Casie Dodd

When forced into one of those icebreaker games, “Two Truths and a Lie,” I always have two easy truths: I’ve visited all the lower continental 48 states, and I once met Mos Def in the French Quarter. The lie changes depending on my mood, but one of those tends to trip people up.

            Growing up as the child of suburban Boomers, traveling had a simultaneously exotic and patriotic appeal. Visiting the national parks alongside tourist chains from Bubba Gump to the Hard Rock Café held a sort of bland fascination. My sense of wonder was rarely cultivated beyond brief stops and scheduled itineraries, so I often spent the long drives between destinations sleeping, listening to music, or reading. My father liked to complain that I was wasting the views with my nose in a book, but it’s hard to say whether I could have done otherwise at the age of twelve.

            Since my family comes from Oklahoma, traveling the country was always relatively simple: just get on an interstate and drive in any direction. But these more formal trips—checking off one region at a time each summer—began the year my older brother finished high school, when I was finishing sixth grade. Our parents took us on an extensive yet speedy 6,000-mile road trip of thirteen states to the west in about as many days. The four of us have unanimously said over the years that that was our favorite trip in terms of sights and our least favorite in terms of our family memories. Within two weeks, we saw the Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Yellowstone, the Tetons, and a whole lot of hills and sky—of all colors and varieties. It’s hard to say what else I’ve forgotten twenty years in the distance. I have little memory of the Pacific Ocean aside from carsickness from weaving along the coast and a vague mental image of the Golden Gate Bridge. My main Grand Canyon story involves my mother’s panic when I climbed down the rocks about fifty yards to get a better picture. I think we ate at a Rainforest Café somewhere. I spent a lot of time in Powell’s. I don’t think I went up the Space Needle.

             We also barely spoke to each other the last day or two of the trip, which was mostly spent driving. Our family is full of a certain kind of love, I guess, but not of the quality that shares a uniform definition of quality time. Despite the stressful conditions of that vacation, at some point the decision was made to turn it into an annual tradition. Over the next several summers, my parents plotted out more road trips: the Central Plains, the Midwest, the Southeast, New England. Each year involved a mix of historic destinations, restaurants that we didn’t have at home, and the endless open road. We went to several baseball stadiums. I saw a lot of Lewis and Clark sites. I thought I was going to die on a giant rollercoaster at Cedar Point.

            I loved those long trips. Despite the fact that some of our “visits” to individual states primarily entailed crossing the state line long enough to get a picture of the “Welcome” sign, I absorbed a lot intuitively about not only how much there is to see in America, but how much it takes to coordinate and sustain independent travel. Almost as soon as I could drive, I spent a lot of afternoons and gas money on long, aimless drives around the outskirts of Tulsa, following state highways and backroads. It’s sort of alarming to be able to look back now at the number of mishaps I experienced my first years of driving because I never seemed quite aware of the potential weight of those moments. On two winter occasions, I slid off icy roads by myself in somewhat secluded areas and needed help from strangers who found me spontaneously. I still don’t know how one man found me spinning my wheels in an isolated ditch; he hooked up a hitch to my Jeep and pulled me out without saying a word, then drove off. Another time, I ran over a barbed-wire fence as I barreled across an open field and apparently did no damage to the car (or the fence? I can’t remember.). Once, I got a flat on the highway entering my hometown at seventy miles an hour and came to an ill-positioned stop just before the exit ramp, waiting helplessly as various men pulled over to check on me until my dad arrived. It seems that suburban drivers ed did little to instill a healthy fear of navigating a vehicle beyond avoiding drunk driving or getting run off the road by a semi-truck passing through town (something that nearly happened my first time on the highway). Those mild brushes with the perils of the road never stopped me from going back out immediately and assuming I’d be fine the next time. The car gave me the semblance of solitude and safety—until it didn’t.

Several years later, a skunk nearly killed me. Now a college student in central Oklahoma, I still used dark, secluded two-lane roads to clear my mind. I can’t say I’d become much more careful as a driver as my experience had increased: solo trips across Texas and all over new-to-me parts of my home state had nurtured my confidence in navigating unfamiliar places and getting myself wherever I needed to go—physically and emotionally. I might have become a little more cautious around icy roads by then, but I’d grown so used to the comforting familiarity of the state highways surrounding my campus that I could drive them largely through muscle memory.

            One night, I took a friend out for a drive as he found himself in a typical, though no less traumatic, relationship crisis. As my attention was primarily focused on reading his emotional energy, I wasn’t prepared for the skunk that appeared in the weak beams of light keeping the way clear. My arms instinctively jerked, the Jeep swerved, and we were flying.

            People say that their lives flash before their eyes when they believe they are in their final moments, but all I can remember is thinking, “People die when this happens.” I think I also yelled SHIT! Whether it was a quick series of them or one long, horrified stream, I’m not sure anymore. Then, just like that, we had landed and were sprawled on the ceiling of my Liberty. My friend was no longer in the passenger seat. At first, all I heard were his moans, and I felt sick. Thankfully, though, he sat up a few moments later in the back seat, and we just sort of stared at each other before the panicked thoughts rushed out. I’m pretty sure one of my first statements was, “My parents are going to kill me.” I remember frantically shuffling through all the debris inside my car to look for my phone. After getting our bearings a little bit, we crawled (literally) out of what used to be the back windshield. It was now a busted window, and the lone rear wiper was swinging back and forth across the void, like a confused metronome.

            Before we were entirely aware of the reality of our situation, we saw more headlights. The cops came and asked what had happened while waiting for the ambulance. They made us sit down while one officer let us use his phone to call our parents. I can’t remember what I told my dad when he answered or if I made coherent sentences, but I know my voice was shaky. The other cops looked around the ditch, located our phones, and gathered what belongings they could find thrown far away from the car.

            So much about that night is fuzzy now; the vividness of near-death experiences doesn’t last as long as the movies make it seem to—or mine didn’t. All that stands out are a few terrified moments. I remember sitting in the grass, cold (it was the beginning of February), staring at what used to be the car I loved. It was my first, and it was dead. The headlights were still on, shining into oblivion while the windshield wiper kept me bound to time. Thump, thump. Silence. Thump, thump. Silence. My friend and I kept apologizing to each other, taking the blame for something that wasn’t exactly anyone’s fault aside from our own general young-adult stupidity. Skunk stench rose behind us in the woods.

            After EMTs arrived and checked us out, they decided to take my friend to the emergency room next to campus because he was complaining about leg pain. I rode in the ambulance with him and waited to make sure he was okay (he was—he’d always had a flair for the dramatic). About four or five in the morning, he told me to go home and get some rest, so I left. The problem was that my keys were still trapped in the ignition and I couldn’t bring myself to wake up my roommates to this news, so I wandered in shock around campus. It’s hard to recall now what I was thinking, if anything concrete. I remember walking as long as I could, hoping that I could distance myself from that night by the number of steps I took. I don’t think I cared much if I was walking in the well-lit areas; what could hurt me now? The dull not-quite-real awareness of danger still lingered as I had—miraculously—survived. Aside from a blackish eye, a bloody shoulder, and some grass and red dirt stains on my clothes, I looked little worse than a student who’d just pulled an all-nighter.

It’s tempting to say that the wreck is what initiated my associations of driving with anxiety, but perhaps that’s not the case. I can also remember, back in the days of long family trips, a sense of unease, like I was failing in some way. I remember wanting to get my brother to talk to me as he brooded silently a few feet away. I remember wondering why my dad always did all of the driving and why I wasn’t allowed to try navigating with the atlas as I counted down the exit numbers to myself. I remember constructing my own world of characters and song lyrics between long car naps, finding connections with people I would never know that seemed stronger in some ways than with the people inside the car. There’s a picture of me sitting inside Grand Central Station in New York City, on the phone with my emotionally abusive boyfriend; I can vaguely recall the sense that I could be more myself talking to him than I could with my dad, who took the picture. Once again, I’d missed out on the views.

            It’s that same sort of ambiguous connection that has made my more adult driving experiences a strange mix of solitude and communion—comfort and fear. After finishing school, I worked the nonprofit circuit for a few years, taking on jobs with a local Meals on Wheels and a county-wide food bank. Both roles sent me driving all over the metro areas of Tulsa and Chicago. Commuting became simultaneously restorative and soul-numbing, depending on the traffic conditions and the encounters I had with clients from day to day. I drove two more cars into the ground through those jobs and had more near run-ins occasionally, yet I don’t think I’ve ever had any serious incidents since that wreck. I learned how to dig out a small sedan from a Chicago snowstorm, how to avoid parking tickets, how to navigate grids created long before automobiles. I became more deeply knowledgeable of my hometown—knowledge I hadn’t known I didn’t have until I drove roads in all sorts of Tulsa neighborhoods. Eventually, public transportation became its own blend of anxiety and excitement as I taught myself to get anywhere or nowhere. When traveling, I’ve always felt more comfortable alone, whether inside my own vehicle or surrounded by strangers.

            Maybe that’s why after becoming a mother, I turned our new family car into a moving crib. When I could no longer take the noise, the neediness, of two tiny children—one still a young-ish toddler, one a newborn—almost every afternoon we went up, down, and off I-40 into the woods. Having now settled in Arkansas, there were new places to explore, new backdrops to fill my headspace with something other than the screams. We drove through the Ozarks and through blink-and-miss-it towns. I learned to plan aimless trips exclusively on small two-lane highways that could keep me from ever having to come to a complete stop. On a good day, I could keep the car moving for two-hour stretches as my children safely burrowed into their car seats with the comforting, familiar sounds of the humming road. I learned to anticipate every likely need, prepared with extra snacks, wipes, or books at an easy one-arm’s reach while the cruise control kept us moving smoothly. I felt empowered, like I could love them better than I’d been taught to love, inside a car or anywhere else.

            But they weren’t always good days. Sometimes, they wouldn’t sleep, and I felt—once again—like a failure. The car filled with nervous, panicked energy as my children looked to me for everything they could possibly need or want—distressed that I could not instantly meet their demands or unnerved that I seemed less than enthusiastic about being there, being with them. I can still hear, too clearly, one hellish afternoon when they would not—could not—stop screaming and at a loss, triggered by my own wounds and anxieties—I screamed back. And kept screaming. I have no memory of how we made it safely off of I-49 back to town; all I could see was rage.

            That sense of shame over being unable to give them what they wanted, or to be who they needed me to be, has infused so many of my experiences behind the wheel long before starting my own family. Those long-ago cross-country trips are such a blur in many ways because I never quite felt like I belonged there. All the dumb little fender-benders and other accidents in high school that I tried to hide from my parents created a cumulative effect where being comfortable inside a car—still finding myself in control of the vehicle—managed to balance out the ongoing reality that it could also be the end of me at any moment. The year after my wreck, I had a recurring nightmare that I was speeding in circles toward a concrete wall; I always woke up just before the crash. I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone about those dreams—the car, whether in my subconscious or in my driveway, has always held my secrets. Why have I continued to enjoy driving as much as I do? Why is the default for my husband to ride in the passenger seat during most of our family trips, whether across town or across state lines? It is one thing to fear the abyss beyond the headlights; it is another to let them shine a light on what needs healing. These days, my children love car rides. They are becoming good passengers. We’ve learned to take turns choosing the music and have developed our own rituals, from Sonic drinks to bookstore trips. No matter the weather—flying past the windows or brewing inside me—I am learning to make sure they always know they belong within easy reach, no matter where we may go.