6.24.2011

The sweet pleasures of driving


"I kept my headlights on low beam on foggy nights, suavely navigating through sudden thick blankets of damp, and found quiet places to park in East Blue Hill or out on Naskeag Point. I had become Andy Hardy. Making out in parked cars puts me into the movies or into a thousand cartoons, but what memory presents about these chilly long-gone summer evenings is the first five minutes under way, with my hands at ease on the nubbly wheel, and with the white highway ahead and the gleam looped roadside power wires giving back tanned knees, a sweet nose, and strong chin, just there to my right. Intimacy."

- "Romance," Roger Angell

Source: The Best American Travel Writing, 2004