I’m the Driver Now
Thirty-seven, I decided, was old enough. Even here in Britain, that is an advanced age to begin learning to drive, but somehow, I had never gotten around to it. And so I found myself, one morning last fall, trying to master the exact sequence of foot movements required to hit something called “biting point.”
That’s the sensation you feel when the gears connect to the engine—when your left foot, on the clutch, perfectly balances with your right foot, on the gas, allowing the car to pull away smoothly without stalling. My friends regarded my decision to learn on a manual transmission as quixotic, . Didn’t I know that in a decade, all cars would be electric or hybrid, and therefore automatic by default? I was resolute. What if I turned up in a foreign country on a reporting assignment and had to explain, using a phrasebook and hand gestures, that I was no better than an American and couldn’t drive the stick-shift car they’d brought out for me? What if Malcolm Gladwell, who has used the ability to drive a manual as an to weed out the incurious, wouldn’t hire me as an assistant? What if I found myself acting as a getaway driver? (Such thoughts plague me: I’ve never checked my ancestry by sending off a
