"Dream as if you'll live forever, and live as if you'll die today"

The Rest of Me: Brake Failure in the Green Mountains

Somewhere in Bethel, Vermont, the brakes on my 2020 Prius decided they’d had quite enough, thank you very much.

Trouble was I didn’t notice right away.

I was on a road trip that was making me cut through the Green Mountains to join up with a couple writing buddies for a weekend of writing alone during the day and coming together at night for dinner, writing talk, and—if you have my tolerance and friends who like to top you off—giggles.

I was looking forward to joining them and getting to work, but I was also enjoying the hairy heck out of the drive. There’s a certain peace to the gentle swoop of the Green Mountain skyline, isn’t there? Particularly when your phone’s happily streaming your favorite tunes and you’ve left enough time to not just stop at a farm stand but to linger over its selection of wildflowers—I chose an orange bouquet of Calendulas¹—but also stand outside my car for a few minutes to watch a monarch dance drunken circles around my ankles.

Once the monarch flew off, I got back in the car and flew up the rest of the mountain.

As I continued the climb, climb, climb up, I admired the scenery, yes, but I also lost cell signal entirely, which meant my streaming service locked in on the song that was cached—“The Answer is Yes,” the most recent single by The Swell Season.

You remember The Swell Season, don’t you?

You do, you do.

They’re the band fronted by Markéta Irglová and Glen Hansard, the pianist and the guitarist from the movie Once. The duo that won an Oscar for Best Original Song in 2008 for “Falling Slowly.”

An NPR review called the song “a natural companion piece to "Falling Slowly" — this time with Irglová singing lead and Hansard joining as the song's second voice” and contextualized it as “ a sweepingly sentimental celebration of lives lived in gratitude, without regret.”

For me, though, the song is also a bit of a slow burn.

When my husband put the new single for the The Swell Season on the car radio recently, we both thought it was fine but a little forgettable…until the next day when we both had different musical phrases from the song stuck in our heads. Seeing it performed live during their recent appearance at the Wang gave me chills and I’ve listened to it many times since, but now, as I crested the summit of Bethel Mountain Road and started back down, the song played on repeat in my car by accident of geography,² and I was a bit irked. My vision for this bucolic road trip through the mountains included listening to my tunes—all my tunes—on shuffle, not this one quiet song on repeat.

Yet here I was in the mountains being told the answer is yes, yes, yes again and again.³

Lovely as the song is, I spent the straightaways of that mountain trip fiddling with my phone to try to get it to play something—anything—else.

Looking back knowing that my brakes were bad enough the mechanic who repaired them the next day said I was a lucky woman, the song’s haunting coda feels hauntingly prescient:

Dream as if you'll live forever, and
Live as if you'll die today

Fortunately about halfway through the mountain pass,⁴ Bethel Mountain Road comes to a full stop—there’s a stop sign, in fact—that forces you to take a 90 degree turn to continue. By now I’m snapped my radio off, and as I brake to stop at the bottom of this incline, there was no denying something was very wrong with my car.

There was a clunky scraping that reminded me of the sound of an exhaust pipe dragging. Plus there was a hot chemical smell I couldn’t quite place.

I pulled into the first driveway I came to, got out of the car, and dropped to my knees fully expecting to see part of my car dragging, but blinked in confusion: my undercarriage was clear.

I sniffed near the hood—the smell had dissipated and there was no smoke.

I glanced at my phone—no service.

I briefly considered popping the hood, but to do so would be an exercise in performative bullshit—worst case I’d burn myself on some hot metal; best case I’d stand with my hands on my hip thinking, yep, that there’s an engine!

I looked between my phone—still no service—and my still-closed hood—still no smoke—and decided that the best course of action was to gaslight myself.

I’d imagined the noise.

I’d imagined the smell.

Plus my friend’s house was less than an hour a way.⁵

So I decide to push on, got back into my car, and managed to drive about ten whole feet.

The banging was louder.

The smell was stronger.

I pulled into a different driveway and admitted that something was clearly not right with my brakes.

But there was still no cell service. And I was only ten feet closer to my friend’s house.

Fortunately the elderly couple who lived in the home that belonged to this driveway was kind enough to let me use their landline to call the number on my AAA card.

Unfortunately the recording on the phone tree at AAA told me in a maddeningly chipper voice that I’d been sent a digital link to complete my request for services, but given there was no cell service, this was about as helpful as giving a man dying of thirst a painting of a glass of water.

So I called my husband to act as my Google proxy and consigliere. Together we asked some important questions about whether I might have been riding the brakes the whole way down the mountain—yes, yes, yes, the answer was yes—about whether it was time to use big ‘B’ gear that Google was telling us was custom made for careening down the side of a mountain just like this one—yes, yes, yes, the answer was yes—and about whether a car with only 20,000 miles could truly have roached brakes—no, no, no we decided, but it turns out this answer was also yes.

About a half hour later, I snapped on my hazards, knocked my Prius into that nifty ‘B’ gear our mostly sea-level lives had never before given us reason to use, and hoped for the best.

A quick word about hope.

Given my clinically anxious brain, I found it pretty damn hard to keep hope alive while the death trap car I was relying on to get me down the mountain in pieces one piece sounded like it was imploding all around me.

I gripped the steering wheel so tightly my knuckles went white.

When I spotted my first steep grade symbol signaling an upcoming gnarly bit, I choked back tears.

When I hit the switchbacks, I imagined by car crashing through the guard rails and plummeting down, down, down.

When I spotted my second steep grade symbol, I let fly a string of profanities more suited to the truckers that sign was intended to warn.⁶

All told it took me about an hour to get down the back half of that mountain because even in ‘B’ gear, I was riding the ever-loving hell out of brakes that were worn so thin that the mechanic in a garage at my destination did a cursory initial investigation and winced.

I was, in short, lucky to be alive.

My brain, however, was still braced against plummeting down, down, down.

Fortunately, my friends were there to keep my brain from holding me hostage. When I arrived I was still rattled enough to try to make a joke about how inauspicious it would have been to kick off a writing retreat with one writer going so literally off the rails, but one of my friends friend didn’t even let me finish saying that out loud before her hand was up and her head was shaking, no, no, no.

“Don’t even go there!”

She certainly had a point.

Not going there is the kind of work I do daily to balance the static of my anxiety:

• Focusing on gratitude as an antidote to being pulled into the pessimistic churn of my anxiety by telling myself I’m lucky to be alive instead of I could have plummeted to a spectacularly grisly death, say.

• Choosing to calm myself down on the walk home from the garage where I left my deathtrap car to be fixed by ducking into a book store and splurging on a copy of Ann Patchett’s latest, not just because her books are reliably fantastic but because the daisies on the cover allowed me to exhale.⁷

  

• Willing myself to start rebuilding my novel’s opening chapters, which I did, in fact, do.

Over the course of this first week of my 100 Days of Fall, I did a rough past for four of the chapters in part one of my novel. And when I say rough they’re rough enough my brain static is kicking into snow globe mode, but I won’t even go there, no.

I’m grateful I have a project I’m passionate about.

I’m grateful I know exactly what I’m working on this week.

I’m just grateful, yes, yes, yes.

---

THE WEEKLY R.A.P #1 — September 18, 2023

A reminder we’re switching things up a bit this fall! Instead of sending a separate email each week for the weekly rap, I’m including a link to the rap in chat for that week. All subscribers are welcome to join us there. Clicking the link below should take you straight to the current week’s chat! The chat is only for subscribers, but subscriptions are free!

1. I think. I actually chose the bright and cheery bunch of orange flowers and tried to play botany bingo via google as I was writing this.

2. Though I have been known to voluntarily play whatever song I’m currently obsessed with on repeat on solo road trips, on this particular day, the mountain was choosing my obsession for me.

3. This line will make a lot more sense if you started the song before you started to read.

4. I think the locals call it the Rochester Gap, but like the name of the flowers in the bouquet, I’m relying on Googling after the fact, which involves zooming in on a digital map and remembering that if I were a better orienteer I wouldn’t need my GPS.

5. Maybe just a half hour without brakes, amiright?!

6. #NotAllTruckers

7. If the plot involves a car accident, keep such negativity to yourself, please.