Despite studying ballet in childhood, modern dance during adolescence, and Sufi twirling in college, I had to settle for adopting dance as a lifestyle rather than a profession. Hyper-extended knees, three back injuries, and an irritating need for regular income were hurdles too high to grand jeté on the way to the career I dreamed of when I was a young and limber thing.

All my life, I danced when and where I could, even at business conventions where I didn't know a soul. I'd stand on the fringe of the crowd and tap my feet to the music until someone asked me to dance. At one convention, I didn't wait for the invitation. I danced solo beneath the strobes - for three hours. The next day, a journalist asked me if I were that "long-legged dancing sprite" his cohorts were "still" talking about. I made unsuspecting college freshmen dance the Russian Troika during their first-day orientation session and, one summer evening, was almost caught doing jazz improv in a corner of the Quadrangle open-air shopping center. Ah, those were the days.

I didn't have a dance career, but I married someone who does, a Flamenco dancer. His technical brilliance and rapid-fire footwork have taken him to concert halls around the world. In his childhood he was known in Spain as the "boy with the golden feet."

The first time I saw those "golden feet" in action, I went home and wrote an entry in my journal about "the beauty of black leather boots sending their rapid rhythms into the sonorous wooden floor." It certainly didn't occur to me on that enchanted evening that one day those same feet in different shoes would be sending their rapid rhythms into the black pedals of a car carrying me through the high plains of Spain.

We live in a quiet village, population 1000, but our working and social lives are based in the capital city, some forty miles northwest of our home. Today is a working day, which naturally entails a drive to Madrid.

The route from our village to Madrid begins at the base of a mountain. This rake of a road is one lane and curves like a sidewinder rattle snake. On one side is the pine-studded mountain and on the other, the non-mountain: air all the way to the boulder-strewn bottom. Breath-taking. In front of us this morning is a blue truck, chugging its way slowly and haltingly up the road. In 20 seconds, we are in front of the truck. If you think this is no big deal, consider that this byway is one lane only, and that we are riding in a Peugeot 606, the widest European sedan you can buy.

Once through the inclined part of the drive, we pull onto the high plains and a two-lane road, only slightly wider than the one-laner. The Spanish sun pours onto and over the land, turning the distant fields gold and the nearby olive trees a lighter-than-usual jade green. A white horse catches my eye, galloping, galloping...giving rein to his freedom, no stable or rider in sight.

"Mierda!" Felipe exclaims, knocking the steering wheel with his fist.

The truck we left behind has a family, and three of its creepy-crawly uncles are in a caravan ahead of us. We pass Number 3. Felipe narrows his eyes and clutches the stick. The Peugeot shoots into the other lane, and we pass the next two big-wheeled numbers - just in time. A square red Renault truck, the kind that looks like the trucks we drew in kindergarten, whizzes at us, then past us, missing us by a yard.

The Spanish Armada of trucks is out today, and my husband is out to overtake them. On his fifth passing maneuver, we nearly bestow a metallic, life-threatening kiss to the car speeding along in counterpoint to ours. The other driver flashes his lights, honks his horn, and waves his arms in the air - all protesting sign language that my husband ignores. I feel like I am at a jousting tournament instead of traveling on a highway.

"You're scaring the shit out of me," I say to my driver.

"How many car accidents have you been in!" he snaps.

"Three - no, four, but they weren't my -"

"I've never been in a car accident in my life. Can you say that?"

Although my dear one keeps his dark eyes trained on the road, I have the sensation that he is staring down at me in the same way a high-court judge might stare at a convicted criminal.

"They weren't my fau -"

"It doesn't matter," he says. "The fact remains that you were in four accidents, not me. You should trust me. I am an excellent driver - one of the very few in this whole country."

He's right. On both counts.

As we continue to travel, it occurs to me that Felipe drives the way he dances. He always takes his dancing to the edge, to the outer and inner limits of his energy, spirit, and physical capacity. He fits more steps into 10 seconds than most dancers squeeze into 45. His turns are tight, exact - up to three in succession, spinning on one leg - and he never needs to spot. His eyes measure space fast. With one quick, concentrated look at a stage, he knows just how many steps it takes to cross or circle it, and make its floor deliver thunder. And with one glance at the road, he knows which risks will reward and which will endanger.

I tried my hand (and feet) at Flamenco dancing once. I had no problem with the arms - slow and liquid movements, hands spiraling their way to the sky. I managed the steps almost as well as the one other beginner in the class, although it seemed anatomically far-fetched to me to think of the foot as three separate parts, each assigned a different movement. The toe, the arch, and the heel do not do the same thing in Flamenco dancing, and they do their different actions at very high speeds. When it was time to match the slow, tall arms with the fast staccato feet, I failed utterly. There was no way for me to catch up with the rest of the class or cover up my big, full-body mistakes.

I lived in Spain a year before I tried my hand on a leather-wrapped steering wheel in my first solo drive on one of her lovely, skinny, winding roads. I chose a short, beginner's route to the neighboring village of San Martín and filled all six minutes of the drive with fervent prayer for a manageable parking place on my arrival. My prayers were answered. The first space I saw was on a street with no slope. My car was last in the parallel parking lineup, injury-free bumpers now assured. After a visit to the market, I strolled back to the car, taking in the sights and scents of the town: the square stone cathedral, the brilliant oranges wrapped in magenta paper outside the fruit shop, the aroma of the rosemary-roasted chickens at "Don Gallo's." With ease I pulled out of the parking place onto a winding street lined with whitewashed homes. After considerably more winding, it became apparent that if there were a way out of the village on this road, I wasn't the one destined to find it. I would have to make a U-turn.

I have never backed into a house before. Either no one was home that morning, everyone inside was still asleep, or it was nothing new to the inhabitants to hear the rear end of a car hitting their north wall. The car was pointing up on a down slope. I gunned it, managed the turn, and with my heart beating faster, found my way out of town. The stucco collision cracked the left taillight, but it doesn't show unless you look very, very closely. I have yet to confess to the head driver of the house that my first Spanish drive was a blemished success.

It took an hour and half for me to decide that Flamenco dancing was not for me and a twelve-minute trip by car to decide that the bus will be my way of going to Madrid. It's the slow way, I know, but it has its advantages. Inside the long blue metal womb of transport, the oncoming cars whiz below me, not at me. The long high windows grant me daydream views of the countryside and villages we pass through, and the seat next to me often yields rich company. On this bus, I have conversed with an archaeologist, a painter who worked for the former King of Libya and survived Kaddafi's coup, survivors of the Spanish Civil War, and the recently widowed Doña Pilar whose dark eyes held years of joy and pain in their depths.

This morning the seat next to me is empty. The bus stops in the village of Navas del Rey where more passengers climb aboard. To my left I see an old stone stable with a roughly cut open square in its center. A dark horse appears in the opening, tossing his head into the open air, chewing hay and looking with lively eyes at his surroundings. His dark coat shines in the morning sun.

As we leave Navas del Rey, our driver, José, turns on the Flamenco station, Radio Olé. I listen to the cantaor sound the opening cry to his song and lean my head back on to the cloth-covered seat. In this country, known for its dramatic dancers and drivers, I will neither a dancer nor a driver be. I am not the white horse galloping, galloping. I am the dark horse, surrounded by the four walls of my stable on wheels, looking at the bright morning world all around me. My way to Madrid is slower, more confined, yet no less free.