The long drive

I have always loved going for a long drive, driving for its own enjoyment — not a means to an end, but the sole purpose. It gives you a real sense of freedom. You are happily by yourself, cheerfully alone.

I look in the rear-vision mirror and all I see is a wall of swirling dust. I shoot my eyes ahead, through a bug spattered windscreen, but don’t hit the washer wipers — that’s a trap for young players; all it would achieve is smearing bug guts across your whole windscreen.

The outback road before me is a corrugated, pot holed, windswept, rain gouged catastrophe, badly overdue for a grading, melting into a hazy brown smear that disappears over the horizon. It’s bleakly accompanied by a single row of poles strung together by shimmering power lines dubiously promising some form of civilisation ahead. It’s just me and the car.

That’s when I get that feeling, the feeling of nervous trust. Nervous trust in the vehicle. Nervous trust in the design teams, engineers, electricians, computer programmers, the army of robots that constructed it and everyone who did the bits too fiddly for the robots to bother with.

And those who checked it, tested it, checked it again, signed off on it, transported it, housed it, displayed it, test drove it, sold it, purchased it, drove it, maintained it, crashed it, repaired it, drove it again, neglected it, tired of it, sold it, forgot it.
Because here I am, in it.

Sailing along in my pre-loved bargain, I'm thinking of all the people involved in making sure this lump of metal, this marvel of modern mechanics, doesn’t just stop in the middle of nowhere.

Meatloaf is telling me that it’s paradise by the dashboard light, but I’m not so sure. So many things can go wrong. What if the temperature gauge sensor is faulty and I’m seriously cooking the radiator? What if the timing chain goes and I blow the engine? Or I hit a bump and lose the steering box? Or bust a universal joint and drop a tailshaft?

What if there's a plain old simple structural failure in which everything important suddenly falls off and it all goes bad? Oh and did I mention that my mobile phone is out of range?

I nervously trust the vehicle as the digital display on the dash warns it's 42 degrees outside. When did cars learn how to tell the temperature of the outside world? And how do we know that they are not making it up or just guessing?

There's an old-fashioned analogue gauge to tell me the temperature of the engine, yet it can be degree-precise on something that's as unimportant as the weather. It’s like the vehicle is saying “the engine is warmish but not too hot, foolish human, but more interestingly the outside temperature is exactly 41 degrees. No wait, it's 42...”.

I decide I’ll put it to the test and crack the window. I receive a withering blast of flame-hot air to the face, like I'm checking the roast or unloading a pottery kiln. I hurriedly close the window and crank up the air-con, safe and sound in my little slice of human-friendly environment.

Now I know how astronauts must feel. For them and me it’s all about maintaining the machine. A breakdown is, to say the least, highly undesirable.

Astronaut Alan Shepard once said: “It's a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realise that one's safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract.” He also said: “Please dear God, don’t let me f*#! up”.

The Apollo astronauts all agree the most stressful time was when in a lunar orbit, the moon fell between them and the Earth and the spaceship lost communication with ground control. That’s the time those guys all nervously trusted the vehicle.

Now as I run my eyes over the satellite-navigation screen and it reassures me that I’m traveling north and I'm 250-odd clicks from the next fuel. At the same time I notice that the small circle with the arrow in it that represents the vehicle has left the road and is now trail-blazing across the map. According to the technology, I'm hopelessly off course.

I immediately run a low-tech data verification analysis by looking out the window to check that I’m still on the road, which I am. I start to verbally pay out on satellites, NASA, the whole sorry space program and especially the Hubble space telescope which is obviously pointing in the wrong bloody direction if it can’t see a car on a road from space. I choose my own data over that which is being provided by the nav system and stay on the road.

This decision proves to be a good one as the sat-nav shortly reloads itself and the pointer returns to the line that tells me I’m back on track. Just a glitch. I hope it’s got its sums right on the distance to the servo. I’ve got two-thirds of a tank of fuel and I’m carrying two jerry cans full to the brim. I'm not stupid and I've got stacks of peace of mind, but still I nervously trust the vehicle.

I rocket on through the nothingness of the Australian desert in my climate-controlled pod. The 'Loaf' can now hear someone somewhere tolling a bell, so I turn him up and we both sing “and the last thing I see is my heart, still beating, still beating, breaking out of my body and flying away”.

My phone -- or as I call it, my ‘First Officer’, since it's in charge of random music selection and more importantly communications with the outside world -- falls quiet, indicating that he has loyally completed the task I set him and silently awaits another.

I don’t select another playlist but tap on ALL MUSIC, RANDOM SELECT and I say, in my best Patrick Stewart: “You now control the tunes Number One, so make them good and make it so”. Glancing down, I notice my phone still has no bars and no service, which makes me laugh because I realise that what I really want is to walk into one and get some.

Yep, it’s beer o’clock. But considering the surroundings that’s generally always the time around here. The First Officer decides to play some Cory Hargreaves, so I turn it up and happily tap along on the steering wheel, forgetting for a moment the distance to the nearest pub and the many and varied potential perils of my immediate situation.

My eyes drift to a distant tower, the only landmark ahead on the otherwise dead flat horizon. I drive on, nervously trusting the vehicle.

BANG! I’ve hit something! A roo? A rock? No, just a big pothole. I’m back, fearing the worst, resisting the urge to brake, but not on the gravel -- that would put it on its lid. Foot off the gas, I’m instantly absorbed in controlling the vehicle and assessing any damage.

Eyes dead ahead, locked on the road, I say out loud: “You don’t want to hit another one like that”. “Der” I answer back, performing some slight steering corrections. It all seems fine, not pulling right or left.

A quick scan of the dash reveals no red lights or rising gauges. I let it slow down a bit more as I pause the loud music on the First Officer and peg back the air-con so I can hear the vehicle. Sounds OK, but I keep listening. Is that a slight grinding noise? I listen harder. I can’t quite make it out. Maybe I’m imagining it?

Suddenly the cabin is drowned in a deafening Mexican shriek “YOUR WIFE! YOUR WIFE! YOU GOT A CALL FROM YOUR WIFE!!” to the hilariously comical tune of La Cucaracha. I jump so high in my seat I bump my head on the roof. Half deaf, I set about combining as many hard-core swearwords as I can as the First Officer connects the call.

My wife receives the tirade and says "F*#! YOU TOO”. Letting out a long sigh of relief, I hurriedly change the volume from sing-a-long to talk normally. Everything has changed. The tower gives me four bars, the wife’s on the line, the pressure’s off.

“Where are you?" she asks.

“I dunno,” I answer, “but I’ve just been on the dark side of the moon”.

“I hate Pink Floyd,” she says.

“Well they speak very highly of you,” I point out.

“What are you doing?” she says.

“Me?” I answer, “I’m just going to the pub.”