I delivered pizza during high school, which meant a lot of time driving. So I invented a game to entertain myself: anytime my front tires were about to cross a shadow, I’d lightly tap the wheel, then tap again when the shadow had passed. The idea was my car was leaping over the shadows.
Around the same time, I ate a Tootsie Roll lollypop with a cartoon on the wrapper: a child shooting an arrow1 at a star. A friend said it was a lucky charm; apparently the Tootsie company only includes the drawing on one in every four wrappers. Anyway, I stuck it in my wallet for good luck. A few years later, my final year of college, I was driving with two friends through central Maine. At the time, I owned a green Jeep Cherokee. The temperature was in the forties, the sky was bright blue. On an empty road, forest on either side, at fifty-something miles per hour—the speed limit was forty-five—the car started to pivot. Later, the sheriff’s office told us pipes had burst in a nearby house and flooded the road: black ice. All I knew was my car was spinning. I turned the wheel: nothing. Accelerated: nothing. Tried the brakes: nothing. Time slowed perceptibly. I remember saying, “We’re going to crash,” then thinking to myself, noticing the slowing time, “I could do a crossword right now.” We went into a ditch backwards at about fifty miles an hour. The Jeep burst out, rolled two or three or four times, came skidding to a halt in someone’s front yard – luckily there’d been a house just there, otherwise we would’ve crashed into the woods. The Jeep stopped on its side, the posts crumpled. All of us were still conscious, we carefully climbed out through a hole that formerly had been a window and jumped down. One friend had bitten through his lip, we were fine otherwise; it seemed extraordinary we survived. But the shock grabbed me hard. I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t sit down or think, my teeth were chattering so badly I needed to hold my jaw shut with my hands. I became fixated on finding my wallet, but it was gone. Another driver stopped and called 9-1-1. Maybe an hour later, the fire department tipped my Jeep onto its wheelbase. I had a wool blanket wrapped around my shoulders, I went over to see what I could find. All the windows were blown out except one, and stuck to the inside of the glass, facing me, was something I hadn’t seen in several years: a cartoon from a candy wrapper, a boy shooting at a star.
Driving is the thing you do with an enormous, very complicated machine that none of us could ever build on our own, yet nearly all of us can operate with very little training. Driving is full of games, yet every moment is nearly out of control. I interviewed Roxane Gay, a recent transplant to Los Angeles, for my last book, and we talked about how much both of us like to drive, that the freeways and stoplights and occasional traffic knots of L.A. don’t bother us too much. “I’m from the Midwest, I’m used to driving an hour to get somewhere,” she said, laughing. When I think of driving, I think of distances, I think of scenery and precise images. Insects at night swimming up through headlights. The parched planet of West Texas. The dense green canopies of summer Mississippi and summer Vermont. The tapping on the steering wheel, I still do it unconsciously, and for some reason I mentioned doing so at a party a few years ago and the host was flabbergasted, he said he’d been doing the same thing for years.
For a time after the accident, driving over twenty miles an hour gave me cold sweats and panic attacks. I saw a therapist about it, I worked through it, now I love driving even more. In my life, driving gives me an additional means of measurement, another way of belonging. In a car you’re always passing things by, but whatever you’re passing, you are still among its order. A car is an open heart. I don’t know what the vastness of death will feel like, but driving gives me an idea of how I will pass through it.
In tomorrow’s “Sunday Supplement,” there’s a new show to stream, particularly if you enjoyed my latest book; a communications device for adventures off-grid (considering recent mis-adventures!); and how we all learned to fear milk. And if you’re not on the supporter train yet, there’s a blue button for that. Speaking of which, Substack just enabled free trials! Give it a shot!
“Meditations in an Emergency” is a micro-essay published Saturdays by novelist Rosecrans Baldwin about things he finds beautiful, with a longer essay once a month dispatched from the wilderness.
Also for subscribers: a Sunday supplement with three-plus ideas for things to love, no paid placements lol 💸
Rosecrans is the bestselling author of Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles, available from Bookshop, Amazon, or your local store. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. Rosecrans’s debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.
Any other books mentioned in this newsletter are featured on a Bookshop list.
Of course, the “child” I’m referencing is problematic as hell, seeing how it’s clearly a kid dressed up to “play Indian.” See also: “The Legend of the Indian Wrapper,” and what you receive if you mail in your wrapper, expecting free candy.