Mike Vargo: Sex, Drugs and Driving

Driving a car can be a profound experience. My friend Merce calls it American meditation. As in the traditional Eastern forms, you assume a seated position, with hands and feet placed in a prescribed manner. Allow the mind to be present in the here and now, alert but untroubled. If thoughts come, which they surely will, let them come and let them pass. 

Cruising along a freeway at 70 miles per hour, keep the windows up and let the om-like hum of the air conditioner be the only sound you hear. As the scenery outside flies by — the trees and hillsides, farms and towns — it will soon become evident that this physical world, which appears to be chiseled and durable, is a parade of fleeting images. The more deeply you realize this, the more fully you are liberated from attachment. 

At least that’s one way it could go. Merce and I find that many of us like to take the meditation in another direction. To prepare, you clench the jaw. Insert coffee in the cup holder. Switch on the sound system: preferably talk radio, a talk podcast, or any talk that will add fuel to the fire of thinking. Remember above all that you are a free individual in a free country, unbound by standard notions of space/time and able to move extremely fast. When you need to be somewhere punctually, leave eight minutes later than ordinary mortals would. 

This too may lead to insights. You are not alone in the universe. And the thing you perceive as “your route” — a sequence of streets and roads leading from A to B — is merely a projection of the mind, superimposed on a complex reality. Every leg of the route overlaps and intersects myriad other “routes,” which drivers in other vehicles perceive to belong to them.  

You won’t always get caught in traffic jams. But when you do, appreciate the revelation that is being offered. You have a front-row seat within a microcosm of all the personal fantasies that clash with the big picture we call civilization. The fantasy that liberty has no constraints. That strangers are enemies. That government intervention is stupid and cruel (red lights, road closings); the fantasy that rage can make it right.

And of course the vehicle itself is a fantasy machine, better than video games or virtual worlds. With the latter tools you can morph into a super-being, transcending the usual human limitations, but only in a virtual sense. With a car you can actually do it. Strap yourself in and right away you sprout steel and wheels. Not to mention a mighty motor. It’s physically transformative. Like sex. Autoerotic. 

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Merce and I were schoolmates years ago, separated after eighth grade when we spun off to separate high schools and then separate lives. Recently the great swirl brought our orbits back together, and we have enjoyed re-meeting as new older persons. Despite our different paths in life we’ve discovered many common threads. Such as, an ambivalent relationship with cars. 

There’s a lot to dislike about them. Motor vehicles pollute, eat space, eat money. They have dictated the ways in which we lay out infrastructure and inhabit communities, producing patterns that are not congenial. A car is a textbook example of a technology that wags the dog.

On the other hand, one must respect the machine. Merce and I respect machines. As a nonfiction writer, I often write about science and tech, and I like to look into how stuff works (or fails to). Merce is a top-notch DIY mechanic, who once bought a dying old car and rebuilt the engine so skilfully that it carried him to adventures all around the country. We respect machines, in part, because we admire the art of the people who invent them and the craft and hard work of those who build them. What these people do is brilliant, and furthermore, they’re extending the brilliance of countless others who came before them. Picture the very first humans who learned to tame fire. Quite possibly they were women. A line runs from these women, through the long millennia, to the men and women who create mobile machines running on fire under the hood. 

Perhaps you favor electric cars, charged with power from clean sources like wind farms. The builders of EVs and wind turbines are descendants of the first sailors and sail-makers. Those ancient mariners, bobbing in crude wooden boats while they wrangled with how to capture breezes in billowy animal hides, applied the force of the wind directly to waterborne vehicles. Their present-day counterparts catch the wind in fixed locations and send the force out to vehicles traveling the land. When you see a car, whether internal combustion or electric, you’re seeing what the history of human ingenuity has brought us.

And it has brought us a machine unique in the annals of machinery. The motor vehicle is the most powerful machine ever made in mass-market quantities. For many millions of people, it’s the most powerful thing they can own. 

You might argue that smartphones hold that position. Never have so many functions been packed into such a handy little device. It’s like a second brain in your pocket. Smartphones are vastly more affordable than cars; they can be life-changers for people in less developed countries; and wherever you are, they connect you with the rest of the world. 

In this case again, though, the connection is virtual. Motorcars operate in meatspace: the geek term for visceral, physical, non-cyberspace. A motor vehicle does more than connect you. It transports you. More literally than any drug, it will take you away from where you are. Why stay in a place that feels like nowhere when you can go to a different somewhere?

Which after all is how our nation was formed. A nation established by people who went away from where they were and came here to be someone else, somewhere else. And a car enables you to re-enact the origin story. You can do it in a single, long, manifest-destiny drive, rolling westward from, say, Boston Harbor all the way to the Golden Gate. Or do it repeatedly in rituals of shorter drives. Leave home. Drive anywhere that’s not home, out to the beach, or onto Sunrise Highway or Utopia Parkway. Drive to Center of the World, Ohio (a real but unincorporated place); drive to The Tattoo Parlour and Lounge in King of Prussia Mall. Do it in the maximum machine a person can acquire without being filthy wealthy, a machine controlled by you alone. 

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Thus it is that so many of us love our cars. This love, in turn, may be manifested in many dimensions — similar to inter-human love in that regard, but it’s not the same. For instance, Rastafarian culture has a beautiful way of expressing the spiritual bond between people. Instead of saying “you and I” or “we,” a Rasta says “I and I.” Would a car lover in mainstream America think of self and car that way? Doubtful. Car love is I-and-mine love. A possessive love, by which one can be possessed.

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Merce and I don’t get swept off our feet. Yet we do feel a bond with cars — indeed, a metaphysical sort of bond — which might be described simply as follows. As the two of us see it, the machines are not objects of passionate love, but neither are they dumb objects to be used with cold practicality. They are fellow beings. To have a car is to have a partner in existence, with whom one will live and interact. In a sense beyond the merely financial, the car becomes a companion in the quest to make a living.   

And the bond can be felt rather strongly. Merce and I each have fond memories of certain cars from our pasts. Merce’s long-lost companion was a red BMW convertible, bought in fine condition on the used market at a nice price, and therefore doubly attractive: an excellent machine that was also a bargain. The BMW perished in a murder-suicide event on a dark country road one night. 

These events happen in areas where deer are numerous. Keep driving and eventually you’ll hit one, even if you are quick to the brake. White-tailed deer seem to be wired with survival instincts that don’t fit the motorized era. Poised at the edge of a road and wanting to cross, the animal sees a bright-eyed intruder approaching. Its first reaction (the “deer in the headlights” instinct) is to freeze: don’t let the intruder notice you! But the beast keeps coming. And when it comes close — ominously slowing, as if gathering itself to pounce — the deer’s second instinct kicks in. Which is to bolt. Wrong move.

The hit may do little damage to the car. But an unlucky point of contact will trigger the car’s crumple instinct. The front end is designed to absorb dangerous impact by folding inward, a feature that mangles the machine’s outer shell and crushes vital innards. Merce was doubly distraught at the outcome: an innocent creature dead and his BMW totaled.  

My automotive pal was a humbler used car, an old but capable Camry. It had served me well through years of happy family trips, solo camping trips and more. Then one day on a city street, while Camry and I were momentarily stopped, another driver backed into us. The man at the body shop did an inside-out exam and spoke to me in the tone of a surgeon bearing bad news. Mr. Camry should be put to rest in a junkyard, donating his intact organs for the good of others. 

The next day, I returned to the body-shop lot to clean out my personal effects from the car. Into a couple of big boxes I dumped everything I had furnished the Camry with, in our process of cohabitation: tools in the trunk, a basketball in the trunk. A string of souvenir beads draped decoratively over the back of the driver’s seat. Sunglasses and so forth, a roll of paper towels. 

Life is like a roll of paper towels. In the beginning it’s bounteous and full of possibilities, brimming with a seemingly endless supply of bright white sheets, each a blank slate waiting to have a chapter of your story written upon it. But gradually the roll shrinks down. Then comes a time when only one sheet is left. That last paper towel clings to the core, not wanting to let go. And once it is torn loose, the story ends. 

So I reflected, as I removed my belongings. The roll of towels augured plenty of life yet to come. But the Camry, battered and now empty, would no longer share the ride. I sat behind the wheel one last time. I patted the padding atop the dashboard, stepped out, and strolled slowly around the vehicle. I gently stroked its roof, gave it a couple of thumping final pats on the hood. And I must confess that I whispered to the machine: Goodbye, Camry. You’ve been a good car. Thank you, thank you.

**

Perspective. Much depends on perspective. The loss of an individual vehicle barely registers as a tiny, transient blip on the nationwide scale. Millions of motorists continue swarming the land in chariots of fire and noise. 

Heavy traffic generates a medley of nasty noises. You get the incessant whines of whirring engines and the hiss of spinning tires. There’s the ratchety roar of trucks and motorcycles, like a gang of giants gargling and babble-farting simultaneously, in concert with the blare of horns and the boom-boom of hip-hop blasted insanely loud. 

Traffic is our national background music. Heard from nearby, for example from a sidewalk cafe, it is a ruckus that can rattle the soul’s teeth. From a bit farther off, it’s reduced to a lower-level buzz and clatter that many people say they are used to, though it may still have subliminal effects on the soul. You need to hunt to find places where traffic isn’t heard at all. 

But perspective can play weird tricks with sound — both muting it and mutating it. I’ve heard traffic while standing on remote hilltops where the nearest roads are not even visible, and have felt the sound assuming a seductive nature. From there, the murmur of distant traffic resembles the sound of the sea. The soft, alluring swell and glide of the ever-murmuring sea. When honking horns chime in, at a distance they are the calls of seagulls. Beckoning, along with the murmur, to come and explore a far-off world of wonder.

It makes a soul want to set sail and travel. Hit the gas pedal and go.

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Copyright 2023 Mike Vargo.

Mike Vargo is a freelance writer who lives in Pittsburgh.