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Give me my first solid snowfall of the season, and the fact that I have driven a gazillion miles in the most horrendous snow conditions and the most challenging locations matters not at all. The very first snow, I drive as if I were 95 and newly licensed. After that I’m right back to the zippy little driver I have always seen myself as.
Especially now that I am again driving a stick shift. I have been a stick driver from the very first car I owned—a light-blue VW bug with no working reverse and a red hood that looked like a tongue. February 1969 marked the third-largest snowstorm Boston has ever had in its 115 years of recorded weather, and there I was blithely driving into it. My little car was snowed in in motion, and buried by a snowplow with me in it.
That was my first giant-snow, potentially life-threatening, what-are-you-thinking-girl? driving experience. Since then, there have been many, but the only time I have been afraid was last year, driving an automatic the world had convinced me I needed when my 11-year-old sedan was nearing the end of its reliable life.
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“Annaliese, you have to get an automatic. It will be so much easier. Remember that problem you had with your hip?” I had to admit clutching and shifting had been a challenge then.
“Really, Mom, you’ll love it,” my son says. My New York City daughter rarely drives, but when she does, she insists on an automatic.
I was trying to make this car-buying scene a studied one, doing my homework, finding the “right” car for me. My car, bless its soul, was a default car—loss-leader on the lot, no extras, cheap, and financeable. Actually all of my cars have been purchased by default. I have to admit, though, I’ve been pretty lucky.
I recently read about a new Mercedes or BMW or some such swanky wonder-car that is touted for getting 60 mpg on a 3-cylinder engine. My cheap boxy 1990 (note: that’s 18 years ago) Ford Festiva also got 60 miles to the gallon on a 3-cylinder engine and lasted over 300,000 miles, raised three teenage drivers, never required so much as a clutch adjustment, and never ever left the road. Obviously they stopped manufacturing them; otherwise, let me be clear, I’d be driving those suckers until I was a little old lady.
Instead, I buy the automatic with air conditioning and a CD player, and a mind of its own. That’s how I found myself last year crawling up a precipitous, snow-covered hill on Route 15 in Charleston, the world vanishing under my ice-encrusted windshield wipers, wildly sweeping back and forth trying to keep a hole open so that now I could actually see the 18-wheeler coming down the hill when my car swerved into the truck’s lane—and, seconds before impact, suddenly righted itself and trudged on up the hill again, my hands white-knuckled on the wheel, my breath ragged, my chest a tight knot.
Maybe it really had nothing to do with the automatic, but within weeks, I traded it in for the car of my dreams, a silver-gray, stick-shift little hatchback, and now this winter, I am once again whizzing around. I can again slip into highway traffic and pass cars. I can take corners with amazing precision. Instead of my car driving me, I am driving it, and that hill up ahead of me now with the snowflakes accumulating on its black surface? I’m loving it.
Annaliese Jakimides’ work was recently selected for the National Public Radio series This I Believe. Out of 35,000 submissions, approximately 200 have been chosen for broadcast. She is scheduled to read her essay in January.
