Four winds

Sep 29, 04 | 9:38 pm

Montana-Idaho-Washington

I hated driving an automatic transmission in the mountains.

The mountains were very steep, there was no room for error, and I felt like I had no control over the speed of the car at all. The last time I spent any quality time driving in the mountains was 1987 through 1991, when I lived in California. And I drove a standard transmission Jeep, so I have no clue if the BMW I was driving today is par for the automatic course, or if there’s some problem with the car, or if I just don’t know how to drive an automatic. I suspect the latter.

I had no way to downshift short of riding the brakes, the natural transmission drag fades to nothing when you’re dealing with inclines like that. No amount of messing with the gas pedal was getting that car into a lower gear. And having zero experience driving an automatic in the mountains I was having a lot of trouble gauging whether or not the car was struggling unduly. And, the car would shift up and down going out of curves, effectively driving me batshit crazy.

When I shot around the bend on the state line between Montana and Idaho, the world just fell away. I'm a city girl. I was terrified.

It was good, having this time between the east coast and the west; to fully grasp the enormity of what I have done, for America is a big country. 3000 miles is so very far from what used to be home. I thought about Tommy today, when Franklin’s Tower came up on the rotation in my iPod. I thought about what he wrote in my high school yearbook, and I looked out the window at the horses flying by at 90 miles an hour and I cried hard.