Yes, I guess regular readers of this blog might be surprised at how much I love to drive. It might seem incongruous in a person with my interests. But I do. Many of my friends just drive because they have to. I've always loved it with a passion. My first car, a faded, rusty red 1968 VW fastback, was a tumbledown eyesore that I managed to keep going through my two first post-college years in the Washington DC suburbs. Have I ever told you about how it (and I) inadvertently became part of the Begin-Sadat motorcade to the White House in 1979? I had driven onto Rock Creek Parkway, and suddenly realized no one else was on the road...until a policeman on a motorcycle drove parallel to me and gestured for me just to keep going. I could see the motorcade in my rearview mirror. Once I pulled off near the Watergate, someone told me what was going on, that the two leaders were headed to the peace accord signing. I guess someone had forgotten to block off one of the entrances.
After I left NYC in 1990, I drove around the country, settling for a time in one of the most wonderful cities anywhere, Duluth, Minnesota. In order to think the deep thoughts that I don't seem to be able to help, I'd find excuses to drive up and down the North Shore, or down to the Twin Cities. One time, I drove from Minneapolis to Denver in one day, about fourteen hours. I was alert and just loving it until I saw the sign saying "Welcome to Denver," at which point my body collapsed and it was a miracle I made it to my destination. (Note to self, that's just a little too much driving on one's own for one day.) I drove over the top of Lake Superior back to the East Coast, and have also driven from the East out to the Rocky Mountain west and back several times.
If I were to wake up one morning and learn that I miraculously had the means to go back and live in England for some period of time, the only, only factor that might give me pause is the driving over there. No, it's not the left side of the road. That I can get used to. It's the cramped narrow roads particularly in the countryside, roads so narrow that people have to back their cars up into little pullovers to let the other car go by. It's the tiny cars barely being able to get by other cars in the cities. It's that feeling of not really being able to take off and be free. That's the American in me, I guess. While car ownership hasn't been a very high priority for me in recent years, and I have bigger environmental qualms about cars now than in the past, that urge to turn the key in the ignition and go is always there. It's probably no accident that I want the Gram Parsons/Flying Burrito Brothers version of "Wild Horses" played at my funeral. It doesn't exactly outweigh Anglican chant, but it's in there in this variegated ol' mix. In the end, I am a wild horse.
