At the end of our session, my daughter logged how much time we had spent – an hour – and then had to log how many miles we had gone.
“Do you think it was 5?” she asked. “Three?” she added, laughing. “How am I going to explain I drove 3 miles in a whole hour?”
Part of the requirements of getting her license is to have 45 hours of driving experience with a supervising adult. Thank goodness there isn’t a minimum requirement of distance.
The next night when we had another driving lesson, I had the foresight to pay attention to the odometer both before and after our hour. She had covered almost 2 miles in all that time.
However, if the odometer measured up and down as well as forward, it would have a higher number on it.
She is one of the rare teenagers out there learning to drive straight gear – but before you can drive it anywhere, you have to learn how to get the car going!
For the previous several months, to get the idea well planted in her head so that it would come to her automatically, I showed her with hand gestures: The hands are held out in front, fingers straight. The left hand, representing the clutch, comes up as gradually as the right hand, representing the gas pedal, goes down. They meet in the middle and keep going to the opposite.
Before she took the wheel the first time, she asked me what happens if you brake without using the clutch.
“I don’t know,” I said, as I was driving along Fayette Street and approaching Moss. “I don’t ever do that, but let’s see.”
I braked with no clutch, and the car heaved and shuddered thunderously to a stop. It startled me and scared her.
“Well, that’s what happens,” I said. “Now you won’t be so startled if it happens to you.”
We pulled over, switched seats, and it was her turn to try.
“Ca-CHUNG!” Goes the car thunderously on her attempt to start it, lurching forward and falling back abruptly.
She turns the ignition off, takes a deep breath, puts the key back in and turns it again.
“Ca-CHUNG!” again.
Again.
Again.
Another time, with a screech from deep inside the engine added.
The girl is unflappable. She will get this done.
“Ease!” I insist, waving my left hand upward as the right hand goes downward. “Clutch and gas! Clutch and gas! Do it!”
She rolls her eyes. “I KNOW about the hands, Mama. That doesn’t help.”
I continue to smile at her pointedly, and she sighs, and puts her hands out in front of her and waves the left one upward and the right one downward. “Clutch up and gas down,” she mutters.
She turns on the ignition again.
I get an idea: I use the light of my phone (we are doubling up, taking a nighttime lesson to get in her required hours of nighttime driving, which means, since we are doing this in summer, that we are up way past bedtime) and look at her feet. She is not moving them as gradually and evenly as the demonstrating hands. She takes off the clutch abruptly as she presses the gas pedal. The car starts – then heaves and stops.
I explain my findings, that her feet were not moving up and down as gradually as her hands, the lesson in all this, were doing. The feet needed to do like the lesson-hands.
She tried again, this time actually moving the feet at the speed and coordination of the lesson-hands, and it worked.
The car eased forward, and we drove across an uptown parking lot. Victory shone from her eyes.
She had spent all year cheerfully telling me that this year, when we go on our annual summer vacation to the Adirondack Mountains, she’d do half the driving. I spent all year telling her it’s not that easy, and anyway, I wouldn’t allow her to drive on Highway 81 until she is at least 26 years old.
As we were puttering along uptown Martinsville going no higher than 15 miles an hour in second gear, she broke it to me gently: “I’m not going to help drive to the mountains this year, but maybe next year.”
“You’re doing great,” I said.
This girl is growing up in the age of the development of the driverless vehicle. I may never have one in my lifetime – though I expect that I will live to see the day when they are in common use, and perhaps even outnumber cars that people drive.
In her lifetime of the driverless vehicle, and other technologies that most of us cannot imagine, she’ll be one of those rare ones who not only know how to drive, but can drive a straight gear.
