Yahoo Autos My Drive to 10Best Reminds Me Why I Moved away from Civilization
I live in a place that Lonely Planet would describe as lonely and maybe not on a planet. When the wind dies, I can hear the UPS truck a half-mile away. It makes a distinctive hiccuping grumble, like popcorn in a microwave. So, when I annually drive 2020 miles east for 10Best, the clamor of civilization greets me with a smack in the earhole. The aural assault feels all the more depraved after I've spent two and a half serene days in Ulsan's Ultimate, the Korean catacomb that is the Genesis G90.
I refueled at a Flying J, where activating the pump set off about 120 decibels of synthesized AM radio, studded with admonishments to eat what sounded like blow-dried Alpo tarts available for $3.99. Then the voice within the pump squawked about the VW Beetle being discontinued, a car it implied was made famous only by Herbie in The Love Bug, knowing nothing about the Käfer's late-'30s roots in a hate-reliant political regime. Layered atop the scripted claptrap was the hydraulic exhalation of a garbage truck, the rattle of a jake brake from a passing 18-wheeler, a high-order argument between husband and wife at the adjacent pump (a spat that bordered on kickboxing as each made his or her way to the restrooms), the Flying J's own piped-in Muzak blasting "It's a Miracle" by Culture Club, the echoed orders from a drive-through window at a conjoined Mickey D's (someone got shorted his "Ekkamuvvin," as he called it), two passing Harleys, a distant police siren, and an unmuffled dune buggy with unmistakable Herbie-sourced power. I about popped the threads on one of the few rust-free bolts that constrain my psyche. It was like punishment for Marines.
Then, as I regained the Genesis, which sounds religious but isn't, there came a BBC broadcast called "The Sounds of Tinnitus." To my aging ear, it was locusts singing mariachi music, artillery in a day-care center, and a boat anchor being dragged through a jungle gym. Radio off.
I'm mentioning noise for a reason. See, we experienced rain for the first two days of 10Best. You'd imagine we loathe rain because it degrades lateral grip, but no; the larger problem is the misty tempest in the wheel wells, an ocean of racket that the BBC somehow missed. For starters, rain can mask engine noise, then it veils the funny clunks that some suspensions educe, and you can't judge the tires' distress: squeal, yowl, or Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Without peering under the hood, every C/D driver can report the number of cylinders in play, but add wiper noise to the jetlike whooshing of the contact patches and, well, you start making uninformed guesses, the domain of congressmen. When I drove the Honda Insight, I couldn't hear the transition from motor to engine; did rain interfere or was it really that seamless? Were those pebbles ricocheting around the wheel wells or did I just flatten a porcupine? Maybe it was the traction control ticking? Is the engine laboring or is that the third doughnut settling in? (Answer: Yes.)
Rain also affects tracking: A sudden feint to the left might be a misbehaving steering rack or just a puddle. Why isn't the steering telling me more about road surfaces? In rain, the steering's weight is all over the place, and premature wheel hop has to be taken with a grain of, well, anything dry. A downpour even corrupts sightlines, making the Benz E450, for example, feel claustrophobic, which is as unfair as saying the Eiffel Tower is no fun because it attracts magnets.
The second day of rain got me so discombobulated that I re-combobulated inside our motionless Tesla Model 3, parked under a tree, where I learned: 1) that you must consult the car's towering touchscreen to open the glovebox and 2) that the adjacent diesel generator juicing the Tesla snaps to life with a thunderclap I'd been expecting all day but from the firmament. Did you know that, in Latin, "noise" means nausea?
By then my brain was mottled with prickly fungus, so I drove alone to Hell Saloon, what was once called the Dam Site Inn, and sipped chili near a troupe of leathered-up orthodontists masquerading as Hells Angels. Why do bikers present themselves as loners yet travel almost exclusively in packs? I'd mention lemmings here, but lemmings don't spend $17.50 on Iron Cross keychains.
On my way home via I-90 in Minnesota, prior to single-lane construction sites, I noticed signs saying, "Use both lanes during backups." Shouldn't the signs have read, "This road doesn't need repairs"? I drove through so many inactive construction sites that I conjured advice for newly minted college grads: Get into the manufacture of barrels, patenting some sort of heavy-duty bowling-pin setter to remove and replace them in all their reflective-orange tackiness. In America, frogs connote warts like barrels connote roadwork. I dream of a day when we melt all the barrels to fill potholes.
Anyway, I phoned God about all the rain and noise, but He directed me to the celestial complaint department, which turns out to be Motor Trend.
From the March 2019 issue
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