God Bless GPS: Or, The OTHER great summer pleasure

I am not surfing this weekend, though it's midsummer and midsummer surfing is one of life's great pleasures. But summer is brief and it's time to discover the OTHER great summer pleasure: the roadtrip. Yeah!

If there's anything better than setting off on a roadtrip, it's setting off on a roadtrip with GPS. I truly think this is one of the greatest inventions in the history of humankind. You can now truly go anywhere without planning in advance and can never get lost (for very long). Roadtrip perfected.

I like going places, but I just like driving in and of itself. Of course, the essential ingredient of a great summer drive is the soundtrack. And some of life's best moments are when road and music coalesce into an experience which transcends either of them by themselves. Great drives stay with you forever and are to be treasured. I've had quite a few and a couple already this summer.

Like the late-night, exhausted-from-sun-and-surfing drive from Santa Cruz to a little town I'd never heard of just outside of it, though a forest or what looked like one by the light of the moon, on a thrilingly winding and deserted road, the air cool and fragrant, listening to a CD I was hearing for the first time: Music for Drella by John Cale. Yeah, an old one but new to me, and with the pine trees and the moon it absolutely blew me away, it was so suited to the night and the whole day that had passed before it. I was going there to either sleep with or not sleep with a man who lived over a bar in this little town. The bar was something out of the 1950s movie and as far from hipster Santa Cruz as could be and I fell in love with it immediately. I ended up not sleeping with the man who lived above the bar with his dog and think it was the right decision even though I had and have decided for all practical purposes that at my age the word "No" should have no part in my vocabulary. And I will never say it again.

Or the drive this week that took me straight through a hailstorm so fierce that I had to pull off the road while hailstones exploded my car with such intensity and such noise that I feared they'd shatter the windshield; it was kind of like being inside an MRI magnified by a thousand and by fear. The rain came down in sheets and made me feel like the car was sliding away while it was parked and I could see nothing but slippery whiteness outside. And then it stopped and the sun came out and I started to drive again, looking for a rainbow and finding one, which makes any drive special. And the sky took on the hue that only comes after a violent storm, and the grass turned that extraterrestrial green of full summer, and there was haze on the river that ran alongside the road, and I said: I must remember this light, these colors, because it was like seeing a painting. And I had just gotten a Nina Simone CD and was listening to it, and it was a compilation of songs that had been recorded over many years but were all new to me, and one in particular I liked so much I played eight times in a row, because it was the perfect music for a day that had been pelted by a storm and washed clean and pure; nothing suited it like that voice. And I was glad to be on the road, many hours away from the ocean, headed in fact for Lake Ontario where there are no waves.