Tuesday, January 13, 2015

The Fly and the Windshield

Like most teenagers, my main focus in early high school was getting my driver’s license. Nothing was more important than having that little piece of plastic that got me off the school bus and gave me freedom to go on adventures with my friends. Therefore, armed with my permit I took on driver’s education with vigor. One assignment for driver’s ed was to complete a total of 50 hours of driving, with at least ten hours between the three practice drives. As I undertook this course during the summer, in one of the stretches of time between assigned drives my family decided to vacation down on the coast of Oregon, several hours away from where we lived near Seattle.


In order for me to get the hours I needed, my parents had me behind the wheel for the car ride down. This journey included many twisty, narrow, tree-lined roads heavily frequented by semi-truck drivers. The sky was cloudy, the road was shaded from the tall trees on one side and the steep hillside on the other, and as mentioned before, the road was very narrow. This wasn't a problem, was kind of fun even, to navigate the twisting, dipping roads, until I hit the interstate portion heavily frequented by large trucks. These trucks seemed almost as wide as the road, and drove very fast. My range of vision was limited by the curves of the road and the trees, and so the trucks seemed at times to come barreling straight at me right out of nowhere.


As a new driver, I had never put much thought as to my own mortality, and how easy a mistake on the road could affect that, but this experience certainly opened my eyes to that. While nowadays, as a more experienced driver, that road wouldn't even get a second thought, that short journey helped to give me a reality check as to the downsides (e.i. getting you and your family crushed by a semi truck) that temper the benefits of driving.

3 comments:

  1. It is really cool how the things that we consecutively do eventually become second nature to us. It makes me wonder if those early explores ever became acclimatized to travel and that lifestyle.

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  2. I love driving along the Oregon coast! It is so beautiful. It is scary to think of how things can change in an instant if an accident were to occur. Sometimes the way the sunlight shines through those trees would pierce my vision to the point of near blindness. I prefer not to drive through those parts, just so that I can peacefully observe all the beautiful trees and forestry!

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  3. Discovering human mortality is a great tie-in to the Renaissance as well! The "What a Piece of Work is Man" section discusses humanism and how Italian artists tried to discover the greatness and reason in humanity.

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