Windows Down
Drove home in the dark last night from a musical event. Part of the trip was down a country road. Narrow. Winding. Twisty. Full of deer. I was going slow. I had the windows down, too. The woods pressed in around me. I could hear the cicadas, crickets, and frogs singing their nighttime melodies. It would stop as I drove through pasture, start again in the woods.
I don’t often drive with the windows down. Mostly I pass through the world in a cocoon of steel, windows up, with temperature-controlled air blowing out the vents. Cars are no longer engineered to let the outside in, and they’re celebrated for being quiet. They’re designed to help us hurtle through the world on our way to somewhere else, driving as fast as our nerves and the law will allow.
They used to sing that we could see the USA in our Chevrolet, but looking around at 70 miles per hour is dangerous because the car is traveling at 102 feet a second; you go the length of a football field in less than three. The world is mostly a blur. Nothing to see here. That’s too bad, because there’s a lot to see in the in between, and hear, as I discovered last night driving slow with my windows down.