The Perfect Drive
It's amazing what varied ingredients come together to make a truly enjoyable drive from one place to another, reminding us of the old wisdom that it's not the destination that matters but the journey. This morning, for example, I got a later start and didn't get rolling until 9:15 or so. The time of day is the first ingredient. Between 9 and 10 everybody has already arrived at work and nobody has gone to lunch yet, so the roads are pretty clear. Luck is another factor. I picked a different route to work, all the way down Steele to 26th, then left onto Holgate, then right onto 17th ave. Take the big 17th swing onto Powell and then veer off onto 12th when everybody else is heading over the bridge. I caught all the right lights and seemed to just float along. Good music is very important. I was just turning onto 17th avenue when Modest Mouse' Fire It Up came on the CD player. Add in a splash of sleep deprivation, just a little, not too much, and it all comes together to transform the driving experience into an enjoyable passage through man-made corridors of mellow groove. I stopped at a cross walk to let a cyclist roll through. He nodded and I nodded back. We both got it. Swinging in a wide arc from 17th onto Powell felt like banking a confident zeppelin, stretching the boundaries of physics for the sake of artistic form. The intersection of Burnside, Sandy, and 12th shed its usual skin of nightmarish bad planning and became a crossroads where travelers from all corners of reality waited patiently for their turn to move on. Those of us stopped at the red light marveled at the pageant of orderly vehicular flow. Then, bathed in delicious green light, we flowed away ourselves. Float on, fellow travelers, float on.