Lesson learned along life's highways
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- July 10, 2021
- 686
For a while back there in the early ’90s, I was afflicted by a crippling case of what mental-health experts call freeway phobia.
Ranging in causation from Steven Spielberg’s 1971 made-for-TV movie, “Duel,” to blood-soaked Driver’s Ed screamers like “Death on the Highway,” a phantom in my 30-something mind woke from its teenage hibernation and blossomed full and paralyzing.
Driving on an interstate highway suddenly became not only terrifying, but actually impossible.
My hands would turn into claws, clenching the steering wheel, my heart rate would spike, my vision would blur and, most debilitating of all, I could imagine my own death, which is never optimum when you’re trying to keep up with traffic moving 70 mph.
And therein, I think, lies the heart of my problem.
No matter how fast I drove my faithful 1991 Honda Civic five-speed, I always felt like an obstacle, a metaphoric tree blocking a railway crossing, a huge boulder in an otherwise free-flowing stream. Even if I drove 5 mph faster than the posted speed limit, I always felt like a hazard, and that wears on a person.
I wasn’t always wired that way; in fact, when I was in college, one of my ambitions was to complete the 240-mile haul from my hometown to South Bend in under three hours. This was, of course, prima facie absurd, but when you’re young, you feel indestructible.
This was, after all, the mid-’70s, and the Ohio Turnpike was a straight-shot funnel of ferocious speed, and once I’d positioned my 1969 Chevy Impala in the rocking chair of a 10-semi convoy, I just let it loose, running 80-plus for mile after mile after mile.
I never did break that three-hour barrier, though I got close.
Getting busted for speeding in Fulton County was a serious buzz kill, though, and I soon left my heavy-sneaker days behind me.
I mean who had an extra couple hundred bucks buried in their sock drawer? Not me. I could barely afford socks, which I definitely needed to survive those Halloween-to-Easter winters that were such a time-honored tradition at Notre Dame.
Speaking of my alma mater and dangerous behavior, I went through a period of reckless hitchhiking during the first semester of my freshman year, my first time away from home and, apparently, I was stupefying stupid, unable to discern the difference between going along with the crowd and being smarter than I looked.
Friday afternoons in the fall meant walking from campus to a busy north-south road called, for reasons that still elude me, the Dixie Highway, and it was there my newly made friends and I hooked rides across the state line into Michigan.
You might ask yourself, why cross the border in such a reckless fashion when all kinds of horrible and potentially fatal outcomes were possible?
And you’d be posing a legitimate question; however, if my 18-year-old self were formulating a concise reply, he’d say this:
“Seventy-five cent pitchers and dancing.”
Then he’d paused, kick the dirt for a second or two and add, “Well, it was actually dancing the polka.”
Only God in his firmament knows why a little club in Niles called Kubiak’s had become a destination of distinction and why that two-step remnant from decades long passed was retro-hip again.
But then again, we were duty-bound by tradition to follow in the footsteps of those who had danced before, even if it meant being branded as rhythmically inept and wishing I’d learned to polka after watching my father dazzle during wedding receptions.
I’d gone through six weeks of hell during my senior year in high school when, as a last-ditch attempt to engender in us the most basic social skills, the gym teachers tried to teach — wait for it — square dancing: allemande left, swing your partner, do si do.
At a time when Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust” and Jethro Tull’s “Aqualung” were in the air and I’d just seen my first real rock concert — Lou Reed, March 1973 — those in charge of our interpersonal development decided a dose of twang was needed.
Toward that end, and with no apparent appreciation of its obvious irony, our PE instructors tried to sell us on the idea that even cornpone cool was better than wallflower aloofness and ennui.
It was, from my point of view, anyway, a well-intended failure.
As Billy Idol would put it a decade or so later:
“With a record collection
and a mirror direction,
I’m just dancing with myself.”
But despite all the negative evidence and disheartening Magic Eight Ball insight — “Don’t count on it” — there came a time when, mirabile dictu, I actually got involved in a serious relationship.
When you’re a junior in college and your first two years have produced exactly nothing, zip, nada in terms of finding someone to spend time with, you do the smart thing and just stop looking.
It’s the opposite of fishing logic, which posits the notion that your next cast might just land a prized catch; instead, you’ve all but put your tackle box away and stored your rod and reel.
And then, like in “Jaws,” there’s a tug at your line, an almost imperceptible tightening of that thin, fragile filament extending across a smoke-filled, noisy dorm room, and all of a sudden — wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am! — you’re connecting with a stranger who feels somehow wonderfully and achingly familiar.
It was as if I’d been waiting for that moment all my life, and, well, I guess I had. The surprising thing wasn’t that it started; no, it was that it lasted. Sure, we had some dizzying flights of fancy that crashed and burned, but there was always something in the ashes.
The last time we said goodbye — before all that was destined to happen did, destroying us — I delayed my departure for several hours, not leaving her home on the Atlantic coast until nearly sundown. That meant I’d be driving all night, some 580 miles, but I was 22 and an ND grad and, as always, felt indestructible.
In Rod Stewart’s world-weary phrase, “Look how wrong you can be.” In a few months time, she would admit to serial infidelity, a character flaw I’d detected but somehow dismissed, citing youth.
I did a lot of driving that fall, both when I was working — covering high school football for my hometown paper — and when I wasn’t, tooling up and down the interstate for visits with friends or concerts or baseball games or parties, anything to dull the pain.
Funny thing about getting behind the wheel and setting out on the freeway — you can never outrun your own unhappiness. It’s always there, riding shotgun, changing radio stations without asking, wondering when you’re finally going to leave it behind.