CAR LOVE, OR LOVE CAR

Car love depends on who is in the car.

Of course we all love a car we can pack to the rafters and drive down the road.

But it’s not about what’s in there, it’s who.

After 4100 miles of togetherness I’ve got nominations.

If you’ve ever been on a roadtrip that felt never ending and all you wanted to do was go home after the first day?

This isn’t for you.

But, if you have someone you spend time with who likes taking off, and they’d go with or without you?

That narrows things down, don’t you think?

 

I’m the least ‘take-off’ guy I know. Here’s why:

I took off, landed, took off again, landed, and came back both times.

Instead of, “Oooo I want to see New York City soooo bad. I can feel the energy of the city in my bones from here,” why not move there and get a job?

Then you see New York paycheck to paycheck, girlfriend to girlfriend, street by street.

Go ahead. Tell us how it all worked out later.

Or buy a plane ticket, make hotel reservations, see a show, go to a museum, and call it good.

That’s the city from the outside, not the inside.

To know a place, to know whether you like it, love it, or hate it, you need to see it from the inside.

It’s not for everybody. A fantasy-city balloon might pop.

So take it another direction. Get inside the earth.

 

Everything Has A Beginning, A Start

The whole thing started with a family plan:

Rent a house with a pool in a warm place big enough for everyone.

But schedules and timing and remnants of the last big outing trimmed the travel plan to two.

Rent a big place just for two? Who does that?

Instead, new plans included the love car, the untested on the road love car.

The first part of the test included the dog and I.

I’ve never traveled with animals and this particular animal’s longest trip was Lebanon to Tigard as a new puppy.

Over time we’ve learned her cues. I hoped the cues worked in the car.

We set off, the dog and I. Three days later we picked up my fly-into-Albuquerque wife.

Me: Honey, would you mind sitting in back?

Wife: In back? The backseat?

Me: The dog really likes the front. I’ll roll the window down for you and give you treats.

 

The Love Car

Car love is having a dependable ride.

A love car is having dependable people.

 

Besides the big gaps in the dirt road, there was washboard, the chattering cover you need to find the right speed on to avoid getting shook hard.

I had the wheel, wife in the passenger seat, dog in back.

Eventually my wife decided she could drive better than me.

She said she could, then she proved it.

 

Wife: You’re hitting every bump. Have you tried pushing the TRAIL button?

Me: No. And don’t push it.

Wife: It says in the manual it changes the suspension from stiff highway to smooth bumpy road. This is bumpy.

Me: Does it say anything about a recall? That pushing the TRAIL button might fry the electronics and leave us out here for dead?

 

She took the wheel, pushed the TRAIL button, and drove the Monument Valley floor like a Baja racer.

From then on we were set. I’d drive on pavement, she’d drive on bad roads.

We turned into a well-oiled machine of logging long miles and unpacking and packing the car.

Neither one of us wanted to quit early.

If you’ve ever been a car with a head case who flips out about everything, who doesn’t really want to be there, you know how important teamwork is.

 

2

 

Imagine sharing a long ride in a car with an amateur geologist, one who took one geology class called ‘Rocks For Jocks.’

It’s a special class for college athletes who need a science credit to graduate.

The guys came in on the first day of class, their girlfriends covered for them until mid-terms and finals.

I was in there every day as a non-traditional student finishing a bachelors in History at 39 years old.

Why? The professor was relatable.

 

GeoProf: This is my last class of my academic career. I started just as the plate tectonics became accepted science.

(Plate tectonics came to be accepted by geoscientists after seafloor spreading was validated in the mid-to-late 1960s.)

GP: Some of my colleagues couldn’t accept plate tectonics and had to fine new jobs. I won’t be finding a new job after this term. I’m done. Done with the department politics, done with propping up a pretentious program, done with the condescension.

Am I babysitting dumb athletes so they can stay eligible to beat their brains in? Or am I seeding knowledge that will grow with each road-cut revealing the secrets of the hidden earth, each canyon striped with depositional flooding.

There’s a canyon in Utah that flooded with seawater over twenty-nine times leaving a salt layer two miles thick. Two miles. That’s eight times around the track in a straight line kind of two miles for you track people.

Every time you look out the car window at the passing landscape you’ll know how it happened. That’s the goal of this class. Call it active geology. After this class you may bore your friends, passengers, and loved ones with rock talk.

Or they may rise to the occasion and join you in the wonder of passing time, long, long, stretches of time, together. Millions and millions of years.

 

Luckily my wife is a scientist interested in the scientific process.

She’s also a wife with a geology-positive husband.

Somehow we worked it out for the better of all, especially the dog.