Driving with Attitude: Seeing the Eye-Openers around Us.
Just a few car lengths off Route 9 in Newton, Massachusetts, Hemlock Gorge is still the wildest spot on the Charles River. Chances are, for all the thousands of drivers who daily commute by, this momentary mountain cataract working the Roxbury puddingstone in the shade of hemlocks is so much water over the dam.
My great Aunt Virginia once took her beloved border collie Kip with her to a friend’s for dinner, over this route, twelve miles from home, and when it was time to leave, Kip was nowhere to be found. Trouble was, Aunt Virginia had to go on a two-week trip the next day, and with a heavy heart left her beloved Kip behind, hoping he would turn up at her friend’s house. Two weeks later, when she pulled into her driveway, who should be on her doorstep to greet her but Kip, a little the worse for wear, but one resourceful navigator. I have no idea how he sorted out the world to find his way home, but I would say this quadruped, ever alert at Aunt Virginia’s car window, probably took in more than would two of us bipeds put together.
For bipeds who spend a significant portion of their natural life cycle strapped in a seat behind glass, we have some serious adaptation to attend to. Someone check my math, but I figure that drivers who typically clock double-digit mileage in a day, let alone the three-digit marathoners, are at it for fifteen percent of their waking hours—including hours when they’re faking waking. With consummate self-delusion, we comfort ourselves that we like the time to collect our thoughts, to be boss of our moment, heck, ruler of the road.
We all know perfectly well that driving can get pretty catatonic. It is not like taking a hike over pesky tree roots or bouncing along on horseback with the wind whistling through our ears, aware with every jolt of the multi-sensory world we inhabit. Cruising along in a well-suspended conveyance, on a smoothly paved highway, we are lulled away from reality. This is what babies used to like about cradles. As our cars hurtle us through vast terrain with the smoothness of projectiles, it is as if we were stationary and the world were moving past us. Not good. In catatonia, bad things can happen. So we let our ears take us somewhere else—music, talk radio, books on tape, friends on cell phones. The more so if we are in a self-driver, listening to and looking at our cells. Better a dose of cell phone bliss than a doze into obliteration cum oblivion anyday. Unless that proves to be a wake up call, our own distraction putting us in harm’s way. Or worse, road rage, truly a bad call.
My beef today is not with cell phones or road rage. It is with how we diss place, and it is a disgrace, a profligate fall from grace. Mile after mile we drive our solitary way through life, sometimes on routes through surroundings too familiar to seduce us with come-hither glances, sometimes on roads less traveled but as unread as closed books. A place commuted through passively is a place that is soon taken for granted or worse yet, held in contempt. Fellow bipeds, this is so lame. If we do much more of this, after a while commuting for a living becomes commuting away a living. Fortunately, it is a sentence that can be commuted. Not by telecommuting, but by active looking.
Yes, I mean active looking, or, if you prefer, active listening with your eyes. We hardly know how to tap this resource in our midst, this corridor we drive through, this place that is happening to us while we are driving someplace else. But the biological beast within us demands that we do. We ought to take a little bit more ownership over the places we are in. No, not colonize it, not put money down on it, that’s way too contemporary, and therefore retro. I mean tap into our hunter gatherer roots to resensitize our feelings about place. We ought to know our habitat so much better than we do. We ought to look our surroundings straight in the eye, plumb the depths of the face before us, and find the life story there. Come to our senses, all of them. Be so attuned to all that passes before us that it quickens the pulse. Be as connected to place as monarch butterflies making their rounds from New England to South America.
If not the answer to putting cases of advanced tunnel vision into total remission, active looking is like a car tonic. We can reclaim our sensory engagement to a world of real places—natural and built. The highway in a traffic jam at rush-hour, or any-old-hour, is like a river flowing over rocks, now white water, now still. On the banks of that river are villages and deserts, some easy on the eyes, others requiring tough love.
We drive at less than warp speed with a warped map of our habitat as guide. Like the Bostonian’s Map of the United States in which Cape Cod is exaggerated to a size and position like Florida for the whole country, the equivalent local perceptual map hypes what’s hip, and glosses over what it does not deign to understand, let alone appreciate. The vastness of Roxbury and Dorchester, filled to overflowing with layers of meaning, is a vast unknown wilderness to ‘burb denizens, and vice versa. The fact is, we all have frontiers to explore. As long as we are here, we might as well get to know this world we are in bed with. We might come to appreciate a place once spurned or overlooked or written off with something like gratitude, even reverence, or at least empathy. The emotional payback could be staggering.
We can learn a lot from Kip. To paraphrase a guru named Yogi, we can indeed see a lot by looking.
© 2023 Thomas M. Paine
Tom, this is beautiful, this thought, this view from behind the wheel -- and this town in which we both grew up.
Thank you for opening my aging eyes....
-- Nick
Terrific photos, all three!