Driven to Distraction
These days, I find myself mostly driving over utterly familiar routes with imprinted scenery, often just a mile or two through local environs. I’ve fashioned driving my car into a sort of a game, and occasionally a contact sport. I’ll leave the details of the three cars my spouse and I have wrecked for another time; today its the games I play with people and their conveyances as I cruise city streets, highways, and byways that I want to tell you about. Here are a few I’ve played and continue to enjoy.
Get Lost
I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence: / Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.
~ Robert Frost, The Road not Taken
Once upon a time in my reckless youth I drove extreme distances just for the hell of it. This is a game I played with myself on long trips to unfamiliar areas in a camper van I signified as Blue Boxcar on CB radio, mainly to convince truckers I was hauling a big rig. As this was well before GPS reckoning, my only map was a road atlas or one of those state road maps the needed to be folded just so to fit in my lap. At certain junctions in remote areas, I would plunge ahead on unimproved roads that seemed like they might go somewhere interesting while conveying me to my destination.
I don’t recommend this practice to everyone, but should you ever navigate by dead reckoning, unless the night sky is visible and you know how to read it, try not to travel after dark. Be sure you can see the sun or else have a reliable compass with you, because it’s critical to know which direction you’re heading in the event the road you’re on isn’t the line on your map you think.
It’s fun getting lost if you have the time and inclination. You meet interesting people when you’re obliged to stop to ask for directions. Off the beaten track, you may be rewarded by gorgeous unnamed and untamed scenery, curious historical sites, or odd habitations in the middle of nowhere. Don’t cheat. Turn off the babbling GPS and use your senses to as you peer through the windshield. The truth is out there, not in your robot navigator.
Going My Way?
This is a game of chance. Should a car I’m following or one following me make the same turns a couple of times, I start to fantasize if the driver has a same or a similar destination. The longer we follow the same route, the more I’ll mentally wager that our missions are similar. Almost half the time, I find this turns out to be true or almost true. It gives me a strange satisfaction that mere words cannot convey. When it doesn’t work out, I sigh and tell myself maybe next time. Serendipity is like that.
What’s My Theme?
This is a game of pattern recognition. On a local journey quite often I’ll encounter the same sort of phenomenon several times, causing me to dub whatever it is as the theme of my outbound or inbound expedition. Once it was women walking dogs. Other times it might be cars turning in front of me from side streets or having to wait for a line of traffic to pass every time I did that. Could be it’s a larger than expected number of blue cars, slow drivers, or big trucks. When I’m following a car that’s lagging, I interpolate what the driver is like and why he or she is poking along. Is it an old fart, someone driving conservatively while black, an interloper who’s sort of lost, or a student driver incognito? In my mind, I hear a stentorian announcer saying “This part of your journey is brought to you by a distracted driver,” or “Today’s excursion is made possible by old men wearing hats.”
License to Spell
Our state license plates tend to have two or three numbers, then two or three letters, followed by two or three more numbers. It’s the letters I attend to. I stare at the plate mounted on the ass of the car I’m following. Suppose it reads 42GIR578. Immediately I think GIRL, ENGINEER, or even MAGNIFIER. I award myself mental points for coming up with the shortest, longest, or most obscure word that I can form with those letters in that order. I’m considering marketing a card game along those lines but am pretty sure I’ll never get around to it. But my ingratiating (there’s GIR again, just backwards) pastime beats worrying about paying bills and speeds me to my destination.
Besides helping to pass otherwise boring time, the little games I play elide some of the tedium of traffic and help me from lashing out against the folly of all the stupid drivers who get in my way. This morning, for instance, on my way to Trader Joe’s, I encountered more than the expected number of attractive female pedestrians, some walking, some running, but none on bicycles or with dogs. A pattern, and one I can live with.
