Girl Meets Hatchback
By Mindy Moreland
You know the old story: I was a blonde American girl with an international driver’s permit and an atlas I couldn’t read. He was a navy blue hatchback with the steering wheel on the right and the perfect price tag. It was love at first sight.
Oliver, as I named him, was my first car. I was three months out of college when, due to a series of coincidences and a notable lack of other ideas, I found myself teaching English to the sons and daughters of rice farmers in rural Japan. People often think of the clogged arteries that are Tokyo’s streets when I mention driving in Japan, and look panicked on my behalf. No, I assure them. It wasn’t like that.
On the southern tip of Kyushu island, the roads are small, and the cars on them are smaller. Most speed limits are posted at about thirty miles per hour, except the toll roads, on which you are permitted to travel at the astonishing pace of almost-forty-nine. Oliver and I drove everywhere: east to Kagoshima City, with its view of the bay and the active volcano crouched on the other side. South to my Australian boyfriend’s snug house in a fishing port town with mackerel-scented wind. And to visit friends up north, along a road that toed a narrow line between a high cliff face and the East China Sea, where the Japanese surfer boys shook their long wet hair out of their eyes as they road their boards atop the modest waves.
Oliver never failed to get me home at the end of these journeys, even during a scary week when his alternator malfunctioned and I discovered my personal definition of hell: trying to deal with car trouble in a foreign language during a hailstorm.
After two years, I left both Japan and Oliver behind, but not before making a list of my top five favorite things about the country. Driving was number three, behind my students and my taiko drumming ensemble, but ahead of small-town summer festivals and the local burger chain’s green tea milkshakes.
Back home in Oregon and seated on the left side of the car again, I took to the roads of the Northwest, where my lingering buzz quickly faded. Somehow, I had spent two years in an individualistic haze of freedom and exploration, forgetting all the other things that cars meant to the world. Now that knowledge bared its teeth every time I shifted from park to drive.
In the left-leaning city where I live, a car is the manifestation of liberal guilt in its most crystalline form. I know all about fossil fuel reserves and CO2 emissions and global warming and the death of the city center as community focal point and oil company revenues and government conspiracy theories and evil men from Texas in big hats. I know all that. But I also know that I love road trips, and that walking nineteen blocks home alone after midnight in January just isn’t a good idea.
Environmental concerns aside, there’s also the trouble that in Japan I fell in love with the simple pleasure of moving forward, going somewhere. Here in the U.S., I expect to drive, and instead find myself dealing with traffic. I think longingly of empty highways winding through rice paddies while I negotiate too-small parking places or idle in a river of brake lights. It’s the difference between being up early and getting up early: the certain pleasure of the one is usually not sufficient to make me welcome the accompanying annoyance of the other.
These days, I drive a nameless red pickup on semi-permanent loan from my father. It’s bigger and shinier than anything I would have chosen for myself, and makes me long for the days when nimble Oliver and I could turn on a ten-yen coin. Every time I pick up the truck’s keys, I hesitate for a moment, feeling like the conflicted product of the late twentieth century that I am. I haven’t found a happy place to stand between the laziness and necessity that cause me to drive, and the frustration and guilt that sit shotgun when I do.
So I avoid the issue. I keep the keys in my pocket, and usually take the bus. But on my way to the bus stop, I look over at the red truck and smile. While I know I will always drag my share of first-world guilt behind me, and do what I can to save both the ozone layer and my own conscience, I also know that I happily take comfort wherever I can find it. Sometimes that means simply knowing that there’s a little guilty pleasure available when I need it.
And I know what Oliver taught me: that there’s a particular sort of Zen joy that’s only achievable after hours on a highway alone, when “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic” plays on the radio and the sun caresses the dashboard and through the open window floats a sweet summer field smell of dust and hay. In those moments, when everything for a little while seems simple, the pure delight of forward momentum makes me grin, turn up the radio and sing along so loud, so happily, and so out of tune that I don’t realize I’ve completely missed my exit for miles and miles.
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Mindy Moreland is a journalist currently making her home in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, where her well-loved passport is never too far from reach. She is a regular contributor to Oregon Quarterly Magazine, and her essays have appeared in numerous other publications, including Culinate.com, FoodloreLibrary.com, and the Eugene Register-Guard.
Photograph used in conjunction with Flickr’s Creative Commons Agreement. It can be found, in its original form, at http://www.flickr.com/photos/kahtava/.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 2:00 am and is filed under Non-Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
