I Went for a Drive

50 KM: 
A SUBJECTIVE GEOGRAPHY OF CAMBRIDGE
CIR. 2011-2017

BY MARCO CHIMIENTI

I’ve run out of time, as usual. The goal was to tell a story in a sort of David-Foster-Wallace-Style run-on sentence about a particular 50 kilometer drive. This stream of consciousness narrative would have fit nicely with what I assumed would be a series of discrete places, dates, events, and memories, roughly located and timestamped, in whatever order I recalled. But as I said, I ran out of time. 

What follows is then a series of notes, in no particular order. 

But first, some context. Whenever I feel anxious or frustrated, I go for a drive. I’ve been going on the same drive, more or less, for the last 6 years. The route has rarely changed. I always look for long country roads. The fewer cars the better. I often listen to music. Sometimes, I listen to the sound of my tires on the pavement or gravel, kicking up dirt, rocks and mud. Sometimes, I wait for the weather to turn, or the sun to set. Sometimes the drive lasts 20 minutes, other times up to an hour. This drive lasts 45 minutes. 

There’s the foot bridge that passes over grand river, under which I contracted some kind of bacterial infection, which sent me regurgitating to the emergency room. I was in the river, not exactly by choice, but something like it. I was stringing rope from shoreline to shoreline——School Project. The next day, I couldn’t stop vomiting. Of course, it may also have been food poisoning from the pig roast I attendant the day prior, but given that no one else got sick, I’m inclined to blame the river. 

There’s the apartment below mine that, I’m quite sure, houses drug dealers. On many occasions I’ve come home to cop cars conspicuously parked in the empty lot across my building——the lot empty because my neighbors burned down their garage shed and never replaced it, preferring instead to leave the charred remains of the concrete slab exposed. The people downstairs yell and fight a lot, often in the street, often about money. Strangers come knocking at strange hours. The dogs are loosing their minds. Walking back alone at night, I heard for the first time the cry of a coyote, which if you don’t know, can best be described as a wailing demon baby. I ran. 

There’s the long, long, really long farm building (perhaps a green house) that sits in the landscape perfectly perpendicular to the road, which I have on more than one occasion used as precedence for a project. It’s clad in clean, sun-bleached wood panels, with metal cross-bracing. It stands out amongst the standard rotting barns, broken fences, trash heaps and concrete silos. 

There’s another bridge which passes high above the grand river, where I’ve never stopped, despite wanting to every time I’ve crossed it. Driving by, catching only a glimpse through the side windows, you can see the river for miles in each direction, and it’s unbelievably beautiful.

There are the five towers, the creatively named cluster of five radio towers which sit between farm land high up on the hills around Cambridge. At night, 3 of the towers are lit up with red, flashing beacons——signaling their ominous presence.

On my favorite roads there’s nothing——maybe a few boring and beautiful grain silos. Maybe a farm house. No cars. No people. On dark nights I sometimes turn my high-beams off and let the darkness creep in a little more. In this bubble I watch the road glide by. I watch the trees and shrubs fade in and fade out. I watch the telephone wires reflect the lights of distant cars. I watch the pulsing of signal tower beacons. Sometimes when the weather is bad, this bubble closes in further. It’s these moments I seek out most, but often the drive alone is enough. Maybe I should see a therapist. 

That’s as far as I’ve gotten, but I want to take a minute to point out the places that I don’t drive by.

I don’t drive by the school of architecture. I don’t drive by the strip-mall-laden suburban nightmare of Hespeler Road. I don’t drive by Toaster’s Dinner, the best kept secret in Cambridge. I never make it to Paris——in fact I avoid Paris. I never cross the 401. 

I’ve never much deviated from my set route, once it was established almost subconsciously. Over time, the drive found it’s way into muscle memory. I couldn’t name even a third of the roads I take. One road I know only by the cluster of trees which line it, another by the strange way it curves off the main road. The first time I looked at my route was for this project. Hovering over Cambridge, I tried to trace my drive on Google maps. I looked for that cluster of trees. I looked for the shape of that road. I did this only to figure out exactly how long the drive was. Turns out to be 50 kilometers. In the last 7 days I’ve gone on 7 drives. Over the last 6 years, I must have driven 25 hundred kilometers. 187 hours. Almost 8 full days of my life spent aimlessly driving, stepping away from work, trying not to lose my mind, and in doing so becoming something of an expert on this small patch of Canadian pastoral landscape.

Marco Chimienti
17.02.17