Learning to Drive
Editorial Article Written by Lesley Lorenz
Nanaimo Magazine, April 2007
A butter yellow 1972 Super Beetle was subjected to my sweet sixteen earnest intentions to figure out how to aim myself at a location and arrive there alive. If you’ve ever been in a beetle, you know that the boot upfront, engine in the rear and bizarre heating system meant that the vehicle was constantly steamed up and having to push itself uphill, usually in first gear (yes a standard).
We lived on a cul de sac, 2 blocks long. I drove around the final road-hockey curve dozens of times before my mother decided I should learn to stop and start on a hill. We pulled up into the neighbour’s driveway, and stopped. I could not get the car to move forward without stalling, nor could I seem to find reverse. My mom told me to move into the passenger’s seat and she stepped out of the car to come around and drive. However, I moved over while the car was in neutral and it started to roll backwards down the hill. Mom chased me, yelling and gesticulating wildly as to how to use the parking brake and me screaming that I didn’t know what the parking brake was while trying to decide whether I should open the door and bail or attempt to pull at all the controls I could reach.
The car rolled across the empty street and into the vacant lot where a swarm of salmonberry bushes halted my backward progress. My mom walked home and poured herself a hefty gin and tonic. To this day, more than twenty-five years later, she still holds onto the passenger door handle, white knuckled and pressing the imaginary brakes on her side of the car whenever she hitches a ride with me.
My Dad was therefore conscripted to finish teaching me to drive. However, Dad was too nervous to watch, so he would lie down in the back seat. I remember precariously bumping up over and back down the edge of an off-ramp island, and my Dad murmuring from the back seat “I don’t even want to know what that was.” However, Dad stuck with his duty and helped me secure a licence, shouting from his aft quarters valuable driving tips like “Kids on bikes are the stupidest things on earth – stay away from them.”
Imagine – in only two short years I will be teaching my daughter to drive, although I think that regulations have been upgraded to qualify that the instructor must be in the front seat, or at least in the car and not running beside it screaming.
© Lesley Lorenz