Teaching the Goddess to Drive

Gaia, the Earth Goddess, came to see me the other morning, as I was drinking coffee and watching the sun rise from the top of the Sledding Hill.

“Tara, I need your help with something,” she said. “Are you free for a little while?”

“Of course, Lady. What did you have in mind?”

“You know how there are some problems with these technological inventions people keep coming up with, right? Unplanned consequences and all that?" When Gaia talks to me I always feel personally responsible for all the Hummers and landmines of the world. “I have a newish plan for dealing with it, and it involves learning to use some of the technology myself. I want to come to visit in human form and play with some of your inventions.”

“There are people in government starting to deal with the issues we talk about. Just the other day I was reading that some of the politicians in Washington…”

“They needn’t trouble themselves.” Uh-oh. When her eyes glint like that it doesn’t bode well for the human race. “I’m a big girl and I think I can take care of myself.” I’m buying a bigger umbrella. But then she brightened. “That’s what you can help me with. I’m ready to get a better grasp on how all these doodads of yours work, so I want to learn how to operate one of your cars. And you can teach me.”

“Well, if you’re sure you want to mess around with something that burns fossil fuels… Wouldn’t you rather start with a computer or something?”

“No, Tara. I’ve never been all that fond of cars, but that’s precisely why I need to understand them. I’ll get around to some other machines eventually. Well, not tanks or space shuttles or anything. Anyway, for computers I’d have to learn to read first, wouldn’t I?”

“Oh yeah, that’s right. Hmm. But, Gaia, I don’t really know how to drive very well myself. I ride my bike mostly.”

“You rock,” she deadpanned.

I shook my head. “No, I mean, I really can’t afford a car. Anyway you always want your followers to eat like hedonists but still look hot. I need all the exercise I can get.”

“Hmm, I never thought of that.” Gaia is always sympathetic to our problems, but she doesn’t necessarily anticipate them, or completely understand them. She certainly has enough problems of her own.

But she wasn’t letting me off the hook. She said, “I’m sure you’ll do fine,” in that tone bosses everywhere use when they want you to do some unpleasant job they can’t get anyone else to do. Probably she chose me for the job because I’m only marginally qualified, so I wouldn’t be judgmental – she hates that. Reluctantly I agreed to do it.

“Good,” she said, pulling an impossibly large keyring out of the back pocket of her jeans. The keys on it were old-fashioned and of various colors and patterns, except for one. It was like a car key but with no notches cut in the business end. We had wandered up to the street, where several vehicles were parked along the curb. She inserted the funny key into the lock of a green sedan and jiggled it around awkwardly, and the lock popped up. When she withdrew the key it looked like an ordinary car key, notches and all.

I looked around in alarm, but the street was deserted. Gaia told me not to worry, that we would bring the car back unharmed. But from the start nothing went smoothly. The first car was a stick shift, a complete mystery to me. But the key worked in whatever she put it in, so she selected another, some kind of red station wagon which turned out to be an automatic transmission. Then she found the shoulder harness uncomfortable. We’re about the same height, but when I tried to fix the thing up for her it kept digging into her more ample breasts. Finally we just slipped it behind her, where it continued to snag her curly bronze hair, but was at least a lesser problem.

“Okay now, how do we make it go?” I showed her the ignition. She slipped the key in a jiggled it around a little bit as she had in the door. Again this somehow worked, and the engine started. This made the dashboard light up, and she noticed all the dials and lights and gauges. She pointed to one. “What is this, anyway?”

“I don’t know.”

“This?”

“Sorry, no idea. But this thing over here tells you how much fuel you have, and it’s pointed toward the empty side. I think we need gas.”

This gave her an idea which made her smile warmly. “I think it would be a nice gesture to give the owner of this machine some fuel for it. Very good then, let’s go to the fossil fuel store.” Without touching anything she made the engine vroom loudly. I’m pretty sure she knew it wasn’t called a “fossil fuel store”; sometimes I don’t know if she’s trying to make me laugh or scare the pants off me. I couldn’t remember if there was a gas station nearby, so we’d have to drive around looking for one.

“Okay,” I said, “To drive it you put it in gear first. That means you move this stick with the letters and numbers by it. You should put it on one of the numbers, I think.”

“Which of these marks are numbers?” I know this doesn’t sound very promising, but we did finally get the thing moving down the street, and I was able to instruct her in using the gas and brake pedals, though at first I forgot which was which.

I didn’t like to think about meeting any traffic. “Maybe you’d better make it 6 a.m. on a Sunday, at least until we find a gas station.”

“Tara, I have no idea what that means.”

“Oh, right. Make it two days ago, at dawn.” She accomplished this easily. I showed her a good point on the speedometer as an upper limit, 30, which she thought looked like a pregnant woman’s belly and breasts. Between the two of us we figured out how to use the “wand”, as she called it, to go into neutral and drive and park. She insisted on trying out reverse as well, which she did with no mercy for the gas pedal. She got a big kick out of that.

“Ack!” I yelled. “Don’t you go crashing us into a tree! I hate irony.”

She laughed. “Don’t worry, Tara, we have a very nice afterlife planned for you.”

She started forward again, practicing on the steering wheel by turning at every intersection. “Where the hell are we, anyway?”

“Madison, Wisconsin. This is where I live.”

“Oh.” Gaia always knows which compass direction she’s facing, knows all the hills and rivers and lakes, and can even tell you what the weather’s like a day’s walk to the north. But she can never remember the place names we make up for our towns and states. I’ve told her the name of the towns around here many times, but the only ones she ever remembers are the ones like Blue Mounds, which describe natural features. I suppose I’d have a hard time remembering too, if somebody took it into their head to make up arbitrary names for my body parts. “Is there anywhere you’d like to go?” she asked me.

“Oh yes, I have a good place for us to go. But first I see a gas station over there.”

She had been doing so well. Maybe I said that last a bit too suddenly, because she turned the wheel with a jerk. We were already going a little fast, and the car jumped the curb onto the wet lawn at the edge of a city park. Gaia tensed as the car cut into the muddy earth, plowed through and then fell back into the street with a bump. She took her foot off the gas pedal and started to hyperventilate, almost crying, almost screaming. I quickly shut off the engine, hugged her gently and stroked her face, but she was still hysterical. So I opened the door and ran to the rut we had made. I walked up and down, using my feet to smooth it down, not completely of course, but a token. It proved to be enough. When I returned to the car Gaia was gasping and hiccuping, but was already drying the tears and sweat off her face with the bottom of her shirt. Her flat voice seemed to come from somewhere outside her body as she said, “I’m ready to go on.”

We made it to the gas station. It proved to be one that opened early, so she didn’t need to mess around with time. I’d never actually filled a gas tank before. I suppose it’s not so hard I couldn’t figure it out, but there was a male attendant so I decided not to bother. The guy was only too happy to come out of his little booth and show my “cousin from Europe” how to fill it up. She played along, smiling and speaking some language that for all I know was Cro Magnon or something. No formal magic was necessary to keep this guy under her spell. I wanted to stay out of the way, so I pretended to have an important phone call to make, and went off a little ways to have a no-nonsense conversation into a pack of gum.

Fortunately I had a little money on me. As the attendant headed back to his booth, I handed Gaia a twenty and she multiplied it by ten. She went over and handed the whole wad to her new friend, who counted out the right amount and handed the rest back. She “accidentally” brushed his hand taking back the change, and his smile turned to wonder. He’ll be grinning like an idiot for awhile, I thought.

She started the engine back up and maneuvered toward the street. “Okay, where are you taking me? I’m getting tired of driving, I want to go somewhere. Then we can take this piece of shit back and get on with our lives, yes?” I wasn’t about to argue with that.

I navigated us another mile or so to a park adjacent to our Lake Mendota, Madison’s largest lake. I insisted that Gaia park neatly, even though no one else was in the lot. This isn’t a well-known park, but it is a favorite of mine. As she got out of the car, her gaze swept fondly over trees and grass and lake. Then she saw why we were here. “Oh, how lovely!”

The town has quite a lot of ancient Indian mounds, over a hundred. This one is a bird-shaped mound, on a tree-covered hill overlooking the water. Gaia took off her sneakers and climbed it, and on the top did a little dance, drawing some kind of symbols with her toe just over the top of the grass.

When she finished she drove us back to the car’s original position without any direction from me. Parallel parking is beyond the limit of my driving abilities, but she had plenty of wiggle room. She did okay. I didn’t have the heart to tell her the car was facing the opposite way from how we’d found it. I left one of the twenties in the glove compartment and locked up.

(1925 words)