Surface Streets

My father’s eyesight, uncorrectable and in no way good, has never legally prevented him from driving. It doesn’t, however, exactly inspire confidence in anyone who’s a passenger in whatever rickety old vehicle he happens to be steering at any particular moment. Curiously, because of the nature of the ailment that afflicts his visual cortex, his sight has actually improved with age. He might have amassed the world’s largest collection of magnifying glasses, all so he’ll have one at hand whenever he has to read or peer closely at something. But hey. I also startle people on the days I’m not wearing my contact lenses, and have to hold a piece of paper two inches from my nose in order to read what it says.

When I was a kid, though, my father needed incredibly thick horn-rimmed spectacles in order to see anything. They were less the thickness of Coke bottles and closer to the density and weight of that industrial-grade glass Toronto’s CN tower uses for its see-through floor, a thousand feet in the air. Even with them, his vision wasn’t sharp. The world to my father has always been, more or less, an impressionistic vista of blurs and indistinct colorful motions. Such a shortcoming meant, though, that whenever he’d drive anywhere, the rest of the family had to do the seeing for him.

A typical drive to the movies would find my mother riding shotgun calling out the status of lights, blocks ahead. My usual backseat duty had to do with spotting cars coming in either direction when we had to make a right or left turn—and often I’d find myself craning my head around to peer out the rear or side windows looking for vehicles in the blind spot when we had to make a quick lane change. If my sister happened to be in the car, she was responsible for spotting pedestrians, bicycles, bouncing balls, and suicidal squirrels that might suddenly dash out in front of us. It was quite an organized operation, really. With my father commanding the wheel and his three subordinates manning the periscopes, turrets, and hatch, we were as well-oiled as a World War I army tank. (And probably about as slow.)

I grew up accepting our family compromise as unremarkable. When I finally went for a license after college, it was something of a cold shock to discover that one driver all by himself was really supposed to be doing all of that navigating and lane changing and squirrel-spotting. The old habit dies hard, too. To this day I’ll automatically bark out “Light’s red” from a distance of roughly a block and a half away whenever I’m in someone’s car. It’s a constant struggle not to stick my neck out the window, then inform the driver that it’s safe to change lanes. I’ve found, over the years, that most people with reasonably good eyesight tend to be annoyed by my ingrained habits. Especially since they have no idea why I’ve appointed myself the seeing-eye dog of the front passenger seat.

Because of my father’s vision problems when I was growing up, our family quite naturally, without thought or discussion, minimized the amount of driving we actually had to do. My parents lived within a mile and a half of the university where they taught. Our schools were relatively close by, our church within walking distance. Our doctors and dentists and piano teachers, our favorite restaurants and movie theaters, all tended to be within two miles or less. More importantly, they were all reachable by surface streets.

We never, ever took the interstates to go from one end of town to the other. Save for either heading down to Atlanta to visit my mom’s family, or up to Baltimore to visit my dad’s, I can’t recall a single time we lightheartedly hopped onto I-95 in Richmond—despite that there’s an on-ramp a mere block and a half from my father’s house. The only time my parents would nervously inch onto I-64 would be for one of our family excursions to Colonial Williamsburg. (As historians, my parents thought it important to maintain yearly passes . . . and use them, occasionally.) Highways were the great forbidden, when I was a kid and later when I learned to drive. They were fast, wild, unpredictable. Even a crowded clown car of lane-change specialists and squirrel-spotters couldn’t have kept up with the insane demands of highway driving, in my parents’ world view.

So we stuck to the surface streets. Over the years, my dad learned where were all the traffic lights and dangerous spots on Northside Richmond’s thoroughfares. He could maintain an accurate mental register of all the places where it wasn’t easy, or expedient, to make a left-hand turn. He knew that some intersections of a busy street like Broad, for example, could be tricky to navigate solo, so he’d track down the less-traveled places to duck off the road.

In my youth I never found it unusual that my father’s conception of the shortest distance between his house and, say, our eye doctor, happened to be through our leafy neighborhood, past the vocational high school, up and over the railroad tracks, under the I-95 overpass, through a maze of one-way twists and turns in an industrial belt, until we emerged by the Krispy Kreme, down Broad Street for two blocks, then in and out through a commercial district, across a vast parking lot, and finally down the long and sparsely-populated winding back road that eventually led to the ophthalmologist.

Dozens of my parents’ routes involved driving by the Lakeside apartment where they originally lived when they moved to Virginia in the early nineteen-sixties. To this day, my father will give me directions to places that are laden with personal landmarks: “Okay, drive down the Boulevard past the Shrine where you saw your puppet shows, past the old office of your pediatrician—remember Dr. Rahal?—until you get to the house of you’re the woman who babysat you until you were four. . . .” Or with the inscrutable incantation, “We’re going to make a U-turn by the store where I bought that pudding your mother used to like before they stopped making it in 1969.” Sometimes it feels as if my father can only get to new places by retracing to those where he began.

Nowadays when I visit, of course, I’ll use the GPS on my phone if I need to travel somewhere unfamiliar in Richmond. Siri will consider my request for directions, laugh lightly at the notion of staying on Richmond’s pleasant two-lane boulevards any longer than necessary, and immediately intone, In five hundred feet, take the exit for I-95 South.

“Can't you tell her to take the surface roads?” my father will ask, trying to suppress his nervous laughter as if Siri can actually hear him. But no, Siri will decree that the freeways are the fastest, shortest, and most logical route available. My father will then go through an elaborate physical charade of bracing himself for impact as I merge onto one of Richmond’s gentle and lightly-traveled highways, using the dash and ceiling and as his anchor. He’s polite, though. He’ll manage to keep himself from saying, “Vance! You're driving like a wild Indian!” more than twice. Once he sees I've somehow managed to steer, accelerate, keep an eye on the cars next to the merge lane, and simultaneously not mow down any squirrels, he'll relax and spend the rest of the ten minutes it takes to get between any two points in Richmond by telling me the route we should have taken.

I became comfortable with freeways during my Michigan years. Detroit’s flat, swampy metro area is largely set up in a simple grid system. If traffic’s heavy along one north-south road, a driver can be assured that there’s just another north-south road a mere block to the east or west. The freeways there act as arteries that let one quickly—outside of rush hour—bypass big sections of the grid to get to a section further away. And since everyday routes in the metro Detroit area can be thirty or more miles in each direction, those freeways come in handy. I kind of miss them.

I say I miss them because, in my dotage, I’ve become something of a reluctant user primarily of surface streets. I-95 sits a half-mile away. A vaguely parallel freeway, the Merritt, runs through this portion of the state alongside 95 to the north. I’m wary, however, about having to travel anywhere on I-95, because between the hours of, oh, five a.m. to midnight, it’s basically an existential parking lot where lost souls languish on their sojourn to an exhaust-filled purgatory. And though it’s just as crowded much of the time, the Merritt fancies itself a ‘parkway’: a verdant green belt through which well-behaved cars are grudgingly allowed to pass. However, I find the Merritt more than a little tense to drive along, because in Connecticut, parkway seems to be the state’s code for when a tree falls on your car on a windy, snowy, or vaguely windy day while you drive along this thing, it sure as hell ain’t our fault.

So that leaves the surface streets. If you were to look at a map of my fair county, you’d notice immediately that due to the state’s rocky and irregular geography, its streets are in no way laid out in anything resembling a grid. No, this region’s streets seem to have been fashioned after the whims of centuries-old Puritans with a grudge against anyone determined to use the Devil’s conveyances instead of their God-given two good feet. Roads amble in the shape of curlicues, or paisleys, or will appear to be going along the north-south axis only suddenly to wrench in a hairpin, two-hundred-and-seventy-degree turn. Broad avenues that seem as if they’d take you to the place you’d really like to go will suddenly peter out. Dead ends abound.

Toward the end of the summer I was driving up the street to the Walgreen’s closest to me when I discovered that the one traffic light between me and my destination was inoperable. No cops were there directing the rush-hour flow of cars. The drivers zooming down the Boston Post Road weren’t paying attention to the malfunctioning light, nor did most of them stop for it as they ought. It took fifteen tense minutes, and one near-accident, for me to make my way from one side of the street to the other. I wasn’t going to drive back through that again, I promised myself once I’d picked up my prescription. I’d simply drive up the side street north, find a side street that would take me to the north-south street a block over, and get home through that intersection, where the light was okay.

Well. It sounded simple, anyway. I headed north for a good half-mile, then three-quarters of a mile, then a mile, fruitlessly looking for a street—any street—that would let me make a right turn. I toured through a section of large estates, traveled across a merrily-bubbling brook, spied some deer, and took a nice circuitous tour around the perimeter of the entire golf course. After a long while I began wondering if I’d yet driven into some other, far-flung state like Vermont. Then finally, roughly twenty-five minutes after I’d left the Walgreen’s parking lot, I eventually emerged exactly one block west of where I’d started.

I considered myself lucky to get there.

As a symptom of my gradual, inevitable metamorphosis into my father, an affinity for surface streets is probably one of the more benign. I try to appreciate it for what it represents: a feeling of knowing one’s place in the community, of so long-lived a familiarity with a locale that its every landmark has a personal story. It’s a symbol of contentment with self and situation, of having no true desire to roam.

Or at least, that’s the quaint fiction I tell myself, as I steel my nerves to drive along sadistically-laid-out streets for a half hour, in order simply to get to a destination a mere mile away.