During the pandemic, I — and seemingly every other bearded dad with a preteen — acquired a van, hoping to transform it into a camper van. My wife and I gradually built our cheap house on wheels, complete with a tiny stove, a fridge, a sink, a couch that turned into a bed and a sleeping loft. Happily for me, an inveterate speedster, it also had a V8 geared for cruising at high speed. We raced from Los Angeles to Seattle to Illinois, on to New Orleans and later to Colorado before finding ourselves bedding down one night at the exurban spread of an old college friend, Mikolaj, who had moved to Minnesota.
Back in the day, a few years before I met Mik, my mom taught me to drive a stick shift on a dirt road in the Everglades. It wasn’t easy — I stalled, again and again — but soon enough I was a demon on the freeway. I would race friends in Interstate 95 traffic and regularly drove an hour or longer on a school night to see hard-core shows. Driving felt like strength, and speed felt like power, as if I’d finally found the freedom I desperately desired. I still drove aggressively in adulthood, even with a kid strapped in the back seat. When my wife and I settled in Los Angeles, I roared from Venice to Westwood for work and school drop-offs, knifing through traffic on the 10 and the 405, gunning for the fastest reasonable speed at all times. Going fast felt like winning, and I kept at it during my family’s pandemic road trip.
By the time we got to Minnesota, we had racked up 50,000 miles. I was proud of how we had outfitted our van and was especially keen, I think, to gain approval from Mik, whose life had often mirrored my own. In our early 20s, our competitiveness manifested in a mutually obsessive cataloging and comparing of our life choices. Mik never hesitated to give me his thoughts on how I should be living my life, whether they were about adopting an extreme exercise regime called “fist yoga” or wearing a toothbrush around my neck just in case I made a spontaneous overnight trip. I always returned the favor. However gruff or unusual our sales pitches might have been, they reflected our care for each other. To this day, I look forward to hearing what this man has to say about how I’m living.
So I gave Mik a guided tour of the van and its amenities, hoping to impress him. When I slapped the steering wheel and told him I could easily go 80 miles per hour, I assumed he shared my worldview about life on the road. But instead of admiring my van or expressing longing for all my adventures, Mik sized the situation up and issued a succinct challenge: Try finishing the rest of your road trip without going any faster than 55 m.p.h.
I initially bristled, but as my wife and I loaded the car the next morning, my brain processed Mik’s latest concept. I thought, with bitterness and a touch of envy, that it was easy for Mik to go 55 m.p.h. on Minnesota state highways. But what would it actually look like on an Interstate or in a city like Los Angeles? With a whole day’s journey ahead of me, I pulled onto Interstate 35. For the first time in my life, I got into the slow lane and stayed there.
Behind the wheel, 55 at first seemed impossibly slow, as if we were barely moving. I checked the rearview mirror, glanced at Google Maps, then looked back to the mirror. In my head, I imagined an obscenely long line of traffic snaking slowly in our wake, and I considered the consequences of my leisurely pace. A red sports car zoomed around me and slotted into the middle lane. Then a minivan passed us. And a box truck. And eventually an 18-wheeler.
I resisted the urge to hit the gas and let myself fall under the slow lane’s spell. Miles stacked up; my internal world evolved, and the energy I usually spent jockeying for position was replaced with … nothing? Or actually: everything. I was thinking. Daydreaming. Making plots and plans for the future. Mentally reliving my favorite moments of our trip. Piecing together hazy memories of difficult situations. I worked over big ideas. I crafted to-do lists. I listened — really listened — to the radio. When my family wanted to talk, I paid complete attention, rather than strategizing how to execute a lane change or avoid a potential speed trap. With nothing to do but focus on the road, my mind settled into a reflective pattern that has felt rarer with every year.
As the sun set somewhere over a Midwestern prairie, I glanced around the van: My wife and child had not even registered my satisfaction. There was, perhaps, a bit of poetry to this that has seeped into other parts of my life. This speed forced me to be present in a way that I maybe hadn’t ever been: I’d spent my life racing toward the future, always gritting my teeth for an arrival time for which I always felt late. Now, even when I wasn’t driving, I was less inclined to rush through life’s pleasures.
Driving 55 seemed dangerous at first, especially on Los Angeles highways that can feel like NASCAR tracks. But those fears were mostly overblown: The other weekend, I made my way from Los Angeles to the Bay and back. While Type A drivers (me, previously; you, currently?) sped along, there were plenty of us rocking in the right lane: the obvious mix of heavy tractor-trailers, but also a grandpa in a pickup truck, a woman driving a late-model Prius, a mustachioed dude with dark sunglasses driving a G Wagon with one finger. All of us cruising dreamily, at a little under one mile a minute.
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