Caught between driver and passenger
Article by Marynn Krull Art by Kristopher Ligtenberg
My love language is: “Driving me [hand heart emoji]. Driving in this city takes years off my life. In return, I’ll feed you fries and scratch the back of your head. (On a good day, I can also give directions.)”
I deleted the dating app prompt with a grimace. A little bit of an overshare. Desperate. A little too lovey-dovey for my taste. It was shockingly effective at earning swipes and likes — which actually sort of turned me off even more. I only scratch the backs of heads that earn it.
For some reason, I thought about the Hinge prompt as I was driving home from a work thing — when the right lane abruptly ended. High-speed traffic zoomed past as I groaned and decelerated into the turn. It threw my directions off the route I thoughtfully plotted into Google Maps, which avoided construction, the highway, and the too-narrow one-way roads I don’t like. I probably could’ve whizzed back over into the middle lane, over the solid white line, but the thought hadn’t even crossed my mind. Why risk it? What’s a couple more minutes, anyway?
It’s so much easier to just let the lane end. That’s the takes-the-years-off-my-life part of driving: changing lanes on the fly. Or having to cross four lanes of traffic to get into the left turn lane, after just making a right turn onto the road.
But it happens. Sometimes you can’t plot another way around on the GPS. So I grind my teeth to nubs and zipper across with alarmingly high blood pressure. I can only afford liability insurance, so I do my best to drive like it.
I was in a lot of car accidents when I was younger. Or it feels like a lot, but maybe it’s actually a pretty average number. My mom was the driver in almost all of the accidents, but never the one at fault. Now she’s an incredibly anxious driver. I’ve inherited this from her. She tucks little warnings into me like notes in my lunch box: “Be safe, people are crazy!” Rush hour traffic, merging onto the highway, the narrow streets downtown, parallel parking, being tailgated by a double-wide lifted truck, and icy roads all wind my knuckles white around the wheel.
I got my license later than most teenagers because learning to drive is expensive and hard when your mom can’t stand to sit in the passenger’s seat.
When I finally got my license, sometime at the end of high school, I drove my dad’s honking-huge lifted pickup with monster truck wheels. The rims were neon blue, and the whole thing was slathered in matte black bed liner paint. It stunk like my dad’s cigarettes, despite the vanilla pine tree I slung around the rearview. The velvet seats soaked up the smoke like you wouldn’t believe.
In the agonizingly long years before I got my license, my first boyfriend would pick me up and take me to school in the mornings. He kept doing it even after I broke up with him. Especially on cold days. I was grateful, and I resented it.
Some days, for no reason at all, when it was below zero and blizzarding diagonally, I’d insist on walking. I’d stomp through the snow with raw fists balled up under my armpits, steaming with red-hot indignance.
One day I got in his car, or maybe out of it, he gave me a hug and said, “Sometimes when you get in my car, you smell like cigarettes.” I slammed the door shut behind me. He never brought it up again.
We were entangled in this too-long relationship. I knew by December of my senior year that I didn’t want to be with him forever. I broke up with him in April, despite planning to wait until May. We kept hooking up until the following April, when I cut it off for real.
It was like jumping lanes just to wind up at the same red lights, wasting gas for no reason at all. Or maybe closer to pumping the breaks, versus slamming on them.
My next boyfriend lived 22 minutes away on US-21, 35 minutes away on I-25, and 40 minutes away on backroads with “Avoid Highways” on Google Maps. Mostly, for the first few weeks, he picked me up for our dates. I thought to myself, this is perfect. And for a while, he was. He could pass the license test with an invisible instructor in the passenger’s seat on any given drive. He was safe, skilled, and above all, always completely comfortable.
I used to joke to my friends that I needed a guy that could drive. It stressed me out too much. I was meant to be in the passenger’s seat with my feet kicked up on the dash (the fries and head scratches, and all that).
The first time I drove up to his place, I took the back roads. You’d think I was piloting a nose-diving plane the way I white-knuckled the whole drive there. The back roads were pitch black, barely-there dirt paths. I’m not confident two cars traveling in opposite directions could’ve cleared it. The road was walled in entirely by dense evergreens that loomed so tall they made the moon a measly key-chain flashlight.
I was terrified a deer was going to leap out into the road and send me careening into the tree well.
My ex once told me that if a deer jumps out in front of your car, you’re supposed to press the petal to the metal, drive through it, plow her down. It’s safer than swerving out of the way and losing control, he said. I can’t imagine that. A quick Google search confirms this isn’t true, but it’s stuck with me ever since. I don’t know what I would do.
Last year, my friend Cassidy told me about what happens if you don’t miss the deer.
On a drive home from college, on the mountainous back roads near Telluride, Cassidy hit a deer. Or maybe it hit her? Either way, the deer’s body crunched the front of the car. She was told it was safe to drive it the rest of the way home. She was closer to home than she was to any other town, though not close by any objective definition.
Her windshield was repaired, but not the body of the car. At the end of the break, they told her it was safe to drive back to Colorado Springs, so she did. Braver than me.
At some point on the highway, the hood flew up unexpectedly, damaged by the impact of the deer. It crashed upward and obliterated her windshield again, sending glass shards flying at her as she flew down the interstate.
I can imagine the smash. The unfathomably loud shattering sound, and the soft rain of shrapnel on her leather seats — probably all drowned out by the instant, ear-numbing roar of wind as her car unexpectedly opened up to the highway in an instant. I wonder if she could hear her own scream, a pin drop in an industrial plant.
I think I might never be able to drive again. I’m astounded she still can — that, now repaired, she drives the same car it all happened in.
Sometimes, when I’m driving on the highway, I eye the crack in my own windshield and think about Cassidy’s story.
A big semi-truck must have kicked a sharp rock up into my windshield and notched a divot in the glass. This disappoints me because I make a concerted effort not to follow too closely — but some things are just inevitable. After a big snow, something like a dump of at least eight inches, the diamond-sized crack blossomed into a big Y-shaped tree. The crack reminds me of the Robert Frost poem I read in high school: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.”
I could fix the crack. But I don’t. I just stare at it and sigh as I crank my key in the ignition. It doesn’t cross my field of vision, so it’s not illegal, at least.
I know it needs to happen. I know it’s prone to getting worse, especially as winter draws nearer. It may not need the unexpected impact of an unsuspecting body to implode.
I broke up with 30-minutes-away-on-the-highway a few months ago after months of agonizing, two-too-many “breaks,” days of tears, and minutes with my fingers quivering over the Abort Mission button, the big red flashing one.
Big decisions like that are a bit of a curse, I think. Sometimes I wish someone would make them for me. Once it’s done, decided, out of your hands — that’s when you know how you really feel. And there’s nothing to do but ride out whatever comes. There’s no changing what’s already past.
This, and Cassidy’s deer, make me think of the Frida Kahlo painting. El Venado Herido. The Wounded Deer. It really disturbed me when I first saw it as a first-grader in art class. I chastise my art teacher for showing it to us then, at such an impressionable age. It might have been the first time I’d ever seen an act of violence. The memory is another note tucked in my lunchbox.
After her signature and the date, at the bottom of the painting, Kahlo wrote: “Karma.” In the painting, her own head replaces that of a deer standing in a dismal, desolate wood. Her face is painless, her eyes resolute, despite being impaled with seven arrows. They drip with blood in a slow crawl. Kahlo looks on at the viewer in the blissful moment of surrender to an impending death. Or maybe she’s in the moment just after, freshly free of agony.
That’s how it feels as the right lane ends in front of you. There’s no part of me that considers jumping back over, attempting to leap out of the way. Some risks are worth avoiding. Others — maybe the inevitable ones — aren’t.
I’ve driven myself to first dates, interviews, deathbeds, and epiphanies. And I’ve been a passenger to all these things too. The experience is the same. And so is the level of risk, I’ve realized.
The “paradox” is a simple one to solve: the bigger your car is, the safer you are — and the more dangerous you are to all the other cars around you. Instead of all driving smaller cars, we armor up. I’ve never felt smaller than when I drove that honking huge truck around. But technically, I was as safe as could be. Unless I was t-boned by an even bigger truck. Or a particularly skittish deer.
I changed the Hinge prompt, but it’s still about driving.
I’ll fall for you if: “you’re down to drive.” I’m still contemplating deleting it entirely, but isn’t that the truth? I’m no Venado Herido — I can pull the arrows out, even if I don’t go out of my way to dodge them. The impaler and the impaled. Caught between self-preservation and resignation to the inevitable. There’s peace in the dance of it, the ritual. The beauty of it is not knowing when you’ll do it again — or if you ever will — but that maybe you won’t be alone next time.