Driving: The Secret of Getting from Here to There
“That lever with the black ball on it is the gearshift,” my dad said as he raised his voice above the engine noise. “You have to push down on the clutch, that pedal there, and then move the gearshift to this position here, that’s first gear. Now let up on the clutch slowly.”
Nearly thirty seconds later, after I had raised the clutch by infinitesimal increments, I started a life of driving. I was seven years old. My ride was an ancient Ford tractor. I circumnavigated a small field with my dad perched on the fender giving a continuous stream of instructions. However, before long he turned me loose with the tractor pulling a harrow in an ever-tightening circle.
Since then, driving has been second nature. Before the legal driving age of 14 in Idaho, I had spent many hours driving the little Ford tractor, a bigger Ford tractor, a 1956 Chevy Pickup, and a 1946 Chevy ton and a half truck. You notice I did not drive a car. My parents were pretty strict about obeying the law. In their minds, it was a parental decision when a child started driving farm equipment in the fields and lanes of our North Idaho ranch. But the state had full sway on public roads. So, driving the car had to wait until I was old enough to take driver’s education.
In the spring of my eighth-grade year in school, I started voluntarily staying late to attend the instructional portion of driver’s education. In my mind, the exercise was redundant since I had been driving for years. But I liked the academic portion of the course and felt that it did a good job of filling in some interesting tidbits. It was with this frame of mind that I took the driver’s seat for my first session of road instruction. The car had an automatic transmission, which I thought rather sissy, but I took the session seriously. In fact, I took it rather more seriously than I should have.
The primary distinction between driving farm equipment around on the ranch and driving a car on the highway is the speed limit. Low gear ratios, rough road conditions, and a general sense of self-preservation made speed limits unnecessary on the ranch. However, I was acutely aware that the highway was different. There, the maximum speed was set by law and was to be strictly obeyed. So as I started that first driver’s education driving lesson, I glued my eyes to the speedometer. And I kept them glued there until my driving instructor reached over to turn the wheel to prevent the four of us in the car from going into the ditch.
During the ensuing conversation, my driving instructor helped me to see that even though an occasional glance at the speedometer could be helpful, in the main, my eyes needed to be focused down the road. This was an important lesson, not only for learning to drive but also for living life itself.
As I reflect on driving, there seem to have been about four epochs in my development. The first was becoming a driver which I wrapped up with the acquisition of a driver’s license at age 14. The next stage was about what I was driving. My father’s idea of cars was big boaty things with names like Oldsmobile and Buick. He loved them dearly and was happy to repeatedly explain what a good deal he’d gotten on them. They made me gag. But I still drove them, humbly sinking down in my seat in hopes that no one would notice the very uncool kid driving the huge four-door beast. I finally rectified the situation by buying a 1967 purple Mustang the summer after my first year in college. It was my first car and even though it was only a three-speed with a gutless engine, I had arrived. Honestly, it is probably the coolest car I ever owned, and I have repeatedly wished I’d never sold it. But it carried me well into the third epoch of driving.
After the burning concern of what you’re driving comes the preoccupation of who you’re driving with. Ramming around with the guys and dating girls showed up late in high school for me. The car was no longer an end in itself. Now it was the means to an end. I was fortunate to have avoided the stage of road insanity that many of my peers went through. Being a pallbearer for a friend who had thoroughly wrapped his car around a tree traveling 80 or 90 miles an hour slower than he was sobered me considerably.
I met the girl destined to become my wife about halfway through my senior year in high school. Since she lived in a town about 30 miles away, driving a car became the lifeline for my budding relationship with her. That trip was made at least once a day—and sometimes more—at shameful rates of speed. But the desire to be together was a powerful driving force in more ways than one. Things progressed and at the ripe old age of 18, I proposed marriage to her while sitting together in a car at the overlook of Cabinet Gorge Dam. Suddenly the “who you’re with” stage of driving started to pivot into the fourth and final stage of driving called, “where you’re going.” I’ve spent the majority of my life in the fourth stage.
Driving became the way to get to all the places we needed to be as our life developed. The 1967 Mustang became the way we got back and forth to college from North Idaho to Nebraska. Then a silver 1978 Datsun sedan took over travel to St. Paul, Minnesota for seminary. Dodge motor company’s popularization of the mini-van expanded the seating we needed for a growing family. And soon we had children that were needing to drive. The concept of the family car changed to the family fleet. I remember clearly the day I realized that our version of a family meal was five people in four separate vehicles meeting at McDonald’s. It was shocking and it was glorious. The American dream is literally driven by driving.
There’s a lot more that could be said, but a lifetime of driving creates its own current that can carry us to places we never imagined. I sometimes envy folks who have their extended families close. But I also love the wanderlust of traveling widely to see family around the globe. This situation had shaped me into the midwestern nomad that I am today. There are so many places to see and so many experiences to have that the pull has become irresistible. If I can drive there, then I will go. If I can’t drive, I may go anyway. Thank goodness some people have learned to fly!