The Chariot of Desire: Massachusetts Denouement

November 21, 2017

With no job or actual responsibilities in one hand and a steering wheel in the other, my sweet Chariot of Desire—a vehicle that somehow keeps going in spite of all outward appearances suggesting imminent relegation to either a junk pile or the untrained hands of a sorely disappointed teenager—is parked in Massachusetts, where I am also parked until conditions in my own troubled nation improve.

The Chariot’s finest moments will always dwell in Utah, where its uncanny feats of endurance mostly abide. One could argue that I never unleashed my car’s full potential: due in part to my preference for bicycle commuting, my 13-year-old car surpassed the 100,000-mile mark only this year. But when you tally up the mountain driving, the rebuilt title, the two collisions, and a lifetime without garages or covered parking, the Chariot touts a decorated profile of grit and fortitude.

If cars were people and my car knew how to die, I would bury my sweet Chariot in the Book Cliffs. It was back there in that ancient expanse that I felt an old journey end and a new one begin. The old journey, in truth, was on its last feeble kid-legs for longer than I knew. It was a journey of youth, fear, sadness, insecurity, comfort, destruction, renewal, maturation, and most prominently, ignorance. I had driven through a desert basin, my eyes creased open, the stereo cranked up, the windows rolled shut, and my body safely contained in the metal-and-glass bubble that sent me rapidly through the unconcerned wilderness I had selfishly taken for a featureless buffer zone. Then I looked back and saw the multifarious world behind me, and I realized all that I had ignored before was matched in equal proportion to everything in front of me. In every blank space was an opportunity that was invisible until I chose, by aggravated volition and conscious purpose, to look away from my compass of comfort and spread my hands into the furious, unrelenting winds of ignorance. In the new journey, my sails are up, and the oars are in. I’m learning that special talent to accept the pain of my limitations in pursuit of every inch of expansion. It’ll never be perfected, but I will resolve, from the Book Cliffs on, to always practice.