Road Trippin'

During the typically endless Northeast Ohio winter, thinking of a clear, sunny, warm summer afternoon while the frigid wind batters at the screen door is a kind of masochistic exercise, largely because such weather feels so impossibly far away. Even when we are treated to that rare summer-like May, and our hopes rise that maybe we're getting an extra early start to the best part of the year, we usually have to endure a cool, clammy, damp early June in a kind of final cruel tease before we are (temporarily) back in paradise once again.

Yesterday, Summer 2009 finally arrived, a perfectly-timed warm and dry end to a week's worth of humid, inclement unpleasantness. For the first time in far too many years, I could think of no better way to celebrate than to head out on a little exploratory road trip in the new MeMobile. While my plan had initially been for a for a full-on all-afternoon excursion, a cluttered schedule coupled with many of the main roads of Lake County being presently ripped to shreds forced me to instead wait out the evening rush before heading east down Route 2, past Painesville and into the rolling countryside.

The idea of going on these aimless trips again has been in the back of my head ever since I started going to get my E-checks done in Painesville Township, rather than off Lost Nation road in Willoughby. After one visit a couple of years ago, the leisurely drive back home (detailed here) took me back to better times when driving wasn't so much a dry, functional part of the day as one of the highlights of the day itself. A time when you didn't have to be anywhere at any particular time, and you could just pick a direction and, well, go.

Even from when I was a kid, traveling by car to my relatives or on camping excursions to Upper Michigan was something that was almost as much of an adventure as the destination itself (save for that soul-sucking 300 mile stretch of Interstate 80 across northern Pennsylvania, anyway). One of my many obsessions as a youngster was maps and roads, and I was always flipping through Dad's old hardbound atlas he kept from his college years, occasionally furling my brow at places that had changed names (or phonetical spellings) over the previous fifteen years. Dad would also bring home newer maps from business trips domestic and foreign. and I would literally spend hours poring over them, memorizing names, locations, routes, mileages, trying to imagine what these places looked like and generally marveling at the sheer scale of the American transportation system and, ultimately, the world itself. I suppose all of this made my later love affair with astronomy that much more of an obvious next leap forward, but I digress ...

As a teenager, I was delighted to find that my love of driving simply for the sake of driving was shared by the friends I'd fallen in with in high school, and we spent many Friday nights piling into Brian's car and embarking on so-called "Psychedelic Mystery Drives," which was basically 4 of us tooling around the sticks in the dead of night listening to music that had absolutely nothing whatsoever in common with real, actual "psychedelia," but nevertheless sustained a kind of eerie, dreamlike atmosphere that made these trips something I looked forward to every weekend.

Though college inevitably scuttled the regularity of these group night drives, I never lost my zest for just taking off and tooling around whenever the mood struck. To be quite honest, that mood struck pretty frequently in the years just after graduation, as home was not a fun place to be on pretty much any given night. In time, these drives became a convenient way of escaping a bad situation for a few precious hours until things died down (i.e., everyone was asleep). It also helped that gas was cheap, time was a luxury and the conversation was good. Whether it was Brian or Rob or Mike being in town for a weekend or summer or Kris being as bored and restless (and perhaps as anxious to get away from home) as I was, I was rarely at a loss for company when the urge struck to hit the road.

On the rare nights when I was alone, I made the discovery that many who are passionate about music already knew: there is something special about listening to an album end-to-end in a car with nothing else around to divert your attention away from the experience. With the volume up, the landscape unfolding before you, and your own solitude to free your inhibitions, you can sing along, pound the steering wheel in time to the beat, and savor each moment in a fashion that can only be approximated at home with a good pair of studio headphones and the lights down low. I'd say that maybe half of my favorite albums of all time became my favorite albums in exactly this way.

A funny thing: the last time I drove a car with a working cassette tape drive was 1993 (and I don't think that particular unit had worked properly since 1991). When I took over the payments on the Fiero from my brother in 1994, I also stepped into the world of CD car audio, and right around that same time, the night drives stopped.

As fashionable as it might be these days, I'm not going to blame the end of this era on the compact disc (though having a CD player in my car instantly wiped out the need to constantly make new driving mix-tapes to listen to): there were a lot of external factors at work by now that gradually wound this part of my life to a close. First and foremost, my close circle of friends had begun to gradually widen as Rob, Kris and Mike either got married or simply drifted away from the area. Also, I was in a pretty delicate state, still getting over the total meltdown of my first serious relationship the previous fall, and was thus far more motivated to get drunk and numb than zip around the outskirts of Chardon at 2 AM.

My home life had also settled down considerably over the previous two years, thus the constant impetus to get the hell away before another fight broke out had been pretty much erased. I had also met a girl and while this would ultimately prove a rather stupid mistake (and what is referred to as a "bounce-back" fling), things were going pretty well and being with her took up most of the free-time I once had set aside for myself. By the summer of 1994, the only long drive I made with any regularity was down to Brian's apartment in Cuyahoga Falls: an hour-long jaunt that I'd made so many times that it felt more like driving to downtown Cleveland instead of nearly all the way to Akron.

A few years later, the Fiero and I parted ways, and for over a decade afterward, I got by with nothing but a radio in whatever car I was driving. Actually, I didn't really listen to anything at all: I'd basically abandoned FM radio in disgust at the end of 1998, and save for a few weeks after September 11 when I had news radio going 24/7 or listening to late innings of Indians games during my drive home the last couple of years, driving back and forth to work became my "quiet time": the one point in the day where I don't have music going around me. For many years, I didn't mind the near-silence at all, but after I got the Saturn, I started to realize I was missing it.

One of the last things I worried about when deciding whether or not to buy The Saturn was the sound system. All that mattered to me at the time was that it had a working AM radio for baseball games: no consideration was given to music at all. The fact that the Saturn came with a cassette deck as well as a radio was more amusing to me than anything else, since I'd been selling used cassettes for years to customers who had purchased used cars only to discover that they had cassette decks in the dash rather than CD players. After years of smiling in commiseration at their tales, I was now one of them.

With the Saturn now legal and with a shiny new muffler installed to quiet it down, I got the itch to try out the sound system, and thus had a fun few days reacquainting myself with the second shittiest audio platform of the modern era: the prerecorded cassette. God, I didn't really miss these things: portability and convenience aside, they were on the whole a terrible waste of money to anyone who actually enjoyed listening to records multiple times in decent fidelity. I grabbed a half dozen oldie moldie faves from the used bins at work, and discovered over the following week that only two of them actually sound well-balanced, spacious and clear, while the others range between noticeably tinny or have those spots where you hear that awful, warbly, half-eaten submerged gurgle that indicates damage (or repetitive wear) to the tape surface.

While the cassette drive still worked beautifully and the heads sounded like they were in good shape, most of the Saturn's speakers sounded like someone partially fried them playing something loud and bassy. That problem was dealt with by simply flattening the low end of the EQ, but that action resulted in the prerecorded tapes, mixed and mastered in the treble-and-reverb crazed late 1980s, sounding even more unpleasantly shrill than before.
After weeding out the sonic weaklings (sorry, The Church, A-Ha and Julee Cruise, but back to the Record Den shelves you go), I spent some time rummaging around the office closet this afternoon and found a box full of old TDK SA-90s, mostly new wave-themed compilation tapes I'd made over a dozen years ago. I selected a few, filled up a box of old time traveling music, and took my drive, stopping on the way to take some pictures of an old railroad bridge near State Route 84, just east of Painesville.

Today, in effect, was all about getting in touch with an old habit that didn't so much "die hard" as "go dormant for fifteen or so years." It's great to be able to do this again: even after so much time passed and so much has changed, it's still a lot of fun and a great way to unwind and relax in a world that sometimes seems increasingly hostile to both.