Sweet Corn, $4.50 a dozen.
I flew past the sign even though I wanted corn. I reasoned I’d see another sign a little farther down the road, because I was in the heart of corn country, if there is such a thing. I saw several signs. Each time I barely eased off the gas because I had to be somewhere. Didn’t I?
I was taking the scenic route, and I finally realized, though I’d budgeted the time for such a thing, I hadn’t adjusted for the reset my equilibrium would require. To get from A to B, you’re supposed to take the shortest route, the fastest route. Mapquest, navigation systems, Google Maps – everything offers you up the fastest ways to get from here to there.
5 great Canadian drives you need to take this summer
That’s what’s wrong with us, if you ask me. I’m aware you didn’t, but come along for a drive, anyway. In our rush to do so many things and be first, best, fastest and shiniest, we forgot to do nothing at all. We forgot to go nowhere, to leave open the door for a surprise ending, to be happy with the route instead of searching for the reward.
When I was a kid, we were told to get in the car because we were going for a drive. Nobody asked to where, or why, or even thought to. “Going for a drive” was the whole thing. My Dad worked shifts, so a Saturday or Sunday off was a bonus, and Dad could bear a lot of things if he could drive while bearing them. Oh, he loved us, but he was a solitary man in a world of girls and while he may have had no childhood himself, he knew he had to make sure we had one. Sometimes you can see the outlines of the struggle as someone does the right thing; my Mom did it naturally, but I admit I appreciated my father’s effort more, because I know it was an effort.
Gas was cheap back then, even for a guy with four kids, working shifts in a steel plant who tried to save as much as he could because he thought he would live forever. Gas was cheap and a drive required only time, that thing you should have so much of when your kids are young and your job leaves you cherishing the moments you do get to enjoy.
We would scrap in the backseat, fighting over who got stuck in the middle, and my Dad would let our chatter fly out of the car on the current of wind that blasted from his open window. If we could keep our bellyaching (my Mom’s word) to a dull roar, we knew we’d pull over near a bridge so we could peer down into some river and fight over who saw the first fish or at least get ice cream.
We would close our eyes to guess what kind of farm we were passing, and giggle when we got it right and my Dad would say any kids of his better know the difference between cow s*** (his word) and fresh mown hay. I would wonder who had to paint the miles and miles of white fences, because I hadn’t yet learned to lift my eyes, to imagine bigger things than just the work involved.
Those drives, those drives to nowhere, taught me to imagine bigger things. I would imagine people who lived not in a bustling suburb like we did, but out here with no neighbours. I would imagine work that needed horses and tractors; kids who got on school buses in the dark; snowstorms that would isolate you even further. I would imagine my father’s protracted childhood.
Scenic Wisconsin farmfields go on forever under endless blue skies.
James Walker, National Post
When my own kids needed this the most, I couldn’t do it. Newly divorced when they were tiny, gas cost too much. Like some modern day Prufrock, I was measuring out my gas money in coffee spoons. I understood it then, but I resent it now. It was easy to feel frustrated that I couldn’t buy them the games and bikes their friends had, but what I really couldn’t give them were the rides to nowhere.
We take drives now, but it’s usually one of them behind the wheel. We talk, but it’s the talk of adults. Nobody asks what that yellow crop is because they know it’s canola. I don’t know how they know this, but they do. I marvel at a field of sunflowers and one will say, “Hey Mom, it’s just sunflowers,” and laugh. And I laugh too, but I know at five or six or seven, they would have marvelled as well.
I took the scenic route the other day, an allowance I gave myself, reasoning I was sandwiching work in on both ends. I turned off the navigation system and got lost more than once; I turned around in people’s driveways and wondered how their lives differed from mine; and I still wondered who painted miles and miles of those white fences.
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