A Drive To Remember

He sat next to me in the front seat of the car, pulling his seat belt across his chest and flipping the radio to his favorite station. “You like that?” he asked. I nodded silently, nervous for what was going to happen next. He settled into his seat. “Alright,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

There comes a time in every teenage girl’s life where she is faced with a difficult situation. Mine came the summer after my sophomore year in high school. He was about 60 years old, with graying hair and an inexplicable Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. I was shy, he was confident, it was my first time, and he was experienced. I was his student, and he was my driver’s ed teacher.

For kids from Illinois, the experience of driver’s ed is oddly universal. After-school hours and summers are spent in stifling classrooms memorizing road signs by shape, learning hand motions that became obsolete with the invention of the turn signal, and watching movies such as “The Nightmare After Prom” and “Red Asphalt.” It’s not uncommon to have a creepy teacher like mine, who carried three cell phones and two pagers with him at all times and frequently asked me to drive him to the mall during my lessons. Our most memorable interaction: He once told me that the moment he meets someone he knows whether or not they will be “friends for life.” I was touched until he said he didn’t think we had a future.

At the conclusion of at least 30 hours of classroom instruction, six hours of behind-the-wheel training, and at least 25 hours of supervised driving, young Illinoisians are allowed to take the state’s driving test. The rewards for our labors are a plastic card that reminds us we are not yet 21, and perhaps permission to use the family station wagon to drive to school.

New York City kids don’t share the common memories of driver’s ed. Among 20-somethings from New York, having a driver’s license is not common. And honestly, it’s easy to condescend them for it. In Illinois, not having a driver’s license before turning 17 is embarrassing. In New York, however, it’s completely acceptable.

One of my coworkers can calculate revenue from dividends on a stock over the past 18 years in six minutes, but would be incapable of getting from Point A to Point B if the two weren’t connected by miles of underground track. In New York, though, this isn’t an indication of incompetence. Instead, it carries the cachet of never having lived outside the sophisticated metropolis.

It was easy for me to get up on my high driving horse before I realized that city kids have road smarts of their own. Few natives would pull the kind of moves I have in New York this summer, such as taking the subway deep into Brooklyn instead of uptown by myself at two a.m., or accidentally tipping a cab driver 200 percent because I forked over the wrong bill.

If I had a movie theater, hospital, and 24-hour deli (seriously, New Yorkers don’t realize how lucky they have it) within walking distance of my home in Illinois, I would consider having a driver’s license less of a necessity. Even the environmental friendliness of not driving would make up for having to carry my passport around as proof of being 21. There is comfort, though, in knowing that, if the opportunity presented itself, I could hijack the Hamptons jitney or make the six-hour, 25-mile trip to New Jersey at six p.m. on a weekday.

Earlier this summer, a friend got lost as he drove a few of us from his home in Manhattan to Long Island. After ten minutes of wandering through dark back roads, he slammed on the brakes and let out an impressive string of expletives, ending in a detailed description of what exactly he would do to himself if ever forced to live outside of a city and drive a motor vehicle.

As I watched a grown man dissolve into a whimpering mass of clothing and car keys, I wondered why even those city dwellers with license to drive seemed uncomfortable doing so outside of the well-lit grid of the city. A few times I’ve even worried that when I finally drive again for the first time in almost a year, I will have forgotten how. I’m reassured, however, by those who tell me that learning to drive is something you never forget.

Especially when you had such a memorable first time.



Emma M. Lind ’09, a Crimson associate editorial chair, is a history and literature concentrator in Winthrop House. She has sunk her talons into driving—among other things—and admirably refuses to let go.