In Massachusetts: Hard Driving

By Sue Hubbell

Those of us who wander across this country -- hard-core itinerants, escapees from a Stanley Elkin fiction, a ragtag of peddlers, truckers, journalists, compulsive tourists -- meet in flyspecked cafes off the interstates and gossip about the cities that are our temporary destinations.

Manhattan, the island borough of 34 square miles, the city that gave us gridlock, each day invites in 877,000 motorists and then does not let them park. Over our coffee we trade hints on what it is not too illegal to do with our delivery trucks there. We tell tales of cabbies and their refreshing obscenities.

Outside Dallas, Interstate 35 splits into two identically numbered segments, differentiated by a tiny W and E, which run north and south. Lulled by interstate monotony, the unwary sometimes fail to notice the split, and circle the city on the 35s and their various permutations until they give up and opt for Waco. That furnishes the underpinning for the legend of the ghost of I-35. It is said in Western truck stops that once a young couple with a small child (some versions claim twin children) circled Dallas in July until their auto air conditioner failed and they died, and that on still nights when the moon is full and there is a lull in traffic, you can hear the wail of a child.

Some say Nashville is the most testing city to drive in, but most say Boston. Boston because of its streets. Boston because of its drivers.

"Ah yes, Boston," says Mark, a photographer just returned from a job there. "Boston, the city where green means go and yellow means go a little faster."

A man from New York, a city not noted for its gentle traffic manners, tells of the time he lost a muffler on Storrow Drive to a Bostonian aggressively merging onto that thoroughfare. The Bostonian, despite the fact that he shed his own bumper in the clash, never glanced to either side and sped on when the New Yorker pulled over to exchange insurance information.

Boston drivers are steely, quick, opportunistic, decisive, but above all they do not look another driver in the eye. They probably do not drive as fast as we itinerants claim they do. A recent comparison showed that motorists in Columbus drive just as fast. However, in Columbus, everyone, including the outsiders, knows where he is going. In Boston, only the Bostonians do. That makes them seem to be going faster.

"The day is past when the out-of-town driver, lost on Boston's streets, was a good joke," said the Boston Globe in a recent series on traffic. "That confused visitor, halted in the middle of an intersection, is likely to be the - direct cause of a traffic jam that extends several blocks . . . Get some signs up -- and make sure they are readable and make sense."

There are those who claim that Boston is a city designed by M.C. Escher, its maps labeled by Italo Calvino. Bostonians speak of a Central Artery that does not appear on maps or signs, of squares that are not square, not labeled and not acknowledged by Rand McNally.

Boston is an old town, its narrow streets not neat grids like Kansas City's. The streets wind, end in cul-de-sacs, curve back on themselves, disappear, intersect by the sixes and sevens at rotaries. Their direction is fluid and changing. An outsider, carefully learning that Charles Street is one way this way, returns a year later to find it that way. Overhead traffic signs are terse, grudging and lacking in true meaning. Street signs are usually placed only on cross streets, leaving unnamed the street upon which one is driving.

A world explorer, a man equally at home in the forests of New Zealand and the trackless Arctic tundra, tried to find his way in a rented car from Logan International Airport to the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge. Forced into a high-speed exit decision at a rotary, he soon realized that he had made a wrong choice. He was immediately and irretrievably lost because there were nothing but cross-street signs, so he could not find where he was on the map clenched in his fist. Cursing the lack of street signs, he asked a cabbie for directions. The cabbie told him he could not explain how to get to the hotel, but for a fee he would lead him. Disgusted, the explorer drove on and, coming to a fire station, parked his Hertz car in the driveway and refused to move until the firemen agreed to tell him where he was.

What the explorer did not know was that cabbies routinely pilot the lost through Boston streets. Floyd is a truck driver who has been delivering Russell Stover candy to the same warehouse in Boston for 15 years. "Tried it on my own a couple of times," he says. "I figured, hell, I can deliver in Nashville which is impossible, I'll soon have Boston in my head, but I'd get to one of them damn rotaries and on to another, rear back and find myself at the first again. And then there was always that same underpass that was too low for my truck. I didn't know how I got to it. But there it was every time. I didn't know how not to get to it either. Never could figure the place out, so I just hire a cabdriver to take me in. Same as other truckers do."

A practiced Boston driver is unsuited for traffic elsewhere. A Bostonian confessed that the horror of Boston driving is so universal that it's like breathing: you almost cease to notice. When he was in Alabama recently, the drivers there seemed to him unbelievably courteous, deliberate and careful. It got on his nerves. "Why don't they drive?" he asked his wife.

Boston driving skills and way finding are very special. It is said that Boston's streets are laid out on 17th century cow paths, therefore the way to drive in Boston is to think like a 17th century cow. Nerveless. Placid -- not too much, though. Superb sense of direction.

There is an amusing bit of driving from Back Bay Station to South Station. It is hard to think about, impossible to describe, but if one doesn't study it too much and keeps hoofing along, everything comes out O.K.

Not even a Bostonian can give directions for driving from North Beacon Street to Davis Square in Somerville, but by replacing street names in the head with points of the compass, it can be done.

Being lost is a concept only and not one helpful to apply in Boston. One drives and drives and then, suddenly, one is someplace better.

In a rest stop in Pennsylvania, Mildred and Jim are sitting at a picnic table eating oranges. They are on their way home to Oklahoma from a vacation trip East. Their car has a sticker saying, JESUS LOVES COWBOYS . . . & cowgirls, too.

They have had a good holiday.

"The best part was Boston," says Jim. " 'Course it didn't seem that way at first."

Mildred adds, "We went there to look at the historic things, the Liberty Bell and all."

"No, sweetheart," Jim says gently. "The Liberty Bell is what we didn't see in Philadelphia."

"Well. Anyway. Those old places. We wanted to see them all in Boston, but we couldn't get to any of them. We drove around one whole day not finding anything until it got dark. Then we came to an old building that didn't have a real name. It just said HOTEL on a little bitty sign. It was real pretty inside. Filled with antiques. The hotel didn't have a restaurant, but the nice lady at the desk sent us next door to an old house up on a hill behind some shrubs. It didn't have any sign at all. Inside was a big room with lots of real old furniture. It was just beautiful. All the tables had crystal bowls filled with roses, and the food was the best we had anywhere. Everyone was so kind and polite and talked to us a lot. Told us a lot of interesting stuff. One lady said we were in some historic part of Boston, real old I guess. It was the high point of our trip. But we never knew where we were.

"I don't suppose you'd know where that was, would you?"