A Walker in the Suburbs

An evening drive through a close-by place I’d never seen before: Clark’s Crossing is a little park that adjoins the Washington and Old Dominion rail trail. To get there from our house you go all the way into the town of Vienna and most of the way out again. It is difficult to find — but worth it once you do.

For most of the drive we could have been out in the country and in another century: narrow lanes lined with vines and hedges, open fields, houses set back off the road, twists and turns and sudden hilltop vistas. The air was fragrant with honeysuckle and had a heaviness that meant summer was here. We couldn’t believe we had never been this way before. And now that we know about it, I hope we come this way again.

Yesterday, for the first time in years, I drove to Kentucky in a car with manual transmission. Instead of gliding through the turns in an above-it-all van, I was shifting and downshifting all through the two-lane part of the route.

Driving a manual car takes more brainpower than driving one with automatic transmission. My mind was on the immediate needs of the road ahead. This is good news for people who think too much.

I bite my lip. I still my heart. I fight the urge to press the ball of my right foot firmly onto the floor mat, my phantom brake. But my hands, they are not easy to hide. They flutter. They grasp. They reach for the side of the car.

Try as hard as I might, I will never be a calm driving instructor. When we’re skimming along one of our area’s “picturesque” two-lane roads — the ones that look so lovely on a sweet summer morning but are so terrifying for the novice driver with their twists and turns and nonexistent shoulders — I imagine the worst.

I’ve done this twice before now; I should be calmer. But this is one skill that doesn’t improve with age. And so, my hands remain. I clasp them in my lap. I dig them into the seat cushions. I try not to grab the side of the car; that looks desperate.

Instead, I practice my yogic breathing. I keep my eyes straight ahead and my voice as calm as can be: “That’s good. Now straighten out. Check your mirrors. Lower your speed. Great. You’re doing great.”

I wish I could say the same about myself.

One thing that cyclists, walkers and new drivers have in common is a renewed appreciation for topography. In our house we have one of each of these — a cyclist, a walker and a new driver — and we are all feeling the hills.

The long slow grades are the toughest for cyclists and walkers. But for the new driver it is the unexpected dip, the unanticipated downhill.

When you’ve been driving for years you forget that vehicles move even when your foot is not on the gas pedal. Cars can zip backwards down a driveway before you know it; they can pick up enough steam on a slow descent to push you quickly over the speed limit. Lesson one, I say to Celia, my voice wavering just a bit from the passenger seat: The brake pedal is your friend.

To myself I think: It’s good to remember the importance of the terrain. Topography keeps us humble.

Driving along Hunter Mill and Vale, my new route home, I pass one of the older trees in Oakton. An oak, of course. Big and broad shouldered, more than 150 years old. It’s not the oldest tree, the one Oakton was named for; that one was a few hundred feet down the road and was felled some years ago. But this tree could be a distant relative.

Last night’s drive home was especially sweet. It was cool and the light was almost blinding in the western approaches but otherwise, under tree cover, it was mellow and warm. I tried to snap pictures from the car.

Why do I like the new route so much better? It may be a minute or two shorter, but there’s more to it than that. I like it because it feels like a town I’m driving through rather than a suburban development. There is a reasonable four-way stop followed by a road that curves beside a church. I pass two cemeteries, peaceful old churchyards. And the new Oakton Library is on the way, too. Sometimes I stop in and check out a book. And then there are the roads themselves; Hunter Mill and Vale are two of the area’s oldest. They wind and curve and are in many places covered by a canopy of trees. Driving home this way is balm for the Metro-jangled soul.

As summer winds down, I think of vacations past, of long drives along unfamiliar roads, of pulling into a place we’ve never been before. The western United States and Canada are good for this. Endless highways, scenery that never stops. A few days in this landscape and the shoulders drop, the headache goes away. Something relaxes in me that I hadn’t known was tight.

Funny thing: After I write this post I read (on Metro) from a chapter in Marianne Wiggins’ book The Shadow Catcher called “Lights Out for the Territory,” these words: “The drive had all these syncopations, then — the percussion of the asphalt road, the alternating rhythms of the landscape braiding, like convergent channels of a river, through divergent threads of time.”

Yeah, something like that!

Today our beloved 1986 white Saab sedan takes one final trip when the vehicle-donation truck comes to pick it up. It’s like losing a member of the family.We brought all three of our babies home from the hospital in this car. We took countless trips back to Kentucky and Indiana to see our families in it, chugging up and over the Appalachian Mountains more times than I can count. The Saab has been to Montana and Arizona and New Mexico, to Oklahoma and Texas and Tennessee. It moved us from Arkansas to Massachusetts and then, a couple years and one baby later, from Massachusetts to Virginia. We carried tools in it, bikes in it, even a cello and a string bass in it. I still remember which side the gas tank is on by imagining Suzanne as a baby in a car seat, diagonally across from me in the driver’s seat.

Tom bought the Saab before we were married, and we first drove it on the brow of a flat-topped mountain in Arkansas. From this idyllic childhood, the Saab moved on to a serviceable middle age. In the last five years it managed to keep going through a few minor ailments and then what we all feared would be its final illness, an injury that involved rust, an axle and the entire front end. For months the car languished in our driveway. But Tom put it back together again.

We have no idea how many miles the Saab has logged; the odometer broke years ago. The headliner is long gone and the finish is pockmarked. But through it all, the Saab has maintained its dignity, its good nature and its fine bones. It is a noble, willing car; it has heart.

I once wrote an essay about the day we finally broke down and bought a mini-van. It was raining when we went to pick it, I said. Even the heavens were crying. Well, it’s raining today. Raining buckets. We’re losing the Saab. Even the heavens are crying.

For years I drove from Virginia to Kentucky on interstate highways. Then my brother figured out another pass through the hills. We call it the “Drew Way” in his honor. It’s part two-lane, part four-lane and it slices through some of the most spectacular mountain scenery this side of the Rocky Mountains. In one stretch of Route 33 that runs past Seneca Rocks, you feel like you’re in Colorado, skimming beside a mountain stream.

You can’t go as fast on the two-lane parts, but it doesn’t matter. The route grabs you, and you are part of the road and the hills and the motorcycle in front of you with the passenger on the back who keeps holding out her arms as if to embrace the view. There are wildflowers on the summits and cool air in the valleys. You are not ticking off the miles anymore; you are one with them.