A memory that I won’t ever forget: sitting in the passenger’s seat of my mother’s golden Toyota Sienna, watching as a massive Ford Explorer hurtles directly towards us. I thought time moved linearly and consistently until that point — both cars seemed to be moving through molasses. At speed, metal crunches like a bag of chips and the proud nose of a minivan becomes squashed and troubled, resembling the face of a pug. It took only a few seconds for a vehicle to turn into a crumpled piece of paper, totaled and ready for the junkyard. Still, we thank the engineering of it all: four people involved in a car accident that totals a car, no injuries.
A memory that’s hazier, a few weeks after the first: sitting in the passenger’s seat of my father’s Honda Accord, three turns away from home. A jolt, and a pickup truck with its bumper where ours should be. A minor accident this time. The man in the truck asking, “Where did you come from?” I wonder if my father’s car can turn invisible like something out of Harry Potter, or if it was hard to see from his perch in the pickup truck, or perhaps that much of driving is hoping that other drivers’s mistakes aren’t dire enough to ruin your life.
In a car-centric place, it’s easy to feel disconnected from the weather. When I moved out to California, people were surprised to learn that Georgia had seasons — that after our summers that reached 100 degrees, the leaves would glow bright orange in the autumn, that sometimes even snow would dust the ground and close the roads down. They would ask how we dealt with the weather which seemed to be extreme compared to the always temperate San Francisco. In reality, I didn’t spend much time outdoors before college. Most of the time we were sheltered by air conditioning or heating, other than walks to and from cars when leaving or entering a building.
In a car-centric place, it’s easy to feel disconnected from other people. You can spend hours upon hours driving among hundreds of others in traffic, and never really see them. Maybe you see a flash of a face through the glare of a windshield for a moment or two. Everyone has their little wheeled boxes that keeps them perfectly isolated. There’s always so much space. Stores stretch on forever, there’s never a need to get too close to other people.
Growing up in suburbia is growing up in cars. They’re the essential connective tissue of the sprawling lands, the only way to do anything or go anywhere. The closest grocery store is 2 miles away and a 57 minute walk, it takes 10 minutes to walk to the mailboxes at the front of the neighborhood, and any park or trail should be driven to. To drive is to live, to be able to participate in the world around you.
I grew up in a place where nearly everyone’s 16th birthday celebration involved going to the DMV. Mine didn’t. Anxieties from my memories haunted me so I invented new reasons to not drive. I was already an antisocial homebody, so why would I need a license? I looked up statistics about fatalities from car accidents (leading cause of non-natural deaths). I came up with any possible excuse to avoid getting behind the wheel. Even if I learned how to become a good driver, there were plenty of bad drivers that could cancel out all of my confidence and skill in an instant.
If you don’t drive in a car-centric place, the world is a smaller place. If you feel conscious about asking people for rides or feel bad about asking your parents to take you places, it stays small.
My college was walkable, as long as you stayed on campus. Going to the grocery store was still a 30 minute walk, most places in the city that you wanted to go were largely inaccessible, but it was walkable. I could go anywhere I wanted at any time with the power of my legs and the process of getting there usually made me feel better than I did when I left. Why is it more tiring to drive for an hour than to walk for an hour?
Checking the weather felt more relevant than ever before. Sometimes it would rain for a week straight and it would be miserable. But at the same time, it was a fun change of pace as everyone would show up to class late or not show up at all on the stormiest days. While walking around, you would see familiar faces and unfamiliar faces would turn familiar. Campus was only so big and there was always a chance of running into someone you knew walking somewhere.
When I wanted to leave campus, my friends and I charted which coffee shops sat along MARTA lines and ended up Ubering to them most of the time. I decided that I only wanted to live in places that were walkable with good public transit, or at least places with something better than MARTA.
But even as I steeled myself against ever living in a car-centric city, I couldn’t shake the sense that I was somehow infantilizing myself. Drilled into my head consciously and subconsciously: driving was something that adults did (generally true), one needed to drive in order to have a job (not true, but sometimes helpful). One needed to drive as a part of running a family (probably helpful), etc., etc. The deeper issue was that I was letting a childhood anxiety prevent me from doing something that was good for me (probably).
I didn’t have to like it or be good at driving, but I needed to get a driver’s license. And I did. During my breaks from school, I started practicing driving my mom around for her errands. I learned I’m a better driver when I’m listening to music. Driving is better when there’s music. And the South makes more sense in the front seat of a car — God knows that Kacey Musgraves makes music for driving up GA-400 to the outlet mall on a sunny day. The sky stretches out endlessly over the tree-lined highway, and country music seems as natural as a Ford F-150 going 15 mph over the speed limit.
At 20, I finally got my license. I wasn’t a very good or experienced driver, but you don’t need to be to get a license, which is only a little concerning. At 22, I moved to a mostly walkable city with solid public transit. I take the bus to work and walk most places. I have never driven in the state of California. It’s awesome.
Yet, every time I come home for the holidays or to visit my parents, I end up behind the wheel to practice driving a bit more. In the last couple of years, I’ve found meaning in it. Driving my parents around while I’m home is a small act of service I can offer in exchange for my entire upbringing. I enjoy what I can offer through the simple act, even if means having to avoid insane Atlanta drivers.
Maybe I’ll own a car in California one day. Until then, I cling to walkability there and let my time in Georgia be for letting the music play as I guide us home.
💧 Drops of the Week 💧
PLAYLIST - Christmas Jazz - one of the better Spotify Christmas playlists
POEM - “The Conditional” by Ada Limón - Say we never get to see it: bright / future, stuck like a bum star, never / coming close, never dazzling.
Beep beep