L

ike many milestones that 
make their anticipated en-
trance throughout adoles-

cence — among them the first kiss, 
first date and the other usual sus-
pects — my first time driving was 
awkward 
but 
wholesome. 
After 

months of tedious driver’s education 
coursework and haphazardly pre-
pared traffic sign note cards, I was 
finally ready to take to the road. Per 
Indiana law, I was required to sup-
plement my online driver’s ed with a 
handful of driving lessons — the last 
step before I would finally be able to 
make the coveted march into the De-
partment of Motor Vehicles and take 
my driver’s test. 

Most of the kids in my grade took 

driver’s ed from the same online 
academy, so the program’s pool of 
driving instructors had become a 
sort of cast of characters often gos-
siped about between the drivers-
to-be. In geometry or English class, 
I would hear the latest tale of the 
frizzy-haired instructor who spent 
the majority of the lessons ranting 
about her relationship problems, or 
about the pale-faced man who kept 
his clammy hands gripped around 
his clipboard during each drive. As I 
listened to my peers exchange lesson 
anecdotes like cigars in a boys’ club, 
I was eager to graduate into this 
sphere of driving adventure.

And then my time finally came. My 

mom offered me a swift “good luck!” 
before dropping me off in my high 
school parking lot, where my instruc-
tor would soon take me out for my 
first lesson. I was met by a friendly 
older man clad in a gray windbreaker 
and black slacks, standing in front of 
a silver car plastered with driver’s ed 
logos. He had a wispy mustache, the 
kind that reminded me of my grand-
father. After firmly shaking my hand 
with the seriousness of a business 
deal, he gestured me towards the 
driver’s seat — the seat. The star of 
today’s outing. 

“You can call me Clarence,” he 

said, buckling his seatbelt and fidg-
eting with the paper and clipboard in 
his lap. I glanced at his handwriting, 
which was scribbly and hurried, like 
a substitute teacher’s. 

“Ready to finally take to the open 

road?” he asked. 

I offered a reluctant nod before 

turning the keys in the ignition, 
prompting a low, growled rumble 
from the vehicle and a pang of ex-
citement in my chest. 

I was driving. 
***
Often heralded as the epitome of 

freedom in a country long claiming 
to be the land of the free, we’ve come 
to believe there is something sacred 

about the first time an American gets 
behind the wheel. The sensation of 
taking the open road, hands gripped 
onto a leathery steering wheel, bask-
ing in the power of utter control: 
We’re driving towards an idealistic 
future only American-born individu-
alism can breed. 

Surrounding media has branded 

this kind of experience as one of “ad-
venture” and “exploration,” supple-
mented by commercials of sleek Jeep 
Wranglers and beastly SUVs shown 
conquering rocky terrain. And to-
wards the end of each advertise-
ment, a gritty, all-American narrator 
tells you this automobile is for trail-
blazers, the American pioneer — the 
white-colonial, anti-indigenous nar-
rative blazes red, white and blue in 
the advertisement’s final remarks. 
To own a car is to assume the tropes 
that have long defined what it means 
to be American: To charge (or drive) 
boldly in the direction of the Ameri-
can dream, and a rugged conquest 
awaits. 

The archetype carries into liter-

ary manifestations as well: Arthur 
Miller’s 1949 stage play “Death of a 
Salesman” casts protagonist Willy 
Loman’s American-made Chevrolet 
as the principal symbol of his endur-
ing struggle to realize the American 
Dream. In the climax of the piece, 
Loman drives the car out into the 
darkness, ultimately leading to the 
termination of his life and the figu-
rative death of his ambitions. And in 
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel “The 
Great Gatsby,” the titular character’s 
Rolls-Royce is drooled upon by nar-
rator Nick Carraway, who prizes the 
“rich,” “triumphant” vehicle as the 
ultimate sign of luxury, wealth and 
success.

It wasn’t until I purchased my first 

car that I began to truly reflect on 
how these tropes of car ownership 
as freedom, as American individual-
ism, as wealth deeply affected me as 
a teenager.

I was a young person with the li-

cense to drive but nothing to drive 
with.

The process of changing that title 

started a few days into this winter 
break. My best friend from home had 
just driven me from Ann Arbor to In-
diana, and I was soon due back up to 
northern Michigan, where I would 
purchase a well-loved Chevy from 
my uncle. 

Like most used vehicles, the car 

was bestowed upon me along with 
a list of imperfections, including a 
leaky gas tank that needed to be ex-
amined right away. My first few days 
of car ownership were littered with 
trips to AutoZone and my dad en-
dearingly poking at parts of the en-

gine to ensure everything functioned 
properly. Finally, after substantial 
analysis, I was cleared to drive the 
car back home, where I was eager to 
accessorize her with all the essential 
features: an aux chord, a pine-scent-
ed air freshener and feminist bumper 
stickers. (To my dismay, my mother 
vetoed my “Keep Your Laws Off My 
Body” sticker for a fear of it provok-
ing other drivers on the road against 
me).

Almost immediately, I formed an 

oddly admirative connection with 
this car-turned-friend, and I knew 
I wanted to name her. Her slightly-
dented black exterior and silver de-
tailing inspired me to go with some-
thing mysterious, like a wise old 
witch who had lived a hundred lives 
before this one. After lots of delib-
eration with friends and family, she 
was named Svetlana.

After the arduous process of trans-

ferring the title of the car then reg-
istering it in my name, I was finally 
able to take to the open road in my 
own car. I quickly classified myself 
as a car owner as if I’d been promoted 
to some imagined, glistening sphere 
of superior beings. But why I felt so 
prideful to be cruising with the Gats-
bys of the world, I did not yet fully 
recognize.
I

n the weeks following Svet-
lana’s adoption, when I would 
drive around the streets of my 

hometown — a picture-perfect sub-
urb tucked north of Indianapolis — 
I found myself surveying the same 
flurries of Jeep Wranglers and BMWs 
I was once so accustomed to seeing. I 
remembered high school: countless, 
dewy mornings vibrating with the 
excitement of these sleek vehicles 
buzzing through the parking lot. And 
the dreaded seventh-period-bell that 
emancipated those lucky license-
carriers to their same cushy wagons, 
with me pitifully departing on foot. 

I remembered all the weekdays 

that began with one red-nosed walk 
to school — in rain, snow, slush, sleet 
and sun. That one, short commute 
felt hours long as I fixed my gaze 
towards the ground, attempting to 
avoid eye contact with anyone who 
might pass by and pity the upper-
classman with no car to drive. 

The end of the school day proved 

more difficult; the street parallel to 
my high school was always immedi-
ately flushed with a parade of stu-
dent traffic in the minutes following 
the final bell. This meant crossing 
a stampede of student drivers, all 
with their car radios blaring, win-
dows down, sitting cool with a kind 
of eased cockiness all upper-middle-
class kids seem to inherit. My task 
was simple: stay on the sidewalk and 

wait patiently for an opening in the 
mass of vehicles to make my pattering 
escape to the other side of the street. 
But in high school, in front of those 
drivers, the endeavor seemed disas-
trous, fatally embarrassing even. 

I then thought of my junior year, 

when my brother and I shared a 
used 1995 Ford Mustang during its 
last months before it broke down. I 
thought of all of the times I sheep-
ishly avoided driving friends so 
they wouldn’t see my rickety pair of 
wheels, the small convertible cower-
ing in comparison to my town’s bri-
gade of SUVs. During after-school 
hours, I made sure to borrow my 
parents’ nicer, newer car when visit-
ing friends’ houses, my body tensing 
at the thought of my decrepit Mus-
tang acting as the sore spot of some 
Crest-white neighborhood made up 
of brick mansions and money-green 
lawns.

Recalling these things meant con-

fronting a brutal classist ideation I 
had long carried since high school: 
a fear that my peers would know my 
family wasn’t as wealthy as theirs.

In retrospect, I feel a little ashamed 

knowing that I grew up in this cushy 
suburb, went to a well-funded pub-
lic high school, had a loving family, a 
warm home and so many other privi-
leges yet still engaged with the hall-
marks of class envy, treating a stroll 
to school like a walk of shame. 

And truthfully, acquiring my first 

set of wheels proved to be as under-
whelming as anything my adolescent 
self once treasured, the first kisses 
and the prom dances and the home-
coming games. The transaction was 
not magical; It did not grant me some 
kind of divine confidence I once 
thought was only earned via a breezy 
drive to high school. It didn’t make 
me prettier or richer or more of an 
adventurer. 

And therein lies the issue cre-

ated when American-brand indus-
trial efforts are intensely amplified 
by streams of literary and media 
messaging. To me, to us, a car has 
always been more than a car. It is a 
vessel with which we conquer new 
terrain, like colonizers on wheels. 
It is a throne on which we display 
wealth. It is a launchpad from which 
we reach for some vastly unattain-
able version of ourselves. And for 
whatever reason, it took finally sit-
ting behind my own wheel to see that 
all of these things a car is ‘supposed’ 
to represent fizzle down to nothing. 
The view beyond the wheel is no 
grander than it was before. The only 
thing that’s changed is the girl who 
once took her first driver’s lesson, 
who grew up a little bit the day she 
bought her first car.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
statement

If you 
 give a girl 
 a chevy

BY GRACE TUCKER, STATEMENT COLUMNIST

Wednesday, January 27, 2021 — 15