The sweltering heat of our apartment puts us on edge.
I’m six years old, sitting at the counter. My mother, wearing a white cotton nightgown, is standing in the kitchen, cracking ice cubes out of a plastic tray.
I’m looking up at her, trying to tell her something, but she stares at me blankly.
“Mom,” I say. “Are you listening?”
Her eyes glaze over. Her center of gravity tips.
She falls onto the yellow linoleum, dropping the tray and knocking a glass off the counter. The glass shatters. Ice cubes skitter across the floor.
Her body convulses, shaking, shaking, shaking.
I call an ambulance, which transports her to the emergency room, where the doctor reports her epilepsy to the DMV. They immediately revoke her license.
She never drives a car again.
My mother would die two years later from complications related to lupus. In the time between her first grand mal seizure and her death, I watched her lose much of her independence. My mother had a big personality—she wore silk blouses and full makeup nearly every day and possessed a fierce sense of justice. Her illness not only prevented her from doing many things she loved—mainly working as a head paralegal at a top law firm—but the epilepsy also prevented her from traveling anywhere not on the city bus route. She had to rely on others to take us to the grocery store, to the doctor’s office, to the movie theater. Though Mom found ways to get around some of the limitations, I watched her struggle with living life on her own terms. Her illness was closing in on her, preventing her from living expansively. Her life, she felt, was shrinking.
I also felt confined. Because I couldn’t go anywhere myself, I used books to push against the limits of my life—and I found myself leaning on them even more after my mother’s death to navigate my grief. Yet something was missing in the books that were either assigned at school or recommended to me. Adventure seemed only to belong to men. Sal Paradise. Huck Finn. Raoul Duke. Men were having adventures, leading messy lives, getting into trouble, and finding themselves on the open road. Not girls.
I hungered for a road narrative that was representative of me, for a book that might lay out a map for my own life. When I was sixteen, a girlfriend from my high school creative-writing class recommended Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays. I read the novel in one sitting, exhilarated by the passages of Maria Wyeth, the novel’s heroine, driving alone, endlessly circling through the infinite circuits of Los Angeles highways: the 405, the 101, I-5. She uses the time both to process her life and to get her mind off her ghosts. It’s not what I would call an uplifting novel. Maria isn’t a particularly good person. The ending isn’t redemptive.
That’s not Didion’s point. Not even close.
It’s that you have to live life on your own terms. You have to be in control of the cards. No one else can play your hand. You have to play the game for yourself.
Once I got my own driver’s license and the keys to a used Volkswagen, I was almost never home. Dad trusted me not to get into too much trouble. I pushed the limits of where I could drive and back in one day, with only a few maps crumpled under the passenger seat to use for navigation, sometimes going as far as my home in Bakersfield to Los Angeles and back before curfew.
It only made sense to go away for college when I graduated high school. Dad wanted me to enroll at the local community college, to stay at home. I wanted to skip town. I wanted to get away from anything that was familiar, anything that was safe.
When I was seventeen, I moved to Wyoming for college. After graduation, I returned to California for a few years, then packed up my car and drove myself to Texas for graduate school. My family and friends expressed their concerns. Was I aware of what could happen to me? There were so many things to fear on the open road: breaking down, blowing out a tire, losing or crashing the car, getting lost, getting assaulted. Since childhood, I had been conditioned to feel that going out by myself for any extended period of time was a threat simply due to my gender.
So I stopped asking for permission or approval. I just drove.
In my twenty-eight years, I’ve moved across the country four times and have taken countless road trips on my own. I’ve driven alone across the Mojave Desert at sunrise and seen the technicolor lights of Las Vegas at night, curving around Utah’s red rock hoodoos, speeding through the High Plains at eighty miles an hour, watching thunderheads race across the big blue sky. I’ve driven across West Texas at night, cutting across vast landscapes of nothing and everything, a blanket of stars twinkling overhead. I’ve struggled through Reno during a snowstorm and stopped in Marana, Arizona, where the asphalt melted the bottom of my shoes.
I’ve baptized myself with the great holy dirt of America.
My family’s fears? Most of them happened at one time or another. I’ve broken down, run out of money, run out of gas, been stopped at the border, gotten speeding tickets, and gotten lost. But I also found my way and found myself. I’ve had to face myself, listen to my thoughts, and figure out what I’m driving away from and what I’m driving toward. I stopped looking at these obstacles as something to fear. Instead, I simply began to see the fear as a challenge to overcome, as an essential part of not only my life on the road but also my life’s journey.
MEN WERE HAVING ADVENTURES, LEADING MESSY LIVES, GETTING INTO TROUBLE, AND FINDING THEMSELVES ON THE OPEN ROAD. NOT GIRLS.
As a young woman, I was taught to fear the world around me. We teach our girls not to take risks to keep them safe. Traveling alone as a woman is dangerous. It’s also radical.
The ability to travel and to idle, to wonder and to wander, is necessary to lead an independent life. In A Room of Her Own, Virginia Woolf famously argues that every woman should have a little money and space for herself: “I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.”
I say every woman should have a car (or bike or bus pass or MetroCard) of her own.