My mother always accused men who drove fast of being simple-minded. One such man was my father. To be clear, Mom didn’t think Dad was stupid, quite the opposite in fact, but she did believe that whenever he got behind the wheel of a car, all of his God-given talents — his creativity, his charisma, the innate magnetism with which he drew anyone and everyone into his orbit — dropped by the wayside, all so that he could go vroom-vroom.
I adored Dad’s driving ability. As his only son, and his only child if I didn’t take into account the half-sister I had somewhere in Germany, I adored many things about my father, an Austrian mountain man who’d chased my American mother back to this country. We lived in a backwater New Hampshire ski town, where Dad had been hired to run the ski school. He was something of a small-town celeb, and I was his biggest fan. I liked the way Dad skied. I liked how he rode a bike. I liked the way he sharpened the blue-black blade of a scythe as he stood in the sun, his big silver hair shiny in the alpine light, his six-foot-four frame bent as he canted his hip into the steep slope belonging to the velvety fields above the Tyrolean farm on which we spent our summers in the 1980s.
But above all else, I liked the way Dad drove a car. Fast, sure, but more importantly, how he did so — like everything in his life — with a sizable dose of flair. Dad didn’t drive a car so much as he commanded it, conducted it even. In his big, thick-fingered paws, the gear shift wasn’t moved so much as snapped into position. He jerked the steering wheel, shifted in his seat, wrung every possible ounce of performance from the mediocre cars he could afford — Chevys and Volkswagens and secondhand Subarus.
The cars of his youth, that blissful period of his life that had percolated with so much potential, at least as I understood it, were far superior machines and thus the subjects of many of his stories. Dad owned a series of VW Beetles. There was the MG belonging to a wealthy friend — a convertible that the two of them once flipped over after having hit a woodpile at high speed. And of course there was Dad’s beloved Citroën 2CV that he’d taken over the Swiss border and up the twisty Engadine Valley en route to St. Moritz, where — as a ski instructor — he’d met the Brooklyn girl who would one day become my mother.
“I still know every turn by heart,” he would say, referring to the road bisecting his beloved Engadine, a place his mind would drift back to again and again. He made myths of other roads, too. Switzerland’s Fluela Pass, the symbolic gateway to his Austrian home and on whose lunar summit he would park the car to get out and kiss the ground, a ritual that made my mother roll her eyes every time he did it. And, a bit farther south of the Fluela, just over the Italian border, the serpentine Stelvio, where my grandmother — my Noni — was born in a farmhouse beside one of the 48 hairpin turns. Even the road to Dad’s hometown, too humdrum by Tyrolean standards to merit a name, felt legendary, with tunnels blasted clean out of the rock and a right-hand shoulder that plunged thousands of feet into a riverbed below. A vertigo-inducing tangle of pavement to anyone but my father, who took every turn with a rote nonchalance, Mom — inured by years of Dad’s driving — talking away in the front seat, me jet-lagged and nearly lulled to sleep in the back as the car rocked this way and that.
When I got older, and my mother stopped going to Austria as much, I had the privilege of sitting shotgun next to my father on these very same roads, giving me a front-row seat to his performances. These took place mostly in cars that didn’t belong to us. Opels we’d rent at the airport in Zurich. A Golf GTI belonging to a friend’s son. A too-good-to-be-true forest green Mercedes 280SE that my father purchased one summer on a whim, as if preparing for some prosperous future. I remember running my hands along the perforated leather of its cream-colored seats, and how later that summer, the car disappeared just as mysteriously as it had materialized.
It wasn’t so much about the cars themselves as it was what my father did with them. Sitting next to him, the alpine roads spread out before me beyond the windshield, I felt his driving more than I saw it; divined the dance Dad did. How he worked whatever car was in our possession round each bend, drifting always into the other lane so that he could swoop back and cut the apex of each turn, just like a ski racer, the car sinking into its struts, Dad downshifting and tapping the brakes. Then he was back on the gas and gripping the gearshift like a wizard poised to cast his next spell.
America Was a Dead End
American roads required no such sorcery. Straight, boring, entirely devoid of imagination, as were — according to Dad — their drivers.
“I’d like to see him on a mountain road,” my father would grumble anytime he obeyed the speed limit and someone had the audacity to ride his ass.
This was one of the many ironies belonging to my father, a man who rode everyone’s ass. He would get within mere inches of whatever unlucky Sunday driver was gingerly tooling down the road in front of him, and angrily flick his headlights, signaling to the driver to pull aside so that he might plow by, as if we were on the Autobahn.
But Dad also loved the solidarity of flicking his lights at oncoming cars anytime a cop was in the vicinity. He would do this for miles on end, all with the same devotion with which he broke speed limits. In those days, Dad seemed to possess some sixth sense alerting him to the precise whereabouts of staked-out cops. Mostly he did this in a black Jetta GL, a brand new car he’d picked up from a dealership down in Concord. I was enamored with the vehicle. How the black paint job gleamed like Darth Vader’s helmet when it caught the sun. The soft grey interior. It had a Blaupunkt stereo with a Beatles or Hendrix tape perpetually shoved inside, and on its rear bumper Dad had stuck a circular “A” for Austria sticker that seemed to signal class and exoticism. He had a vanity plate, too. “ALPWV,” it said, a portmanteau that stood for all the conflict in my father’s life: the abandoned mountains of his home that he ached for with the pain of a phantom limb, and the initials of the New Hampshire resort — Waterville Valley — that we lived in; a place Dad often treated like a penal colony in which he’d somehow washed up.
What Dad didn’t pick up, had never picked up in fact, was an American driver’s license. Like all details in his life, having an American driver’s license was simply a formality Dad didn’t think he needed to concern himself with. “My license is international,” he would say, referring to his Austrian one in a somewhat haughty way.
My mother didn’t share his confidence. “Do you know what would happen if he had an accident?” she would say to me in private, her blue eyes big and wide and full of worry. “Or, God forbid, hurt someone? He would be deported.”
Dad’s lack of a New Hampshire license exacerbated one of my most consistent fears: that he would one day leave us in favor of returning home. When my parents fought, or when Dad would be in one of his bad moods, which could last a week or more, it was a common refrain. “Your mother and you are a team against me,” he would say. “Maybe I should just go back to Austria.”
“With Mom and me?” I would say.
“We’ll see” was his common reply.
I could sense Dad’s moods just by the way he pulled into the driveway at the end of a workday. We lived off a quiet street, with a bluestone driveway in the shape of an upside down letter “L,” all of which formed a chicane that Dad — should he be in high spirits — took like a Formula 1 driver. If his mood had soured, however, he would lurch in, the black Jetta as ominous as a hearse, and get out of his car slowly, ignoring me from where I stood expectant on the front porch, hoping that my presence alone might divert the storm that was surely coming.
I always worried that my father might leave us like he had left his first family, an ex-wife and a daughter I vaguely knew about. And so mom’s worry, that Dad might get deported were he ever to be pulled over without an American license, became my worry. It charged all our drives together in this country, gave them stakes. I would be Dad’s lookout for cops hidden in the trees like some side-of-the-road snipers wielding radar guns. Radar detectors were things my father spoke about with wonder, but like all expensive new technology it seemed out of our reach, just like fancy cars.
My father loved expensive fast cars, pined for them. On Sunday mornings, the two of us would watch Formula 1 races on TV and marvel at the Ferraris and the McLarens driven by Prost and Senna. Dad spoke of a friend who had put a 911 engine in a souped-up VW Beetle all so that he could leave unsuspecting BMWs and Benzes in the dust along the Autobahn. Once, in Montreal, Dad and I happened upon a silver two-door Mercedes 500SL in a parking garage that — judging by my father’s reaction — had to have been far more pornographic than whatever untold treasures could be found in Club Super Sex and the other titty bars lining St. Catherine Street.
A Car Too Good to Be True
Sometime in the early ’90s, as if in fulfillment of a secret wish, Dad got a navy blue Volvo 850 GLT. The car, a fast, angular, five-cylinder four-door, was a company car, emblazoned with Waterville Valley logos on the driver and passenger-side doors. It represented a rebrand for Volvo, that erstwhile maker of family station wagons dreamed up by sensible Swedes, and it represented a rebrand for our family, too. It felt good driving around in that thing, a parade of outward respectability, even though Dad and I couldn’t contain our giddiness inside. On hot summer days, one of us would invariably switch on the other’s seat heater — the car had heated seats! — and await the inevitable scream. But we would not engage in such hijinks with others. A sexy ad campaign narrated by Donald Sutherland touted the 850’s sporty features, and because of this everyone seemed to take notice. This became apparent to my father and me while coming through the tollbooth on Interstate 93 at the Massachusetts border, when some hot-heated guy in a Corvette tried to drag race us. The man motioned out of his open window and revved his engine, but all he could elicit from my father was a laugh and a shake of his head. We were Volvo drivers now, and such trivial matters did not concern us.
It was that same summer when my half-sister and her mother came to visit. They stayed with us, which I found strange, at least vis-a-vis my own mother, who to her credit put up a good show. We were mostly out of the house anyway. Every morning, my father shooed the three of us — his wife and his two children by two different women — into the Volvo and he’d spend the day shuttling us up and down New Hampshire so that we might marvel at the slender state’s modest tourist attractions. The Flume. The Cog Railway. The Old Man of the Mountain, whose craggy profile graced the state license plate. My half-sister snubbed her nose at all of it, sitting sullen in the backseat, her dark bangs hanging sharply above an always furrowed brow. If my father pointed something out, she would request that he turn up the Rage Against the Machine CD she insisted we listen to everywhere we went. Later that week it was on to Boston, and then down and out along the Cape, where in a motel lobby my father swore he saw the tennis legend Björn Borg (even more than sports cars, my father loved athletes, high-performance machines in human form).
In the end, our week-long mixed-family roadtrip wasn’t that odd. It hadn’t been odd because like all trips we took — that is, my mother and my father and I — it took place in a car. Short of going to Austria in the summers so that Dad could return home and work the fields, we didn’t go on traditional vacations. No Disney. No national parks. No beach getaways. And so drives became our thing. The town we lived in was a dead end, literally. One road in, one road out, with thousands of acres of national forest surrounding it. Locals called it an “island in the trees.” My mother called it fake, not a real town, flicking her lit Merit at all the condos and hotels that had been built for the skiers and which stood virtually empty in every season save winter. The place gave her city-girl blood cabin fever, and so she was always eager to get out of it for a day trip.
Dad Didn’t Need a Taskrabbit
My dad fixed his car engine with a Pepsi can, I complain to Claude about my leaky faucet. What happened to men?Day trips with my father often became half-day trips. The man was always running late. Office visits, errands, last-minute paperwork. The details were always vague, but the effect was always the same: Dad finally returning home and then tornadoing us into the car. My mother hated the rush and the stress but she had no choice. The woman had grown up in Brooklyn, lived in Manhattan, and then Paris, all locations that didn’t require cars. She hadn’t learned to drive until her mid-40s, when Waterville Valley’s isolation forced her to pick up the skill so that she could drive the 30 minutes south to the grocery store and back again. For anything longer, Mom deferred to Dad, and so on these day trips we were at the mercy of the man. Late starts necessitated fast driving, even faster than usual, and thus Dad would let it rip in a bid to assuage my mother by getting her to whatever quaint town or country fair she wanted to visit — anything, really, for a change of scenery. When I think of our family back then, I often picture the three of us peering out of the car’s windows to catch glimpses of the passing world.
Our ownership — however tenuous — of the Volvo came at a good time in our lives. I’d been accepted to a local boarding school, whose 30-minute proximity to our house meant that I’d been admitted as one of its few day students, all to the tune of a far cheaper tuition. On top of that, they’d given me financial aid. If my father picked me up from school, it was in the Volvo. I didn’t care that it bore the logos of Waterville Valley. If anything, this marked my father as a company man, just like the other respectable dads belonging to the boys with whom I went to school.
Like anything in life, it didn’t last. This is part of the natural ebb and flow of things that I’ve come to expect. But back then it was disorienting. That winter, a new company took over ownership of the ski resort — a bunch of corporate bean counters, by Dad’s estimates. He didn’t like the way they did things, especially their failure to understand the magic of the sport or the fact that they took his — our — Volvo away, deeming it a perk that another employee should enjoy. That spring, the spring of my freshman year of high school, my father quit his job as ski-school director, all without another gig lined up. My mother was distraught. My father didn’t share her concerns. He interviewed with resorts in Colorado and Wyoming, both of which represented a return to the type of respectable-sized mountains that satisfied my father’s lofty alpine standards, but neither panned out. He lost the farm in Austria, too. The creditors came calling, and only because his younger sister could afford to pay off the debt did the place remain in the family.
My father needed a job, any job, and it came in the form of banging nails for a ski-lift company. This meant he was gone for weeks on end installing lift towers and cables and chairs — doing manual labor at various mountains across the Northeast. I would look out at the driveway and see the empty space left by his vacant Volkswagen — the car he’d been forced to resume driving; a car that had lost all its charm — and wish for his return. And then when he did return, weary and bitter, I would wonder when he’d leave again.
“Where’s your father?” came the common question that year and the next. Everyone asked it. Everyone I saw. Dad was a local celeb, but also a man of the people. The vacationers asked, the local workers, the teachers at the boarding school whose tuition no longer felt affordable.
“He’s working for a lift company,” I’d say.
“Doing what?”
“Consulting,” I’d lie. “In their office.” I might have even alluded to him having become president of the company. Anything to avoid saying that my father was doing manual labor for a living. It didn’t matter that the man looked better than ever, his shoulders broad, his forearms taut, his Italian roots (by way of my grandmother) manifesting in the form of a magnificent tan. All this was negated by the fact that, unlike those of my peers, my own father used his body to make a living.
The Jetta did him no favors either. The Austrian sticker remained on the bumper, while my school’s decal had been stuck to the back windshield, and dad still drove fast as shit. But now the car squealed. It belched. It moaned. I could hear the old rattletrap coming from a mile away, echoing across the campus quad long before Dad picked me up from school whenever he was home for a few days. Even worse, rust had eaten away at the car’s underbody so badly that a hole had appeared beneath Dad’s seat. It looked like an ever-expanding cigarette burn. Finally, he cut a pair of two-by-fours and jerry-rigged them into a support structure, wedging them beneath his seat so that he wouldn’t fall through. He laughed at my worries. Still, I kept a watchful eye from my perch in the passenger seat, one eye glued to the road whipping underneath him, constantly fearful that my father would fall through, splatter on the pavement, disappear from our lives.
The End of the Road
My father died in the fall of 2019. Cancer — not a crash or a hole in the floor of his car — got him. I was living in Switzerland at the time, in a small, Brothers Grimm-looking town in the foothills of the Alps, about 20 minutes from the Austrian border by car. My wife’s job had brought us there, along with my desire to somehow lead the life Dad had given up. We put our eight-month-old in day care, bought a used Subaru Legacy, and with my wife at work I spent my days writing a novel. On weekends, we disappeared into the mountains.
My father’s cancer was so advanced, had metastasized to such a degree, that by the time his oncologists found it that September they could no longer pinpoint its organ of origin. He would die in just over two months, and much of that time I spent at home. When I wasn’t sitting vigil over my father’s bedside alongside my mother in the hospital, I was driving down to Boston to pick up friends who had flown into Logan to pay their last respects. Folks from Italy, Germany, as far away as South America. By then, Dad had finally cottoned to America. He loved our healthcare and our sports teams and the Vermont ski resort that eventually hired him as a ski-school director again. Dad had even gotten around to procuring an American license. A state trooper had finally nailed him, and once the cop had gotten over how long my father had driven in this country with a foreign license (much to my mother’s surprise), issued him only a warning. The statey said get your ass to the DMV, and Dad did as told. He’d gone through several cars by then, the last of which was another Volkswagen Jetta, this time in white. It’s the one I drove Dad to the hospital in the night he broke his cancer-riddled arm merely by lifting a bed sheet. The same one I drove during all those four-hour roundtrips to Boston and back to pick up his friends.
“Jimmy shouldn’t be driving so much,” my mom said. “He could have an accident.”
I remember how my father looked at me, sallow and weak and propped up in his hospital cot, but smiling all the same. There was pride in that smile. “Jimmy will be fine,” he said. “He’s an excellent driver.”
In all my 20-something years of driving, it was a compliment I’d never received before, let alone from my father, a man whose moves behind the steering wheel still gave me chills. I wondered when he’d come to that conclusion, and thinking this, I was filled with a disproportionate amount of joy considering the state of things. On my drives down to Boston, I would detach from reality and let it rip, weaving in and out of traffic, imagining myself locked in like a race-car driver while minimal techno pumped from the Jetta’s speakers. I picked up my Italian cousin. My father’s former employee, a man who had returned to his native Argentina. My half-sister, who’d come in all the way from Germany. During our drive up to New Hampshire’s Connecticut River Valley, during lulls in our conversation when I didn’t know what else to say, she would look out the window at the passing towns and their white clapboard colonials, and say, “I always loved it here.” When she left a few days later, I broke down, saying something about how sorry I was that it had been me who’d gotten her father instead of her, and she shushed me and pulled me in tight to her chest as the tears poured down my cheeks.
Dad was taken from hospice to our home in an ambulance. I followed behind in the Jetta during the 90-minute drive across country roads to Vermont; the same roads Dad had bombed on our day trips with Mom all those years ago. The ambulance lurched in front of me, cautiously taking turns, dutifully obeying the speed limit. It felt unfitting. Two weeks later, while mom was outside, Dad died on a bed in our living room with only me for company. I held his hand, watched him go. Afterwards, I dressed him in a button-down and slacks and a sweater, his limbs already stiffening, because I knew he wouldn’t have wanted to be taken away looking sloppy. I shaved him, too, because he hated scruff. He was zipped up in a body bag by two men from the funeral home, then wheeled out on a gurney and loaded into a hearse. It had snowed that day, and so the men were extra careful. When they backed out of our driveway, they took it nice and slow.
That winter, it was back to Switzerland, back to our used Subaru. Most of my driving involved weekend ski trips, or hitting the road to report a story. I remember speeding over the Arlberg Pass on a powder day, running late to meet a ski guide for a magazine feature, and pulling to the side of the road because I could no longer see out of the dirty windshield. I’d forgotten to refill the wiper fluid, and so I grabbed a fistful of fresh snow and used it to wipe away the grime caking the glass. While doing so, I was hit by a distinct memory of my father having done the same thing. The similarities didn’t stop there. Anytime I found myself alone behind the wheel that winter, I was speeding, taking the turns tight, cutting off their apex. I could still hear my father’s words. “Jimmy is an excellent driver.”
The pandemic came soon after, shutting down the borders and keeping us housebound. But it didn’t stop me from driving. Sometimes, during spring and summer afternoons, I would slip out of our place to go tool around the country roads winding through Appenzell, one canton over, or drive even further afield. The best roads are found in the Alps — the high alpine passes. I drove the Fluela, the Albula, the Julier, the San Bernardino. My son is prone to car sickness, like his mother. But alone, free of their queasy constitutions and judgements, I found myself driving faster and faster, more at ease with the narrow roads, the tight 180-degree turns, the dramatic dizziness of it all.
In my father’s final days, when my wife was visiting with me, I was prone to reach for her in the middle of the night, cling to her, tug at her pajamas, wanting to bury myself into her, overcome by desire. Driving felt like the opposite, but just as freeing, surrendering myself to the road, to the speed, to the machine that served as medium between me and the world through which I sped. After a long bike ride with friends in the Canton of Uri that summer, I took the long way home via the Klausen Pass instead of the highway. The light was low, the fields a billiards-table green, the cows grazing indolently. I flew down the road at a speed that still shocks me in retrospect. Revving the engine, coming up fast on a rear bumper and then overtaking the car in front of me while an oncoming vehicle left little room for error, the tires screeching around turns. I could feel my heart in my chest for miles upon miles after having completed the pass.
We visited my half-sister and her family that summer. They were vacationing two hours away in Austria. My wife was fully pregnant by then, practically bursting with our second son, and we pulled into town slowly that first night. Now we live in Connecticut. We drive a Ford Bronco, the compact model. It isn’t the type of car to be driven fast, nor one with a low enough center of gravity to conquer turns. Even if it did, I’m no longer struck by the desire. We have two sons now. The oldest no longer needs a car seat, and the youngest has recently upgraded to a booster seat. “A big boy seat,” he calls it. Often my wife drives as I sit content in the passenger seat.
In the last week of his life, when his mind started to go along with his organs, and he spent much of his days laying in the cot, drifting in and out of sleep, speaking in tongues that were increasingly hard to follow, my father began waving his left hand back and forth across his body and face in sweeping and spastic movements. One time he did it for 16 hours straight. It was difficult to watch, and because of this I began ascribing deeper meaning to what might well have been simply the effect of muscle spasms and synapse misfirings. I imagined my father conducting the symphony of his life. But this didn’t feel fitting. And so the conductor’s baton that I imagined him holding morphed into a gear shift. He was driving a car. He was in the old Citroën 2CV heading to St. Moritz, heading to my mother, ready to live life all over again.
My father only ever drove manuals, or stick shifts, as he called them. I can still picture him. Depressing the clutch, downshifting into a lower gear, no need for something as vulgar as a brake pedal, the black Volkswagen’s gear-shift boot moving with all the contours of a black leather skirt.
“You see, Jimmy,” he would say in his sing-song Austrian accent, his green eyes gracing me in the passenger seat. “With a stick shift, you are always in total control.”
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