| INSTANT CAR, MA! THE SUN AND THE SON Historians write that my place on the Pacific coast was first settled by people who lived easily on its fertile shores. They were the followers of the sun called snaileaters and mudpeople by Europeans, who worked without rest to purge paradise of its sins. And here in California these new, tireless, paler tribes finally ran out of land, and took to the Sea or turned once again inwards. The skies of night are still lit, even during the foggiest San Francisco summer, by uncountable stars and star stuff--made from the same ingredients as us humans. During the day, all those rocks except one stop glowing while we below mirror their movements, orbits, risings and settings, the streaking deaths of meteors. The new tribes brought many stories, most portable of luggage, with them to explain the galaxy's show. One of their stories was about the sun god Helios and Phaethon, the sun's son. Phaethon is a happy child, loved and cherished by those he thinks are his mother and father. Then mom decides to tell him the truth: his real dad is not the man who raised him. It is Helios. This truth does not set him free. Instead he starts bragging to his friends, who of course don't believe him. So Phaethon will bring them proof by visiting his new daddy. The sun god's palace is full of bronze, gold and the noise of the awesomely strong horses that carry him and the sun through its daily journey. Helios, feeling guilty for abandoning his son, vows to give him anything he wants. Phaethon wants to borrow dad's car. What makes this a problem is the horsepower. Helios' souped-up chariot is too strong for any except its rightful driver, the sun god. However, a promise is a promise. Morning is coming. The young Phaethon adjusts halters and they're off over the horizon. The horses pull the car out of control immediately. They plunge groundwards, trailing the fiery sun, evaporating oceans, burning canyons, turning some humans black with searing heat. Phaethon pulls back on the reins with all his youthful might and the sun is towed high into the sky, freezing what had just been burnt. The green planet is near destruction. Its cries of terror are heard and the greatest god of them all, Jove, hurls a thunderbolt from his high mountain that kills the boy and stops his crazy ride. Who will stop ours? MOTOWN ROCKS Drive to my birthplace, Henry Ford Hospital, if you dare. Cross Eight Mile Road, take the Ambassador Bridge from Canada, motor from Ford's place in Dearborn, or even sail up Lake Huron into Detroit, headquarters for General Motors, Daimler-Chrysler and Ford still. The great French doctor and writer Celine went to its great factories to study workers there in the 1930's, and was driven into such confusion he joined the Nazis, as did Ford himself for a while. Those giant auto factories are mainly closed now, moved away and leaving their shells. Tearing down those massive buildings is too difficult. Let them stand. Same with the houses, some burnt down during riots, torched for the insurance or just abandoned. There is very little public transportation, and none to many suburbs of that wide city. Nowhere else in this country has the center not held so spectacularly. The loot from the world's love and addiction to automobilization have fled only a few miles outside Detroit, into the mansions of the rich. I bicycled through there a few years ago as my mother died and my father called his hometown a "death ship." Yet it still floats, carrying passengers and crew, dancing and singing while they pass much shinier vessels plunging under the waves. Nobody can deny the music it makes, wind shrieking through the rigging, and the merchandise it carries. It must have been a sight to watch Detroit steel being unloaded in some foreign port during the boom days of red, white and blue convertibles, coupes, sedans, jeeps, trucks, SUVs, station wagons, vans. Let's be fair: who has not thrilled to a ride on an empty road, traveling anywhere really? Making love in the back seat or front, turning up the radio, narrowly avoiding a crash while speeding through an intersection. The joys come early, often, ripe with that new car smell. I've been in the industry at its most primal end, selling used cars for my girlfriend's father, and it's wasn't easy to forget the excitement of holding the cash in my hand, after a sale where I sometimes succeeded in being completely honest. A hallelujah minute • Then I began paying for my happiness: speeding tickets first, escalating into police chases, jails, car wrecks. The romance was over. In "Divorce Your Car!" Katie Alvord lays out how she ended her love affair. Read and learn. She charms as she gently analyzes how Big Auto, along with the Oil Boys, managed to drive all their competitors--walking, running, trolleys (buying the great Los Angeles system in the 1940's only to tear it up), bicycling, ferries, railroads--to the margins with car-only highways. Ms. Alvord writes of facts: car crashes are the top killer of children in the country; autos contribute to asthma, obesity, smog, sprawl, road rage, global warming and oil wars around the world. They also can be fun, convenient, speedy, private and givers of status, and a vast majority of adults in democracy-loving America drive them. Yet the combustubility of our co-dependent relationship with the engine has never been greater. There is an undeclared war going on between motorists and the rest of us. From 1896, when the first walker was killed by a car and "La Locomotion Automobile" in Paris wrote, "if pedestrians use revolvers [defending themselves], we carry machine guns"--to the roadside bombs in Iraq, it rages on. Insult a man's religion, career, sex preference--or scratch his car with yours. Which is more likely to start a fight? The beginning of the movie "War of the Worlds" is all about the same conflict, as dad (played by Tom Cruise) threatens to kill his son for taking dad's car without asking, like Helios and Phaethon again! Then aliens land during a Jovian thunderstorm, dad steals the lone working car in town, and the family is isolated amongst the walking refugee hoards. Even more ruthless survivors soon force them to give their transpo up at gunpoint. The fleeing family boards a ferry boat and that's capsized, dumping its cargo of cars. One plunges beneath the waves towards the family trapped underwater. At the last moment Tom Cruise escapes with his children above the surface. Car and Man was a forced marriage, not love match. Government policies, industry practices and media promotion have combined to make a mockery of transportation free choice. The highway bill this year is $286 billion, larded with pork like a $229 million bridge from the small Alaskan town of Ketchikan to a nearby island, population 50. It was easy to undermine mass transportation, like railroads and the electric trollies run by the none-too-popular richest men in the country, the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts. Yet what replaced them was controlled by the same barons. Ms. Alvord tells the tale of National City Lines, organized by General Motors, Firestone, Standard Oil and a bus company, that destroyed 100 trolley systems in 45 cities between 1932 and 1956. The buses that replaced them lost money, but when they were sold to the government NCL made 30-50 million dollars. The companies were convicted in 1949 for "criminal conspiracy" in violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, and the guilty executives fined one dollar a piece. RUBBER HITS PAVEMENT So what will it take to change our ways? In my case, it wasn't just the crashes and jails and used car salesman jobs. Sometimes, in my love/hate relationship with cars someone else would get in the way. Inside a car with another loved one a triangle was created, and in that strange hermetic environment, with escape and hiding difficult, emotions collided like drivers playing chicken. Feelings became hard as roads, soft earth forgotten. My new lovers are the bus, bike and boat. On these three, or best on foot, the world assumes its normal strangeness. There's not as much convenience or speed, but the body and mind is more involved beyond the feeble physical effort and low-grade anxiety necessary to drive two tons of lethal steel. This change is going to happen the easy or the hard way. How much more evidence do we need that it will happen? No new technology will solve this human problem. Hydrogen fuel cells, for instance, require petroleum to produce. This is no solution. Even Chevron says oil is running out, killer hurricanes gather strength over the super-heated Gulf of Mexico, glaciers are melting and a billion Chinese are trying to live more like us, complete with drive-through McDonalds. Even in the U.S., using such a disproportionate amount of the world's gooey black oil, citizens can't help but understand the dilemmas of our addiction, hoping that our species isn't the next supplier of fossil fuels . Yet after the righteous Californian instructs his fellow diners to stop smoking, he doesn't think twice about turning the key on his 2-ton metal buddy. I say this having just blown out my kerosene light. When I bought its fuel yesterday at the local hardware store, an old coot in line accused me of "living in 1900." Which time, when you think about it twice, wasn't so bad for Americans technology-wise, in ways unequalled since. Edison, Ford and the Wright Brothers in America, and countless others around our watery planet, were inventing ingenious labor-saving devices and yet the average person used little compared to today. If we can go back to conserving our resources and sharing them more equally, there is no reason to live in caves. And if we can't... |
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| the author beside his toyota that gulped 2 quarts of oil per hour in the Colorado Rockies |
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