Lehe: Driving ourselves mad

Two weeks ago, I was driving on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and I saw a sign that said… Two weeks ago, I was driving on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and I saw a sign that said “Breezewood.” I always stop at the Breezewood service plaza, so I pulled over. Going down the exit ramp, I felt a knot in my stomach as I realized I had pulled off at the Breezewood exit. Instead of a friendly fast-food oasis, it was a toll plaza that loomed before me. I checked my card. The charge was $4.10, but I only had $2.50, since I had planned to get my toll fare from the ATM at Breezewood.

I told the man at the tollbooth, “I’m from Alabama. I’ve never been on the turnpike before. I heard there would be a gas station center at Breezewood, and I was gonna get some money there, but right now I don’t have any.”

The best thing about being from Alabama is that no one ever thinks, “That guy should have known better.” No one ever expects people from Alabama to know anything.

The man in the tollbooth nodded glumly and ordered me to back up, turn around and get back on the road, which I would have done in the first place if I’d known it was legal. The car behind me had to back up, too, and an old lady glared at me from her shiny blue Buick.

Driving is depressing.

The main way driving brings on depression is by making me feel stupid. I’m not self-loathing: I only feel stupid whenever I mess up something really obvious — tasks that a competent adult should be able to do right 999 out of 1000 times. But driving gives me so many thousands of chances to make one-in-a-thousand blunders that I fail on the order of the toll plaza catastrophe several times per year.

In contrast, I don’t pride myself on the countless other driving tasks I didn’t screw up: the wrong exits bypassed, the turns signaled, the brakes applied under a policeman’s radar and the hundreds of picture-perfect parallel parks. I don’t feel good about those times, because I didn’t realize screwing up was even a possibility in those situations. I didn’t even realize they were “situations.”

Most drivers deal with this extremely wide distribution of minor risks by fabricating total lies about why things suddenly fall apart. In a situation like my bungled toll plaza attempt, the average driver would curse the sign for not being clear enough. He might even yell at the toll plaza worker. The reasoning is pretty straightforward:

I am a competent adult.

This seems like a situation that no competent adult should have screwed up.

Therefore, the situation is not as it seems. Something or someone made me screw up.

Driving is also depressing because even circumstances outside your fail-prone hands are unpredictable. It doesn’t hurt your head to drive 45 minutes. In fact, when cars first came out, people would go for long drives in the country just because they liked cruising around for hours and hours with their kids. Rather, it hurts your head to drive 45 minutes when you thought it would only take 20 minutes.

Why would a 20-minute trip take 45 minutes? What could go wrong?

Actually, I am always amazed at everything that can go wrong, because it is impossible to imagine ahead of time 99 percent of the things that can go wrong on a 10-mile trip. I’ll run into construction. I’ll get lost in a totally familiar neighborhood. I’ll get behind a garbage truck on a narrow road. The turn lane will be blocked, so I’ll pull into a parking lot to turn around, but it will turn out that the parking lot doesn’t have room to turn around, so I’ll drive to the end of the lot thinking I see an exit, but instead of an exit, it will be a small curb that blends visually with the concrete.

Hell, one time, back in Alabama, I drove right into a flood, and my girlfriend and I had to swim out of the windows. That really happened. And the only comfort — the only affirmation that driving is way complicated — that I’ve ever received was from the tow truck driver who pulled my car out of the flood. He reassured me this type of thing happens all the time.

E-mail Lewis at ljl10@pitt.edu.