More of this newsletter is about driving than I might wish it to be, but if fish could write there’d be a lot of books about water, and so I must report on the element in which I exist.
Of all the terrors in this world, driving on a Los Angeles freeway ranks highly. Somewhere between taking a stroll in the woods during deer hunting season and spending the night alone in a haunted house. Much like getting my period, I hoped to avoid it forever, but nature finds its way.
The worst freeway in Los Angeles (and that’s quite a prize) is the 110, which has been around since 1678. The section from downtown Los Angeles to Pasadena was built when cars were no faster than horses and people didn’t mind dying, and has quaintly not been updated. The entrance and exit ramps are roughly the length of a chaise lounge and empty into three tight lanes. You’d think this means that people drive carefully, signal clearly, and obey the speed limit but—surprise!—they do not. They even like to drive a little bit crazier when it rains!
My sister recently got in accident on one of these on / off ramps. I myself had a close call at the exact same entrance a few weeks prior. The onramp spills onto the freeway right after a sharp curve, and you have to keep looking behind you to see if cars are coming and looking ahead of you to see if the car in front of you is moving. If you assume (as I did) that a gap in the freeway behind you means the car in front of you is moving, you might start accelerating and then quickly realize they haven’t moved, screeching on your brakes. Because you’re still on an active freeway entrance, you won’t fully be able to process how close you were to dying until you’re back on the 101, which now seems like a quaint country road compared to the 110.
So maybe you’ll understand why I vowed to never drive on the freeway until it became quite clear that limiting my routes to surface streets limited my life as well. It’s scary and its dangerous and there’s no guarantee you’ll make it safely back home in one piece, but you can also get killed by a car on a walk, so you hold your breath and hit the gas and hope there aren’t too many loose cannons out to get you.
All this is to say I had a baby last week and the experience has been much like launching onto a Los Angeles freeway. Accelerating at a terrifying speed into a journey that will take you places you’ve never been, fueled by fear and faith in equal measure, trusting the route to get you where you need to go.
That said, I did give birth in Pasadena, off the 110, and you better believe we took surface streets all the way home.
Scared now? Just imagine your beautiful and precious Oona at 16 with a brand new license taking that same on ramp! Yikes!!! Maybe a move to a small town in the midwest looks better now.
So thrilled for you! I'm reminded of the day your mom gave birth to you! (Except she vacillated about your name for more than a week!) Hope to see you and meet Oona soon!