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een right. Everything was costing more than she’d budgeted, and she now feared we
might have to dip into the emergency fund, which she at last revealed was my college
money. All because of a thief. “Gloversville,” she muttered, shaking her head in disgust.
How lucky we were to finally be shut of such an awful, awful place.
WE WERE SCARED, if not nearly as scared as we should have been. It was beyond lunatic to set
out in a vehicle as dubious as the Gray Death with a novice at the wheel, on a twenty-
ve-hundred-mile journey. In the weeks before our departure, I’d gotten on the Thruway
a few times to get used to interstate driving, but usually got o again at the next exit
and returned home. I knew we were budgeted, as indeed we always were, right down to
the last nickel, and it seemed a waste of time and gas to drive to Amsterdam, pay my
toll, and then turn around and drive back. Those short trial runs weren’t a waste,
though. I at least got a sense of how much faster everybody else would be going, that
even eighteen-wheelers were going to blow by me like I was standing still, and that
even a vehicle as sluggish and heavy as the Galaxie could be tugged into their wake. I
also learned to stay in the right-hand lane and to disregard the pissed-o expressions of
impatient drivers who’d get trapped behind me, then roar past with horns blaring and
middle ngers erect. What that relatively benign stretch of Thruway could not prepare
me for, of course, was the white-knuckle trac in and around major cities, nor for the
trailer I’d be towing.
Nor could I imagine that while my plan to poke along in the right lane would work
well enough most of the time, I’d eventually have to change lanes and learn on the y
how much space between cars to allow for both the Death and the trailer. Our rst day
on the road I must’ve nearly caused a half-dozen accidents, and the drivers I imperiled
by unsafe lane changes, their red faces contorted with rage in my side-view mirrors,
retaliated by laying on their horns before swerving in front of me to see how I liked it.
One man I cut o pulled alongside and powered down his window to yell at me, but
then didn’t. I don’t know if it was my age and obvious inexperience or my bewilderedlooking
passenger, but the righteous fury instantly drained out of his face, and I could
read his thoughts clearly. Whoever we were and wherever we were going, we weren’t
going to make it. “What’s wrong with all these people?” my mother kept wondering.
“Why’s everybody so mad at us?” I didn’t have the heart to explain what I was only just
coming to understand myself: we were a genuine menace.
On the morning of the second day, studying the course AAA had charted for us, she
said, “I don’t know why they want us to go around all these cities. The road we’re on
goes straight through. Why burn all that extra gas?” Her question got answered that
afternoon in Indiana when we decided to ignore AAA’s advice to loop around
Indianapolis. Immediately we found ourselves locked in a sea of angry city commuters,
and to my complete surprise the right-hand lane was no longer ideal, because it would
end abruptly, forcing us to exit—or, rather, another driver would have. I, however, had
no intention of getting o for the simple reason that we didn’t want to. Putting on my
left-turn blinker, I simply held my course, in eect creating my own lane, until one of
the drivers in the lane I was determined to merge with, fearing death or