Somewhere around midway in my life’s journey, I found myself in an electric car with my collegiate son. The path ahead was clear — 600 miles of turnpikes and interstates to reach his dorm — and the road lay through fallow winter farmland instead of a dark forest. Nonetheless, on this trip, life suddenly became a perplexing pilgrimage, a bit as it did for the fictional Dante Alighieri, who made an epic trip through infernal and purgatorial regions in order to finally reach heaven in the course of the “Divine Comedy.”
I was expecting a regular old drive back to school with my son, but as everything started to go wrong, it didn’t feel epic or adventurous. Life is mostly like this — less epic, more everyday. As we roll along, we hit potholes and then try to realign, all the while praying for the humility to make room for God’s ever-present grace. I know I prayed many prayers as we wound along the roads to the West, although I have to keep this real: For most of the 28 hours of this road-trip-of-errors, I was just trying to wrangle myself into some semblance of a pleasant, mostly functioning human being. I wasn’t thinking about heavenly destinies; I was trying not to curse our frozen EV car battery as we gamely fumbled ahead.
We set out from home before the sun rose on a Sunday morning. A little while into the trip, my son started examining the dashboard statistics.
“Mom, that driving range mileage number … seems kind of low, doesn’t it?” I glanced down. The inordinately low driving mileage shone impudently amid the array of numbers glowing on the dashboard.
“YES.” I said. “That … can’t be right.” We soon realized that with the interior heat running, our driving mileage would be severely diminished from what we had estimated it to be. It was January, 28 degrees outside and dropping, but gamely we turned off the heat and donned a few extra layers. It’s really not all that bad if you’re out of the wind, we told ourselves — and with the heat off, our driving range increased enough to get us to our first planned charging stop.
Cold as hell
With the temperature creeping ever downward, we plugged into a supposedly speedy Level 3 charger. The charging rate was so slow that I thought the thing must be broken. Texts with my husband soon revealed at least part of the problem. Well, he wrote, it looks like charging in below-freezing temperatures can be slow with this particular model of car. But it shouldn’t be that slow, even with the cold. Maybe the next station will be faster?
No, the next station was not faster, nor the next one after that. And an extreme polar vortex was sweeping down from Canada that day. As we drove, the temperature crept into the teens. While charging the car at a Target outside Pittsburgh, I purchased blankets, along with hand- and foot-warmers. I tried to convince myself that the car heater was just an “extra luxury” we could go without even as I began to wonder if my mind was functioning optimally in the icy temperatures.
As the afternoon grew later, and we approached the 10-hour mark for our supposed-to-be-nine-hour trip, my son reminded me that he needed to go to Mass, which he had planned to do that evening on campus. Given our location — 250 miles from his dorm on an endless stretch of the Ohio Turnpike, with a dwindling electric car battery — he would certainly not make it to Mass at school. And that is why, having dropped my son at an evening Mass somewhere in Ohio, I arrived alone, with a 1% charge on the car, in the parking lot of a strangely abandoned hotel. All the rooms were dark, though a single lamp illuminated a lobby filled with stacks of what looked like furniture and cast-off lumber. The e-car app had claimed there would be a charging station here, and sure enough, there was a charging station glowing at one corner of the empty lot.
Losing the true way
Once I’d plugged into the charging station (which was still abysmally slow), I found myself with a problem as I shivered in the 17-degree car. This place was so sketchy that I wasn’t sure I wanted to sit there alone. On the other hand, this place was so sketchy, I didn’t want to leave the car because I wasn’t sure I would come back to it with its windows intact.
I gambled on departure, slipping and sliding across the parking lot — which was basically an untreated sheet of ice — and heading toward a few nondescript stores and restaurants in the distance. I aimed for a little building I thought might be a local pizza place; its cinderblocked side was painted with a cursive, red, Italian-ish kind of name. As I began to tug the handle on the establishment, my frozen mind began to register that the words stenciled in black paint on the windowless front door were advertising not the evening’s pizza special but something altogether different. XXX Adult Special! Videos and more! XXX, it read. Chagrined and dinnerless, I turned back to the car.
The remaining journey with my son found us charging the car in the back of a shadowy car dealership, sprinting across an eight-lane highway in the dark to the only restaurant still open at 9 p.m. in rural Ohio (an Asian buffet), and, later, wrangling a Level 3 charger which spontaneously shut off every five minutes. At 2 a.m., after 20 hours of travel, we checked into a hotel somewhere near the Indiana border for a four-hour nap while the car charged. The next morning, things with the car were not much better, though we eventually made it to campus just in time to completely miss my son’s first class of the spring semester.
The journey of our life
It remains a mystery to me why we didn’t consider turning back home, right at the first charging station — we could have taken a different car and still made the journey in nearly half the time. Maybe what pushed us on was optimism, maybe foolishness, or that natural human drive to continue ahead, always hoping that the bend in the road will lead us to that next good thing.
Maybe the whole trip, as mundane as it was, could be a good analogy for life, for the scrapes we have to get through in order to reach our end in heaven — even if we have to forge through Dantesque landscape of ice, shadows, dysfunctionality and adult video stores that would make the doomed lovers Paolo and Francesca blush. The analogy might really work: It was, in fact, quite heavenly to arrive on campus, to a shower and a nap, to confession with a compassionate priest, and to a celebration of the Eucharist in a gold-rimmed basilica.
On the other hand, maybe this is just half a tale of a middle-aged road trip filled with a haphazard string of electric-car mishaps. Half a tale — because my way home involved navigating the highways around Wheeling, West Virginia, in a blizzard, scooting between slaloming tractor trailers, trying to find places to charge the battery that were only on downhill exit ramps, and excavating every charging station in western Maryland out from behind 6-foot-tall piles of snow, using only my handheld plastic windshield scraper. But that’s another story, for another time.
