The Long and Winding Road Trip Blues
Autonomous cars, those self-driving vehicles that will more or less take the human being out of the equation, are on the horizon and will no doubt bring abundant benefits. However, it must be admitted there will be a cost.
Observers fear that a certain hardiness of nature, the sturdiness of the pioneer spirit, will be bred out of the species and eventually we’ll look like those people in the science fictions movies who float in a tepid bath of nutrients and take pills now and then labeled ‘love,’ or ‘religion,’ or ‘poetry,’ and call it a day.
Our most forward-looking commentators, or this one at least, can see a way around this dead end: it is what you might consider The Boot Camp Approach.
In previous eras it was not unusual for a middle-aged man taking his family on vacation to back out of the driveway on tires worn smooth as inflated floating rings in a swimming pool, a broken gas gauge, an engine that made a clackety clack sound similar to a perpetual series of dinner plates being smashed against the cobblestone floor in the best Greek restaurants, a missing rear window, a front door secured with packing tape, a rear view mirror that had to be hand-held since it no longer adhered to the windshield, and both a trunk lid and a hood that blew upwards in the wind when speeds reached over 35 mph.
Not only did this fellow think nothing of it, but neither did his family, nor did his peers or neighbors.
This was about how people got around in those days. Most cars were bad, bad, bad, but if you had any hopes of getting from one place to another you simply gritted your teeth and got on with it.
Aunt Agatha may be a holy terror who never did see what her favorite niece saw in you, but by God, she was going to be visited, and visited with vigor.
You see here elements of this pioneer spirit I was speaking of.
Whatever the physical obstacles, whatever the insufficiency of the means of transport, whatever the highly uncertain value of your destination, you were bound and determined to make it through somehow, take some damn fool Kodachrome pictures of whatever godforsaken wilderness Agatha had planted herself in this time, and make any number of people come over and watch the slide slow of these same pictures in the basement you remodeled yourself until the last slide dropped in the last carousel, until in other words those damn slides were watched.
People went off across deserts no better equipped than this fellow we speak of above, crossed gorges, clung to the sides of narrow mountain roads, and forded streams, all with four kids in the back and a baby on Maggie’s lap in the front seat.
These people in turn echoed the spirit of the true pioneers of only a few generations before them, loading up their covered wagons, the ‘schooners of the prairie,’ carrying entire communities of settlers through danger-infested territory, under punitive weather conditions, and over rough terrain.
Well, it not only called upon a man and woman’s best qualities, but strengthened them as they went. The process of travel activated the nerve endings and gave them pools of resolve to draw upon when they got to wherever they were going. Perhaps this same godforsaken place that Aunt Agatha has landed this time.
To the crux of the matter.
It should be simplicity itself to set aside a reserve of land, let us call it North WyMonKan, to serve as this Automotive Travel Boot Camp that I speak of.
Once a year in order to renew their driver’s license, each citizen would need to report to the border of the camp, where he or she is assigned an automobile, if you can call it that.
This car would have an engine of either 800 horsepower or 8; it all depends on the luck of the draw.
You would have to have a special vapor-detection device to measure the minute amount of gas in the tank at outset, and along the ensuring hundreds of miles the gas gauge not only doesn’t work…it gives false readings at random.
There will be a certain slack in the steering system, so that in turning a corner you are required to heave the steering wheel around like a circus clown making his way around the main ring, or a ship’s captain trying to bring his sailing vessel around in the face of the oncoming hurricane.
There is no spare tire, or if there is one, it is itself flat.
The springs in the seat have given way, or perhaps given up, with the result that upon sitting down on the front seat you sink to a point that you are eye level with the very bottom of the steering wheel. No matter, you can always stack up 44 magazines and sit on them and see just fine.
Neither the pedal managing the acceleration system nor the pedal managing the braking system work exactly as advertised, which calls for some quick accommodation of your mental machinery, or perhaps simply required that you make your way down the highway with one foot on each, both partially depressed, toggling back and forth between the two.
In the back seat will be anywhere from three to a dozen children, as well as your mother’s bridge club colleague, the one who hates to travel and walked out of a presentation on Stonehenge, saying that the whole shebang could fit in in her living room. Her living room! She is not, in other words, of a nature to enjoy the splendors of whatever territory you are traveling through.
Also back there is Uncle Henry, who has two and only two lines:
“You’ve got to be kidding me. This is what we traveled 500 miles for?”
“ I’m in the wrong business. I should be in the fleecing tourists business.”
These he repeats at regular intervals. Sometimes this coincides with events or sights that might spark such remarks, sometimes not. Usually not, actually.
Though unrelated, he and the bridge club gal bond over their shared disappointment at most of what creation has to offer, which will eventually include each other. It will really be something when that happens. Goodness.
Well, you get the picture.
The map in the glove compartment is a perfectly nice depiction of the state two time zones over, the baggage in the trunk spills out at regular intervals in the manner of a jack-in-the-box whose time has come, some sort of tree sap or insect splatter has administered a viscous layer upon the windshield making it seem as if you are trying to look through those glass bricks that you still sometimes see around as architectural accents, the radio is broken, the air conditioning not yet invented, the driver’s window will either not stay up or not stay down, and every handle, knob, button, and keyhole will either twirl helplessly or fall off in your hands.
The engine itself looks sound until you look in the trunk and see any number of parts belonging to it that seem to be left over after someone, on a bet, first dismantled and then reassembled the engine.
With a hearty ‘good luck’ the professional at the border will hand the keys over to the driver, and over the course of the next few days the intrepid explorer will feel the stirring of that old Pioneer Spirit once again.
It may falter and wither entirely after a few days at Agatha’s, but there are some things that quail even the bravest spirits.
