It’s a huge wrap; a long line of sausages; a continuum of isolated sensations, with each one of us, mostly, solo, behind the controls, merging, blending, into giant worms slithering up and down and around in loops about the city.
Freeway driving. Many people fear it and so avoid it. It’s the province, they think, of macho truck drivers and snaky guys on motorcycles, delivery vans, and salesmen beating it back to Omaha. “You wouldn’t catch me !” they say, “on I-25, especially at rush hour.”
Ah! But that is the time when the magic of the freeway most takes over.
For a period of about a year some time ago I had to toil a stretch of the feared and infamous Eye25 from, roughly, University Boulevard to 84th Avenue, there and back, there and back.
I tried North Washington a couple of times and it has its charms, because of the vistas of the mountains and the neat truck farms. And, I must admit, being female and no longer young, to more than a little trepidation over driving on the freeway.
There had been at least six accidents on my stretch; I don’t know how bad they were, only felt their impact of stock-still lanes, then the creep-creep of all the segments, suddenly coalesced, in silent understanding of “Something’s happened up ahead,” and then, one sees, after what seems hours but is usually five or ten minutes, the flashing lights and the jaunty ambulance from Denver Health Medical, that somehow, gets over the backs of all the traffic.
But what is there about freeway driving that I like? It’s a little hard to express but I’ll try.
It’s a sensory experience unlike any other. It’s challenging while at the same time, oddly comforting, being part of some mysterious, pulsating “something” so alive, so mercurial, so instant, and dangerous and fluid and utterly machine. At the mercy of. Steel and rubber.
Also, hand and eye, foot. Reflex, but at-rest reflex. Lullng, soothing, semi-automatic. Part of a whole while yet intensely individual.
The stereo on, the air conditioning in summer and the heater in winter. Think one’s own thoughts. There’s time to, on the freeway, for about, in my case, twenty minutes.
And the sights. The backside of the city. Mile High stadium, the graceful white concrete spans and ramps of the other highways that tie into mighty Eye25.
Oh, but, the city. Especially at that time of eve when the rays of the western sun hit it; all the tall towers, seen on a clear day—and there are plenty now—look wonderful.
Sure, one has to stay alert, cautious, quick, nimble, a host of things, to drive for a year daily on the freeway, so as not to be at the end of the clanging siren and the flashing lights. We know all this, we freeway drivers, some of us better than others. It’s a knowledge tucked away, along with all those other sensations I’ve tried to convey.
I guess that’s it, on the freeway. Sensation that you don’t get anywhere else. Even though one of the best is, at journey’s end, wheeling off.
Mary McPhee lives in Denver. EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.
