a teenager, a driver's exam and a white Zephyr

I flipped the left blinker and prepared for certain death.

I was sixteen when I failed my driver's exam due to the inconvenient (yet rational) fear I had of operating a giant killing machine that had four wheels and an AM radio.

Before test day, I had been practicing my driving for about six months non-stop with my dad all around our neighborhood in his small white Mercury Zephyr.  It was a vehicle that by all appearances (and sounds) was older than the first groans of the universe.

It was a car that always had a bit of a coffin feel to it, which was not ideal for my already lacking self-confidence.

My dad was very excited for me to pass the driver's test so I could become a delivery boy for our family's drugstore during the summer months.

“There is no better school for a kid than a job,” my dad would say as if he were a fortune cookie writer.

I was less than enthusiastic about the whole thing. I didn’t want to work. I wanted to decompress over the summer months from all of the near F’s I had just narrowly avoided getting in the previous school year.

To be honest, driving cars never really interested me. While all my friends were salivating at the opportunity to get behind the wheel, I was ambivalent about the prospect of it at best.

A large part of my apathy was due to my healthy terror of being the sole operator of a 3000-pound vehicle as it speeds down a road next to other similarly large fast-moving cars.

I never understood how easy that was for everybody else to get over how close every motorist is to death at any given moment. It’s all a dangerous dance of bumpers eager to impale the closest human they can find.

Even to this day watching cars rush next to each other at 80 mph down a Wyoming Interstate with only a few feet separating them still seems absolutely insane. Nobody seems to mind that we are all just one hard brake away from being turned into human slushies.

To this day driving in high-traffic areas terrifies me. When we have to leave the safe rustic half-Amish road conditions of Wyoming for the crush of Colorado roadways I always cede control of the car to my wife. She is totally at ease with being the driver on a rushing road full of cars swerving between each other like manic swing-dancing metal ants.

I’m pretty sure that in order to feel comfortable driving in a big city a person must have very little regard for their own life.

Not to sound like too much of a judgemental jerk, but I think I’m equally nervous about the drivers of the other cars as I am about the act of driving itself.

Just taking a look at some of the people that we pass or pass us on the road indicates that a majority of them are not to be trusted with not killing me. Most of the other drivers are on the phone, yelling at their kids or cramming a hamburger down their maw for them to be ready to deal with a potential high-speed calamity that always feels like it is just a whisker away from happening.

It all seems like we are playing Russian roulette behind the wheel. Whenever I drive I always have to ask “Is this the day when a drunk driver or a broken-hearted teenager turns me into intestinal roadside risotto?”

I remember asking my dad about how much danger there inherently seemed to be with driving in heavy traffic.

“What if the driver of the car that I’m passing has a heart attack or gets stung by a wasp and swerves straight into me?” I’d ask my dad.

“Well, then you are probably destined to be dead meat,” he replied with more of a matter-of-fact tone than I would have liked. His answer was half zen and half road warrior.

I sighed as any person who values their mortality would in response.

“But things like that don’t happen very often,” he said to attempt to calm my nerves.

His use of “don’t happen very often” offered zero comfort to me. The fact that it could happen ever seemed like terrible odds to me - especially given my innate ability to invite random disasters into my life. Even at a young age, I knew that the universe had it in for me. If anybody was going to get killed due to a freak accident on the highway involving an overturned truck carrying bubbling acid it was going to be me.

My dad recognized my fear of driving in high-density traffic early on and decided that the best way to deal with it was something that sociopathic mental health experts call “immersion therapy.”

Keep in mind, my dad had no experience in the field of child psychology -  but he was certain that if I confronted my fears head-on (phrasing intended) I would quickly get over them. I’m certain that in his mind, he pictured a time years later when the two of us would be sitting on a porch drinking black-label beer where I would thank him for forcing me to go toe-to-toe with my aversion to driving in congested traffic.

A few months before driver’s test day I was sitting in the back of our car (the dreaded death trap Zephyr) as my dad was speeding his way through ridiculously thick Denver rush hour traffic when the idea of how to help me came over him. He pulled over into the emergency lane and looked back at me with wild eyes.

“It’s your turn.”

Both my mom and I looked at him as if he had just had an invisible lobotomy performed on him. Was he having a stroke? Had a bit of delirium taken him?  Maybe he had accidentally huffed some model airplane glue?