Backing Up

When I graduated from college with an English degree years ago, my original plan was to become a truck driver. I didn't know what to do with my English degree and neither did any of my other English-degree-graduating friends.

So, getting a job as a truck driver seemed like the most sensible thing to do. That is, except for the problem of backing up.

The idea of backing up an 18-wheel oil rig down curvy icy mountain roads in Colorado scared me straight-so to speak.

There's something almost a little demeaning about backing up. You back up when you're in the forest and you come across a mother bear with her cubs. You back up slowly, never turning your back on the bear. It's a way of saying “You're bigger than me. You're stronger than me. I give in.”

Rhinos are one of the few animals in the wild that never back up. That's because they don't have to. They're so big and fierce that everything and everyone around them does the backing up. This refusal to back up is actually a display of dominance.

That's why it's always such a problem when two cars meet bumper to bumper on a one way road. Someone has to back up. And I never want it to be me. So, I'll just sit there with my arms folded giving the other driver the evil eye. Not because I want to prove my dominance, but because I'm afraid I'll back right off the edge of the cliff or into the river. It would probably be more honest of me to simply tell the other driver I'm too afraid to back up. But by the time it would take me to get out of the car and do that, the other driver could have been backing up.

Backing up is hard. And this is the reason why I think it's so hard: You have to do the exact opposite of what you're used to doing. So, if you want your car to turn left, you have to turn the wheel to the right. If you want to go left, you have to turn right. It just feels so counterintuitive. Backing up a boat attached to a trailer is even more complex. You have to do the opposite of the opposite of what you'd normally do. It's too hard to think about. That's one of the main reasons my family approved so wholeheartedly of my brother-in-law when my sister decided to marry him. He was the only person in the family who could back my dad's speed boat into the water without crashing it into the dock.

As for me, I am so bad of a backer-upper, that I have gotten stuck in my own driveway on numerous occasions and have had to call the tow truck driver to pull me out more than once. After so many years, I've gotten to know my driveway so well that I can almost close my eyes like “Darth Veder” and feel my way down the driveway in the absolute darkness of the night.

Of course, I don't really need to do that, since I have a semi-circular driveway. This means that no matter which way my car's pointing, it's always in the right direction and I never have to back up.

It's too bad the rest of the world isn't like that all the time.

(Readers can e-mail Lisa at lisal@thegrid.net.)