I spent eleven and a half hours in the car with my dad yesterday, driving from Grosse Pointe to Edina. It’s a trip we’ve made every year for the past nine years, and by now I recognize various landmarks along the route: the quarry, the weird-shaped casino, the church with high spires that look vaguely like Quidditch goal posts. It takes a long time to get that kind of familiarity with the landscape, and I’m starting to wonder about all that time I’ve lost in the process. After all, with nearly twelve-hour trips twice a year (one going there, one going back), that’s almost a full twenty-four hour day spent staring blankly at the landscape.
It’s weird the kind of cultural capital that roadtrips have built up in American culture, given how boring they are. I mean, there’s a whole genre of novels and films built around an activity that amounts to sitting motionlessly while you wait to arrive somewhere. Maybe it’s not surprising, if art imitates life. After all, one of my earliest memories is watching the flat midwestern landscape whizz by as my family drove a straight vertical line up and down the country, from our home in Texas to a remote lake in Canada and back again. And I bet that most people who grew up in the U.S. has a similar early memory of long car rides. But even if it’s something that so many people experience, why is it something that we want to remember and celebrate? No one writes books or makes movies about waiting in line at the doctor’s office or lying still in bed with your eyes closed as you try to fall asleep.
I guess you’re not just staring out the window when you’re on car trips, though the range of activities is still pretty limited. You can drive, sleep, listen to an audiobook*, stop at a gas station to use the bathroom, talk, and that’s about it. Not exactly thrilling stuff.
All the same, I’ve always sort of liked road trips. Sometimes I’ve even enjoyed them more than the places they’ve taken us to. For a long time I thought that it was just because I liked listening to audiobooks, but I realized yesterday that I even get a strange kind of enjoyment in the quiet hours, where it’s nothing but sitting in silence and watching the landscape.
My dad’s giving a guest-sermon this Sunday, and to pass the time he asked me to read the scripture he’ll preach on and talk to him about it. The passage was a tough one, 2 Peter 3:8-18. Essentially, it’s trying to figure out how to get on with life on earth when Jesus still hasn’t come back yet, and concludes that you have to be patient and not get fed up with God for taking so long. Given that this period of waiting has lasted two thousand years, I’m not exactly holding my breath for The Second Coming these days, so it’s hard to relate to. If I were anywhere else, I might have given up, or given some snappy answer to make it seem like I understood it right away. But we were in the car, we had hours between us and no better way to fill them, so I stared out at the low rolling hills with tall grass half-covered in snow, and just let it sit with me. After a couple minutes of pondering, there’s one passage that really stood out, “With the Lord, a thousand years are like a day, and a day is like a thousand years.” I’d heard that line quoted quite a bit before, and I’d always written it off as just another way to describe God’s infinite knowledge, but now I really took the time to wonder about it. How could there be a God who can take the long view of history, seeing human history as the blinking light that it is, while at the same time understanding and feeling every passing moment in that car ride, knowing every landmark better than I do? You can’t understand the enormity of God’s knowledge either way, let alone hold the duality of it in your mind at once. But, when you’re in a car ride you don’t have anything better to do, so you might as well try.
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* On our car ride we listened to Michelle Obama’s memoir Becoming. It was very good over all, and really made me miss having such a relatable but intelligent presidential family (unlike the incomprehensible wealth and endless stupidity of the Trumps).
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