The windshield wipers are screaming against the glass, a rhythmic, high-pitched protest that sounds like metal teeth scraping a frozen chalkboard. I am currently staring through a swirling vortex of white, my 4 fingers on each hand-the ones not currently fused to the steering wheel by sheer terror-numb with a cold that the rental SUV’s heater hasn’t quite figured out how to combat. We are somewhere on Berthoud Pass, though ‘somewhere’ is a generous term. For all I know, we have drifted into a different dimension where the only residents are pine trees and 14-inch snowdrifts. The dashboard clock says it is 6:24 PM. We were supposed to be in Winter Park 44 minutes ago. Instead, I am participating in a high-stakes game of ‘Find the Lane Marker,’ a game I am losing spectacularly.
The Silence of Three Small Humans
My children are silent in the back seat. This is not the peaceful silence of slumber; it is the heavy, atmospheric silence of three small humans who have realized their father is currently outmatched by the North American Rockies. It is the same silence I felt last Tuesday when I accidentally deleted 3,004 photos from my hard drive. Three years of vacations, birthdays, and blurry shots of half-eaten sandwiches, gone in a single, confident click of a button.
I thought I knew how to manage my own archives. I thought I was the expert of my own digital domain. That hubris-that absolute, unearned confidence in my own ability to handle complex systems-is exactly what put me in this driver’s seat.
The Statistical Joke of Control
We suffer from a collective delusion that physical presence behind a steering wheel equates to control. We believe that if our hands are the ones gripping the leather, we are somehow safer than if we were passengers. It is a biological leftover from a time when we had to guide our own horses or navigate our own paths through the brush. But on a 14 percent grade in a blizzard with zero visibility, my ‘control’ is a statistical joke. I am a suburban commuter with a resume that includes zero hours of professional mountain driving, yet here I am, piloting 4,004 pounds of steel over a frozen precipice because I wanted to save $114 on a shuttle or because I didn’t want to wait for a professional.
“
‘People watch a film and think they know what’s being said,’ Max said, nursing a drink that cost exactly $4. ‘But without the captions, they miss the frequency. They miss the subtext.’
Out here, on the pass, I am missing the subtext of the road. I am looking at a white wall, but a professional driver-someone who does this 24 times a week-would be reading the tilt of the snow, the vibration of the slush, and the subtle shifts in wind direction that signal a localized whiteout. They wouldn’t be white-knuckling; they would be communicating with the terrain. We treat driving like a commodity, like a basic human right that we all master at age 16, when in reality, navigating these specific conditions is a high-level craft. It is the difference between me humming a tune in the shower and a concert pianist performing at Carnegie Hall. Both are technically making music, but only one of them should be trusted with the heavy lifting.
Competency vs. Convenience: The True Cost
Lbs Driven
Hours on Pavement
Our systemic distrust of specialized expertise is a quiet poison. We live in an era where we can Google ‘how to fix a radiator’ or ‘how to perform a deep-tissue massage’ and convince ourselves that the professional price tag is just a ‘convenience fee.’ It isn’t. It is a safety fee. It is a competency fee. When I decided to rent this SUV, I convinced myself I was being ‘independent.’ I told my wife that I preferred the ‘flexibility’ of having our own car. But looking at the 24-foot drop-off just beyond the shoulder of the road, I realize that ‘flexibility’ is just a code word for ‘avoiding the admission that I am out of my depth.’
I’ve spent the last 34 minutes trying to remember if this rental has all-wheel drive or just front-wheel drive. The paperwork is buried somewhere in the glove box, which I can’t open because I’m afraid that moving even one hand will cause the entire vehicle to pirouette into the abyss. It is a ridiculous way to spend a vacation. We fly across the country, spend 4 days of salary on lift tickets and gear, and then decide to start the trip by subjecting ourselves to the most stressful physical experience of the year.
The Alternative Path: Surrendering Agency
There is a version of this story where we are sitting in the back of a professionally driven vehicle, perhaps Mayflower Limo, where the driver has logged 4,024 hours on this specific stretch of pavement. In that version, I am not staring at the wipers. I am looking at the photos I didn’t delete. I am talking to my kids. I am breathing.
The transition from ‘driver’ to ‘passenger’ is often viewed as a surrender of agency, but in reality, it is an exercise in wisdom. It is the realization that my time and my nervous system are worth more than the illusion of being the one in charge.
Max T.-M. would probably have a caption for this moment. It would read: [ANXIOUS BREATHING INTENSIFIES]. He understands that the truth of a situation isn’t what we want it to be; it’s what is actually happening. And what is actually happening right now is that the wind has picked up to 44 miles per hour, and I am a tourist playing a game I don’t know the rules to.
We outsource almost everything else in our lives. We don’t bake our own bread (usually), we don’t fix our own plumbing (unless we want a flooded basement), and we certainly don’t perform our own surgery. Yet, we insist on driving in the most treacherous conditions on the planet because we’ve been conditioned to think that the driver’s seat is the throne of the household. It’s a strange, masculine-coded trap that catches plenty of women too-this idea that to be a ‘traveler’ is to be the pilot.
But a pilot without a license is just a liability. I think back to the 3,004 photos I lost. If I had just paid for a professional backup service, or if I had listened to the expert who told me my hard drive was failing 4 months ago, I would still have those memories. I chose the DIY path because I was cheap and arrogant. I am currently making the same mistake at 11,314 feet above sea level.
It ruins the first night of the trip. We arrive shattered because we spent all our vacation energy just surviving the commute.
I wonder how many accidents on this pass are caused not by mechanical failure, but by the sheer, grinding fatigue of an amateur trying to do a pro’s job. We see the flashing lights of the tow trucks-I’ve seen 4 of them in the last hour-and we tell ourselves ‘glad that’s not me,’ while our own tires are slipping 4 inches to the left every time the wind gusts. It’s a bizarre form of cognitive dissonance. We see the danger, we acknowledge the danger, and then we decide that we, and only we, are immune to it because we are the protagonists of our own stories.
But the mountain doesn’t care about your story. The black ice doesn’t care if you have a ‘Gold Plus’ membership with the rental agency. The mountain only cares about physics. And the physics of a 2024 SUV driven by a tired father from the suburbs are vastly different from the physics of a heavy-duty transport vehicle driven by a mountain veteran.
Survival, Not Victory
Eventually, the grade levels out. The whiteout thins just enough to see the glow of the town lights in the distance. We survived. But as I pull into the resort parking lot and try to uncurl my frozen fingers from the wheel, I don’t feel like a hero. I don’t feel like I conquered the pass. I feel like a man who bet his family’s safety on a coin flip and got lucky.
Next time, I will remember the deleted photos. I will remember Max T.-M. and his insistence on context. I will admit that I am not the expert. I will step out of the driver’s seat and into the role I actually came here to play: a person on vacation.
Why do we insist on making the hardest part of the journey the part we handle ourselves? The road is a language we haven’t learned to speak, yet we keep trying to shout over the wind.