I grew up in New York City, a fact that I mention not to lay claim to some innate savvy, but by way of explanation: I spent very little of my first twenty-eight years in a car.

Today, I am a “megacommuter,” one of the nearly six hundred thousand Americans who travel at least fifty miles and ninety minutes to and from a full-time job each day. We are an extreme subset of the 8.1 per cent of American workers with commutes of an hour or more, according to a recent report from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. A majority of us make the journey alone in a car.

My fifty-five-mile commute, in a 2007 Accord (I call her “Jane Honda”), takes me anywhere between seventy minutes (wildly speeding) and a hundred and twenty (stuck in traffic) each way. I know every pothole, casino billboard, and abandoned deer carcass between Princeton, where my husband and I live, and Passaic County, where I work. I have cultivated a special relationship with the anchors of the BBC World Service. I’m surprised when I’m not in a car: out jogging on weekends, I sometimes catch myself checking my side-view mirror.

In 2011, the average commute, nationwide, was twenty-five and a half minutes—a figure that has changed little over the past decade, even as the Great Recession has reshaped our working lives. “Long commutes,” which are defined by the Census Bureau as trips lasting sixty minutes or more, have also held steady. They are particularly common around large metropolitan areas. Residents of New York State, Maryland, and New Jersey reported the highest rates of “long commutes,” at 16.2, 14.8, and 14.6 per cent, respectively. More than twenty-seven per cent of people working in the District of Columbia in 2011 spent two hours a day commuting.

One nice thing about my megacommute is that I have plenty of time to think about all the terrible things my megacommute is doing to me (not to mention to the environment). A 2010 Gallup survey found a link between long commutes and obesity, back pain, and high cholesterol. In 2011, researchers at a Swedish university reported that couples in which one partner has a commute of forty-five minutes or longer are forty per cent more likely to get divorced. Nick Paumgarten wrote a piece on miserable commutes for The New Yorker two years before I even got my driver’s license, at age twenty-five. It didn’t occur to me that this could be my life—and now, in place of toned subway abs, I have a permanent belly crease.

At the outset of our relationship, back in 2011, Jane Honda and I had rules. But as we near the hundred-thousand-mile mark together, we have compromised. “No eating in the driver’s seat” was amended to “No eating embarrassing fast food in the driver’s seat.” A ban on cell-phone usage gave way to “Let me just check this text message,” which gave way to a hundred-and-eighty-dollar ticket (and the forced exchange of my hard-earned State of New York driver’s license for a New Jersey one, the ultimate indignity). To keep things spicy, Jane and I play games. We try new routes and gas stations; we parallel park with one hand. I do impressions of BBC anchors, whose takedowns of lily-livered foreign ministers can relieve even the worst morning traffic. (“But wouldn’t you agree, sir, that this kind of internecine violence is precisely what your party’s leadership pledged to avoid?”) Sometimes Jane rattles a little, for attention.

By the time I arrive at work and roll my aching torso from behind the steering wheel with an expletive-laced groan, I am steeped in self-pity and ready for a day’s work, beginning with an angry text message to my husband and a slam of Jane’s trunk.

Joan Didion wrote that moving to Los Angeles from New York disrupted her sense of narrative continuity, mostly because of all that driving, the “seductive unconnectedness” of extended car trips. Public transportation, with its porous exposure, its mass anonymity, feels somehow organic, part of a seamless urban flow. Daily car trips are private and disjunctive. My commute is less a shift in narrative than a breach, the rough equivalent of a David Foster Wallace endnote: aesthetically jarring, physically inconvenient, and essential.

I am fortunate to have a job that I love, for which I am willing to spend roughly fifteen hours a week as a prisoner of my car, and an editor who lets me work from home when I am on the cusp of vehicular manslaughter. Even so, I am often overwhelmed by diffuse resentment—of my job, which is beyond the reach of New Jersey’s public transportation system; of my grad-student husband, who walks each day to the campus library; of my city friends, with their smug MetroCards.

Sometimes, my commute brings me to tears. Other times it brings me to stories, tragedies that interrupt the numb nothingness of a familiar route. On an icy morning in December, 2011, I was driving up I-287 when a private Socata six-seater crashed into the highway median several miles ahead. I parked on the shoulder, slipped on my press pass, and walked north through the motionless traffic. Just south of Exit 35, outside Morris Township, dozens of emergency vehicles idled helplessly around the plane’s charred remains. I walked across the police line. A trooper told me to “step back or get arrested,” and I was escorted back to my car. Two children had been on the plane—their father’s—along with their parents and their father’s colleague, himself the father of three young girls. The family dog was also on board, and of all things it was the dog—the thought of the animal’s incomprehension and terror in the eighteen-thousand-foot plummet—that brought tears to my eyes.

Last October, I was stranded in the newsroom when Hurricane Sandy prompted the closure of state highways. I slept on a couch in the women’s bathroom. At 5 A.M. I was the only reporter on hand when state police reported that the Meadowlands were underwater, and two thousand people were being evacuated from the low-lying towns below Route 46. I steered Jane through the still darkness of Teterboro, grateful for the hum of her engine. A gray, wet dawn broke over Moonachie and Little Ferry and revealed livelihoods adrift in brackish water. Old women in pajamas clutched plastic bags of belongings, plucked from their homes by Army trucks. For the next week, Jane was my trusty mobile office. In a Maccabean touch, despite logging roughly a hundred and twenty-five miles a day, I never had to wait in a gas line.

When I am out late on an assignment, my favorite way home is I-95, with its generous lanes and rolling vistas. Manhattan glitters to my left as I descend into Newark’s airport and through the industrial mesh of Elizabeth. Farther south, the sky glows with the eerie yellow lights of the Linden Co-Generation Plant. Sometimes, I make phone calls to friends on the West Coast—Bluetooth is a megacommuter’s best friend—but more often I enjoy the solitude, relishing the silence increasingly threatened by adult obligations. Here in the deepest ocean, far below the frenzied schools of fish, braced by the great whales of eighteen-wheelers, I feel a remote camaraderie with my fellow megacommuters.

Except the ones who drive with their brights on. May their tires wear unevenly, and their radios get stuck on Lite FM.

Illustration by Kevin H.