Taking the Left Turn
found at wikihow.com
My son told me recently about a driving “adventure” that he and his buddy went on. The rules of the adventure were this: you drive straight ahead until you reach a T intersection, and then you have to turn right. You continue on straight, or making right turns, until you can go no further. While I was digesting the idea that, only by pure dumb luck I didn’t get a call from Chicago, or Terre Haute, telling me not to worry, they’d be back the next day, my son related with relish and a bit of cackling glee how they ended up in what could be described as the slums of Danbury, CT, a mere 35 minutes away, in a dead end by some housing projects. “Why always a right turn?” I asked him.
“It’s easier,” he said, with a look that said, “D-uh!”
I had reason to think of this driving game again when my friend Diane told me about her current heartache. She had met a man on the west coast when she was out visiting her grown daughter, and their chemistry had been immediate. Apparently, they lit each other up, body and soul, like a generator plant on the New Jersey Turnpike. Because she’d go out 2 times a year to visit, she was able to spend extended time with this man, and they fell deeply and madly in love. Skype and phone calls carried them between visits. After a few years, the time had come when they began contemplating combining their lives, but because both of them had strong family, social, professional, even soulful ties to their own communities 3000 miles apart, they faced some tricky obstacles. They had started talking happily and dreamily about splitting their time on each coast, assuming they could find the way to make their professional activities more portable. While Diane had no friends or community connections on the west, her daughter was there, and she looked forward to the adventure of gaining new friends and activities there. And she would still be spending plenty of time with her family and friends on the east. Her man had both family and siblings on the east, and his kids on the west were virtually grown, ready for their own adventures. Nevertheless, this great love of her life seemed to be balking, talking with anxiety and dread about the huge changes necessary for them to be together on a day-to-day basis. He thought he’d be able to carry most of his work with him, but what if he couldn’t? What if he missed his much larger social circle on the west too much? What if he hated living on the east coast, with its gray cities and variable weather? What if, to accommodate him, she ended up spending more time on the west and began resenting him? What if their projected net worth as a pair really wouldn’t be enough to sustain the kind of lives to which they were accustomed or the resulting travel costs? Diane began feeling hurt. Based on what she understood, these possibilities did not seem likely. And wasn’t their love worth the changes? Wouldn’t the day-to day-joy of being together make everything else seem manageable? Fun, even? She wondered if he had just been indulging in a dream of love, one that evaporated when compromise became necessary, while she had been committing her heart.
“It’s not that,” I told her. “He’s just afraid to make a left turn.”
“Huh?” was her response, but I saw from her face that she could already sort of grasp where I was going.
“Diane,” I said, “this is probably the first left turn this guy has made in about 25 or 30 years.”
Dick Grossberg – CD Clocks
Despite the rules of my son’s driving game, young people make left turns all the time at the craziest intersections. They deliberately put on their left signal, having possibly decided at the last minute that’s where they want to go. They move out in the middle of the intersection with all the attendant risks, and nimbly or not so nimbly make it happen. Sometimes with bravado and confidence, sometimes with elevated heart rate, drawing in breath through clenched teeth or muttering “fuck” under their breath, but they make it. They follow a college sweetheart to a new city, a new country even, with no real plan for their future. They quit a job they realize is making them sick or just not leading anywhere they particularly wanted to go, and begin an entirely new career or profession from nothing. They decide they will go to Bhutan before they settle down into a routine life, and suddenly discover a burning desire to become a Buddhist monk. Why can they do this? Is it just because young people are braver? Do they take more risks because they don’t have the life experience to think through all the possible negative consequences? In other words, are they blissfully ignorant?
I think that is definitely so, but instead of worrying on their behalf, which they never appreciate and indeed chafe against, I think we should take a few lessons from them. I used to be one of those mothers who always offered a nervous litany of concerns and fears about her kids’ choices. Offered the litany without solicitation, of course. It just bubbled up out of me, like a compulsion, and I convinced myself I was doing the right thing, counseling my naïve and judgment-impaired children, throwing water on their fires. It started when they were very young, and became so ingrained in me as a protective impulse, that at some point I couldn’t be any other way. I immediately went to that place where everything that could go wrong would, and into the dread, of course, I factored in the weighty heartache and fresh worrying I would personally experience when things inevitable turned sour. What a drag! How did I get so negative and fearful? And I’m not even remotely as negative as most people I know!
What saved me? I started noticing, finally, that there were some people who, when I mentioned something my kid was going to do, something that I felt okay about, would start going through all the things that could go wrong. They set forth all the reasons I should discourage my child. I started noticing that these were the same people who plan out every detail of their vacations, and always find it necessary to proudly point out how they were able to get a spot close by to an event because they charted out their course days earlier and made sure to arrive an hour early. All risk is managed away to provide as smooth a ride as possible. No supporting a kid’s dream, because a dream isn’t practical and almost certainly will fail. No pursuing their own dreams for the same reason. And certainly no left turns! So many of us will continue down a path that really isn’t suited to us, that is leading us astray or to a dead end, rather than make a left.
But perhaps it isn’t just the ever-spreading tumor of worry that drags us down, away from the risk and the rightly earned delight from successfully making a left. After all, when we are older, our vehicles are longer. Instead of a zippy little car or jet ski built for one, maybe two, they are freakin’ tractor-trailers, or huge tankers that carry all the people, responsibilities and ties we’ve accumulated. They don’t turn easily. They take up the entire intersection as they swing round, creating a disturbance, and threatening to upset our cargo. It makes sense to avoid that left! But is it sense or fear that keeps us from taking it? Is it our forgotten skills or long buried sense of adventure?
I know of people whose lifestyles involve changing locales every 5 or 7 years for professional reasons. Their craft never seems to get too big to turn. They find fun and adventure in every new place, and remain nimble, flexible, daring. Sure, moving is a pain, but they do it with good cheer and make the best of it. They have many friends all over the country with whom they keep up contact and visit. They have safe ports all over. But for those of us who stay in one port for too long, our crafts just seem to get bigger and bigger, maybe even stuck, and other ports begin to seem foreign, scary, hard to navigate, not worth the effort.
Maybe our crafts are not as big as we think. Maybe we just haven’t made a left in some time and we’ve lost the stout heart for it. I think even a person who once led an adventurous life for many years can lose heart if they’ve been settled for a while. They might even still make the occasional right, which isn’t nearly as scary, and tell themselves they’ve been making lefts.
No question, the left turn is far more challenging, even dangerous at times. And yes, being parked, or going straight, or even turning right is much safer. And maybe the surroundings we’ve been in for such an extended period of time are wonderful in many ways that we are loath to give up. But maybe what lies to the left is the promised land, the incredible place we never found because we just wanted to avoid that left. Maybe, if we go for it, we will discover that our craft, while indeed carrying a load, isn’t really that huge and heavy after all, and that we can in fact travel back and forth, keeping the delights of our old port while discovering even greater enchantments at a new one. And in the process, maybe we might realize that the young do not have the market on adventure and exploration, and that there is something to be said for venturing forth without a clear sense of what could happen. Maybe it keeps us young, and what’s wrong with that?
I told Diane, “Tell him to turn on his signal, take a deep breath and get ready for the adventure of a lifetime. Or get on board and remind him how.”
Found at weissesrauschen.tumblr.com
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Here’s to left turns!
Instructions for making a left turn driving a semi-tractor trailer truck:
Driving a tractor trailer is nothing if not an art, but like any other art, perfecting it is mostly a matter of practice and inspiration. Practice comes from doing it, from daily honing of crucial skills, and knowing your blind spots. Inspiration comes from the knowledge that you’re capable of handling any situation that the road throws at you. To make a left turn at a crossroads:
1. Look at the crossroads ahead and figure out if you’ll have the room you’ll need to complete the turn. If there’s traffic sitting at the intersection close to your right, then allow for there to be enough room to swing into the right hand lane ahead.
2. Engage your left turn signal at least 200 feet before making the turn, and check traffic at the intersection and in your mirrors. Downshift to the appropriate gear. Bear in mind that despite the left-turn signal, it will at first appear to other road users near you that your truck is making a right turn rather than a left turn. Check traffic coming up on your right behind you, and then bear to the right side of your lane. Cross over the line to your right by about a foot if necessary, but no more.
3. Check your left-hand mirror one last time to make sure that no one is trying to pass on your left and going to end up with a trailer parked on their hood. Enter the turn, aiming the front of your truck for the oncoming lane.
4. Watch your left front, hood-mounted blind-spot mirror. Once you’ve determined that you have the clearance to swing out, your trailer tires are effectively “driving” the truck. You already know that you have room for the tractor, and once you pass this point of no return, your primary duty is to direct the trailer tires so that they don’t hop the curb on any islands at the intersection, or that the trailer scrapes against a traffic light or other obstruction.
5. Look ahead every couple of seconds to make sure that the traffic is where you left it, and to re-check your tractor clearance. Go back to watching the trailer wheels in your left mirror, and steer the tractor in or out to get them as close to the apex of the curve as you can without hopping it.
6. Turn the truck sharply to the left after your rear wheels have passed the apex of the curve. Nothing you do past this point will steer your trailer away from a central island or other obstacle, so now your priority shifts to getting the truck completely into your lane and straightening it out and completing the manoeuver.
7. Cancel your turn signal only when the truck has completely straightened out in its lane.
Thank you for this very detailed set of instructions for turning large tractor-trailers left, which, while uncredited, I’ll assume you thoughtfully obtained from a credible source. There is no doubt that making a left turn with a huge truckload is a complex maneuver. It certainly helps to have a guide, and consider all the potential complications. However, it seems to me that is remains the case that you need a stout heart and a willing courage to try it in the first place. For some people, I imagine, viewing the left turn as requiring so many steps with so much at stake for each one can actually overwhelm their determination and dishearten them. And that’s ok. There are some people who just won’t be able to manage it, and no one can blame them.