Someplace That I Used to Know

Gotye has a song entitled "Somebody that I Used to Know."  The meaning of the song can be inferred from the title, though it is a pretty good song about a break-up.  If you are either a bit rusty on what heartbreak feels like, or are looking for a soundtrack to wallow in your post relationship pain, Pete Yorn and Scarlet Johansson's Break Up, Dashboard Confessional, Math and Physics Club, or my favorite, For Emma, Forever Ago, by Bon Iver are good additions to your playlist.

I recently stumbled upon my ex-wife's Facebook page.  I had the idea that there are elements of divorce that are probably like watching your child grow up, but without the joy.  I saw pictures of Caroline wearing clothes that I bought for her, doing activities that I shared with her, and living out fantasies that we had dreamed together.  Yet, I no longer knew her.  As Dan Savage said in a piece on This American Life, "There are somethings a mother is entitled to not know" (or something along those lines), children, seem to also grow into people that parents used to know.  I am sure my parents remember teaching me to do things, that I now do without them.  I imagine, it is heartbreaking to no longer be as important.  That said, for a parent, that was always the intention.  The parent wants their child to become their own person, and the tragedy is when they fail to do that, not when they do.  In divorce, the whole point at the beginning was to never grow apart.  Unfortunately, in relationships, we never dream of the beautiful life our lovers will have after us.  Thus, when I spot a picture of Caroline, cooking dinner on the tailgate of a truck in the brown Arc'Teryx vest I bought her, or in the field in the green jacket my salary covered for her to ski across the Juneau Icefield, I miss what could have been.

Other relationships are different.  I know two people who were in a relationship, that was secret throughout, and has now been stricken from the record.  Much more inline with the Gotye song than anything I feel like I have experienced.  Yet, an ended relationship, no matter what, becomes people who used to know each other, no matter how much evidence there was.  My marriage has $5000 worth of photo-documentation, and these two share a single photograph, but for everyone involved, we no longer know the person we loved.

I have other relationships that have ended.  Relationships with things, and places.  I have owned three cars.  One I sold to my parents.  One is with Caroline.  One was totaled when the transmission ceased when an ex was driving it (after our relationship ended).  These cars, I no longer know.  Yet, so much of who I am, and what I have done has been done in or with these cars, and in my parent's Aerostar.  These cars, like ex-lovers, are only things that I used to know.

Another relationship that ends in life is with where we live.  These relationships, are often much more inline with Gotye's song, than my relationships with people.  When I live in a place, it seems to follow a predictable pattern.  It begins with hope.  I hope, with every ability I have to hope, that this new place will be good.  That this relationship will blossom.  Well... I don't think I can honestly keep that on the record.  I am too skeptical to be that hopeful, and often times, I know, before I arrive, that where I am moving is going to be a terrible place to live.  Maybe I am skeptically hopeful that the place I am moving will not be as bad as I think it will be.

After hope, or whatever it is, comes dislike.  The place is either not as good as I hoped for, or is as bad as expected.  Either way, I dislike it, and start dreaming of escape.  I sink into despair over the state of my relationship with my surroundings.  I try to revive our relationship, and with every failed attempt to reignite the spark that was never there, I resent the place I am living more.  Eventually, I "dump" the town I am living in, and I admit that I am glad it is over.

Yet, I miss it.  What I miss though, is not there.  I have been back to Socorro since leaving, once.  There was the Arc'Teryx vest, but I didn't know the place anymore.  It was said by someone in Socorro, that it "grows on you like a fungus," yet I may have become immune.  The fungus did not flair up when I went back, because the Socorro I knew, existed only during that time.  The Caroline I was married to, existed only in that time.  The car may still exist, but the bond I had with it has expired.

Moving out is comparatively unique.  You must stop, in the moment when it is ending, and deconstruct the relationship.  Room by room, box by box, item by item, your relationship is removed.  Erased, meticulously, so that on threat of financial penalty (via the security deposit), no trace of the relationship can ever be found.  The existence of the relationship is bound exclusively in memory.  Memory too, eventually fades, and the building, town, and people become someplace that I used to know.

Team Driving

The first car I owned was a Ford Ranger.  There was nothing fancy about the vehicle, which one might say about many cars, but this truck literally had no options.  It had a radio and a heater.  The radio was seriously just a radio, no cassette, no CD, just an AM/FM radio.  The heater did have a dial with blue and red as if to suggest you could select the temperature of the air coming out of the vents, but the temperature of the air was controlled more by engine temperature than the position of the dial.  With a cold engine the air blew cold, with a hot engine the air blew hot or melt the sun hot.  In just the right atmospheric conditions, one could manipulate the dial in such a way to make the air temperature comfortable.  Though occupants were probably still not truly comfortable.

Inevitably, no matter what the outside or inside temperature, driver and passenger(s) alike would eventually become sticky, sweaty and gross wherever skin or clothes touched the slick, flat, vinyl bench seat.  This was not, in fact, the worst part of this seat.  While uncomfortable, the seat presented a far larger problem for the person in the passenger seat.  This truck was so basic in its trim, that Ford had declined to even include a grab handle anywhere for the passenger to latch onto for cornering.  When driving became spirited, a passenger could claw at the door, try to wedge against the dash, or, the most common approach, resign themselves to be flopped about the passenger seat, kept from tangling with the steering wheel only by the locking seat belt that would start ratcheting them tighter against the smooth, slick vinyl their sweat was accumulating against.  This flopping was really only a problem with two occupants. 

When three people went for a ride in the cab, there was no flopping.  The cab might have been five feet wide, but having slept in the cab on multiple occasions, I would guess that a better estimate of the dimensions of the cab would be an L, four feet wide, three feet tall and three feet long.  Three was, without a doubt, a crowd.  More could be accommodated, on a river trip I once had four in the cab, and eleven in the bed with  three boats and enough PFDs, paddles, and helmets for the crew.  Clown car antics were not well suited for long drives though, so three people could wedge in for drives to the local crag, or across New Mexico.

On one of these drives, it was discovered that everyone was far more comfortable if the person in the middle "seat," straddled the stick shift, one foot on the driver's side, on on the passenger's.  When Heidi or Corinne would ride in the middle this was no problem, as their leg made a nice armrest for me, and the intrusion upon their personal space was not the biggest issue.  They were both also small, put three people my size in the cab, and it was tighter.  Put three men abreast in the truck, and second and fourth could be uncomfortable shifts.  I could drive without these two gears, but with a full house and a four-cylinder engine, it made for rough shifting with lots of revs and slow acceleration.

At some point someone came up with a solution.  The person in the middle would do the shifting!  It seemed so obvious.  The driver would say shift up or down (usually obvious to the copilot), and they would shift when the clutch was depressed.  Eventually, this method evolved into the person in the middle also working the gas.  It was team driving, and it worked with anyone familiar with driving a clutch.  Driver and co-driver had to communicate when to clutch.  It also took a couple of practice shifts to get used to the rate each person applied the gas and let out the clutch, but you would be driving along smoothly soon enough.

One night, driving home from climbing at Spook Canyon, Travis, Egypt and I were engaged in this driving style.  We realized that the person on the far right had no job, which seemed not in the spirit of team driving. Far from any of the controls there was only one job that this person could perform, navigator.

At some point growing up, probably after watching Sneakers, my father told my brother and I that in college, they let their blind friend drive on the back roads of Pullman.  They would give their friend clock directions to turn the steering wheel, and he would drive the car.  The navigator in the Ranger would have a boring job, as we all knew the way, unless we took a lesson from my father's antics, and the driver were blind.

None of us were blind, so, the driver closed their eyes, and had control of the steering, clutch and brake.  The co-driver had the shifting and accelerator.  The navigator gave steering, and, most importantly, braking directions.  We took turns at the various roles.

We started, as I recall, with me driving, Egypt shifting, and Travis navigating.  To my memory, Travis was not suited to navigation, as the more impending the doom, the less instruction, and more giggling he did.  I recall opening my eyes to a fit of laughter, and Egypt's expletives, headed directly for a 30 inch drop into an arroyo.  This may have been the motivation for rotating roles.

I think I was shifting and Egypt was navigating when the next issue was encountered.  The steering on a Ford Ranger cannot be described as tight.  There was not any play in the steering, but tight corners required turning the wheel at least 180°.  The steering directions had to be amended, on the fly, to include clock directions like "three o'clock left," or rotating the wheel 270° counterclockwise.  This might make sense reading it here, but remember this was driving at night, on a windy gravel road, with no prior agreement, and lots of natural hazards provided by the arroyo that ran along side, or sometimes on the road.  Calling out, "three o'clock left" with a shrill sense of urgency does not make a great deal of sense.  I think I swore, the natural reaction of the shifter, who could only make the vehicle go faster, and watch danger coming.

When we made it back to the highway, the navigator position was dropped for reasons of public safety, but we kept team driving.  I think the experience made us better at team driving, like some sort of crazy trust and team building exercise for adults.  If any security clearance background checkers or wives are reading this, I think two things are important here, as soon as speeds were involved that could really injure someone, we stopped doing the really dangerous part of this nonsense.  Secondly, I trust these two people so much that I will let one of them close their eyes and drive the car, while the other gives directions so as not to injure any of us, or destroy my most valuable possession.

As a non sequitur, it is said that students from top tier institutions like Harvard and Stanford are being trained not for the positions of tomorrow, but to create the positions of tomorrow.  If that, whatever it means, is true, than the lower and middle class students at New Mexico School of Mines are not being trained to create the positions of tomorrow, but rather how to solve the problems of today.  Facebook is an amazing revolution in procrastination, but the minds that created team driving are engineering energy sources, and programming electronic security.  We may not have changed the world, but damn if we did not have a good time in the desert solving problems that didn't really exist.