Night Driving was written in an unrelenting, focused burst of energy in three months at the end of 1974. Writing, like skiing and climbing, has always helped keep me on track, particularly in times when the track is icy, rough and hard to see. 1974 was a particularly unsettling, unsettled, difficult, confusing and, at the same time, joyous and satisfying time living in Bear Valley, Squaw Valley, Jackson Hole, San Carlos de Bariloche, Yosemite and points in between. Some of those peripatetic times were spent living and traveling around western America in my 1938 Chevrolet pickup with the redwood camper on the back in the company of my three year old son, Jason.
Both of us needed a bit more stability, routine, creature comforts and space than life in the old Chevy allowed, so that fall we left the road and moved into a small cabin on Montreal Road between Truckee and Squaw Valley in the Tahoe Sierra where we would live for the next five years. Getting off the road and removing one’s hands from the steering wheel opens up a great deal more time, energy and creativity (and hands) for the solitary road of writing. I started out the dynamics of daily (and nightly) life on Montreal Road by writing Night Driving, most of it, appropriately enough, written at night. The first draft was written in longhand in a spiral bound 8 ½ by 11 inch notebook. Then I rewrote it in another notebook and finally transferred it to the typewritten page via my Royal portable typewriter given to me by my father for my 15th birthday and which I used for nearly 40 years until its spirit was broken by the invasion of the computer which banished it to the closet reservation where it passed away of old age.
All writing, particularly the memoir, is or should be at least as mentally, spiritually and emotionally nutritious to the author as it is to the reader. The process of writing Night Driving forced me to delve into events and aspects of my life and times that were richer and more significant than they might appear on the surface. The work of the story teller helps light up the road of life, including long nights of racing from one crisis to another, from one war to another and from one ideology to the next. Telling stories encourages every driver to take it easy and pay attention to the present moment because it contains all the past and determines all the future and is the only moment we really have.
When I had a 100 page manuscript ready I sent it to Mike Moore, the good editor of Mountain Gazette, in hopes that he might see fit to publish it in three or four installments, as most submissions were in the 10 to 20 page range. Mike chose to devote most of the February 1975 issue to Night Driving, with a shorter, sterling piece by Ed Abbey, Desert Driving, filling up the rest. It was thrilling to have my name on that Bob Chamberlain cover photograph along with one of my literary (and cultural) heroes, Ed Abbey.
Since then Night Driving has taken on a life of its own, which is all one can ask of any story ever told by every man, woman and child attempting to light up and stay on the road of civilization and discover what sort of human we are, and why, and how.