The Preposterous Pedestrian

I learned to drive when I was 27. That means 12 intervening years of embarrassment, in which silly, vaguely slapstick scenes ensued as a result of being vehicle-impaired. I nearly ran over a cop at the London airport, who insisted I move the car when my mother was inside the airport; I walked two miles to get coffee in Jackson Mississippi; only to find out it was a drive-thru (which I walked-thru). And so on. I have only myself to blame: for years I had an idee fixe that not learning to drive would help me maintain my connection to the places I’d lived abroad: would help me stay foreign in America. Never mind that all of my international friends in graduate school knew how to drive, having prioritized driving lessons above learning American slang, as I proudly waited in the snow for buses. Even when I finally broke down and learned, the comedy continued: my first collision involved a parked car, and my undergraduate students had to coach me on how to deal with the accident.

Being carless in Virginia (a nineties movie with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan that never happened) brings back all of these memories, and I am once again the preposterous pedestrian, sprinting across the highway, walking past used car franchises and gas stations, just to get to where everything’s gorgeous: the rolling farmland that lies a mile from the residency. But there’s also something comforting about being stuck in a place like a twelve-year-old: I find my limited mobility allows me to concentrate on my route better, stare at its unwavering scenery each day. Today, for example, I noticed that there must be a local designer who creates the family signposts for houses along Stage Road, declaring where “The Johnson’s” and “The Hendersons” live in the same careful black cursive. The run-over cat that has been battered by traffic for the past week was removed from the road sometime between yesterday and today, to my infinite relief. I don’t know what the Eifel Tower featured in one house’s front yard has to do with the Christmas decorations, but maybe tomorrow I’ll be struck with the answer. People say you have to have a car to take in rural America but there is a wonderful slow digestion that occurs when you have to walk past every damn thing. In memorizing it, you grow to understand it, or at least form some theories. Even if you’re singing “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” as you walk. For the preposterous pedestrian, nothing is too incongruous.