Shut Up and Drive

I bought my first car when I was 18 and promptly lost my mind for the next six months.

I couldn’t believe how much freedom I suddenly had. Every time I sat down in the driver’s seat I’d get giddy. The sense of possibility was so overwhelming it was a physical thing. No matter where I was going – school, work, a friend’s apartment – I’d wonder what would happen if I kept driving. I’d give myself stress headaches thinking about it. Where would I end up? Who would I meet? What would I see?

Some nights I’d just get in the car and drive. I’d get out on those Arizona highways and drive for three or four hours with the windows down and that cool creosote soaked desert air blowing in my face, a road atlas next to me on the passenger seat. There wasn’t anything out there to see, only whatever plants my headlights could pick up at fifty miles an hour. It wasn’t about going fast. Hell, the car was only a couple of years younger than I was. But it was mine and for the first time in a life dominated by high school or college, and adults telling me what to do next, I had something that was truly mine, something that no one else could control.

Over the next six months I put something like twelve thousand miles on that car. I drove to San Diego to sleep on the beach. I drove to Seattle to visit a friend for a week and was still there a month later. And when I left, instead of going home to Arizona, I drove to Philadelphia. It took me five days to cross the country sleeping in my car, brushing my teeth in sketchy rest area bathrooms and surviving on what I could buy out of vending machines. I was so tired by the third day I could only drive for two or three hours at a stretch before I had to pull over and sleep. I was so sleep deprived that I almost blew a tire outside of Chicago and didn’t notice that the steering had gone to shit or that my front end was shaking so bad my arms were getting rubbery. I only pulled over because I couldn’t figure out how to get my portable CD player, which was sitting on my passenger seat, to stop skipping.

I’ve driven across the country a number of times since that first trip but none of those subsequent trips have had the same sense of adventure as that first time. Partly because I’d done it before. The shine had worn off. I knew about the long days with nothing to see, the days of singing or of talking to yourself to pass the time. Of doing jumping jacks by the side of the road to wake up and get the knots out of your back.

That first trip I ran hot. I was low on cash and I didn’t want to get stuck somewhere in the middle of the country with no idea of what to do. But a bigger part was because I couldn’t believe that I was out there, doing it. I expected a big hand to reach down and pluck me right off the road. To turn me back and put me back where I was supposed to be. I’d walked away from college, from an apartment, from a girl I thought I loved, from a whole life. I drove hard, all day every day because I wanted to see just how far I could push on this new freedom before someone figured out I wasn’t playing by the rules.

And that feeling stayed with me for years. There was always one more mile to drive, one more drink to drink – nothing could ever be enough.

It wouldn’t be until eleven or twelve years later that I’d hit a wall. I was standing on a rocky beach in Alaska. It was midnight and the sun hadn’t set, still burning low and orange sitting just above the horizon. There were only a few of us still awake bullshitting about our lives back home and as we started to pack it in for the night, I turned and just stared off at the mountains silhouetted by the sun.

It was a beautiful night, the kind you don’t want to end. And as people were headed to bed I couldn’t help but think, “This is it. This is about as far as I can go in one direction. Much further north and all I’m doing is heading south again.”

It was a strange kind of bookend to all those years I’d spent wondering what was just around the next bend or over the next hill. For years that feeling of potential had always been there. But for the first time in my life I felt like I had found the end of the road.

There was almost a childlike wonder to it – like following a rainbow and, despite a cynical belief that it’s really nothing more than just water in the atmosphere, finding the pot of gold. I’d always thought that if I just drove long enough I’d find an adventure. For whatever reason, standing on that beach, I suddenly felt like I was finally in the middle of one.

Even now I’m not sure why. I’ve thought a lot about that night. Maybe it was the people. Maybe it’s that Alaska feels a little wild, a little untamed. Maybe it was lack of sleep or too much hiking. The rational part of my brain wants to pick it apart, give it an explanation and even though I know that will kill whatever magic the moment holds, it’s hard to stop myself.

For the first time since I sat down in my car and drove all night to San Diego, I felt something new. Not just fun or exciting but totally new. Out of context with everything I’d felt over the last thirty years. At a point in my life when I thought I knew all I didn’t know, I found myself wanting to laugh and cry at the same moment. Unsure of what I was feeling and too overcome to take out my camera and snap a picture.

I know in moments like that, there’s supposed to be some epiphany. Some revelation that then drives the next ten years of my life. But there wasn’t that night. I stood there for as long as I could and when the sun dipped behind the mountains, I simply wandered off to bed. Happy to have been there.

Even a year later I’m unable to come up with some context for that night in Alaska. That first trip across the country wasn’t a mystery. It was a decision, a line in the sand. How far was I going to push against what other people wanted for me? When I left Seattle I was blowing up a whole life. My parents were telling me to get my ass back in school. Everyone was telling me that I was making a mistake. And the whole time that everyone was telling me what I needed to be doing, I was driving myself crazy with the idea that I should just do something. And maybe I should do something that I didn’t necessarily believe was smart just to see if it could be done. For months I’d dreamed of pointing the damn car in one direction and driving until I couldn’t any longer, just to see what would happen. And standing there at the beginning of the summer, low on money I was faced with a decision. Was I going to get a job, enroll in school, push the all those thoughts and dreams out of my head and take what was, admittedly, the smarter path or was I just going to jump?

I know that there’s something in me that’s wired a little different. it’s a little wild and probably a little loose. It’s easy, looking back, to see what 18 year old me was going to do. There was no way I was going to enroll in school, get a job, put down roots. Given the choice between chasing the adventure and doing the smart thing, there’s no question that I’d chase the adventure.

And that’s why I’ve come back to that moment on the beach so many times. It was the first time in my life that I didn’t feel the need to keep moving. Suddenly some hunger that had been driving since I was seventeen just vanished. I can only imagine that what I felt that night is what it must feel like to find god.

I was 25 when I moved out to California and I had these terrible nights of insomnia. I’d lie in bed for hours, my mind just racing. I couldn’t ever get rid of that feeling like if I wasn’t moving I was dying. I’d crossed the country twice looking for something that I clearly hadn’t found and I didn’t know how much more slingshotting between coasts I could take. But whatever I needed, I hadn’t found it. And I’d lie there unable to sleep until I’d slip out of the apartment and down to the beach.

Some nights I’d sit there for hours watching the moon over the water. Even with an ocean in front of me, I’d still feel that urge to go. People would ask me “why California?” I’d tell them it was as far west as I could drive. I thought it was just a funny thing to say but sitting there in the dark and cold, buried in a sweatshirt, I’d feel a frustration that I couldn’t go further. Like the ocean was a personal insult, trying to tell me what I could and couldn’t do.

That night in Alaska I should have been mad or resigned or angry. Any of those old comfortable emotions that I’d worn every other time in my life when I felt like there wasn’t an escape to be had or a move to be made. But I didn’t. I felt happy. Delighted. Amazed. For the first time in my life I felt like standing still. I felt like someone else.