I pull out to make a left on Prospect Road. These days my slipping transmission is triggered by even the slightest of inclines, and I ease the car out slowly, waiting for the inevitable cacophony of clink, bang, echo that accompanies any low-gear change. To my right is a town shuttle, whose extra height has sufficiently blocked all a matter of visibility. Slightly to the left of him an unbalanced Fed-Ex truck goes to turn off a wretchedly steep hill.
When I glance to the left I can be thankful, for once in my life, for my slightly-lower-than-average height, because it gives me the advantage of being able to actually look through the windshields of the high seated SUVS that block the view in that direction. It is a sketchy process, and doesn’t work for sedans that fall below the gas-guzzlers’ window lines. I am eight minutes from home, already calculating my tasks to do when I arrive, but this left turn is making those eight minutes stretch in languid suburban purgatory. And then I think I have a shot – a small gap, I’ll go after the pizza delivery man, right –
He makes a left onto my street instead, and I bang on the brakes, hear that cranky old transmission singing its familiar, metallic lament.
Such is the plight of the suburban driver. For, in all honestly, it is fair to call the act ‘driving’ at all? Would it not be better suited to the term ‘accident avoidance’, ‘swerving and dodging,’ or, ‘laying on my horn ‘til someone moves.’ On record, I rarely partake in the horn blaring pastimes, (though generally because by the time I find it, the perpetrator has long left my vicinity.)
Truly, I love to drive. I love the winding twist of an automobile, knowing tires to the road. I love a car’s sheer power, as it steam trains ahead. I love to drive.
But my daily fifteen minute skirt across town is not born from the same parents as a wide open road stretching great and empty before you. It’s not even the strange, and slightly creepy second cousin. Driving through a busy New Jersey suburb is a battle scene. It’s an ‘assume the worst in everyone’ sort of world, where you should really have known that Mini Van was going to make a left, and construction trucks stretch wide across the main street through town.
No joy can be found in this sort of driving, because there is no drive. We car enthusiast gear head, muscle mad groupies need a surge of power that isn’t the overcompensation of a trigger happy transmission. We need a playground on which to explore just how far we can put down our feet. We need winding ribbons of spread highway that doesn’t care what you drive or how fast you drive it, but just lets you know it will always be there to hug tires to pavement and let you feel like flying for once in your life. The word is a truth for each of us, the drive is the drive – the open road is the reason we so love these cars, this hobby, this pumped up, powerful, petrol world.
So do not stoop to call this maze-weaving, shit-school-just-got-out avoiding, this street got dropped to 25 crawling pathetic excuse for transportation driving. This sort of madness is a means to an end, a way from point A to point B, nothing more than proof that New Jersey just has too many people, and that blinkers really must be an after market option.
I do not hit the pizza delivery car, just as I did not hit the Mercedes who darted in front of me last week against every single rule of the road, just as a I did not hit the woman turning her behemoth of an American SUV left, while talking on her cell phone and edging the enormous, and utterly invisible-to-her points of the machine far too close to me for comfort. I am glad I have passed these challenges, but there will be others. There will always be others. So I spin back the wheel, wince at the banging of metal shifting bits, and simply daydream, of an open road and a chance to really, truly, drive.