It is forty-eight degrees Fahrenheit and sweat is dripping down my back. My goggles are steamed up and it is hard to see. I am on a tract of land owned by the railroad, a wooded area in Richmond, Virginia, with discarded beer cans and the occasional homeless encampment commonly referred to as “behind the Martin’s.” Riding a dirt bike on a narrow, meandering trail that is rocky and muddy, with protruding roots and fallen limbs, creek crossings, steep descents, and tight switchbacks, at a mere fifteen miles per hour, I might be taxed to the very limit of my mental ability. Picking lines, making imperceptible decisions of throttle, clutch, steering, braking, and body English, revising them on the fly as surprises arrive at my front wheel—all this demands total concentration. When I push the pace beyond my current level of confidence in response to some challenge of the terrain, it is a leap of faith.
Or perhaps it is a query. I can’t say to what entity this question is addressed—myself? the obscurities of the trail? a loving providence? It is a position of utter exposure to contingency: let’s see how things go. If it goes well over the following seconds (meaning without mishap, maybe even with a glimmer of some new finesse), this faith redeemed is the sweetest vindication I know of. For a moment, I feel existentially justified. In pursuit of that feeling, I once took four trips to the ER over the course of twelve months: two broken ribs, a broken heel, what I feared was a separated tendon (it was a muscle strain), and a case of heat exhaustion.
To ride a motorcycle off-road is in no way typical of the driving that we do most of the time, and therefore perhaps an odd choice of anecdote to open a book that ranges widely over the driving experience. But the heightened feeling of exposure one has on a dirt bike recalls one to a basic truth: we are fragile, embodied beings. There is a certain risk that is inherent in moving around, by whatever means. A responsible person does everything he can to minimize this risk. Yet is risk somehow bound up with humanizing possibilities?
In his exquisite essay about walking the hostile streets of Kingston, Jamaica, as a boy, and then New Orleans as a young man, Garnette Cadogan writes, “When we first learn to walk, the world around us threatens to crash into us. Every step is risky. We train ourselves to walk without crashing by being attentive to our movements, and extra-attentive to the world around us.” As adults, we sometimes walk simply because the street beckons with serendipity; you never know who or what you are going to find when you step out onto an urban sidewalk. “Serendipity, a mentor once told me, is a secular way of speaking of grace; it’s unearned favor. Seen theologically, then, walking is an act of faith. Walking is, after all, interrupted falling.”
The heightened contingency of driving off-road resembles walking in the faith it enacts—that of throwing oneself into the world with hope. The ancient Greeks had a single word to express the condition of being “without a road,” when the way forward is not clear: aporia. It represents a moment pregnant with the arrival of something unlooked for.
These experiences of serendipity and faith feel a bit scarce in contemporary culture, and the language for articulating them seems to be fading from common use. We have a vision of the future in which there would be little scope for such moments; the most authoritative voices in commerce and technology express a determination to eliminate contingency from life as much as possible, and replace it with machine-generated certainty. That’s what automation does, whatever else it may accomplish. Suddenly it is in the realm of mobility that this vision is being expressed. Suddenly driving is a topic that cries out for critical, humanistic inquiry.