My father knew the county roads
By every bend and scar,
And kept a folded map beside
The papers in his car.
Now a voice says, “Turn in fifty feet,”
And tells us where we are.
There were truckers in the darkness,
Taxis waiting in the rain,
Mothers making school runs,
And young men racing trains.
There were lovers driving nowhere,
Old friends going home,
And a thousand little journeys
No machine had ever known.
We learned the weight of steering,
The language of the gears,
How an engine changed its breathing,
How a bad wheel sounded near.
Sometimes we drove for wages,
Sometimes to disappear.
I remember paper road maps
Spread across the passenger seat,
And the radio half-static
While the tires sang beneath.
You could miss a turn and wander,
You could stop and ask the way,
And sometimes being lost awhile
Was the best part of the day.
I was lucky in my lifetime,
Born when drivers still were free,
After horses left the highway,
Before cars no longer needed me.
Now every road is measured,
Every turning understood;
The machines will never lose their way—
And I sometimes wish they would.
When the final driver’s finished,
And the last old engine cools,
When the roads are ruled by numbers
And the traffic flows by rules,
The cars will know each destination,
Every choice they have to make—
But they’ll never know what called us
Down a road we needn’t take.