Last week, when embarking on a six- to eight-hour journey (highly traffic-dependent), we waited until 8:51 AM to have our roast beef sandwiches (or “RBs” as they are known, especially when prepared for travel). I wouldn’t dream of having lunch before 11 at home. We’d left at 7, so we hadn’t exactly earned it, but knowing I’ll be sitting in the passenger seat for hours apparently triggers some kind of Pavlovian response.
Any car trip over four hours, or where at least one meal needs to be accounted for, heads into international waters territory — not physical water, but more the same lawlessness that drove Scientology to buy a boat and establish itself out on the open sea where no one could really intervene.
Ordinary rules no longer apply, but there are road trip statutes: the driver is in charge and has veto power over music, route, and all stops. There are established patterns from childhood that have to be accounted for: we were allowed one fifteen-minute stop on a road trip over four hours. The dog, who always came along, had to be walked and given water in that same timeframe, so bathroom coordination among all parties was critical.
We actually had a binder where my parents logged the timing of various past drives. Two outlier trips required multiple asterisks because two stops had been made, and I think my dad is still bitter (but will find out after he reads this).
We have taken many traditions from my family growing up, like RB sandwiches (always on kaiser rolls) as well as a special rally cry my mother invented for departures, which involved a short preamble from her and then all of us screaming “Pigs for [wherever we were going]!!!!!” I fully adopted it in my own family regardless of destination. However, we have adapted the laws around pit stops to allow for two since Jeff and I both believe in the importance of hydration.
On the sea, the crew all have rank, and in the car there’s a very clear and established hierarchy: driver, then front seat passenger, then backseat windows, then lowly middle seat or third row. I essentially went from being the youngest child, wedged into the third row of the van next to the dog kennel, to being an only child with full backseat control once my brothers left for college. Now, I’m sitting pretty with a permanent reservation for the front passenger seat and its inherited responsibilities of distributing snacks and enforcing GPS adherence. In our car, we never trade off driving duties unless Jeff is at death’s door, and even then he’d think about it, because being driven anywhere by me is pretty much his nightmare. And I’m a horrible passenger to boot.
I’m not an unsafe driver, but I’m an unconfident one, which is not reassuring to passengers. In the passenger seat, however, I have confidence in spades. From that position, I offer such helpful tips as “careful, careful” and “everyone else is braking” and then when the situation calls for it, do a full fake brake myself, slamming my right foot down on no pedal at all, gripping the door handle and doing a swift and aggressive inhale. My understanding is that the highly alert response to any possible danger is genetic since both my mother and her mother were big fake brakers.
When we went to buy our car at the dealership, we intended to get a smaller model SUV but I got in the one a size up and fell in love with the setup for the front passenger since it had a grip bar for the left hand that was part of the center console. In times of panic (which happen multiple times an hour), I would be able to securely brace, holding both sides — the dream. When a friend bought the same model vehicle, she texted me the day she got her car to say “you must be so pumped to have an extra place to grip.”
I am.
Based on my past tales of control issues, you may think the clench, “careful,” and frequent repetition of hot tips I learned in driver’s ed in 1999 mean I want to be in charge. I don’t. Through pure muscle memory, and perhaps some generational trauma, my body is attempting to assert jurisdiction I know I don’t have or deserve.
I would love to not be this way since I know it’s profoundly annoying and, on a trip with particularly bad traffic, it tends to make Jeff snap: “I am being careful, will you just stop?” Alas, I cannot. Those words of warning come out of me as unconsciously as correcting someone’s pronunciation of croissant.
All of these laws, however, apply only to life in the car. Last week, those six and a half hours were all done just to get us to a two-and-a-half-hour ferry ride. Boarding a new mode of transportation (even in your existing vehicle) brings new rules and new hierarchies. I already knew the open waters were different from the Sea Org.
Not that the Scientologists were thinking about anyone’s comfort. When you’ve signed a billion-year contract with the only possible benefits being a distant chance of meeting Tom Cruise or a less distant one of getting name-checked by Leah Remini in a future tell-all, logic and motion sickness are clearly not your top priorities.
On the ferry, I was no longer second in command; I was just a woman trying to get two sedated elderly poodles up a staircase that they’re scared of while various doodles and retrievers barked at them from below. I wanted to read my book but my noise-canceling headphones that do just fine with the roar of an airplane somehow couldn’t block the sounds of the guy next to us watching YouTube music videos and ads at top volume. I would have moved but I was trapped by sleeping dogs and I knew I was supposed to let them lie.
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