So I’m home for the weekend. And when I say home, I mean the town I grew up in, in my parents’ house, on my mom’s computer. I come home fairly regularly, so it’s not like I’m having all kinds of Thomas Wolfe moments or anything, but I’m always a little surprised at revelations I sometimes have when I’m here.

Tonight, for example, my sister and I went to visit my brother, and on our way out, she asked if I wanted to go drive around or something. I figured it would be nice to give my parents some alone time so I said yeah. We decided to go check out the game refuge. For the sake of brevity (yeah right), I won’t go into a long treatise on the game refuge or why it’s here or why we sometimes decide to go drive it. Suffice it to say it’s a place for endangered deer and it’s a nice, long, windy road next to the river. We used to get ice cream cones and drive it with my grandmother. It’s nostalgic.

But it’s also the place where I learned to drive. I mean really drive. My step-dad took me for my first excursion behind the wheel. And I’m sure my mom played some part in my vehicular lessons, but, judging by the difference in our driving styles (she’s NEVER had a ticket, ever), I think that part was small. No, mostly I learned to drive from the older boys I dated in high school. They’d take me out to the game refuge and let me practice driving their trucks. There wasn’t much else to do in town, so teaching young girls to drive was a pretty exciting night, I guess.

As my sister and I were driving out there tonight, I was floored at the trust these boys put in my less-than-capable skills. The roads at the game refuge are freakin’ scary. They are windy, like I remember, but they are also small and full of potholes and host about a million blind corners. On one side there is a steep embankment, not quite a ravine, but pretty close. On the other is another steep embankment, but this one leads into one of two rivers. So if there happens to be, oh I don’t know, a DEER on the road, you have really limited choices about how to deal with it. I feel fairly confident that I could manage that decision making now, but at 15? Shit.

If you know anything about boys from small towns, you know how much they love their trucks. My only guess is that the idea of a potential makeout session by a grateful student driver was more valuable to them than the hours they spent rebuilding engines, perfecting paintjobs, and making the truck bed as comfortable as possible for their black labs.

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