Night Driving

I ended up getting dinner late this evening, after dark. I drove through the local PDQ (a chicken restaurant). On the way back, the radio was on Classic Vinyl, the windows were down, and the air was warm but cooling quickly. I was headed home, but I wanted to head out and drive. Drive anywhere.

I love driving. More than that, I love driving at night. Even just being in a moving car if I'm not the driver is a thrill. When I was young, my family was always going somewhere. I have distinct memories of staring out the rear passenger window up into the night sky for hours. If I wasn't looking up, I was watching the headlights of other cars on the dark highways. 40+ years ago you could get on the highway at night and be alone or nearly alone. I would turn around and watch for distant on-coming headlights behind us. The best headlights were those far enough away to disappear if the road dropped slightly and then reappear when it rose again. In my head I played a patient game of tag with the other cars, waiting for them to slowly catch up with us— or waiting for our car to catch up to red taillights far out in front of us. When the world has simplified itself into nothing but a dark starry sky overhead and an endless black road ahead, there is something magical about meeting another car on the highway

My enjoyment of the open road at night has never lessened. As a young man, newly living on my own, I often hopped in my car at night and headed out for the loneliest stretch of road I could find. I can remember coming home again in the middle of the night, exhausted and cleansed. Night driving is my way of communing with the universe. Of course, gas was much cheaper then. Purposeless driving was an affordable luxury. Some nights I would head up the mountains on the north side of San Bernardino. (The city sits at the base of the mountains.) I would drive halfway or more to the top then pull over in a turnout. I'd park my car and just gaze out over the entire valley.

That was in the mid-80s. In the 90s I was working a regular shirt-and-tie job, and I didn't get out as much. Southern California was also becoming rapidly overbuilt and overpopulated by then. You could hit the freeway in the middle of the night and never be alone. (You could stuck in traffic in the middle of the night!) But the company I worked for at the time used to take us all to Vegas for a weekend every year. At least one year I got a room to myself and drove up rather than take a bus the company had hired. On this particular year— it must have been '97 or '98, I turned melancholy on Saturday evening and hit my room early. After a short while I realized that I needed to be on the road, as nearly by myself as possible. So, I checked out of my room and hit the road about midnight. It was a glorious night's drive across the desert, miles and miles from any real civilization. As much as I could, I stared up at the stars and played mental tag with cars ahead of and behind me.

So, driving back home tonight with the windows down, rushed that old nocturnal wanderlust through my soul. I wanted to just... go.

"It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." — E. L. Doctorow