Where I Was From

The long and winding road, 1997

It is a singular delight to drive through a summer afternoon with the radio loud. A responsive vehicle, a small steering wheel, accelerating into bends in the road--pleasures all. The hum of an engine rapidly turning makes my heart beat faster and stirs up a feeling of cinematic excitement inside of me: I pick my own backdrop with the turns I make, I choose my own soundtrack with the radio dial, I make my own film featuring me as the main character in the driver's seat.

Birmingham, June 2008

I don't know whether it's because I'm from Detroit that I love cars and driving as much as I do. It could be, too, that it's a natural by-product of coming of age in a suburb where all of my first experiences of independence came from getting my driver's license, and where, on the weekends, when there were no more movies to watch and no more lolling around people's houses to be done, we might simply pile into a car and drive.

The music would be loud and some would sing along, not trying to carry the tune necessarily, but trying to get all the lyrics and emotions and volume just right. It seems to me now that we mainly wanted to escape to other times, to other places, or to other people. And I guess we thought we could reach them by car.

The soundtrack was generally set to Tom Petty, the Beatles, the Doors, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and to Bob Dylan on occasion....We drove up and down the same circuit of streets, the winding, tree-lined ones mainly, with names like Lone Pine, Vaughan, and Orchard Ridge, where each curve in the road settled us more deeply into our wordless reveries.

Bloomfield Hills Sky, November 2004

Sometimes, too, we had a destination--a darkened park or a churchyard where we would do things too juvenile by daylight but legitimized by the night, like kick a ball around or swing on a swing set.

I don't know what others thought about during our drives, but I do know that I was busy memorizing the moment as I always do; I narrate in my thoughts the life I'm living, string together in words the actions I live as I live them [below the cars roar past on the FDR, the elevator dings in the hall, my fingertips strike the keyboard]. Later when I would find myself alone in my room, I would record my impressions of the evening: "...moonlit tunnel through the trees on Orchard Ridge, Last Dance with MaryJane vibrating in my chest. Winter in the November air, a smell of brown leaves, the warm leather seat. All of us staring out the windows, quiet."

In August I turned right on Lone Pine and remembered this:

I used to ride around with the first boy I ever loved in the passenger seat of his boxy SUV. It had buff leather seats, soft and worn like a baseball glove, smelling faintly always of his cologne. My memories of him in high school and of him in his car are inseparable; it seems to me now that it was there more than anywhere else that we talked, argued, and shared things. One evening, looking up through the maple and ash and poplar trees, we drove around with the sun roof open, searching for a clearing through which we could see the full moon. We found ourselves at Cranbrook, where there was dew on the grass by the lake, and where the earth exhaled its summer breath of sun-warmed soil and of pine. There we found a clearing in the trees, and the moonlight slipped around my shoulders like a gauzy veil. But I was too cold, so we returned to the car to talk.

Under the Pines at Cranbrook, late afternoon, 2005 (?)

Of course I find all of this again in my thoughts, the light and the air, the ground covered with pine-needles, but mostly it is the driving I remember: kids in a car, singing Tom Petty into a lamp-less street or chasing down the moon. We were all so young, full of hopes and dreams, and were anxious to be on the road, any road. It's not the destination I remember now, but all of us on the road together.

The Killers sang out from a local radio station when I was driving through these memories this summer, "Sometimes you close your eyes and see the place where you used to live when you were young." I listened to the music, and to my tires on the pavement, and realized that sometimes you can drive right into that place with eyes wide open. Maybe all you need is a car.

Roughly made little clips of driving in South East Michigan and more photos of the road:

Harmon, November 2005

Baldwin Road sous neige, sometime between 2005 and 2008

To Ann Arbor from Detroit, fall 2005.