I Read Pace Notes Out Loud at Ninety Miles an Hour for a Living. When My Husband Asked How My Day Was, I Froze.

I am thirty seven years old and I have worked as a professional rally co-driver for the last six years, out of a converted single-car garage that serves as my office on the ground floor of a small brick house in Ogden, Utah, about twenty minutes north of the mouth of Ogden Canyon. Most of my seasons run in the American Rally Association’s national series, on gravel stages that wind through Michigan and Colorado and Idaho and the specific stretch of Washington state that eats brakes if you have not repacked them. I sit in the right seat of a car that most weekends is either a Subaru Impreza with a warmed-over EJ25 or a Ford Fiesta on a rental spec sheet, and my job is to read pace notes out loud, at a speed that stays roughly one and a half seconds ahead of what the car is about to be doing, for the entire length of a stage that lasts anywhere from four minutes to twenty two.

The pace note has a shape. Not written in any book I could give you the title of, though there are books, but as internalized in me now as the way I hold a fork. Each corner in the notebook is one line. Direction, first, right or left. Rating, second, a number from one to six that translates roughly to how tight the corner is and how afraid of it I should sound. Distance, third, in a shorthand for the meters until the next feature. Then modifiers, which are the part that matters most on a stage that is not the one you practiced on: crest, dip, tightens, opens, long, don’t cut, caution, keep in, jump. I read a full stage at somewhere between one hundred and twenty and one hundred and eighty calls a minute, in a specific flat cadence you learn during recce and cannot ever quite explain to a friend, because the driver needs to hear me a beat before he sees the corner and no beat before he needs to hear me. I have read pace notes across, by rough count, close to nine hundred stages over six years, in Rally Idaho and the STPR out of Wellsboro and the LSPR up on the Michigan U.P., and I could read a full transit list on autopilot from the passenger seat of a rental car headed to a service park.

The way I found out that the shape had been quietly eating the rest of my ordinary talking life was that my husband, whose name is Cole and who teaches auto shop at a public high school in Weber County, asked me on a Sunday morning in late March how the previous day’s recce had gone. He asked it the way he asks most things, which is with the coffee already poured and a plate of pancakes in front of him and no particular agenda beyond hearing my voice fill the kitchen. I said it had gone fine. Then, at the small pine table under the west window where we eat almost every Sunday breakfast, the sentence I would have said next did not arrive. Cole waited a beat, in the way a person waits when a normal question has landed on nothing, and he moved on to something about the plumber his brother had used, and we finished the pancakes. I put my mug in the sink afterward and stood at the window a long time working out that I had gone the better part of a season without telling the person I share a house with anything true about the stages I had walked, in a register that was not a debrief.

What had happened, once I could look at it, was less strange than it had felt at the sink. I had not become a person who did not love Cole or a person who did not care about the recce. I have a group text going most weeks with three other women who co-drive in the series and we talk about corner ratings and gearbox noises and the small politics of who is running out of what tires at which service park. I have a coffee I get every second Tuesday with a mechanic named Devi who has been building rally cars since before I had a license. I have Cole across the table most nights. What all of those rooms had that Sunday morning breakfast did not have, without my noticing the pattern, was an axis. The group text has a corner. The Tuesday coffee has a car. Cole and I most nights have a specific problem with the ductwork upstairs that has become a running project. Cole’s Sunday morning opener had none of that. It was the specific unstructured kind of question that a person you love asks you when there is nothing in particular they need from you, and the muscle for that had gone somewhere while I was sharpening the other muscle to the tenth of a second.

Lauren, a former Baja 500 co-driver who is in her mid fifties now and who runs a small race school out of a private airstrip in Grantsville a couple of hours south of me, was the person who mentioned it. She and I do a monthly reflection call, mostly because I decided a few years ago that I did not want to become the kind of pro co-driver who forgets that there is a life going on outside a Peltor headset. On the call after that Sunday in March I told her, in a shorter and slightly more embarrassed version than I am giving here, that I had not been able to answer a normal weekend question in my own kitchen. She said she had gone through the same thing in her mid forties, and that her surprisingly practical fix had been a twenty minute habit she kept on the evenings when her wife was at pottery class, on a site called Knotchat, where you get matched with one stranger at a time for a random one-on-one exchange you can keep to text or video and that closes when either of you decides it is done. It was not, she said, therapy, and she was clear about the difference. But for the specific problem I had described, she thought it was the strange small thing worth trying.

The first person I got matched with was an older man who kept a small secondhand bookstore in Dublin, who was on his phone during the slow half hour after opening and wanted to argue about whether the early paperback edition of a Flann O’Brien novel was worth what a specific online dealer in the north of England had been asking for it. I did not have a preexisting position on Flann O’Brien first editions or on the specific dealer he had opinions about. What I discovered, at the pine table with Cole out for a run and the low late-March light coming through the west window, was that I could ask him the kind of question that let him hear the shape of his own thinking, which was a skill I used to have with the mechanics and drivers I worked with when I was starting out, and that had gone stiff on me since I began earning my living calling corners a beat ahead of a Subaru. We went back and forth for twenty three minutes. He thanked me in a tone I do not think I would have earned from anyone I had ever met at a service park, and closed the tab. I sat at the table with a cup of coffee gone cold and noticed that I had just held up my end of a conversation with no corner in it for the first time in what was honestly closer to eighteen months than to one.

I have kept at it, in the small self-conscious way you keep at anything that has started giving you back a piece of yourself. On a Thursday evening between a service park pack-out and a flight home I matched with a stage sound engineer in Bergen who wanted to walk me through, in careful English, why he still preferred a specific model of German-made ribbon microphone from the late nineteen sixties to any of the digital hardware he had spent his consulting budget on that year, and why the difference mattered on the specific kind of acoustic guitar solo his youngest client had been recording. Two weeks later a drum maker in Salvador in Bahia, up early in a small workshop on the second floor of a building above the harbor, walked me through the traditional way of tuning the goatskin head of a surdo drum for the local samba schools and why the school his grandfather had built the first drum for still refused to accept synthetic heads. On a Sunday night after I had already told myself I would not open the laptop again, an amber merchant in Vilnius spent forty minutes explaining to me why the age of a specific Baltic amber inclusion could be verified by the color of the trapped insect wing and not by the price a certain auction house had been trying to charge for it. None of them knew I was a co-driver. Two of them told me small unexpected things I have not been able to repeat to anyone since, which turned out to be a piece of the arrangement I had not seen from the outside.

Knotchat’s shape is the whole reason it has been useful. One person at a time, an exchange that starts wherever the two of you want it to and ends when either of you decides it is done. I would not describe it, to anyone I know from the paddock or to Cole across the pine table, as a stand-in for the slow work of knowing people whose names you learn over years, and I have kept that in front of me. What it has been, for me, is a small stationary bike for a muscle I had let go quiet while the professional muscle was doing all the walking. I open it twice a week, in the evening after Cole is at his shop class open house or up in the guest room with a lesson plan, for about twenty minutes at a time, and most of the exchanges are, in a way I have come to appreciate, forgettable.

Cole and I were at the pine table on a Sunday morning about six weeks ago, in the same seats, with the March light replaced by the specific brand of early September light that says the season is about to change. He asked me, again, how the recce had gone. I told him that on stage four the road came off a fast crest into a compression I had not been able to picture from the road book, and that during recce the driver had asked me to change the note from a five long to a five tightens over crest, don’t cut, and that we had spent forty minutes at that one corner walking it back and forth in the light rain and I had thought about it on the drive home because I was not sure we had gotten it right, and I was still not sure. Cole asked me two follow-up questions, the kind of questions somebody who has been listening asks, and we talked about that one corner and then about a squirrel that had gotten into his classroom on Friday for close to forty minutes. Near the end he said, without any special weight on it, that I had sounded like myself. I told him I had noticed I liked it. He laughed and got up to make more coffee, and I sat at the window a little longer than I needed to.