Tuesday Slice: The passenger side

One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, 

"What if I had never seen this before? 

What if I knew I would never see it again?"

--Rachel Carson

As an undergraduate, I prided myself on my long-distance driving skills.  College was here in Austin and home was El Paso, five hundred eighty-seven miles due west.  I inherited the family car when they moved to Germany halfway through my freshman year, and I made the drive each holiday, spring and semester break to spend time with my high school friends and my grandparents, who were long-term house-sitting for us.

As the driver, I had to pay attention to the road conditions, look out for deer, gauge food, bathroom, and fuel stops.  After the second or third trip, the latter became routine--Isaack's Restaurant in Junction, the McDonald's in Fort Stockton, a quick on-and-off the highway gas station in Van Horn.  The focus was on getting there, sometimes in thirteen hours, sometimes in nine.  The trip was already long, so there was little incentive to sightsee.

Fast forward a few years, and I married a man who prefers to do the driving.  Now I get to open my eyes to a passenger's view of the highway.  On a trip this past weekend, I saw

• a three hundred sixty degree view of the sky, filled with gray rainless clouds
• twin calves with unusual, matching markings
• a gray-haired, scruffy, paunch-bellied man on a tasselled motorcycle, no helmet, no gear, just a brown cigarette dangling from his lips as he rode
• a caravan of cars from Minnesota, loaded with people and furniture
• vehicles from twenty-three different states (license plate game)
• the Fort Worth skyline, and planes flying in and out of the DFW airport
• cars of all shapes, sizes, and conditions
• fields of wildflowers in orange, yellow, and white
• tall wild grass waving in the wind
• billboards and church spires, dilapidated barns, almost-abandoned shopping malls

There's a good chance I'll get to see many of these things again, with an undergraduate son going to school up that road.  I'll enjoy the view from the passenger's side while I can.