18. Driving

The jeep careened around the corner onto Nowers Road, barely staying on all four wheels. “Jesus H.
Mahogany Christ,” said my father. My heart was beating very fast, and I
clutched the steering wheel hard as we went down the straightaway. I slowed
down and pulled over, shakily.

Learning to drive wasn’t too easy. Although Dad and I
usually got along very well, doing things together, we clashed when he was the
teacher and I was the student. I didn’t like being told what to do, and this
was a situation where that was rather necessary. I also didn’t like not being
good at things, or not being able to master them quickly. Using the jeep as a
learning vehicle probably wasn’t such a great idea, though – I don’t think we
did it again. My mother was patient and endlessly kind, so she did the bulk of
the sitting-while-I-drove: down the familiar highway, around the town, around
the lake, offering a few suggestions now and then, never getting too riled up
or jumpy. My father did the jump-off-the-deep end parts, taking me to an
iced-up parking lot to practice controlled skids, teaching me to parallel park,
driving on interstates and in traffic. I had plenty of outbursts; he tried to
be patient but got mad back; we are, and always were, a lot alike. I always swore
I wouldn’t get in the car with him again, but of course I did. It was the same
when he taught me to sail. It was OK to get mad and frustrated, or even to jump
off the boat and swim to shore, but he never let me quit: I’m very grateful.
And I’m grateful that my mother and I were not so alike in temperament: it kept
me from fighting with her – we almost ever had words - and allowed us to do
many things together happily and peacefully. There was nothing my mother
disliked more than conflict.

My father and grandfather both loved to drive and drove constantly, from one end of
the county to another, as part of their business. Mom was a good driver, having
learned from her own father who was just as patient, kind, and generous as she
was, and she and I went places together, but when my father was in the car, she
deferred to him. Neither my grandmother nor my aunt ever learned to drive at
all: my grandmother was basically lazy and enjoyed being waited on and driven
around, and my aunt blamed her inability on her left-handedness. Neither of
them really needed to drive – my grandfather was more than happy to drive anywhere, and
my grandparents often drove to the farm to take my aunt uptown to the store. It
was recreation.

On Sundays my grandparents often took a drive over the
hills, just to look around at the beautiful scenery of the Chenango and Otselic
valleys, or to visit relatives and friends. My father told me recently that
before I was born, and when I was very small, they all used to go to Beaver
Meadow nearly every weekend for a drive or a picnic. The last time I went there
with my grandparents was at my request – I had wanted to see the family
gravestones and try to remember what was where. My grandfather, in his eighties
then, drove right off the road at one point. My grandmother never blinked, but
sat, quietly queenlike in the front seat, until he got the car back under
control. Not long after that, another elderly man in town had a serious accident
in which someone got badly hurt. My grandfather heard about it and put the car
into the garage and said, “That’s it.” He was like that: graceful, aware of his
own limitations, and not inclined to rage against inevitabilities. My mother
was too.

Hardly anyone in my high school class drove to school; in fact one of my own recurrent dreams is that I’m back there, but have my own car. Strange. But I think it has to do with how trapped I felt then, in that small town, without really knowing it, and how a car became a means of independence. Still, I didn’t get my license until I was out of college and working,
and for the first time in my life very much needed my own car. My parents saved and paid for every cent of my education, at considerable sacrifice to themselves, but unlike nearly all parents today, they felt I should earn the money for the other things I wanted. I had a job as a naturalist with the State of New York, and I saved and bought a car, with some help from them. And that was it: I moved out of their house at the lake into the upstairs of my grandparents’ house, and that winter spent a lot of days commuting between Cooperstown, where my boyfriend lived, and our town, where I was working. It was a very snowy winter and I learned how to drive in terrible conditions — which was good, because the next summer I moved to New England. The road, drawn like a curving line between us, became the path between my old life and the new, and the car, the mail, and the telephone the vehicles that carried my love and life back and forth between the two. My ancestors had come from there; now I went back, further away than anyone in the family had gone in generations, except my great-great-uncles who had gone to the west. But I went east, and north.