Driver’s Ed

I asked Canada for a driving licence, and they fell for it. (Yes, with no more than tourist status and two pieces of foreign ID, I can legally get a licence here. Heartening for me, terrifying, I imagine, for North American citizens on both sides of a porous border.)

On my second-last trip to the big city, I speed-read the _Ontario Driver’s Handbook_ in the car, then lined up to take a written test with a clutch of surly teenagers and a few bewildered dodderers. I passed the vision test with a LASIKed squint and gave them one hundred Queen dollars, my passport, a credit card, and my sister’s address. They gave me an Ontario Driver’s Licence, Class G1. Now that I exist officially, I will use this little plastic card to jimmy the doors to Canadian success.

It was always humiliating to be asked for identification in the US, though I miss it now I’m a raddled spinster.
   “Driver’s licence,” the guy on the velvet rope at Chelsea Billiards would say.
   “I don’t have one. Sorry.”
   “I can’t let you in without proof of age. You don’t have a driver’s licence?”
   “I can’t drive.”
This was a bizarre admission in the United States, even in New York. Like saying “Sorry, I never went through puberty” or “I never learned to wipe my ass.” Outside New York, it would have be easier to explain that I’d never bothered learning to walk; a less useful skill, surely.

Thing is, I did know how to drive. My Dad taught me when I was seventeen. Stick-shift, too: we don’t hold with wussy automatic transmissions. When my learner’s licence arrived, Ranger Tim volunteered to let me drive him to the big city in his Honda Accord, which rolled off the assembly line soon after my first driving lessons fourteen years ago.

Though I never passed (or sat) a test, it’s just like riding a two-ton, fume-belching bicycle. It took a few attempts to reverse down the dirt track and around the big red pine, and then–oops–I drove up the left side of the gravel road to the highway. But after these hiccups I was disappointingly competent. No comedy gear-screeches, no amusing dings and scrapes, no juddering down the highway in the wrong gear, wailing apologies. I pulled into and out of the petrol station without incident, and even avoided the two deer out for a stroll on Highway 17. I drove all the way to Sault Sainte Marie and through the first set of traffic lights before we swapped seats for in-town safety. My only eccentricity on the open road is playing a 40-kilometer speed band like a scale. In real life I’m a cautious scaredy-cat, but in a car it turns out I drift towards 120 kph.
   “Speed, Dervala, speed,” muttered Tim as he tapped the invisible passenger brake.

Driving is fun, sort of. It’s a game, except when I remember that I have charge of enough speeding metal to maim and kill far more people than I could otherwise. Other drivers aren’t quite human, they are fellow car operators in a private world with a private soundtrack. We don’t greet each other or check out each other’s clothes, and they look straight ahead when they overtake me. The countryside is no longer real either; it’s a backdrop that passes quickly on a screen. I scan it for obstacles, and deer appear in my peripheral vision like Space Invaders. Pow. My side of the road switches from one lane to two, and back to one, and I try to colour inside the lines with the tip of my car. I can’t imagine doing this for several hours a day just to get to and from work; how lonely.

My Dublin friend Joy had just sent me a rant about a miserable holiday on Cape Cod (made worse because she had ripped off a toenail in a fall from her bike the day before she left, and is too pregnant for painkillers):

We foreigners seem to be slow to adapt to America’s autocracy. Justin, another Dub and a California transplant, writes:

That is our difficulty. Europe isn’t a paradise of villagers strolling from _boulangerie_ to _boucherie_, pausing to chat in the village green. Of course we drive everywhere–just look at our newly fat backsides. What we can’t understand is how people could accept that cars should shove everything else off the road: bicycles, walkers, runners, rollerskaters, Vespas, baby buggies. A cyclist in the US is six times more likely to get squashed than a European riding a bike, quotes the _Philadelphia Inquirer_ (via Justin), and as a former bicycle commuter, it feels true. It’s not malicious, but American drivers don’t expect to have to share the road. The absurdity of people driving to a gym to walk on a treadmill because they have no footpaths in their suburbs is depressing. It’s a degradation that would seem cooked up by the car companies and the anti-depressant makers if it weren’t apparent just how willingly we are seduced by the ease of the car.

One reason I never took a driving test, I think, was a superstitious hope that my lack would protect me from living like that. I’m drawn to the lure of the car. It would have been a burden in my butcher-baker-and-candlestick-maker Brooklyn neighbourhood, but just about everywhere else it’s addictively handy, if not essential. I turn into a sloth as soon as I’m behind the wheel: I want that parking space at the door of the shopping centre, and I’ll prowl the car park to get it. Stepping out, my legs feel boringly slow, as if I’d taken off RollerBlades. (For much the same reason, I don’t own a television: I like it so much I turn into a glazed TiVO donut.)

Without a driving licence, I had to live in places with good public transport, good street life, plenty of small shops. They were densely-populated, so I had to live in small spaces. This was fine–without a car, you can only drag home as much stuff as you can carry, or fling into a taxi. Without a car, I couldn’t accumulate the mound of stuff and consequent responsibilities that I would have used as an excuse not to travel.

But Canada is just too damn big for even my patient legs, and the nearest grocery is an hour and a half from my log cabin. I even concede that some people in these parts, chugging up the unmaintained Frater Road in winter, say, might actually need those great big SUVs. And to all the people who have patiently chauffered me for the past 31 years, thank you. I’ll do my share of the driving next time. I know I can’t rely on freeloading charm and beef jerky bribes forever.

Further reading:
“As Suburbs Grow, So Do Waistlines.“–New York Times
“First comes the suburban sprawl, then the spread“–Philadelphia Inquirer