By David Clear. Scituate, Rhode Island, USA
It would be in August of 1977 that I was once more driving, beginning my career now in earnest after my share of buses, bicycles and shared rides.
I left Hollywood, Florida, in an Oldsmobile Starfire and arrived some ten days later in Los Angeles, California. The map puts it at 2,723 miles, but surely it was a bit longer, given our side trip to the Grand Canyon.
Driving around Los Angeles at 22 years old felt like I was finally in the big time. I would pick up my girlfriend, who was working on Vermont Avenue, and we would drive up to Griffith Park for lunch. Then I would usually drive to the Santa Monica pier and often a little part of the Pacific Coast Highway. I didn’t need to audition to be in a movie, just driving in L.A. made me feel like I was already.
Of course, the traffic can get wearisome, so one weekend we took a ride to Sonora, California. About 700 miles round trip. And then on New Year’s Eve, 1978, made the desert crossing of some 600 miles roundtrip to Las Vegas.
I can actually add approximately another 300 miles to that month because after returning to our jobs and apartment in Los Angeles, we soon decided to move to Las Vegas based on the highly unsuccessful New Year’s trip. Plainly, more time on site was needed, if only to affirm I was much better at driving than gambling.
And so, within a few months, my girlfriend and I mutually decided the sensible thing to do would be to go back to Rhode Island and work for my dad’s construction company. She did insist on seeing a relative on the way. Sort of out of the way.
Las Vegas to McAllen, Texas, to Lincoln, Rhode Island: 3,687 miles. My girlfriend, having grown up in Florida, after having experienced one New England winter, let me know immediately by spring we would be back on the road.
Lincoln, Rhode Island, to Hollywood, Florida, closing the loop: 1,453 miles. There would be no more driving trips from 1979-1982. After about 9000 miles in 3 years, surely over 10,000 if long distance work commuting within Florida was factored in, the Starfire, along with my relationship, went nova and was no more.
I didn’t need to audition to be in a movie — just driving in L.A. made me feel like I was already.
I was back home in Rhode Island, working for my dad’s construction company. I had a Pontiac Grand Prix now. And I began corresponding with a new girlfriend who happened to live in upstate New York — 830 miles away roundtrip. After which I went back and moved in with her.
Upstate New York is even more notorious for its winters than New England. I had a plan to attend an environmental college in Prescott, Arizona. 2,250 miles plus, given that we took the northern route because it was summer and got to see the site of the Battle of the Little Big Horn — where a distant relative of mine perished with Custer.
Looking up at the monument with his/my last name on it, I thought how he, like me, must have also been too restless to stay and work, in his case, the family farm in Ohio.
If he’d had access to cars and highways, he might have ventured even farther than he did.
The Pontiac Grand Prix made it to Prescott and died in Prescott. When I returned to Rhode Island in 1988, I would be demoted to a Toyota.
Let me add at this point I am not a car guy — I have never changed oil or spark plugs or talked about horsepower or any such particulars. I think my immediate fascination and attraction for the wide-open spaces of the west, and the desire to move around frequently and lengthily by driving, was a past life memory of life as a member of one of the nomadic Plains tribes.
And when I visited Australia in 1992, I became familiar with the concept of ‘the walkabout.’
Driving, for me, always had a meditative, spiritual component. Beginning now in 1996, it would move into high gear.
