Driving Suspension

The best part about night drives is the limbo.  It isn’t purgatory.  It isn’t even a kind of waiting really.  It’s a suspension between decisions.  Nothing has to be decided on, the course is already set, the destination in mind, and if the driver is lucky the little arrow will hover near full for miles, removing the need to stop. 

Drivers don’t really even have to think anymore.  We take our favorite songs on our iPods, mp3 players, old mix CDs.  Podcasts on economics, politics, humor, spare us having to have original thoughts.  We need only listen and watch the world flow around us. 

At night there isn’t a lot to flow around.  Especially traveling on those mid state highways that pass between major cities separated not by tens but hundreds of miles through small towns, farms, and pocket forests.  Someone starting in a bustling city in the afternoon, cursing rush hour traffic for keeping them from a destination four hundred miles away where they have no set time or need to arrive quickly, can lose even the other drivers on the road after turning of the interstate.  Moreover, traveling alone, there will be miles of highway without the rude glare of other headlights in the rearview, or the telltale pinpricks of red taillights, like eyes, wandering back and away.

After three hours a driver can be pretty far into the limbo, the suspension between places.  The sun which required the visors to be lowered, sunglasses to be donned, explicatives to be uttered, is almost fully gone, leaving only traces of orange and purple in a navy and deeply darkening sky. 

From the four lane mid state highway a driver might turn onto a smaller two lane state road that curves over hills and through farms (if one is lucky enough to travel in the Midwest).  A driver rushes past sleeping houses, no lights visible inside, flies by small, dying towns built around railroad lines which no longer stop or care.  Where do the people go?  The grocery is boarded up.  The car dealership sells cars, but no one is ever there to look. 

But the town is gone again and the last ten minutes of the podcast is playing, or that part of the song that the driver always sings along to, no matter how bad or out of tune the voice. 

It could continue like that.  It could, really, in that suspension.  Experience is the only indication that the driver is getting close to the end. The dark pinpoints of light cannot illuminate landmarks.  The stars—old standards of navigation which could have provided the necessary course having long since fallen out of use in lieu of GPS and Google Maps--are only a part of the backdrop, the stage, the setting.  They move, but unperceptively, unhelpfully. 

And it’s not that the driver doesn’t want to arrive.  Everyone wants to get to where they are going.  Eventually.  Some are in more of a hurry than others.  Maybe this time, the driver’s pulse quickens, recognizing the last twenty minutes (distances measured in time, “how far is this away from that?”  “Oh, about twenty minutes”), the courthouse of another county before the destination providing the only point of illumination for ten minutes at sixty miles an hour in any direction. 

But the suspension, because the driver, me, I’m nearing the end of it.  Because waiting like that, driving three hundred miles, a little over four hours doing over seventy miles an hour and what’s more doing that in the evening, feeling the sunset and not watching it, listening to This American Life and Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me! (I’m a card carrying Liberal with a capital ‘L’) and my favorite music on the iPod I got for Christmas two years ago, just the waiting, I don’t have to choose anything.  Not really. 

Questions I had in my head at the beginning of the trip resurface.  The pulse, the crawling feeling, the drumming fingers, impatience with the music because there aren’t songs for this exact feeling, because the limbo I was ok with because I didn’t think about it, that time is almost over.  In ten minutes I’ll be there, in another place.  A definite place, not an idea at the end of some time on a road, but a definite, physically defined real as far as we can tell series of sensations and facts that isn’t transitory but NOW. 

Because in two minutes I’ll put the car in park.  I’ll turn the key and the low hum of the engine with cease.  The radio will be silent, the music gone, the voices of National Public Radio quiet till the next three hour trip.  It will be me, and the car, and some reality that for two hours flowed around me, not noticing, but suspended.  

Image from pragmaticcompendium.com