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Illustration by Drew Shannon
“Gone for a drive,” my father would quip.
Before I could hear him, his foot would be half out the door. When I ran and pressed my face to our front window, the taillights of whatever old and sputtering car he had would be rounding the dimly lit street of our suburban Toronto neighbourhood and fade out of view. He had three jobs, not to mention an equal number of children who fought like feral animals. Soon the car would be back in the driveway. Sometimes, he’d return with little offerings for my siblings and myself. But always, for my mother, with a long and loving embrace, he would say, “thanks for letting me go.”
I too have learned the therapeutic effect of driving. It was a salve for my grief when I learnt of the untimely death of my grandmother. I grabbed my keys whenever a romantic relationship that held promise reached a painful end. And, during the dredges of the pandemic, on more eerily empty roads than I can count, I sought to set myself in motion — when I buckled under the pressures of 36-hour hospital shifts to cover for sick colleagues, or when the crush of human suffering made me question my pledge to cradle it as a physician.
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Cocooned from the environment yet open to the surroundings, the confines of my car afford me an in-between: somewhere I can be left alone but, also, find community with others. (I’ll never see that guy whizzing by me in the left lane again, I’ll think, wiping tears from my eyes, while I also wonder what song his fingers are fluttering to.)
My millennial pals are ditching the practice in droves. When I ask them why, they say they work more from home, have finances spread thin and know that a car, if one is ever needed, can materialize with an effortless tap or two on our phones. I wonder if driving is becoming another of those victims of modernity, that getting behind the wheel elicits any prospect of self-discovery is not so much the focus of therapists or the goal of my Uber driver as it is starting to ring of the old-timey stuff of a bygone parental whimsy.
But for me, a two-ton, carbon-spewing, windowed box of steel has a strange ability to soothe my frayed nerves.
Driving as a form of enlightenment might be the product of a distinctive time. One that was steeped in a motorized counterculture. When pages of Kerouac’s On the Road were being turned, or the grainy pictures of Hopper’s Easy Rider glued eyeballs, enthralled by their subjects’ gasoline-guzzling journeys that propelled them beyond the overwhelming tedium that was calcifying around North American life. The appeal of setting out on the road today is slightly different.
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I liken driving aimlessly to the heyday of watching cable television or listening to AM/FM radio, those humanistic institutions that presented the world around you before you could microscopically curate it.
When I drive — and especially when I do so with a spirit to wander — I’m brought to perspectives I’d not thought of at all. And those insights I simply happen upon are the most illuminating. Outside of co-ordinates, my moral imagination expands. It’s why floating across undulating ribbons of rural roads on the sultriest of summer days opens my mind and heart in ways that few things ever have.
I try to limit my unplanned jaunts. I’m cognizant of overstepping my carbon footprint — so, often, this just means taking the “long way” to stretch out my thoughts. But recently I found myself in a rut. Weighed down by the headlines of the day, I left the stark and gleaming halls of my hospital and made for my car. The jammed grids of city streets soon gave way to wider and then narrower roads. Walls of glass and concrete flattened into rippling carpets of tall grasses and cornstalks. Around me were no longer the sounds of sirens and storefronts, but a bucolic quiet carried on a sweet summer wind.
From a column of cars, one after another broke away. Eventually, I was on my own. I stopped behind a giant “STOP” sign. There, I waited patiently for another car cresting a far-off hill to pass.
In that long moment I hoped for something epiphanic. A solution to pass me by, too: to the hardships that marred the lives of my patients; to the troubles that seemed to mire humanity ad nauseam.
One, however, never came. In fact, they rarely do.
I’ve learned that what undergirds the catharsis of an aimless drive is not distancing myself from my problems. It’s not the sparseness in a stretch of road or how far I end up venturing. Nor is it the answers that come (or don’t) to me. It’s an allowance to remind myself that wherever I’m going, in whichever direction I’m heading, when I’m sensing being lost, I’m still moving with purpose.
Arjun Sharma lives in Toronto.
