On Driving (Hesitations and Joan Didion)
One foot on the gas, two hands on the wheel, attention to the road, to the yellow lines, to the blinking lights, to the people, the wheel, the road, pressure on the gas, the rhythm of the tires on the road, the volume of the music. I do not understand how people can drive and think about anything else as much as I cannot understand how anyone can consume themselves entirely in driving – that they are gripping the wheel and moving the car forward with slight pressure beneath their feet. The gas, the wheel, the road, the lines, the lights, the people.
When I first learned how to drive I had never been behind the wheel. But I knew how to be. I knew that it was important to be aware of small children and fleeting dogs. To spot out any fast-moving objects on two to four legs. To be good at parallel parking, this has always seemed key. Any good driver must be excellent at parallel parking, I had to be too. I understood that when you turn the car you must lean into it, you and the car should collide as one, move together, turning. It should be a dance, a graceful one. The wheel, the road.
I learned how to drive during the pandemic. I laid under my crumpled blankets while watching videos about driving, listening to a woman drone on about turn signals and the number of feet between you and the car in front of you. I fell in and out of sleep every Sunday morning to these sounds. I regrettably turned the volume down to scroll TikTok on my phone and like Instagram posts of people mostly taken before this time indoors. The melodies of online driving school hurt my ears and conceptualizing the physicality of it all made little sense. As the months went on I was welcomed into stranger’s cars with a mask. The outside of these small boxes of silver cars read “NOVA Driving School” in thick red letters. The back windshield was always equipped with a glaring yellow “CAUTION, STUDENT DRIVER” sticker. This was the scarlet letter of all cars in Chicago. A physical accumulation of self-doubt and uncertainty. I was grateful for my KN95 mask as I drove on the side streets of neighborhoods infiltrated by teenagers I recognized from their noses up. My instructors drew diagrams on whiteboards explaining how to make left-hand turns. They chewed gum loudly, held tight grip on the dashboard, laid their hands over mine to steer, and groaned to me about their daughters, husbands, and wives.
At one point during these frightful first moments behind the wheel, I actually burst into tears in an exhausted attempt to piece the illustrated turn drawn in blue expo marker on a whiteboard together. My instructor pulled the car over and told me I was not a natural. We spent two hours moving in circles around my block. With every turn – right turns, left, turns that ended up in the middle of the street and those that reared too close to parked vehicles beside – I winced and my instructor told me I was “wrong”. Before this lesson I was unaware one could be wrong when turning a car. I thought as long as your hands moved the wheel to one side and the car moved along successfully, steadily, without hitting another, you were right. It was not until this instructor, an older woman who made a lot of expressive noises in the passenger seat (“ah”, “mmmm'', “not quite”, “hm''...), that I knew one could be wrong turning and that I was a person capable of such wrongness. She told me I had to engage in a pep talk that mimicked what someone might tell their friend before marrying someone. “See it through, don't think about it too hard, be confident.” This is when it sunk in for me that I could not drive because I could not commit to the act. To drive you have to consume the car, assert yourself. You must see it all through without a second thought.
Another instructor once arrived outside of my house with gloves, the windows down, multiple masks, and a nervous energy that swelled the car inside out. While sensible during a pandemic, the windows being perpetually rolled down brought me a unique horror that comes with being 16 in a city where “everybody knows everybody” – or at last knows “of”. I sunk low into my seat and worked to avoid peering at the people walking on the sidewalk to my left. This lesson fell at sunset and I marveled at the absurd nature of my situation. Here I was taking in burnt orange and glowing pink next to a middle-aged man who wanted nothing more than for me to pull over and for the lesson to be over. This was a ride filled with the familiar “Woah!” and “Break!”, but this time he told me I was almost ready for the test.
I did not understand how any of this might help me drive. I still am not sure if it did. I memorized the facts and passed my permit test with two wrong questions. I memorized the rules and passed my driving test in one go. Seven points were removed for going too far under the speed limit. A drawn out image of my hesitation. I could follow the rules, and I eventually learned how to turn in a “correct” way, but nothing was instinctual, natural, or self-guided. The wheel, the road, the lines, the people.
In The White Album, Joan Didion writes about driving the way I understand it to be:
“Mere driving on the freeway is in no way the same as participating in it. Anyone can “drive” on the freeway, and many people with no vocation for it do, hesitating here and resisting there, losing the rhythm of the lane change, thinking about where they came from and where they are going. Actual participants think only about where they are. Actual participation requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over. A distortion of time occurs, the same distortion that characterizes the instant before an accident.”
“...hesitating here and resisting there, losing the rhythm of the lane change, thinking about where they came from and where they are going…requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway…mind goes clean…”
When I went to write this essay I immediately thought of this quote. I remembered reading it in high school before I understood driving the way I do now. I have always understood the way she writes about driving fully. I understand this quote so fully because I can see how it is not about me.
I did not truly know the facts or the rules. I still did not understand how to drive. I can mimic the motions but do not quite comprehend how to surrender to the wheel or feel the rhythm below. I am a vague participant in driving. A mere person behind the wheel. I allow the car and the road and the outside to take me over and my mind seeps with thoughts. There is no rapture or cleanliness.
Yet I am who Didion writes about, the participant. While I understand the rules, I know what I should aim to do. To be one, in sync, in rhythm, I lose it. Thinking about where I am going. Where I am coming from and where I have been. Where those on the street beside me come from, where they've been, where they go.
I am drawn to this quote because I recognize Didion is a good driver, she wrote about driving the way a good driver would. I can recognize that this rapture of the freeway signals good, clean, sharp, significant driving and that I have never reached such a feat. The lines, the lights, the people.
A man in a mask holds a gun against the passenger seat window. Kanye West raps about a woman “dancing so sleazy” in the background and my friend Samantha white knuckles my fist. “Shhhhh, it’s ok,” I hiss. It is just nearing 11 p.m. and we are sitting in the back of my friend’s black coupe at a gas station.
A man had pulled up beside us and made us the subjects of a citizen alert my dad would later send out to our family. “A man robbed two people near the BP gas station in Lincoln Park”. The notification popped up on my phone before we had made our way out of the gas station and before. For months I have been warned not to sit in idle cars or even near gas stations at night. For years I have determined I am invincible to crime or trouble, these things can affect others and be dinner table warnings and gossipy stories but ultimately do not and will not involve me. I am a rational person who doesn’t sit in their car in the dark. I am a safe driver. I do not let my gas run out at night.
“Hand over your purses,” the man said. We were high school juniors on our way to a friend's house, who did not carry purses. We shuffled around and held wallets and phones to the window. He took only the wallets and left. The police arrived, assorted distressed parents arrived, a detective arrived and took our lacking descriptions. Everyone told us they rarely see crime like this where the car is not taken too. My friend’s mother ran around the parking lot tipsy off of red wine in a white bathrobe telling us we never should have needed gas in the first place. The BP manager stood in a corner in a complete state of confusion. A couple whose white Tesla broke down before the robbery shouted out their window that they witnessed the whole thing. My dad pulled into the scene and I cried though I am not entirely sure why. Our friends in a separate car arrived and the police asked if any of us have Evan on Find My Friends. My infamously reckless friend Mortimer responded yes and proceeded to sit in the passenger seat of the cop car all the way down Lake Shore Drive. He and his new friend on the Chicago Police Force found the phone cracked and shut off, thrown out the window. The black coup’s driver Evan did not call his parents and drove himself home with Rania in the passenger seat. They were dating and maybe he had something to prove about his masculinity.
My dad drove me home and I texted my mom about the situation in the morning. I felt guilty that this happened to me. I felt shame telling my parents and friends I have been robbed as if I attracted the issue myself.
I imagined myself stuck in the backseat on Lake Shore Drive. What a mess that would be. I wonder where he might have taken us. I consider how far the situation could have escalated. This would have been a true rapture of the freeway. The lights, the people, the rhythm beneath the car.
In the days following, people appeared very concerned about us while we laughed with each other about the phone chase and fleeting white bathrobe. We were relatively unphased by the situation. I was afraid of driving before and am still afraid after. It is not until weeks later that I realized I swerve slightly in the presence of other cars at night. It is not until weeks later that I Uber home from my boyfriend's house and imagine getting held up again. How strange that would be. I wonder if I would have to stay for questioning. I wonder if Uber will refund me. The gas, the people.
Items stolen in the BP Gas Station Robbery:
Evan’s (driver) phone (Only because he was filling up gas and to prevent him from calling the police early. The phone was later thrown out the window on the highway because it could be tracked.)
3 assorted debit cards
Gift card to Sephora with an unknown and mostly likely low balance
4 fake IDs claiming residency in California, Michigan, and Pennsylvania
4 very real Illinois driver’s license
Just around 100 dollars that mostly belonged to Evan because of a basketball card-selling business he has run since middle school
4 wallets
1 phone that was thrown out the window and recovered (shattered) by the police
Used Cubs tickets from a game I paid 40 dollars to go to without knowing what “obstructed view” meant or just how “obstructed” the seats would be
A handful or two of change, maybe just pennies, I'm not completely sure
Before taking my driver’s test I had just enough experience driving to grant me a license. I sat next to my dad for a total of 50 excruciating Illinois-required permit hours as he yelled out about stop signs and my distance on either side of the road. I pretended to see everything he pointed out and was brought to tears many times about my “wide” left-hand turns and failure to understand city driving etiquette. I did not know parking lots had driving rules but I said that I did. I sometimes was so preoccupied with the people and the trees and the lines that I missed a stop sign until he yelled out, but I said that I saw them all. Over Christmas break, I pretended to not be afraid of the ice sheets under the car or the crunch of the snow beneath the tires. I jerked the car forward from full stops and counted to three slowly at every stop sign. Nothing about the practice felt instinctive.
My dad taught my mom to drive at 30 years old. She went to high school a couple of blocks away from my own high school and relied on the CTA and friends to get around. She understood the L train system better than I ever have and lived within walking distance of most things she needed, most of the same things I needed. High school, friends, the bus stop, the train stop, the Greek restaurant on the corner, the grassy expanse littered with school children, teenagers smoking, and on-the-go barbecue grills that make up Oz Park. My dad tells me she is a bad driver. She tells me she is good but white knuckles the wheel on any highway and encourages me to get my license mostly so she would not have to use hers. She told me Chicago kids don’t ever learn to drive, a sentiment which only fueled my ultimately failed fire.
My dad acted as my primary driving instructor during the time between passing my permit test and obtaining a real license. I fought with him often about whether or not I saw stop signs before he pointed them out and occasionally ended our lessons early because his repetitive parallel parking instruction became short-tempered and confusing. I did not want to admit my dad was a good driver or that I did not see some of the stop signs before he called them out. I was horrified that he could be right. I wasn't ready to take the test and increasingly paranoid that my mother passed down an inability to successfully drive. I spent years subconsciously bothered by her lack of confidence behind the wheel and upset that she, an otherwise highly functioning, Chicago-navigating single mother, could not drive with assertiveness. It was out of character and reminiscent of an era I unfairly decided was outdated.
My mom instructed me for one short-lived driving lesson around our neighborhood. It became obvious she was not sure how to teach me to drive. I reflected on when she drove my sister and me down the highway during winter and was pulled over for driving too slow. She held the wheel tighter than I'd seen anyone hold on to anything as large icy snowflakes came down on the rental car windshield. I think of the time my grandmother drove my sister and me down a similar road in a similar snowstorm in the winter. She stopped the car at the top of a hill in our driveway and called for reinforcements to drive the car. A young cowboy who worked at our family’s guest ranch met us and traded places with her behind the wheel. My stepmother recently started graduate school downtown about 20 minutes from our house and my dad drives her to class nearly every day despite her having a license since 16.
I’ve taken Uber and navigated public transportation since middle school as a common side effect of having divorced parents in the city. Now that I’m living in New York I know nobody with a car and rely almost entirely on the subway and walking during daylight hours. I wonder why so many women in my life back away from driving but I understand it despite an impulse to prove the inclination wrong. I hope to one day feel assured behind the wheel. I hope I decide I am more uncomfortable not being able to operate a car alone than I am behind the wheel. It panics me to imagine not being able to maneuver a car if I ever really needed to.
Hesitation.
This is not to say I have never spent time behind the wheel. After I got my license,
I drove alone in the summer to meet my friends at a concrete beach in Chicago called “The Ledge” and was quickly overwhelmed by the suffocating summer parking lots and “beach” goers wrapped in neon floating devices crowding in front of me. Their rubber flip-flops and burnt noses are more enticing than the yellow parking spaces or city gravel my car slowed down in.
I drove alone to my boyfriend’s house and nearly got us in a crash going through an intersection in a sloppy attempt to park outside of an ice cream shop. We ordered sundaes and I ate slowly, mixing the vanilla and fudge in many circles and hoping the car might disappear from its parking spot if I stretched out this ice cream date long enough.
I drove between my parent’s houses, but mostly at night. Daytime driving felt chaotic and the traffic between their neighborhoods mimicked a board game. One foot forward, three back. Two feet forward and a man is yelling something out of his window. Four feet back and there is a child zipping by on a lime-colored scooter. I quickly understood that I was not a good driver. Navigating cars around me felt suffocating and attempting to merely plug my phone into the aux cord required a full stop in the middle of an empty street before continuing onwards.
I sat in the passenger seat of a friend's car and wondered how everyone around us was so capable of driving. I imagined the thousands of people and their own lives. I pictured them waiting in line at the DMV to take their driving tests, then getting in cars with strangers holding yellow point sheets on clipboards. I pictured them posing for their license photos. I wondered if they did their hair or their makeup for the picture. I wondered if the people around me cared at all about how their photos turned out. I questioned the red Prius or the gray Toyota next to me and who it belonged to. I thought about the large trucks in lanes over and wondered how it would feel to drive a vehicle of that size. I imagined myself behind the wheel and felt afraid. Maybe the issue stems from this imagining of the world around me. When I sit behind the wheel I become restricted from this other thinking, unable to escape the lines on either side. The people behind their own wheels. The gas meter and the clunky rhythm below my loosely tied sneakers.
I drove at five in the morning to the ledge for a sunrise with my friends our senior year. I took a wrong turn and was barred from the entrance with thick yellow concrete barriers. I maneuvered a U-turn on the edge of Lake Shore Drive’s entrance and regretted not getting a ride instead. On the way back I turned my music up and took deep breaths. I slowed the car for school drop-off lanes and those on their way to early morning workouts. I was determined to be calm. Only during these early morning hours could I imagine getting used to driving. Only when the sun was just peeking out and the air still felt dewy. Once the sun took over and people fleeted out of buildings for lunch breaks the whole act of driving felt impossible and cluttered. The people, the people.
I enjoy the idea of driving. Of being in control, of listening to music, of interacting with other people through a sort of rule-filled dance, of getting places on my own. In practice this was not the case, the whole thing feels more like a surrender of self.
A sport of extreme concentration
A dance I am clumsy at
A rhythm I do not ever completely match the timing of.
I enjoy being in the seat beside the driver. Staring into the midwest sun as it creeps through the window. Surveying the skyline and taking photos of the light bouncing on and off of the Sears Tower. I fixate on people holding iced coffees and the hoards of middle school girls waiting inside a Starbucks. I smile at friends or couples singing along to songs pulled up next to me and wish I could hear the world they belted to each other. I find driving in a city dangerously distracting. Sometimes when I am in a car I imagine how many people are surrounding me, all clutching the wheel tightly and resting their feet on the gas with slight pressure. All moving 2,500 pound vehicles back and forth and between each other with little interaction besides the occasional eye contact across a red light or middle finger out the left hand window.
A handful of weeks after I was robbed I made an attempt to use my re-ordered license that sat untouched in my (new) wallet. I managed my way to a friend’s house and about halfway back when blue and red lights flashed behind me. I continued my final block home sure that they were for someone else. As I pulled into my parking spot two police cars cornered me and a tall man got out of the car and asked if I was aware why I was being pulled over. I did not and his hand invaded my dashboard while explaining to me that my lights were off and the sun had just gone down. He turned them on for me and told me I appeared to be “worked up”. Behind teary eyes I apologized and said I'd barely had my license for a year. It was clear he let me off not for lack of severity in my mistake but because I was a young girl crying. I allowed myself to decide I would not drive again for a long time. The lights.
I’ve spent recent summers saying that I will reteach myself to drive and face my fear of the wheel. I have told both of my parents that I worry I will drive into the car facing towards me when I'm on the highway. As if my thoughts could instantaneously summon disaster. My dad told me I would need to have a death wish and my mom told me she often has felt the same way. She said that she told this to my dad when he taught her how to drive.
When I first learned how to ski I would fixate too hard on the people around me. Once, coming down a blue diamond slope when I was younger I lost control and my skis slid under those of a middle aged woman at the bottom of the mountain. We fell onto each other and I knew the entire incident was my fault. On green level slopes that connected more complex things like mougles or steep black diamonds I always felt the most intimated. I imagined that just by looking out across the flat plane of white snow I might fly off and end up deep in the snowy trees or swimming in powder.
This same feeling reflects itself when I find myself on highways. I imagine what is on the edge, I worry that just by thinking about the edge I could end up falling off of it. When a car shoots down in my opposite direction I imagine swerving the wheel in its exact direction and becoming fearful. This idea is a summoning of disaster.
In Didion’s Why I Write she considered a certain imposition,
“I
I
I
In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act.”
I see reflections between this idea of writing and of driving and wonder why I cannot impose myself physically as I do on a page. Perhaps my aversion to driving is genetic. My mom and I are both driving participants. Method actors. When Didion distinguishes between these “actual participants” of driving this is who she is referencing. I am not an actual participant but a fake, holding the wheel, attempting to sort out the rhythm, moving the car forward.
It is fascinating to me that I climb into the back of cars often driven by men I do not know, and often at times in the middle of the nigh,t and allow them to drive me to my home. But I do, and I rate them 5 stars and leave a tip. I picture myself relearning to drive this summer – because I do not trust driving is anything like “riding a bike” and that even if it is to some people, I am not one of them. I imagine myself behind the wheel of my mom's navy Volvo with a foot on the gas. I imagine driving down my street in Chicago and getting in line with all the other cars and wheels and people. I imagine pushing my car ahead of those going too slowly and maneuvering the highway like an actual participant of the sport. The gas, the wheel, the road, the lines, the lights, the people.
