From the Archives 1
If I had to choose a thing I dislike about my new home which I mostly love a lot, it would be the car culture. I don’t have a car, so I bike and bus and take BART. Sometimes I rely on friends to drive me places. Often, I complain. But there are things I love about the personal automobile, much as I disparage it in public, and I recently unearthed an essay on the car that I wrote in 2019, my first year in Boston. That feels like a million years ago, so I’ve made some changes, but preserved most of it.
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The first thing anyone taught me about the car was how to hold the wheel: “Grasp firmly, at 10 and 2 on the clock face.”
And from the start, I was afraid to steer. Afraid to twist the wheel, which winds up like coiled muscle, poised to unflex. Afraid to command such a hulking mass of metal. And even after so many highway miles have scrolled through my vision, at each shoulderbelt-click into the driver’s seat, I feel a jolt of trepidation.
I delayed driving as long as I could, but my parents, having schlepped me around for my whole life, finally turned the ignition when I was 17, and I found myself behind the wheel, inching out of our driveway in reverse. My first ride, I kept an icy grip around the wheel’s border. With my patient father in the passenger seat and my occasional, timid taps on the accelerator, we crawled around our suburban Midwestern neighborhood, never exceeding five miles per hour. Even at this glacial pace, I was terrified.
In Indiana, everyone drives. Growing up in the sprawling land of soybean fields and parking lots, we were conditioned to desire the freedom of the car, and my friends eagerly awaited their plastic licenses, lining up for awkward photos in the DMV as their birthday clocks struck 16. My delay was an aberration.
When I finally sat through the endless hours of driver’s ed in a dingy building off North Walnut St. next to Big Red Liquors, I was the last of my cohort to be initiated. The classes were both mind-numbing and terrifying in the way that driving lulls you into rolling hypnosis and then jolts you awake as a deer darts in front of your hood and you swerve with the same instinct as the hot, beating animal that misses your grill by a fingernail. In that windowless cement-walled room, we half-listened to Lindsay, our booth-tanned instructor, deliver painfully boring lectures, interspersed with road-rash videos warning us of the highway’s impending catastrophes.
If possible, I enjoyed driving even less than driver’s ed. It seemed a task too fraught with responsibility and potential for disaster. My fears felt rational, especially once a friend took a turn too fast one late night, her car careening off the road and into a tree, totaling the family sedan, miraculously, without a scratch to a single passenger. My concerns, justified with every roadkill carcass I observed sprawled across the double yellow lines. My hesitations, validated by the gory videos Lindsay had forced upon us in All Star Driving School; the films designed to scare us into safe driving scared me into not driving.
Eventually, it became clear that driving was a necessity, and the terror dulled and became familiar, a chore rather than an ordeal, but never something I could enjoy. Even now, my sister calls me a “passenger princess.” Whenever I can, I opt for any seat but the driver’s. Driving feels solitary and onerous, but as I passenger, I get to share an enclosed space with other people, breathing in the same heady air that breeds closeness. In the car, I’ve shared the whole Hairspray soundtrack, an old donut, a mortifying story, memories of a friend. The car has been, for me, a vessel for communication, has let me go places, while going places.
I first fell in love with the car as something other than a means to a destination when our family bought a used minivan. I was in second grade, my sister in preschool, when my parents rolled up our cracked asphalt driveway in a tan 2000 Toyota Sienna. It had only three doors—you had to crawl through the passenger side to get in and shuffle into the back—and as my parents drove it off the used car lot, the car salesman cracked, “Ah, you got the strippy!” But to my sister and me, it was huge and luxurious. When we first clambered inside, I looked back at my parents and exclaimed with all the gleeful joy of a seven-year-old, “It’s a palace!” Parked in our garage, the minivan became the setting for our ongoing game of House in the following weeks. To this child, the car represented a carefree experience—inside we could be anyone, go anywhere.
And we did go places. Amherst, MA, Bloomington, IN, Sioux Falls, SD, Tallahassee, FL, Chicago, IL, St. Louis, MO. The car carried the family, dog, and a cooler filled with fruit and seltzer. We traveled across a patchwork of united states, while I rode in the backseat with my face pressed up against the window, the rest of the world scrolling past in periphery.
The family car bookended my days, and the rides home from band or cross country practice encompassed the time I was most willing to divulge the contents of those hours since I’d seen my mom at breakfast. Fresh from the experiences, I shared more of myself, my friends, my life than I was willing to do over dinner, or ever.
As I entered high school, the inside of the car became even more of a secret, sacred space. Feeling watched in the walls of our high school, constrained by rules, at the final bell five minutes before 3 pm, we poured out of the mouth of Bloomington High School North and flooded the parking lots, cars zipping off.
During these years, we heard about, perhaps engaged in, the illicit activities that took place in cars—rumors wafted through the school about the kids who parked near the alleyway behind the school’s back lot, hot-boxing their cars and having sex in the backseat, then coyly boasting about it at lunch the next day.