The Bravest Thing I've Ever Done is Drive A Car

I didn't learn how to drive until I was 30

Me with my Outback at 11,000 feet on the Beartooth Highway in Montana

I deserved mountains for crossing the Colorado state line, coming from the East. I had driven a thousand miles through industrial farm fields, strip mall towns, and a fog of manure as wide as Kansas. AT&T welcomed me to Colorado, but I saw only another eternity of wheat.

I had come all the way from Indiana, driving across Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas. It took five days to cover that distance, because I had driven a carefully researched route of backroads. It was my brilliant work-around to avoid facing one of my greatest fears: the interstate.

People tell me that I’m brave. Brave for traveling alone. Brave to be alone. 

I hear the admiration in their voices. Presumably, they are wondering how I feel safe traveling without a man, a group, or a friend. But I’ve been wandering off since I was a child, and it doesn’t feel brave to be on my own. It feels safe.  

What did feel brave was asking for help, attending parties sober, staying anywhere for longer than three months, joining group activities for longer than two days. Quitting drinking. Leaving a man I loved. Learning how to drive.   

I didn’t learn how to drive until I was 30. 

I was 40 then, with ten years of stick shift city driving under my belt, but I was still scared. Scared of the highway, changing lanes and semi-trucks. I still jumped at the sound of a horn, wondering what I had done wrong.

The one who wasn’t scared was Gilbert, my zen and unconcerned co-pilot, a nine year old shih tzu who sighed deeply and slept most of the way in a dog bed in the passenger seat.

We were on our way to Denver to pick up my travel companion Margot. The plan was to drive to Taos together where we had rented casitas for a couple months.

It my first time driving west. And only my second time driving long-distance.

All was going to plan until I crossed into Eastern Colorado and confronted a gut-wrenching “Road Closed” sign that Google Maps didn’t detect. I followed the detour, until it led to a freeway entrance. I turned just in time, pulled over, and searched the map for another way. 

That’s how I got lost in a human-devoid maze of dirt roads with the sun going down, my gas tank on empty, and zero bars of service. Because I was too scared to drive on the highway.

One miles-long dirt road led to another. I passed a lone, monolithic farm vehicle in a field and a one-story shack with a yard full of junk.

Desperate, I pulled up the dirt drive, got out of the car, walked to the front door and knocked. It was as silent as the apocalypse, except for the wind ravaging through the rusty machinery on the lawn. The wind was so strong I thought I would get sucked into outer space if I didn’t get back in the car. I had an unwholesome feeling in my stomach, too, about not wanting to see anything or anyone behind that door. 

I backed down the driveway and headed toward the setting sun, toward the west. When I hit the next dirt road, this one looking as if it meandered into an even larger tract of nowhere, I stopped the car, cut the engine, rest my head on the steering wheel and cried. I gave up.

“What am I going to do, Gilbert?” I sobbed.

Gilbert replied with his usual jet black side-eye. 

I was also talking to my friend on the other side. The human named Gilbert Lopez, who had taught me how to drive a stick shift, and if I’m honest, how to drive in general. Who had given me Gilbert the dog so many years before, who he found as a mangy, abandoned puppy on France Street, where I used to live in New Orleans.  ***

When I was sixteen, I took the learner’s permit test three times and failed. The failure was so piercing, stronger than any desire for freedom, that I stopped trying. I got through the last two years of high school bumming rides and shamefully riding the school bus. Failing a test three times indicated that I was too dumb to operate machinery that could have fatal and devastating consequences. I didn’t trust myself to drive a car.

In my twenties, I lived in New York City, where I didn’t have to worry about hiding my shame for not knowing how to drive. On the rare occasions when driving did come up in conversation, my blood ran cold. Maybe I could not steer a wheel, but I was expert at steering others off the topic. I could not risk anyone asking a direct question like, “What was your first car, April?” 

If people knew I didn’t have a license, they would know I was incompetent. Unable to do what even the dumbest could do.

When I was thirty years old, I moved to New Orleans, and knew it was time. I could hide in New York, but not there, where my lack of a driver’s license would be more evident.

I took six private lessons with an old man named Denny who probably wasn’t the best choice of instructor for my particular wounds. When I made a hard brake for a squirrel, giving us both mild whiplash, he scolded, “Now that was a dumb thing to do. You never put a human’s life in jeopardy for a critter.”

I fumed. Silently.

Denny instructed me onto the highway. The fastest I had gone until then was 35mph. Suddenly, Denny was shouting at me to speed up as we ran out of lane and semi trucks taller than buildings shot down the interstate at 70mph. 

“Merge!” Denny shouted. “Merge now! Don’t be dumb!” 

I wouldn’t let Denny see my tears. I wanted to defend myself. Tell him that I read books and knew things he never would. I didn’t of course. I was too emotional and would have sounded like Fredo in that scene from Godfather II where he snivels, “I’m smart, not like dumb.”

At the end of our six sessions, I took the final road test at the DMV. A kind woman sat in the passenger seat with a clipboard. At the end of the test was the parallel park, which I completely fucked up. 

“It’s okay,” she said. “Congratulations, you passed. And don’t worry, you’ll get better at it.”

I gave her a hug, but I didn’t believe her. I don’t have to parallel park, I told myself, I don’t have to get on the highway. I got my license and that is fucking enough.

***

That August, I moved to New Orleans as a licensed driver. I even had a car. A gift from my father and youngest brother who had suffered a mental breakdown and the onset of schizophrenia and could no longer use it. It was a beautiful 2005 gray Mazda 3. The catch was that it had a manual transmission. My car sat parked in the street across from my apartment, unused for at least a month. The car I could legally drive but had a goddamn extra pedal and gear shift that I didn’t understand how to operate.

I needed a teacher. Someone patient. Non-judgmental. Someone who didn’t have anything better to do like a job. 

Technically, Gilbert Lopez did have a regular job. He hauled the trash can out on Thursday nights at Vaughan’s Lounge in exchange for a triple shot of Hornitos. He also took handyman gigs and wooed packs of young women into paying for his tequila.

Of course. Gilbert Lopez would be the perfect driving instructor.

Gilbert Lopez, the rascal, with thick white hair and a black beret, who carried himself with an air of intrigue and the picaresque, which is why I believed that he was a famous artist the first time we met at a party and he told me he was a painter. 

“I’d love to see your work,” I said, holding my glass of wine by the stem. 

“I’d love to show it to you.”

Later on someone clarified. “He paints, that’s technically true. He paints people’s houses. Lays flooring too, I think.”

Gilbert Lopez. Who was also my kind and beloved friend.

“Do you even know how?” I asked a little bratty, when I proposed that he teach me stick.  

“Fuck yes I do.” he laughed. “Listen, we’ll go to Chalmette. There’s a nice little po-boy shop. Nothing too fancy, but I like it. We’ll eat there for lunch.”

The day of our first driving lesson, Gilbert gathered that I needed more help than just learning to drive stick. He laughed, “Hey, you sure you know how to drive? Do we need to start with some basics?” 

“I know how to drive,” I snapped. “I have a license. I’m just rusty. It’s been awhile.” 

Gilbert gave me a refresher on the basics anyway. 

Seeing my hands tight at 10 and 2, he said, “OK, so when you’re driving, it’s a good idea to put on some tunes. Helps you relax.” 

“Ugh, it’s a distraction. But okay.” 

Gilbert turned the radio to WWOZ. “There we go. Okay, now shift into third.”

“No, oh please no. I can’t. I’m not ready.” 

“Yeah you can. Just shift up. Put the clutch down and push the stick up.” He laughed. 

“I can’t, I can’t.” 

“You can’t spend your whole life in second gear, babe.” 

“Oh that’s profound,” I said with a note of sarcasm. 

Gilbert and I had many driving lessons and po-boys out in Chalmette, until I felt comfortable enough driving around on my own. Over seven years, I mastered the manual transmission, but I never left the confines of New Orleans and I never got on the highway.

One evening, years later, a dried camellia fell from a shelf, and fluttered to the floor like a leaf. It was the one Gilbert Lopez had given me years before, on the day he found the little shih tzu who I adopted and named after him. I picked up the flower, wondering how it had gotten loose. I thought I had left inside a book. Later that night, I got the call that he had passed on.  

***

After sobbing on that dirt road in the middle of butt-fucksville Colorado, asking the Gilberts what I was going to do, I lifted my head, wiped my tears with my sleeve and looked at my phone.

There was one, miraculous bar of service. 

Frantically, I pulled up Google Maps and navigated to gas station, and got myself out of there.

I could not attempt those backroads again. Sunset was in minutes and soon it would be dark. There was no choice. I would have to take the highway.

I cried and screamed the whole way. Semi-trucks pressed in, lanes appeared and disappeared out of nowhere, traffic sped up. The sky turned midnight blue and dark orange.

Then I saw the Wall. Driving I-70 west into Denver.

A sudden, ominous and dark purple wall, tens of thousands of feet tall like an petrified tsunami wave. The Rockies.

It was a Beauty so towering and ferocious, it could only be endured and fully witnessed once. Never again. Like the first time I saw Venice approaching by boat, or the streets of Manhattan coming out of the Holland Tunnel.

A terrifying Beauty that was also an announcement, heralded by Seraphim and ringed by a sunset fire.

I had arrived somewhere else.

I had arrived into a new story.

I had arrived in the West.

Gilbert the dog, the morning after we arrived in Denver.

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Gilbert the human on his birthday at Vaughan’s Lounge