"Driving into the Sun" by Karin Hedetniemi

Driving into the Sun

I was always calmer inside my grandfather’s gentle aura. He was soft-spoken and wise, a speechwriter for the governor of Michigan, an honest citizen, educated and kind. To the child me, he was the keeper of books, the savior of small birds, a safe barn from winter storms.
As a family man, my grandfather learned to drive only after he bought his first car: a 1941 Plymouth sedan with a manual transmission. Maybe I inherited something from him, since my first car was also a Plymouth: a 1987 Horizon hatchback with a stick shift. I was 23 years old, without a driver’s license.
My young husband tried to teach me to drive, but our impatience with each other frustrated the goal. Breaking a horse, the hard way. I failed my first road test. The instructor said I was too nervous behind the wheel. Just give it a little more time, gain a little more confidence.
The country backroads offered solace and thinking space. The Plymouth Horizon was my patient teacher, as I learned to understand its mechanics and shift smoothly between gears. It listened to my inner turmoil. It was my friend.
It was also my getaway car.
I took my second driver's exam on a snowy February day. The icy roads demanded I be more cautious, more deliberate. This time I passed the road test, unlocking my freedom. Two weeks later, the Plymouth Horizon and I secretly left town, heading east on the Trans-Canada Highway. 
I was in fight-or-flight mode, fleeing an unhappy marriage, taking a blind risk, driving towards happiness. Or so I thought at the time. My instinctive response was preconditioned, a biological factory default, the ignition turned on and left running from an earlier time I’d bolted from home. Then I was fourteen, a startled colt, flying out of fear, out of courage, out of everything else imprinted in my cells.
On that flat highway, I drove from dawn to dusk — sleeping in cheap roadside motels, eating gas station sandwiches, never looking in the rearview mirror. When I was thousands of miles away from pain, I stopped to breathe. Found a job, a temporary home, a momentary romance. But not happiness. That would only come later, when I learned to understand my body’s manual transmission. How to shift between emotional gears. Allow my mind to idle in neutral, before deciding which direction to take.
It wasn’t long before the eastern, big-city version of my life dissolved. My sensitive internal wiring wasn't meant for busy freeways, shadowed buildings, and constant noise. I had a broken heart, full of unprocessed grief and long-held trauma, that would never mend in such an over-stimulating place. I needed the prairie, its visible stars, and forgiveness.
One spring morning of torrential rain, the wipers beating hard in syncopation with my heart, I started driving west. The floorboards filled with water. I kept my eyes on the horizon’s gentle sliver of light.

Karin Hedetniemi

Karin Hedetniemi lives on Vancouver Island, where she photographs and writes about nature, place, inspiration, and being human. In a former life, she helped lead an environmental education charity. Her creative work is published/forthcoming in Prairie Fire, Still Point Arts Quarterly, Sky Island Journal, Barren Magazine, Capsule Stories, Door is a Jar Magazine, and other journals. She won the 2020 nonfiction prize from the Royal City Literary Arts Society. Hedetniemi shares her writing on her website: AGoldenHour.com.

Headshot: Gary Salmon

Photo Credit: Staff