Stephen Harris
Back in the Hometown
No, I can’t tell you why I’ve kept them over the years. But here they are, my old driver’s licenses, hidden under a pack of sticky notes in a corner of my office desk drawer. My old licenses offer a quick review of my life.
Oh, here’s a license from a long time ago that I did not get here in the hometown. The photo shows me clean-shaven with more hair on top than on the sides. And no gray. That can’t be me.
Six years later, however, the beard had come out, part gray, but the top had not yet turned. On that occasion I managed to crack a smile, such a contrast to my last expired card, taken when I was not ready for the camera. In that license, I look like I had just seen a ghost.
They’re talking about doing away with printed driver’s licenses. In 2018 Louisiana became the first state in the nation to allow drivers to carry their licenses in their smartphones, a substitute for the familiar laminated business card with the suspect driver’s license photo that’s the foil of many a smart remark.
Some stopped Louisiana drivers now can show an officer their phone. The phone also can serve as an ID for voting there. More than half a million drivers in the Bayou State have downloaded an Apple or Google driver’s license app (activation fee: $5.99.) The state has four million drivers. A plastic driver’s license still is required as well, for now.
A driver’s license used to be magic. Back in the day our teen-aged souls would burn for our licenses. A license meant no more trying to peddle my toy race car in the tall grass. No longer confined to a bicycle’s two wheels and leg power. A license put us behind the wheel finally and gave us the freedom for which we had yearned for 16 years.
On the afternoon of my 16th birthday I got to go to the North Elkin DMV office after school. Mom surprised me. I didn’t think she would run me down there after her work shift and beat the office’s closing time.
I rode to North Elkin a boy and drove home to State Road a man.
A driver’s license meant that I could drive to school and ditch the lumbering school bus. I could stay after school for beneficial extracurriculars. I could bond with friends while on the highways and byways. I could go to town for an evening.
And I could cruise downtown Elkin, a onetime rite of passage here that drew fellow teens from throughout the region and even captured national attention. Elkin cruising became so famous and so crowded, it got banned starting in the 1980s except for special car cruise-ins and such promotions by our tourism folks. I never saw the harm in teen cruising and thought of the ban as stemming from old-folks’ spite.
A license also meant that I could go to work after school. (OK, so that benefit was not so hot.)
It meant that I could play with big boys’ toys. Not only could I get behind the wheel but it prompted me to start learning under the hood and exploring the undercarriage. I never made much of a mechanic, though.
Scrapping the plastic driver’s card is the coming thing. At least 14 other states are looking into what they call digital driver’s licenses, according to the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators. North Carolina is not among them.
One reason is that 77 percent of American adults now have a smartphone, including 94 percent of adults under 30, according to Tribune News Service. Many already have gotten used to swiping their phones at checkouts instead of using credit/debit cards.
“This is a quantum-leap improvement,” boasted Geoff Slagle of the motor vehicle administrators to Tribune News.
Promoters claim that a smartphone is more secure than a plastic card that can be lost or stolen, while detractors claim that it would be one more computer file that could be hacked or surveilled.
“That’s ’1984’ stuff,” a reference to the famous George Orwell novel on government control of society, Alan Butler of the Washington, D.C.-based Electronic Privacy Information Center told Tribune News.
But my onetime conversion from cash to plastic cards went smoothly, and I do appreciate not having to bother with writing paper checks in store checkouts anymore.
However, I don’t have a smartphone and don’t plan on getting one. But I also know that you can’t swim against the tide forever.
“May I see your phone?” officer Friendly N. Nice says as you roll down your driver’s-side car window on the side of the road. And it’s not because he wants to make a phone call.
It’s going to happen to you and me some day.
Stephen Harris returned home to live in State Road.