Somewhere in the middle of a long flat afternoon I ran out of signal and started hitting the scan button, which cycled through static for a full minute and then landed on a man reading swap meet listings. A washing machine, working. Two goats. A truck bed toolbox, call after six. He read them slowly, with no music behind him, for eleven minutes.
It was the best thing I heard all week, and I could not have found it on purpose.
The scan button as a local paper
I use the scan button more than anything else now, especially in the middle of a driving day. Not because the programming is good. Because it tells me where I am.
You can hear a region change on the radio before you can see it change out the window. The ads change first: the kind of business that buys a spot, the way the announcer says the town name, what the auto dealer thinks you want. Then the music format changes, then the churches, then the ballgame. On a long day I can hear myself cross from one part of the country into another about an hour before the landscape gets around to agreeing.
It is also the only thing I listen to that never asks me to concentrate. I can lose the thread of a swap meet show for thirty seconds and lose nothing. That matters more than I used to think.
Why I gave up on the perfect playlist
I spent an embarrassing number of hours building road trip playlists. Sequenced for mood, seeded with things I knew would land at sunset. It was fun to make and it never worked.
The problem is that a playlist is a plan for a day you have not had yet. It assumes you will be in a particular mood in hour six. You will not be. You will be in whatever mood the day made, and the carefully chosen sunset song will arrive during roadwork on a stretch that smells like a feedlot.
What replaced it is a small pile of albums I know well enough to half listen to, plus whatever the radio has. Familiar is the key word. Something I have heard two hundred times does not demand attention, and a driving day is a long negotiation over attention.
Audiobooks, and the mile that disappears
I like audiobooks on the road and I have had to be careful with them, for a reason that took me a while to name.
A good book makes the miles disappear, and that is exactly the problem. The reason the miles disappear is that part of my attention has gone somewhere else, and the part that is left is running the car on habit. I noticed it first when I missed an exit I had been watching for, then noticed it more when I got to a stop and could not have told you anything about the last twenty minutes of road.
So I keep them for the easy stretches. Straight road, light traffic, daylight, nothing complicated. When traffic thickens or the road starts asking me questions, the book goes off, and I have learned to do that before it gets interesting rather than after.
The other thing I watch for is that a calm narrator on a warm afternoon is a sedative. If I catch myself rewinding twice for the same paragraph, that is not a comprehension problem. That is a tiredness signal wearing a costume, and it means I am stopping soon.
The case for silence
The thing that surprised me most about driving a lot is how much of it I now do with nothing on.
I started doing it by accident, when an aux cable died and I did not feel like fixing it. The first twenty minutes were uncomfortable, in the specific way that being alone with your own head is uncomfortable when you are not used to it. Then it stopped being uncomfortable and I did not turn the sound back on for three hours.
Silence makes a drive feel longer and makes it stick better. I notice more: the way the road noise changes on new asphalt, wind in the trees at a stop, whether a town has a train through it. And whatever the driving mind does with a problem you have been carrying, it does more of it in silence.
Not every day. Some days I want the noise, and there is no virtue in enduring a quiet car when a quiet car is making you miserable. But now silence is a thing I choose, rather than what happens when the music runs out.
What I put on when I am flagging
Here is where I want to be careful, because this is the part where road trip writing usually turns into bad advice.
Yes, I turn the music up when I feel myself getting dull. Yes, it helps a little, for a little while. What I have had to learn is that loud music is not a countermeasure. It is a symptom. The moment I reach for volume as a way to stay alert, the useful information is not that the song woke me up. It is that I needed waking.
So I treat it as a timer rather than a solution. Volume up means I am stopping at the next place with a lit lot, and the music is there to get me the ten or fifteen miles to it. It is not there to buy another hour. I ran the buy another hour version of this for years and it always ended the same way, with the alertness wearing off somewhere with no services and a worse decision in front of me than the one I skipped.
The last hour
The one rule I keep is about the end of the day. In the last hour before I stop, whatever is on goes off.
Partly it is a safety thing. The last hour is when I am dullest and the least able to spare attention, so I stop spending it on a story.
But mostly it is that the last hour is when I am arriving somewhere, and arriving deserves the attention. That is when I am reading the town: how many blocks the main street runs, whether the diner is still lit, which motel has cars in front of it. That is the whole thing I came out here for. It seems strange to drive twelve hundred miles to look at small places and then pull into one with a podcast talking over the top of it.
So the sound goes off, the window comes down if the weather allows, and I take the last stretch quiet. It has never once made the drive worse.