To Everything, Turn, Turn

“Dad, how far would you have to turn the wheel to go around that corner?” asked Nicholas, my nine-year-old, as we ran an errand in the GTO.

Wow.  Talk about déjà vu, I thought.  My mind flashed back four decades. . .

“Dad, how far would you have to turn the steering wheel to go around that corner?” I asked my father as the two of us sat in an idling car outside a store.  Mom was inside running an errand.  It was the early 1970s, and I’d have been about 10.

I was very curious about the whole act of driving.  In my child’s mind, I imagined that when a driver approached a corner, it was necessary to know in advance just how much steering was required to negotiate the turn: That’s a right-hand turn, so I must turn the wheel three-quarters of the way around.  The way I reckoned, it was all about pre-calculated actions and results: You moved your foot this far on the gas pedal to get to such-and-such a speed; you pushed the brake this hard to stop before you got to the stop sign. 

Maneuvering a car, therefore, was virtually an act of genius.  I was flabbergasted that Dad did it so easily.

Dad—never one to use more words than absolutely necessary—didn’t address any of that.  He merely looked at the turn I was pointing at, laid a finger alongside a spoke of the steering wheel, and pushed.  “Oh, about that much,” he said, as the ridiculously over-boosted 70s-era power steering allowed him to rotate the wheel about 90 degrees.  I shook my head, amazed that he could catalog all of these innumerable strategies in his brain, retrieving just the right one for just the right circumstance. . .

“Dad?  How far?” queried Nicholas once again.  I returned to the present.  Since the car was moving, I couldn’t use my father’s “about this much” answer.  Instead, I told Nicholas to watch the wheel as I made the right-hand turn.  Once I’d completed it, Nicholas said, “How did you know it was going to be that far?”

Oh, how funny:  Nicholas was thinking of driving just as I had as a child!  As inputs and outputs that you had to plot out in advance!  This was my chance to really explain it as I wished it had been explained to me; to disabuse him at this tender age of a misconception I’d carried until well after I had my first driver’s license.  My mind began to whirr.

“It’s not like that, Nick,” I said.  Unlike my father, I was going to use words.  “You’re not really thinking consciously, ‘Oh, I’m gonna turn the wheel this far.’  You just—well, you get to the turn, start turning the wheel . . . and from there on you just turn however much you need to in order to get it done.”

Nick was listening, so I kept going.

“Everything about driving is like that,” I continued.  “You do whatever you need to do for the circumstances.  You react to the situation, have a look at the results you’re getting, and then you either do more or less until you achieve what you want to achieve.”  I took a breath and tried to sum up:  “You just . . . you go do it.  You can’t really know in advance how much of this or that you’re gonna need until you’re into the situation.”

At that point, I believe, Nicholas started in with the questions.  I suspect I answered them, but I must’ve been on autopilot.  A thought suddenly preoccupied me.

In that moment, I’d stumbled on something else I wish I’d understood better when I was that tentative, contemplative boy:  That life itself is something you can’t plot out in advance; that you can’t wait until you have all the answers before you budge; that you have to go out and do it, make adjustments as you go, and keep adjusting until you get the results you want.  Ultimately, steering and braking and accelerating only have meaning within the context of moving.

I suppose that’ll be a talk I’ll have with my boys another day.