While I grew up in Wisconsin, my father’s parents retired to Florida. Accordingly, nearly every year of my childhood, my family would drive in August from Wisconsin to Florida in order to spend a week with my grandparents. This annual trip was something I looked forward to all year long, and these trips were a formative experience for me.
My parents argued and fought verbally frequently. However, during our annual trips we were all the best versions of ourselves, and generally speaking they were the most harmonious experiences we had as a family. My family loved to travel. Ironically, when I arrived at the airport to fly home when my father was dying, I instinctually got excited as I usually do, anytime I set foot in an airport. Given my father’s love of traveling, I think he would have understood.
These annual car trips were formative in other ways as well. I grew up in an era before the ubiquity of screens. A one, two, or three-day car trip from Wisconsin to Florida requires somewhat of an internal game. It requires a person to be able to occupy themselves: to converse, read, listen to music, observe, or think. Learning this practice from a young age has served me well. I find that I rarely feel bored.
Another way in which these trips were formative relates to how I began to think of the nature of time. Our perception of time is fluid. There are times when time seems to move quickly, and other times it seems to move slowly. There is also the seemly contradictory experience in which hours may seem to fly by while the days into weeks seem to drag (or vice versa).
Driving through the flat landscapes such as Indiana presents a situation, in which the horizon seems still and unchanging. Meanwhile, the middle ground changes, but at a snail’s pace. However, telephone poles whip by a a good clip, and if you look directly down at the pavement outside the car, the motion is dizzying. That is the nature of time. At any given moment time can change to any of these perspectives, based upon our emotions and environment, potentially creating an illusion of time being both rapid and slow.
During my teen years, my relationship to drives to Florida strengthened. When I was fifteen years old, my Grandmother had a stroke, and was moved to a nursing home, dying a year later. As a result, my Grandfather was living alone. At this time, if my father had a few days off from his job as a high school teacher, he and I would drive straight down to Florida without a break, stay with Grandpa as long as we could, and drive straight back. It was often just the two of us in the car, and we bonded very closely on these trips. Once I had my driver’s license, he and I would alternate driving, switching ever three to four hours. To this day, I feel closest to my Dad when I am driving long distances.