Baby You Can Drive My Car

Posted on August 22, 2013 under Storytelling with 3 comments

I was recently speaking to a friend whose daughter was just learning how to drive.  Is there anything more nerve wracking than envisaging a teenager getting behind the wheel of a vehicle weighing a few tons?  And that’s only half of the worry.  Coming up with the equivalent of a mortgage payment to insure a new driver is yet another reminder of the costs of raising children… or the benefits of staying single.

Most of us learn how to drive at an early age, starting with a tricycle and then moving up to a bike with training wheels.  There have been many times over the years that I wish we had never let our children out of the jolly jumper.  Most people of a certain age learned to drive the old fashioned way.  When our economy was more agricultural based, kids on the farm learned by doing.  They were driving farm equipment from the time they could walk.  They might occasionally run over a chicken but the general public was not at risk.

Townies learned differently – usually at their father’s knee or more likely on father’s lap.  It was not uncommon on our street to see a youngster perched in front of Dad manhandling a gigantic steering wheel.  Graduated driver licensing was not even a twinkle in government’s eye back then.   And, of course, seatbelts weren’t even invented so there was little worry about mundane things like safety.

My own driving career started when I was around fourteen.  I was the stick boy for a local senior hockey team and travelled the province with the team.  One stormy winter’s night, on the way back from a game in a town two hours away, I found myself in an unenviable situation.  All of the players were intoxicated, especially the driver.  About a half an hour from home, he announced that he was too drunk to drive and pulled over to the shoulder.  He handed me the keys. “You’re driving or we’re spending the night right here.”  There were no other voices of reason as beer bottles clinked in the back seat.  I pondered my dilemma and the words to the poem “Horatius at the Bridge” leapt into my head. “… and how can men die better than facing fearful odds…”   The odds were quite good that I would freeze my ass off if I didn’t take up the challenge.

I got into the driver’s seat and propped myself up by putting two sweaty hockey gloves under my rear. The former driver issued a caution. “She’s pretty peppy.  Go easy on the gas.”  Pretty peppy, eh?   The car was a recently retired Mountie car with about an 8,000 horsepower motor.  Carefully putting the car in drive, I gently depressed the gas pedal and the throaty roar almost bounced me from my perch.  I managed to make it home safely and refused to get behind the wheel of any vehicle for several years afterward.

Eventually I got my license in my early twenties.  I had two driving instructors who used decidedly different techniques to prepare me for the test.  The first one was a relative and the day of my very first lesson we stopped at the liquor store before heading out to the back roads.  In those days you could buy a case of quarts of beer (the good old days!), six to a box, for about the same price as a handful of Joe Louis’s and cokes.  At first I thought, “How odd to have beer in the car for a driving lesson” until I realized that the beer was an essential prop.  He drove well out into the back woods, out of harm’s way, save for the forest animals.  He popped the tops off of two quarts of beer.  I protested on two grounds: that the beer was too warm to drink (this was long before you could get cold beer in the liquor store) and that learning how to drive while drinking seemed somewhat incongruous and unconventional.  Well that discussion lasted all of ten seconds and moments later, I was behind the wheel with a quart of warm Alpine beer between my knees.  Sometime into the third quart we hit a rough patch.  Somehow I had managed to get too close to the well gravelled shoulder and, just like that, the car was in a full blown tail spin.  My instructor barely noticed and showed no alarm. “Take your foot off the gas,” and that’s all it took to solve the problem.  I learned a few lessons that day.  One is to take your foot off the gas pedal during a spin and the other is, don’t drink warm beer.  It is not good for your digestion.

The second lesson was in a large city on Canada’s West Coast.  I had recently purchased a used VW Beetle, standard shift, in anticipation of getting my license.  Quite simply put, my instructor, a close personal friend was (how do I put this delicately) , certifiably insane.  Getting the hang of a standard shift is problematic enough without other distractions.  To wit.  We started our very first lesson at rush hour, in rush hour traffic.  None of this wimpy driving around a mall parking lot on a Sunday morning.  No, it was baptism by fire!  My first feeble attempts, just trying to get out of my driveway, were comedic with the car shunting and lurching a few yards at a time and the gears grinding.  Gradually I got the hang of it and I felt a degree of satisfaction as we wheeled into lanes of heavy traffic.

I was doing just fine until I felt something akin to a vise grab my crotch.  It was my friend and he had this demonic look in his eyes.  “You never know when the driving examiner might grab you by the nuts’”, he said.  Two other strategies, covering my eyes with his hands while I was driving at 60 mph on the highway and jerking the steering wheel from me shortly afterward certainly got my attention.  Defensive driving took on a whole new meaning.  How could I fail the driving test after this experience?

My own children all learned to drive and all but one took drivers education – a gentler and more sensible way to learn… and infinitely easier on the parents.  We were living in a rural neighborhood when our three daughters started dating, before they had their licenses.  It was ironic that all of the boyfriends lived at the far reaches of the county.  It was nothing to get a call at 11 PM to pick up one of the girls and have to drive the better part of an hour in each direction to get them home.  Or, to drive a boyfriend back to his house.  By the time they all had their licenses, we had moved back to town.

And now we find ourselves at the other end of the spectrum.  Always a two car family, we recently sold one of them in an effort to downsize and reduce our carbon footprint (and our car insurance bill).  We now share one small, modest vehicle.  Our next purchase will be a tandem bike.  Hopefully we won’t need to take a driver’s test.

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