10/23/23
There is something about driving that I find compelling
for more reasons than I can enumerate.
When I am driving, I am either alone with my thoughts, prayers, tunes,
talk stations or the sound of my engine.
If I am not alone, I am, in most cases, with someone I love dearly,
i.e., my wife, my kids, or, in the past, my brother who shared, and probably
largely imparted to me, my love of cars and driving. When I am driving, I am in control; I can go
where I want by any route I choose. I
can see what my car can do or I can drive excessively cautiously. And if the car I am driving is new, I can
luxuriate in one of the greatest aromas known to mankind, the smell of a new
car. The entire combination, and maybe
especially the latter, is intoxicating, thankfully figuratively rather than
literally. There are few things in life
that I would rather do than drive.
While humanity is a varied lot, characterized by
different tastes, wants, and fixations, I have a very difficult time
understanding people who don’t like to drive.
I am incredulous when I hear people say things like “That’s a four hour
drive; we’d better fly” or “I’d like to go to that restaurant, but it’s an
hour’s drive away.” Four hour
drive? I’d drive farther than that for
dinner, and if somebody were to suggest a ten hour drive, right now, I’d
respond with something like “Let’s go!”
One of the attractions of many of the restaurants my wife and I like, at
least to me, is that they involve a reasonably long drive. Years ago, my (now late) great friend Steve
Haldi and I loved to go to a restaurant in Yorkville called The Bridge Street
Café, largely due to its being about a 45 minute drive from our respective
homes. Sue and I grew to love the
Bridge Street as well and would take the kids there with some degree of regularity
when they were young, and why not? The
food was great, the prices were reasonable….and it was a relatively long drive
for a meal. What could be better?
When my brother Dick was alive, I would go to his house
nearly every Friday night to hang out and solve the world’s problems. My brother-in-law would ask from time to
time why Dick didn’t drive out to my house; why did I have to drive the hour or
so to his house every week? “Have
to?,” I would reply. While Dick was one of the funniest and most
insightful people I ever knew, probably half the fun of going out to Frankfort
to see him every Friday was the drive out there…lots of nearly empty backroads,
plenty of opportunities to see what my car could do. There was at the time an especially
interesting bend in Cedar Road that I referred to as “Dead Man’s Curve,” from
the old Jan & Dean tune, that was an especially delightful part of the
trip. The kids probably remember my
taking them to “Dead Man’s Curve” when they were little; “Let’s go to Dead
Man’s Curve, Daddy!” I was, of course,
a bit more careful when they were in the car, but still made it fun for them.
When Sue and I take our annual winter trips to Florida,
we drive. Sue doesn’t appreciate the
drive as much as I do, but I strongly suspect she likes the drives more than
she lets on. We get to see things, and
not from 30,000 feet. We get to
experience the hotels, good and bad, and the restaurants, good and bad. We get to see the backroads of Alabama and
Kentucky. We get that marvelous warmth
one experiences as one gets farther and farther south in January, and the
delight of that first rest stop over the Florida line. It sure beats the hell out of an at least
two hour wait at an airport, with its attendant hassles, followed by a three hour flight in an
over-stuffed tube, followed by the redux of the misery of the airport
experience at our destination.
Flying is miserable.
Passenger trains? While I have
yet to experience the obscenely priced trial by ordeal that is Amtrak, I am
reasonably confident that it is nothing like the train trip Cary Grant and Eva
Marie Saint experienced in North by Northwest. Driving is the way for me. Back when my cars were exclusively manual
transmission machines, I thought that the joy of driving would end when I had
to go to automatics, which I derisively referred to as slush boxes. But when in 2015, due to family and health
considerations, the time came to ditch my sticks for automatics, I found that
the pleasure of driving had fallen only a tad.
Driving is driving, and if it must be done at the wheel of a car that
shifts its own gears, it is still one of life’s grandest experiences.
About twenty or thirty years ago, there was an
advertisement run by some kind of federation of all the car manufacturers who
sold their products in the United States.
The tagline of this ad was
“Your car is your freedom machine.”
Truer words have rarely been uttered.
