Open Windows on a Michigan Highway

They’re merging us down to one lane on a Friday afternoon in Michigan, where everyone’s going the same way—Up North to the cabins and lakes and wooded lots with firepits. It’s good to be back in the Wolverine state, where we met and married and welcomed our two children.

Old music comes through our fancy, new Bluetooth speaker. Steve’s got his playlist going. Peter, Paul, and Mary still want a hammer.  Simon and Garfunkel bridge the troubled water. The wind’s still blowin’. And after more than six decades of the song being out in the world, everything keeps on turn, turn, turning. All the sounds of long ago.

Steve rolls down his window and smiles at me.

There are all sorts of good reasons to keep windows shut on the road: to reduce wind noise and air resistance, to increase fuel efficiency, to keep debris from flying in. But at this moment the open window takes us back to the pre-AC days when folks had tans on their driving arms and wind in their hair, when they breathed in the sharp, heady scents of  asphalt and combustion exhaust.

That’s how we rolled down Saginaw Street after a date.

But for me, open windows go even further back—to my childhood. To nine-hour family trips from our city home in Flint to grandparents and cousins in Western Maryland with five or six of us packed into the back seat of a sedan. The baby was lucky, riding in spacious luxury between our parents in one of those small dangle chairs that hooked over the front seat.  

My parents were lucky too. With the roar of the road through the open windows, they missed most of the tattling. Who stepped on whose foot and who was spreading halfway across the seat and who said something that was not at all nice.

But luck ran out for all of us when the baby soiled a diaper. The odor didn’t mix well with asphalt and exhaust. One time the baby wet once too often. Extra diapers were packed deep in the trunk. So my mom closed her window over the end of the damp diaper, where it flapped outside in the wind.

The flapping worked well for my mom, muffling protests of embarrassment from the back seat.

At sixteen I ran into luck—finding something more calming and way more fun than being a big sister in a back seat—open windows and “Turn! Turn! Turn!” on dates with Steve.

But even better is old music through the Bluetooth and a smile that calls back the decades.