American Roads

I love American roads, but I don’t always love the other people on them.

I love that American roads go everywhere, but I don’t love that they don’t necessarily have warning labels to tell people like me not to drive just anywhere on them. Google suggested I could make it from Portland to Nampa in eight hours even if I left I-84 and struck out through the badlands of Eastern Oregon. I thought that sounded fun. Well, it took more like thirteen hours, because it turns out there’s no way forward from John Day other than taking several high mountain passes in a row, in the dark, with snow coming down. I had chains - but it turned out the ones I had didn’t work. Always practice with your chains before you actually need them. I later replaced them with better chains. I still haven’t practiced with those either.

At any rate, I got over, at about three miles an hour, coming down icy grades at a crawl.

I also don’t like it when I’m driving more slowly than usual because it’s a six percent downhill grade and I don’t know if there will be a spot of ice or not, so I’d just as soon not go sixty-five, thank you, but the three-trailer truck (!!!) behind me is in a hurry, and I feel the pressure of being judged by everyone else on the road. So it’s anxiety either way, the constant tug between the anxiety of going too fast to be safe if I hit ice, and the anxiety of being judged by the angry people behind me.

Driving through the Wasatch in Utah, I was saved from angst solely by the frequency and length of passing lanes, further reinforcing my stereotype of Utah being competently-run. In Colorado I was constantly stressed, because everyone wanted to go ludicrously fast, and I wanted to go painstakingly slow, just in case I ran into a patch of ice. I never did, but I wonder how everyone else was so confident there wouldn’t be any. I mean, sure, some of them had 4WD vehicles, but there were also sedans and minivans, and we all had the same sort of tires. Did they just know something I didn’t?

Worrying about how the other cars would perceive me bedeviled me. My chief terror in Telluride was not slipping and falling on the ice, or spending all of my money on books (a very real danger), but that when it came time to unpark my car and drive away, I might slide into something and be mortally embarrassed. I already imagined I was being judged a foolish amateur tourist for arriving in a beat up Camry in a town where everyone else drove Subarus and SUVs. But then, I kind of am a foolish amateur tourist in denial, so…

Only one person actually honked at me or was in any way rude on this entire trip, despite all the large pickups I’ve held up going slowly over mountain passes. But being me, of course even before someone came along to confirm my projections, I had already decided that all of these drivers held me in contempt, and in return for this imagined slight I felt personally rebuked and slighted, and harbored a certain kind of irrational resentment. This is, of course, extremely silly, and no way to drive or live well, even if the supposition did turn out to be true in some cases.

Still, I wish there were a way to feel less pressure to drive fast or be judged, when conditions are at all adverse. But my idea of adverse conditions is Colorado’s idea of a nice day, so maybe that’s asking too much.

What’s really interesting to me is how my projections of unwelcomeness mapped the concerns about driving speed and type of car so closely onto political and social divides. I have a certain kind of insecurity whenever I go to a place I do not live, that someone will tell me I’m doing something wrong, or that someone will spot that I am out of place and think “oh no, another tourist.” This is not helped by carrying a camera everywhere I go. But as someone from the coastal suburbs, I tend to feel this anticipated unwelcomeness less when traveling in a foreign country, and more keenly when in the very urban or very rural parts of America. This is despite me not particularly liking the suburbs, aesthetically. I think it has to do with the visibility of class and political differences in these spaces - or rather, with my own stereotypes about them. Because this isn’t an objective phenomenon I’m reporting on and observing about our country - rather, this says some unfortunate things about the state of my own psyche, and how prone I am to prejudging and reducing others in my mind - so naturally I imagine they will do the same to me.

I think I used to be more empathetic and less judgmental when I was a child, but I’m not sure if that’s even true. I would like for it to be true again, though, if it ever was.

I’ve been on the other side of things as well. A year and a half ago when moving across the country in midsummer, I became increasingly impatient to arrive on the West coast, and drove faster and faster as my confidence grew each day. I remember tearing over the speedways of Montana, leaping up and down the hills by the Clark Fork at ninety miles an hour. And in Connecticut I was perfectly comfortable driving in the winter, because everyone just seemed used to it, and I figured they can’t all be wrong. Maybe it’s just that I’m rusty.