When I came home for the summer after my first year of college, I told my mother that my best friend and I were driving to California. She laughed out loud – 2,000 miles in a what? Well, my best friend had an old Chevy. What could go wrong? The following year, I did drive from New York City to St Louis (1,000 miles) with my new boyfriend and his best friend, in a “driveaway car” that the two of them found in New York City. A driveaway car was one that needed to be transported from one region to another. There were no guarantees of roadworthiness, and the boys were not, of course, to be paid. It was free transportation. As I remember, arrangements were completed towards dusk, we set out heading vaguely west, and we had just enough money for petrol – we arrived, crossing the Mississippi river the next morning with 25c between us. We were proud of that: perfect planning.
I don’t know whether the road trip propensity is genetic or environmental, but when my 17-year-old informed me this spring that he and his friend were driving to Seattle (970 miles) on a Thursday, staying there for one night, and returning Saturday, I didn’t bother laughing. I knew that if I laughed, they could get the thin end of the wedge in, and I would find myself flying to Seattle to help them shift out of first gear when faced with one of those precipitous hills.
Where were they planning to sleep? They didn’t know. Was the factory they hoped to visit open on Friday and did it allow visitors? They didn’t know. Had the older boy (a mere 18) ever been anywhere? Nowhere north of San Francisco (that was bad enough – the first time my stepdaughter drove in San Francisco, aged 24, she got out of the car at the top of Nob Hill and wept). How much money did they have? A couple of hundred dollars.
I have reared, or helped to rear, five children and the scariest bit, bar none, is the learning to drive part. It has filled me with anxiety not only about the children, but also about my former self and my friends. I once thought it was funny that my stepbrother sneaked out of the house after midnight, ran down the street to where the 10-year-old unregistered heap he’d bought with a friend for $50 was parked, and drove around town for two or three hours. It once amused me that it took me three tries to pass my driver’s test and that my driving instructor told my mother that I was the least talented person behind the wheel that she had ever taught. Now I worry that, though I haven’t had an accident in 44 years, I have passed on this unfortunate propensity, not only to my children but also to my children’s children, unto automobile eternity.
There are several methods for introducing your children to driving, and all of them are bad. Probably the worst is to put it off. The worst driver I knew was a man who grew up in New York City, and didn’t learn to drive until he was 22. Driving never became second nature to him. Even though he hunched over the wheel, hyper-attentive, his reactions weren’t automatic, the way they were with that other man I know, who grew up in Iowa and was driving himself to school at 14. Of course, the second man always drives too fast – his confidence in his reaction times is absolute – and the first man has never had a wreck, but when I am driving with him, he is so jumpy that it feels like a wreck is imminent.
In California, there were so many accidents that the state instituted a policy of graduated licensing – a 16-year-old takes an eye test and a written test, then a mandated driver’s course, then a driving test. After that, they have to drive for a year before they can have other kids in the car.
Teenage drivers are also subject to an 11pm to 5am curfew. This policy has been in effect for three or four years, and has cut down on teen mortality. However, most new drivers I know have hit something. When I had had my licence for about three months, a kid my age rear-ended me, though not very hard. The daughter of a friend of mine wrecked her car while drinking from a soda can. My most responsible child sneezed, jerked the wheel, and was spun by a truck she was passing across the central reservation and into oncoming traffic (she wasn’t hurt, but the car was dented on all four sides).
My son’s father was a passenger in a truck that skidded, and flipped into a cornfield. The boys in the truck bed were thrown clear, no one was much hurt and the boys used hammers to pound out the dents. My stepbrother avoided going off a bridge by hitting a streetlight; when my stepfather was taken to assess and pay for the damage, the city assessor’s assistant leaned against the next streetlight down, and it fell into the river. Every light pole on the bridge turned out to be termite-infested. When my son gets into his car, I remind myself that we have all survived. He has survived – a few weeks before he asked me whether he could take his road trip, he fell asleep at the wheel (after his 5am curfew) and hit a mailbox, writing off his car. He was not hurt and does not intend to drive on the road trip but, really, I don’t even want him in a car. I want him quietly playing video games in his room, taking the bus to school, and wearing a microchip in the back of his neck so that I can locate him at any moment.
Except that, of course, I don’t. We Americans have all seen the USA from the backseat of our parents’ Chevrolet, and the view is very constricted – their old grey heads are in the way and their conversation is utterly banal, as in, “Honey, did you forget your pills? I think you forgot your pills,” or “Did I really leave my handbag on the roof of the car? I can’t find it anywhere” (Yes, I did do this. A sympathetic woman made her husband stop his car so that she could run across two lanes of interstate and retrieve it. She called me. She said, “Oh, dear. I’ve done that myself.” She was, and is, a saint.) The side windows seem very small and they never allow you to view the whole panorama.
After I threw off the parental traces, I couldn’t get enough of road trips. East and west across the US, usually along Interstate 80 (New York to San Francisco), but sometimes up and down Interstate 35 (north to south-west), I-95 (Boston to Florida), I-5 (up and down the west coast), I-90, the northern route, through Montana and the Dakotas and, my current favourite, California 101, north and south just inside the coastal mountains, through a landscape that is bright green in the winter and rich gold in the summer. In 1970-71, I hitchhiked through Europe and the UK, and there was something alluring about our idleness and our mistakes. We learned much more and felt much more not knowing where we were going but finding ourselves standing by the side of the road than we did with timetables in our pockets and the scenery rushing by outside the rail coach window. We were, perhaps, protected by our size (he was 6ft 10in) but we never had a single problem – nothing was stolen, no threats were made, in fact more often than not, those who picked us up did us favours. No, my son cannot go to Seattle. What are the parents of the other boy thinking?
Except that in California, the other boy is on his own. He is 18. He can join the army, he can vote, he can drive to Seattle, he can do what he wants. On Tuesday we have a family meeting. Beforehand, the boys have to come up with a plan about where they will go, where they will stay (hotels won’t let them in), and what they will see.
The other boy turns out to be an A-student. His car is a new Subaru. They are willing to stay in California. They each have a friend to visit. They head off to Sacramento. Well, Sacramento. Is there a place more dull? They are gone for two nights and three days. I yield to temptation and text my son (who I know isn’t driving) once a day. Where are you? Sactown. Are you OK? Yeah. Where are you? Davis? Are you having fun? Yeah. Mostly, I know, they are driving and talking and stopping and eating. They spend one night in the car and one night with friends. They make it home safely.
This is only the beginning. Might he drive his car to summer camp? Where would he park it? In the parking lot. I duck this one by telling him to call the camp and ask them. Might he drive by himself to Davis (three hours, many busy highways) to his stepbrother’s graduation? No, it’s ridiculous to take two cars. What is his ultimate goal in life? It is not making a million dollars, saving the world, or becoming president – it is heading south on the Pan-American highway, looking for Tierra Del Fuego, not because he is fascinated by Latin American culture but because he wants to go. And go some more. In an age when a 13-year-old is climbing Mount Everest and 16-year-olds are sailing solo around the world, this is a rather modest goal. Peak oil means he’ll never get to do it. Peak oil means he shouldn’t do it. Peak oil means he should do it soon, while he still has the chance. Peak oil means that he should go by bicycle – even more dangerous.
In Anthony Trollope’s 1877 novel The American Senator, two characters spend most of the day travelling 60 miles by train to Cheltenham and, in doing so, remind me what a luxury the automobile is, not only because it gives us speed and independence, but because it invites us into the world outside the windshield. Shepherding all those kids through the narrow pass that is learning to drive reminds me how costly the luxury is, not only in terms of environmental damage, but also in terms of danger. When I was 17, we didn’t know as much about the costs as we do today, so we got to enjoy the freedom without many pangs of conscience. I don’t think my son will be as lucky. But he has to learn to drive, and he has to learn to go out into the world, and when I am tempted to say, “Stay home,” I must say, “Have a good time,” instead.
Private Life by Jane Smiley is out now in paperback, Faber, £7.99
From : Guardian website
