How the Road Beckons

As far as nostalgia goes, I used to have a lot of it, but little fibers of it remain.

I drove my car for the first time in two and a half weeks yesterday, and because it was low on gas, I filled it up. Then... I went for my usual drive around Portland.

I find that I drive mostly for fun. Some places like the Blue Ridge Parkway say that driving is America's favorite recreational sport. Well... I think that is somewhat true. I really enjoy driving. The independence, the control, the fact that you are the sole pilot of your own little steel and fiberglass landship.

I have a hard time explaining this to people, who see cars solely as a means of commute and maintenance money robbers. To them, cars are a "necessary" expense. (I put necessary in quotes because many people I talk to have the resources and ability to ditch the car, metaphorically, and rely only on public transit and carpooling to get around.) To the average commuter, the car is a four wheeled machine designed to accelerate your life and to get you where you need to go. I don't like to see it that way. That is what buses and other people's cars are to me.

The car (or truck, van, motorcycle, or other personal automobile) is an embodiment of the space to which you dedicate your "inbetweeness". You are in the space between two destinations, and to some that would be called the journey. And we all know that old phrase.

My car, her name is the Catalyst, is... well I've already given it a name so far in the description. That should tell you loads about what I think of personal vehicles. I see it not necessarily as a person, or autonomous character, but gendered with a personality. She gets cranky, her underside is rusted, the exhaust rattles like you will bottom out. Her parts are shaky, and the inside is rarely pristine. Its not the most comfortable ride, we are talking about an economy car here, but on the open road with landscapes too grand to imagine, she will get you 40+ miles per gallon.

I wouldn't quite use the phrase the band Queen so wonderfully wrote a song about: I'm not in love with my car. But I do appreciate such an intricate, interlaced, multicomplex gathering of steel, copper, and plastic, which to no end or means of studying I will ever be able to fully understand.

I am in awe of many things in this world, and my imagination is captured quite easily. When driving along the stretch of I-5 going northbound opposite of downtown across the Willamette, I couldn't help but feel as if I were in an average car, rolling down a concrete and asphalt ribbon in the late 70's.  Led Zepplin was on the radio, blaring "Rock n' Roll" and the overpasses of the city streets and signs just felt like I was on the ultimate independence granting journey among the new found youth in an aging decade. A place and essence so enticing that I even role played that I was in that time and city; its soft yellow lights refracting through a haze ridden skyline, a dying timber industry giving rise to a new tech culture, and the face of a city which would lead the charge against so many paradigms about living urban.

A MAX train whizzed past, and broke my spell, and I took the exit back to I-5 north, switched the radio to modern country, and felt the cracking pavement on that nearly 100 year old remnant of a more traditionally industrial time. How the road beckons once more, tempting me to see all the landscapes I can, and never being able to fully know all the places that exist even within my tenuous home states.