Learning to Drive

At the end of December this past year, I bought a car. This would be generally unremarkable for an adult in her late 30’s, but it was remarkable to me: after a lifetime of being someone who “doesn’t drive” (really meaning: can’t drive), it’s the first car I’ve ever owned. It’s a white Hyundai Veloster whom I have christened Velma. She’s small and zippy and comparatively stylish, and whenever I approach her it’s with a dull twinge of fear.

I’ve always thought of myself as someone with nerves of iron, going back to when I was a child playing the piano. Performing and public speaking have never given me any trouble, nor have first dates or job interviews. Moving to a new city knowing no one, traveling alone, making advances, rejecting advances, telling people off, asking for raises — all difficult but manageable. I have taken enormous pride in this, perhaps exaggerating my own capabilities in my imagination (would I be able to face a firing squad with courage? I like to think so). Seeing myself as someone who can handle stressful situations has enabled me to live a larger life.

But there are some primal fears that still lurk. Heights is one: I remember taking a narrow staircase up to the top of St Peter’s in the Vatican, and wanting to weep from fear when I saw how low the railing was, how little force it would take to tip over the edge and plummet to the stone floors below. Climbing gyms, even the bouldering kind with the big thick mats where the course doesn’t go up too high, have given me much the same experience, as have bridges and towers of all kinds. And there are other sensitivities: I can’t watch horror movies. I’m afraid of wild animals. But the one that has had an unmistakable impact on my life, circumscribing and diminishing it in all kinds of ways, is my fear of driving.

When I was sixteen, my parents signed me up for driving lessons, and while I wasn’t thrilled about the prospect — I was reluctant even then — I don’t remember having any deep terror about it. Between lessons I’d practice with one of my parents in the car: my mother, who got nervous, and my father, who got frustrated. I remember that I mostly fared okay until one practice session with my father. I don’t remember quite how I screwed up, but I do remember that someone gave me the finger, and that my father couldn’t maintain his calm. It ended with me pulling into a parking lot, sobbing into the steering wheel, and declaring I wouldn’t drive ever again.

And, for the most part, I didn’t. My parents didn’t push the issue. I got good at bumming rides from friends (and also my brother, who I think resented having to ferry me around so often). In the past, when people asked me why I had never learned to drive, I didn’t say it was because I was afraid. I usually said that I had always lived in cities where I could get away with not driving, and while this was true of Toronto, it certainly wasn’t true of Edmonton, Alberta, where I grew up (it’s not particularly true of Seattle, either). Public transit was patchy and slow, and the long, cold winters made it unpleasant to stand at bus stops. My memories of Edmonton are spotted all the way through with waiting for the bus, riding the bus, trying to figure out the bus schedules, shivering in the cold at bus stops. I had a good group of friends, but I sometimes sensed I was getting left out of things: I couldn’t drive to parties, or drive home from them, or spontaneously meet up with people. I was someone who required additional accommodations, which may have been more trouble than my company was worth.

Not driving means getting left out of things. It also shrinks the world to those parts of it that are reachable on foot or by transit. Not only does it put certain conveniences out of reach — people always talk about Costco and IKEA, but more troublesome is the fact that you can never leave a grocery store with more than you can carry — but it puts many pleasures out of reach, as well. My plans can never include day trips out of town to picturesque islands or tulip fields or rural fairs or hiking trails, unless someone else who can drive makes or agrees to the plan. It’s also made for some sad travel experiences. On a business trip to Denver in the pre-smartphone days, my hotel far out in the suburbs, I remember walking for a mile along the side of a busy road to eat dinner at the only restaurant within walking distance, which was an Outback Steakhouse. On the same trip, I had to ask the hotel shuttle guy to drive me to the light rail station so I could take a train downtown and see the city a little, and also set a time for him to pick me up and drive me back, which precluded any real exploring. A couple of years later on a trip to a conference in LA, not wanting to spend money on cabs, I spent hours taking the bus to places a ten minute drive away. One evening, to get to one of the conference’s events downtown, I rode the bus to a light rail station, and it turned out the station entrance was beneath an enormous concrete underpass and up a narrow stairway. It was after dark, the train platform was empty when I reached it, as were the sidewalks of downtown LA when I arrived, and I was afraid for my safety. To get back to my hotel after the event I accepted a ride from a man I met there who was a total stranger to me, and I was afraid then too. But even those experiences didn’t make me want to learn to drive. And then Lyft and Uber came along and made life much more manageable.

It wasn’t until about three years ago that I thought about learning to drive in earnest. Some city dwellers finally buy cars when they have children; for me it was getting a dog. I wanted to be able to take him places, and you can’t take a large dog in an Uber. I took driving lessons with a soothing and apathetic woman who assured me I was doing great. When later that year I ended a relationship on bad terms, passing the driver’s test two weeks later seemed like an appropriate fuck-you.

Even with a license, in the period after that I was still someone who couldn’t drive. Without a car, why would I, and how could I? The Washington State drivers test didn’t cover getting on and off the highway. There were car share programs, but I didn’t like using them. I felt deep, cold dread whenever I buckled into one of the shareable cars and couldn’t figure out where any of the controls were. And it’s easy to gloss over the absence of a basic life skill when the moralities of urbanism and environmentalism are on your side: cars are bad for cities, I could think smugly. Bad for the environment, too.

Finally, a precipitating event, or two. This past summer my dog had a medical emergency, and I found myself calling up my friends with cars in a panic trying to find someone who could drive him to the hospital. That made me start to think seriously about getting a car. The other motivation was coming to this paragraph in the novel The Only Story, by Julian Barnes, where the narrator contrasts his older, unhappily-married, change-resistant friends with the willingness of the young to leap over all obstacles in pursuit of love:

Over my life I’ve seen friends fail to leave their marriages, fail to continue affairs, fail even to start them sometimes, all for the same expressed reason. “It just isn’t practical,” they say wearily. The distances are too great, the train schedules unfavorable, the work hours mismatched; then there’s the mortgage; and the children; and the dog; also, the joint ownership of things. “I just couldn’t face sorting out the record collection,” a non-leaving wife once told me. In the first thrill of love, the couple had amalgamated their records, throwing away duplicates. How was it feasible to unpick all that? And so she stayed; and after a while the temptation to leave passed, and the record collection breathed a sigh of relief.

This may seem to have nothing to do with driving, but that paragraph has haunted me ever since. What I took from it was: the older you get, the more practical problems seem insurmountable, and the more difficult it is to change the arrangement of your life. I felt certain that if I didn’t learn how to drive, really learn how to drive, within the next couple of years, then I never would, and that my life would be permanently constrained. And I knew I would never really learn unless I had a car. So I bought one.

Every time I get into the drivers seat of my new car, it’s still with a teeth-gritted determination to face something frightening and unpleasant. It’s getting better, and my radius of reachable places in the city is expanding. I report to friends: “I went over the scary bridge today” or “I went on the highway” and think that I must sound a little like a four year old who proudly announces that she tied her shoes all by herself. From learning other skills, I trust in the hope that things that require all my brainpower now — changing lanes, parking — will eventually become automatic. But I spoke a few weeks ago to a friend who also learned to drive as an adult, who felt that she may never reach the same level of unconscious ability as people who learned when they were fearless teenagers. So some fear may remain all my life.

I’m still afraid of the highway, but I keep getting in the car, shoring myself up with visions of one day being able to drive to a remote house by the water, or a lavender field, or Vancouver or Rossland or California. For now it’s almost enough that I can go to the grocery store and buy milk and wine and a 24-pack of toilet paper, and even wood for the fireplace. Nothing has made me feel quite this young in a while, because the opportunities to expand my life in radical ways are few. It turns out that I can still change my life.