wine fridge. I spent months figuring out which RV I was going to buy until I realized that although I loved the idea of driving a massive home on wheels, I couldn’t think of a single destination to which I wanted to drive. I’ve already seen pretty much everything this country has to offer and, as Martha pointed out to me, falling asleep behind the wheel of a car is one, terrible thing but falling asleep behind the wheel of a 25,000 lb. motor home doing 60 down I-95 is exponentially worse.

I did not buy an RV.

In retrospect, my obsession was almost certainly a psychological response to being homebound. Which tells me something about what it means to being an American. We are a people on the move. Always have been. Founded by pilgrims and merchants, sustained by immigrants. Motion is the American way.

At times, our go-go-go culture drives me nuts. I do not wish to always be in motion. In fact, of late I am far more inclined to plant my ass in a rocking chair and then not even rock. The problem is that slowing down leads, invariably, to introspection. Americans are not so good at that.

We are a people focused on the exterior world rather than the interior one. The French discover themselves sitting at cafes waving around their Gauloises cigarettes while arguing about politics. The British discover themselves getting wanked off at private school. Here, though, the American identity is to be found out there, among the purple mountain’s majesty and amber waves of grain.

But once we followed Horace Greeley’s admonition and went West as far as we could, once we paved over the orange orchards of southern California and put up a Space Needle in Seattle, there was nowhere left to go. We bought big cars and raced them. We piled the whole family into station wagons and drove down to Disneyland. We built sub-divisions with garages facing the street, as if the house were designed for the car instead of the family. For all of that, our American itchiness has never been soothed.

So we drive. Hither and thither. The long-haul commuter taking up the same space as the long-haul trucker, each of us occupying ourselves the best we can as the miles click off one-by-one. It is there, in motion, that some of us end up doing our best thinking. The exterior and interior worlds blurring together at a mile per minute. We go because stopping scares us. If only we had some idea of where we were going.