Learning to Drive

This is maybe thinking just a bit too far ahead, but lately I've been obsessed over figuring out how to teach my child to drive. Cars--especially the giant ones that people drive out here in Caifornia, Hummers and Tahoes and Titans and other metal mammoths--are really scary and powerful and dangerous machines, and the thought of my baby behind the steering wheel of one freaks me out.

Now, obviously I know that this "baby" won't be a baby when they're learning to drive, but you know how it is with mothers; their children are always babies in their eyes. I've learned that already and haven't even met mine yet. But still.

I remember, as a child, my dad would take me to the parking lot of his old high school on days when no one was there and let me steer from his lap as we crawled along. He wouldn't let me actually drive--I was too small at the time to even reach the pedals--just turn the wheel and make the car go where I wanted it to as he supplied the power, which was fun despite the fact there was nowhere to actually go. I remember being older and going back to that parking lot and being allowed to sit in the driver's seat all alone while I made the car go and Dad encouraged me to give it a little more gas. And I remember driving down the narrow side streets of Arlington Heights, shaded by giant trees whose names I never knew, in our little temperamental Jetta and being so afraid to turn onto Northwest Highway, which, despite its name, wasn't much of a highway, just a four lane (total--not in each direction) main drag that would take you all the way to Chicago if you wanted. But there was traffic there, more cars and actual stoplights, and I avoided it until I was really, really comfortable behind the wheel, because the speed limit was, like, 40.

And then I think of my kids and the streets they'll be driving on. The main drag through little RSM here is 55 mph in places. Fifty-five! The slowest it gets is, like, 45. And the roads here curve like asphalt rivers--no easy grid like Arlington Heights, where you only turned the steering wheel to turn a corner.

And then there's the I-5.

Now, I may be mistaken--someone in Chicago, please correct me if I'm wrong--but the most lanes the expressways have out there are, like, 4 in one direction. Typically, I think it's more like 3. Whereas the I-5 can have as many as 6 lanes at a time, each one filled with maniacs going 90 and other maniacs going 50. You could stay in one lane, never switch left or right, and find that lane to be both the middle lane and the far-right lane in the span of 5 miles, because lanes just peel away and add on line some mutant onion. And for some reason Cal-Trans has really embraced the idea of these little reflector things that they glue down in the paint between lanes, and in some places they have ditched the paint altogether, so that your space on this Great Plain of cement is defined so by nothing but the occasional plastic bump reminiscent of a Pac-Man pellet, but less frequent.

And I think, My baby is going to drive on this road someday?

Who knows, maybe in sixteen years we won't have cars anymore; we'll have transporters like on Star Trek. Or transporter belts like on The Tomorrow People. Or maybe some new public transportation system will burst onto the scene with such an efficient and extensive network that cars will be rendered superfulous. Or, more likely, the price of gas will have gone so high that it takes a double-income home with both adults working as top executives to be able to afford it and people will just go back to their bikes. I'm hoping for one of these. Because I shudder at the thought of my baby learning to drive.