A Walker in the Suburbs

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.

Yesterday, on my way to Kentucky, I drove along the Robert C. Byrd Appalachian Highway System as the late senator was lying in state at the capitol in Charleston. As I listened to eulogies on the radio, I zoomed along Route 33, Route 55, gorgeous curving two-lane roads and even the occasional stretch of four-lane pavement, roads to nowhere it might seem to outsiders, but not to West Virginians, of course. To them, the roads were proof their senator cared about them, that their state mattered. To generations of West Virginians, these roads are the way out of cloistered communities, a way out into the world beyond. But yesterday, they were a way back in.

Articles on stress reduction often present this scenario: You’re driving to work and someone is tailgating you. Instead of getting angry, imagine that the fast driver is late for an important job interview or his wife is about to have a baby.
For me, the opposite is true. I am the impatient driver; for me the story has to explain why the car ahead of me is going so slowly. Maybe it’s a newly licensed driver on her own for the first time, I tell myself. Or an old man, clinging to his license because it gives him the freedom to live on his own.
This morning, I had a chance to study the slow driver when I pulled up next to him at a light. He was a middle aged guy wearing a loud print shirt. Next to him was a prim older lady. As soon as I saw them, I had my explanation. He was taking her to Fairfax Hospital for outpatient surgery. She was nervous, so he was driving way below the speed limit. Suddenly my impatience was beside the point. I was embarking on a normal day; for them, this day might change their lives forever. Of course, for all I know they may have been dashing out for a gallon of milk. But it doesn’t matter. I drove more slowly after that.

At no time does the quotation “life is a journey, not a destination,” seem more apt than when you take a four-day trip, two days of which are spent driving there and back. I’ve always appreciated the meaning of this line, that the striving matters as much as the goal we’re striving for. But it’s always been hard for me to practice. Some of us are cursed; we are goal-driven by nature.
But on this trip, I did enjoy the journey as well as the destination. Part of it was the mountain scenery, the high snows on the peaks and the rushing streams in the valleys. But most of it was sharing the trip with Claire. We talked the whole way — and the miles flew. For the journeys of life to matter more than the destinations, companionship is key.

As the big snow of 2010 becomes a part of history we on the ground are left with its aftermath. We are still digging, still shivering, still feeding the birds. We are also learning the etiquette of the yield. Our roads are plowed now, and for that we are grateful. But there is not enough room on the road for two cars side by side, so one must give way. This is true for pedestrians (and dogs!), too, and was especially noticeable before our street was cleared. The one-lane footpath that was Fort Lee Street was only wide enough for one person at a time, so if neighbors were coming toward each other, the one closest to the smallest snowbank (or mailbox “dig-out”) stepped aside.

Seeing this ballet reminds me of a trip Tom and I took to Devon and Cornwall before we married. We stayed in a place called Old Walls and the roads we took to get there were the most impressively narrow ones I’ve ever seen. They were bordered by tall hedges and were barely one car’s-width wide. As we crept slowly down them in our borrowed Renault, an Austin Mini (or whatever it was) would zoom toward us like a bat out of hell. Every time, I braced myself for a head-on collision. But every time, at the last minute, those narrow-road veterans would dip into some nearly invisible turnout in the hedge, and we would be saved. The local drivers knew about these places all along, of course. Playing chicken with the tourists was their favorite sport.

This was a lesson in how not to give way. I’d like to think we’re adapting a more courteous approach here, that we’re learning to read the intentions of the car coming toward us, that we’re becoming flexible and patient. But then again, I’ve not left the house (except on foot) in a week. So it’s easier to believe in fairy tales.