My senior year of college, in my expository writing class, we read Wendell Berry’s essay “An Entrance to the Woods,” in which Berry describes the serenity and joys of an experience walking and camping in the woods. The essay is often touted as exemplary nature writing: Berry meticulously describes the air, the water, the texture of the ground. He spends a lot of words condemning driving and flying in favor of walking — a slow, deliberate activity that he argues is more true to human nature than mechanical transportation. He describes feeling a tinge of melancholy when he’s alone in the woods:
That sense of the past is probably one reason for the melancholy that I feel. But I know that there are other reasons.
One is that, although I am here in body, my mind and my nerves too are not yet altogether here. We seem to grant to our high-speed roads and our airlines the rather thoughtless assumption that people can change places as rapidly as their bodies can be transported.
[…]
The landscape has been subdued so that one may drive over it at seventy miles per hour without any concession whatsoever to one’s whereabouts. One might as well be flying. Though one is in Kentucky one is not experiencing Kentucky; one is experiencing the highway, which might be in nearly any hill country east of the Mississippi.
At the time, I was immediately peeved. I was 21 and annoyed by anything that I believed was too close to being cliché. (In that class we also read George Saunders’ essay “The Braindead Megaphone,” which I rolled my eyes at and said in class that it reminded me too much of American Idiot and the Bush-era moral panic around cable TV. But Saunders was probably right.) I thought Berry had discounted the highway too easily. It depended on where you were driving, I thought, and what the highway looked like. Driving up to school, I used to always take the longer way, which wound through small towns in Pennsylvania, along the Susquehanna river. It took me right by the town shops and schools and hospitals. I’ve now done the drive so many times that there are little cues I use as milestones: The big letter sign in Maryland that says nothing but “GOOD SOIL FARM LLC . COM,” the solar farm my friend’s dad apparently helped spearhead, the strip clubs along the Susquehanna river, the anti-Biden billboards, the Little League Hall of Fame museum, something called Reptileland, and a massive BBQ joint on a big hill that towers over the road and river.
Since taking that class, I think about Berry’s essay every time I make the drive. At the time, I wrote an essay about how Berry was misguided in his critique of highways. He was conflating the linearity of highways with the speed of their transportation, I thought. He had a problem with the way highways cut through land, not in the existence of cars as a form of transportation. I compared his descriptions of highways to a scene from the movie Cars:
In Cars, anthropomorphic cars Lightning McQueen and Sally Carrera look over the natural scenery surrounding the fictional town of Radiator Springs, and then back down to the interstate highway forcefully cutting through the hills. “They’re driving right by they don’t even know what they’re missing!” McQueen exclaims. Carrera explains, “Back then cars came across the country a whole different way,” moving “with the land” as “it rose, it fell, it curved.” “Cars didn’t drive on it to make great time,” she says with a sigh. “They drove on it to have a great time.”
The moral of the scene is clear, and speed demon McQueen says it outright:“It’s kinda nice to slow down every once in a while.” The scene has less action than most others in the film; it’s just two talking heads speaking at a slow pace, recalling the past. Appealing to the sensibilities of the past is, of course, a common trope in popular media, and the YouTube comments on the Cars clip verify its effect: “This scene has a bigger message to it,” writes residentevilfreakk55, “we try to make life easier by creating new technology but we are eroding away the interaction we have with each other.” Brandon Xing comments, “It reminds me of the part of American culture that's been lost.…People weren't in a rush to get somewhere.…Sad that so much of that is gone now.”1
The longer way I would take up to school was like the old route 66 in Cars. Meandering roads curving like rivers and balancing on mountainside cliffs. I don’t take the longer way as much anymore, though I still look forward to the drive. For six hours, I am hurdling myself forward at 70 miles per hour with nothing but Waze and a Spotify playlist of podcasts to rival my own thoughts. I daydream and think of jokes and talk to myself. I imitate the accents of podcast hosts. There are no texts to check, no emails, no difficult conversations, no need to fill the time. I’m busy.
I think, again, of Wendell Berry. Was he wrong to suggest that there was something perverse about moving so fast? I wonder if I enjoy the drive because of what I see or because of what I don’t. I find myself compelled to remember funny little signs and sights from the road, though by the time I arrive at my destination I’ve forgotten them. I asked Siri to record a voice memo last time I drove over, so I could remember a “BE PREPARED TO STOP” sign where someone had snarkily cut off the “TO STOP” part. I want to pull over and take pictures, to actually see the reptiles at Reptileland or eat at Skeeter’s Pit BBQ. But by the time I’ve thought to do it, it’s too late.
Last week as we made the drive back from a family friend’s house in the Shenandoah Valley, my dad told me he hates driving at night, because the point of a road trip is to see the country. Is there anything more American than that? Driving as seeing? To be going so fast that you see a little bit, and then say “well that’s quite enough?” There’s so much to see and not enough time, so driving through will have to do. If I were to stop and take pictures at every funny city name I saw on a road sign or eat at every little outlet along the road, it would add two hours to my drive. I’m not in a rush to get back to school, but I am in a bit of a hurry.
So instead, I stop at Sheetz to pee and get gas because it’s fast and it’s what I know. Sometimes, I’ve noticed, I stop at Sheetz because I’m bored.
some things:
On my emo “last” drive back from school (well before I knew I’d be coming back for grad school), I did actually stop to take pictures, and they’re so stupid. One is of the river, the other is of a highway sign for a place called “Opossumtown,” which I thought was hilarious.
I started watching Severance yesterday. I’ve only seen 2 episodes but it’s so good. Would someone talk about it with me? Please?
My therapist is literally moving to a different state and won’t accept my insurance anymore I’m throwing up and crying and sobbing. it’s been real
I had a nice break back at home with my family, even though I was fighting with my dad for most of the time <3 :D xD
idk, I think that’s all! see you next time :^)
PM
What I missed at the time was that in Cars the cars had no choice but to drive. To a car, driving is just walking, right?