If NASCAR were outlawed it would result in a civil war because our entire civilization is currently designed for cars, not people, and NASCAR happens to be the racing circuit by-and-for the people.
These days we humans, minus our Detroit exoskeletons, are the interlopers on our own cities’ streets. Parking spaces trump pedestrians and bicycles. Our street construction&repair budgets dwarf human services monies. We have designed a Habit Trails™ for mindless and soulless automobiles and yet we live here—dodging cars, breathing fumes and waiting with blind, compliant stupidity for the WALK/DON’T WALK light to change.
We are absolutely blind—in the same autonomic way we are unaware of our heartbeat and respiration—to our slavish obeisance to automobiles.
Cars are everywhere; we literally can’t live or function without them. Our hearts are choked with cholesterol, rumps rippled with cellulite, and foreign-policy whored-to-oil because of our pervasive dependence upon and love affair with the automobile.
Even as we are perpetually hobbled by incessant road construction we deal with the delays knowing that it can’t last forever (ha!) and traffic won’t be as bad when it’s completed (ha! ha!).
But we can’t simply ban the car and return to a simpler time. So many things that we take for granted in America: Lifestyle, Democracy, and even Sex are possible because of the automobile.
LIFESTYLE
In order to live where we want to and work where we have to, we commute. To the next city, county, or state. We commute thousands of miles a year to ply our chosen professions and still live in reasonably rural, if not bucolic, environments. We commute to escape the bustle, noise, pollution and confinement of cities.
We like this arrangement.
We enjoy our backyards, lawns and suburban McMansions. And the auto makes this choice of lifestyle possible. We are wedded to the automobile until Death Does Us Part.
DEMOCRACY
There’s a joke about being so old that you can remember when
eggs, meat, and sunshine were good for you.
The same is true about war.
World War II was fought to stop some truly bad people from doing increasingly more terrible things. It is an indisputable fact that the Allies won WW II because the United States of America had a huge automobile manufacturing system in place. That auto-making capacity was retooled to manufacture planes, tanks, jeeps, and trucks not only for our armed forces, but on a lend-lease program, for the armies of China, Canada, Australia, France, Britain, and especially Russia.
SEX
Even as repressed and stunted and backward as we are in terms of sex in America (there was also something in the daily newspaper I mentioned above about gay bashing and teen abstinence and abortion and a condom ban deep in the heart of Texas…) but if it weren’t for the automobile, waking up in the morning with an erection might be illegal.
This here country, remember, was founded and settled by various religious sects and has fostered and nurtured repressive, uptight, God- fearin’ people ever since.
Then elected the uptightest and Godfearinest to office.
It is a simple and obvious fact that Henry Ford is the True Father of the Sexual Revolution. If it weren’t for the affordable auto that removed the courtiers from the chaperones for a little pitch-and-woo (or slap- and-tickle, or blow-and-go: depending on your age and orientation) holding hands might be referred to as “Third Base”. The liberty provided by the car has, even more than alcohol, afforded sexual freedom to successive generations of Americans.
And so the auto reigns supreme, both present day and in our recent past. Providing for Lifestyle, Democracy and Sex are the four-wheeler’s formidable legacy. These are compelling rationale, but not the ultimate reason that NASCAR (and all other sundry types of internal combustion competition—from riding mowers to dragsters) will never be restricted, banned, or environmentally censured.
Auto racing is sacrosanct because the automobile is the United
States of America’s One True God.
And we feed that hungry God, with human flesh, on a daily basis. When a traffic fatality is reported on drive-time radio the announcer
doesn’t request a moment of silence for the road-martyred victim, she
immediately spouts expected delays and alternate routes so as not to disturb the Sacred Commute.
Yearly traffic fatality statistics, if they were the result of terrorist attacks or airline crashes, would never be tolerated. But since they are the direct result of the fundamental way our culture moves and functions they aren’t even viewed as collateral damage: they are an essential by-product of this particular type of civilization. These deaths are tolerated propitiation—properly burned offerings—to the continued existence of our consecrated four-wheeled culture.
Millennia ago when an Aztec priest, with a terrible grace borne of practice, plunged his surgically-sharp stone knife and a still-beating human heart was plucked from the sacrificial victim’s chest it was not simply the death of a human. It served to honor a deity who would continue to approve and prolong and provide for some holy aspect of Aztec civilization.
So it is today with the United States and our Car Cult.
Highways are our Aztec pyramids; sacred sites where we practice our incidental human sacrifice. Highway deaths are accepted as the price of keepin’ it rollin’ down the line.
The unprecedented popularity and cult-of-personality that surrounds NASCAR (“Who’s your driver?”) has installed those drivers—whether NASCAR likes it or not—as High Priests in this cult. There are millions of Americans who adore and emulate these drivers with a “03”, “24” or “88” bumper sticker. These NASCAR boys drive faster and farther and better than we do. They visibly risk death every week and when they survive; we survive. Our cars, our culture survives. NASCAR escapes scrutiny; environmental damage is never hinted at; the word waste is never uttered.
Not coincidentally NASCAR’s premier raceday is Sunday. Hundreds of thousands worship in person; millions watch on the tube. NASCAR’s popularity is not a fluke, a fad, or a fringe phenomenon. It is a ritual practice that somehow expiates us from the excess of our incessant and indulgent driving; from our dysfunctional, national love affair with the auto.
NASCAR’s spectacle rationalizes a plunder economy in search of petroleum. It makes starting a war—neither for liberty, nor to ensure peace—but to secure oilfields somehow worthwhile. Road carnage and the oil-war dead are slickly and stylishly, every week, justified by the NASCAR spectacle and the Art of Human Sacrifice.
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Then there is bicycle traffic. From the Press Democrat:
TWO BICYCLES
While traveling in cars, shrouded in these plastic-and-metal manifestations of our status and self-image, we never see anything fresh; anew. While driving we must observe and monitor pedestrians, bicyclists, autos, and road hazards but this type of road-awareness is a necessary autonomic function. It’s impossible to appreciate subtle and unique experiences at 35 MPH.
This is why I walk my hometown of Windsor.
So I can see and smell and hear, directly, the differences between my neighborhood off Old Redwood Highway and a cul-de-sac off Hembree. Between a lively trailer park littered with tricycles and skateboards and an upscale subdivision that’s so postcard-manicured and quiet it seems devoid of habitation. This Tuesday evening, prior to the second Presidential debate, I strolled up Old Redwood Highway in perfect 80 degree warmth, kicking at crackling piles of fallen maple leaves. The final desperate trickle of commuters were still zipping and speeding home as I sat on a curb and stretched my back. I relaxed when, across the street, a Sonoma County Transit bus thundered up and wheezed to a halt, disgorging students, mothers, and the one DUI guy in a new suit (with cell phone and laptop) who’s slumming on the bus until he gets his license back.
I sat there a minute before walking up past Raley’s and
Safeway to Los Amigos Road. I always think of Los Amigos as the “Road to Nowhere”. It is a flawlessly paved two-lane thoroughfare that is perfectly unpopulated. There are no stores, schools, or houses. It backs up to several high-fenced subdivisions to the east and a cyclone fence bordering 101 to the west. This time of evening it is frequented by strollers from the Windsor Senior Center—always friendly and energetic—and dog walkers: poop-scoop bags at the ready. Shortly after my turnaround (before Los Amigos dead ends at Arata Lane) I noticed a bicyclist—officially decked out for the Tour de California in helmet, shades, team-logo-jersey, shorts, and gloves—flying my way. I waved and he passed without a nod or wrinkle of acknowledgement, which didn’t surprise me: I’m a recreational cyclist and I noticed the more expensive the bike (this guy was on a carbon fiber Cervelo, I figure about $3500) the more intense, severe, and unfriendly the rider. So I exchanged passing pleasantries, “Dark early, huh?” “Hard to believe it’s fall!” with several retirees and ambled back to Old Redwood Highway. About a block from home, nearly dark now—tonight’s debate already begun, I heard a hollow CLUNK CLUNK CLUNK CLUNK.
It’s wasn’t a car (no headlights; silence but for the CLUNKs) so I turned and, for a moment, saw nothing. Then out of the dusk I saw a round little man riding an ancient creaking bicycle: the CLUNK CLUNK being the sound of his aluminum lunch pail banging against the handlebars. Walking backwards, I waved.
He smiled.
So, that’s Windsor on a Tuesday night in October. One walker; two bicycles.
Two contrary and divergent bicycles: one cost more than the first three cars I bought and the other my son might have owned twenty years ago. One is a dedicated fitness toy ridden by a serious athlete, the other an indispensable mode of transportation pedaled by a smiling grunt on his way home from work.
Leaves are falling, a presidential debate rages inside. I suppose a more thoughtful writer would use the two bicycles as symbols for where America has been in the last twelve years and where we’re possibly headed—depending on which of tonight’s debaters wins the election. But these bicycles, ultimately, aren’t and shouldn’t be symbols: there are simply parts of two vastly different lives I brushed up against tonight in Windsor, CA.
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Or you can always walk. Written for the Press Democrat:
WALKING WINDSOR: “Ahhhhh…”
In a light rain on the day before December’s “Storm of the Century” I walked my usual running route: up Pleasant Avenue and out Chalk Hill Road. The drought that surprises us every five to seven years had abated somewhat and during the previous month we had received a smattering of rain. Needed and necessary rain.
Overdue rain.
But once it arrived the earth knew exactly what to do with it. Everything looked immediately bright and revivified. Grass sprouted perky green in between the rows of autumn-dyed grape vines. Sword ferns unfurled and waved their primordial fronds. Small scattered cities of mushrooms—gold, brown, and white—had appeared literally overnight. In about an hour, as I ambled out to Roth and Chalk Hill wineries, I walked out past $4100 worth of plump and fresh-sprouted golden chanterelles. (I walked back through $3973 worth of those same chanterelle mushrooms. Apparently you can only stuff about $127 worth of chanterelles into a stocking cap.)
During my rainy stroll this familiar Windsor-scape was thankfully moist and refreshed, different from the sere and flammable brown it had been for too long.
But so was my perception of it.
Usually I run past it; today I walked through it and that makes the difference. Any faster and my attention automatically concerns itself with balance and pace and safety; subsequently, your peripheral vision and depth-of-field diminish.
Try it.
Walk past a familiar stretch of road that you usually traverse by jogging, car, or bicycle and see how your perceptions change.
I’m sure part of today’s shift is simply because I’m moving more slowly through the terrain, but there is more to it than that. Not only do you see (and hear and feel) more at walking pace, but it is processed and digested more thoroughly.
This is the key.
Apparently our sensory apparatus functions most optimally at the pace of a brisk walk. A few tens-of-thousands of years of our ancestors’ wandering through veldt, seashore, and woodland have tuned it to this precise walking pace. I’m certain a group of cynically and clinically precise scientists—in a lab somewhere—are testing the parameters of human perception at varying rates of perambulation but I don’t need to wait for their peer-reviewed paper to sway me. I know in my soul that I smell, hear, and see more acutely and honestly when I walk.
Today’s route looked, smelled and even sounded different. When you make the descent down to Pool Creek on Chalk Hill Road the constant-swishing-white-noise of 101 disappears. And today between the wet-tires-on-wet-pavement swoosh of the occasional vehicles that passed me on Chalk Hill Road I heard water traipsing and trickling in streams and rivulets alongside and across the road. I didn’t hear the rattle of the wind through dry branches but instead the spattering of drops breeze-teased from the drizzle-soaked trees. There was no birdsong: feathered critters are too smart to flit about in weather like this. And I may be mistaken but alone on the road—no cars coming either way—I thought I heard the hills actually say, “Ahhhhh, it’s about time.”
* * *
Chicken Soup for the Soul published this in 2011:
FIRST DAY
My daughter Elisa recently emailed me pictures of her daughter Gillian smiling and ready for her first day of school. I’m certain my granddaughter Gillian, with fear and excitement and anticipation hugged her mom goodbye and walked away into a brand new world, just as Elisa hugged me about twenty-five years ago. But I wonder what Elisa did after Gillian disappeared into that swarm of first-day-students? She probably choked back, then wiped away a tear and marveled at how quickly the time had gone: all those natural and sentimental feelings of parenthood.
The day I dropped Elisa off for her first day of school I returned, for the first and only time in my life to a quiet and empty house.
I’d been raised in the crowded, loud and rollicking house of Irish immigrants. A brother or cousins or neighbors or a priest or aunts-and- uncles were always sitting and perpetually eating and drinking at our kitchen table. I married young and had five children of my own, the best way, rapidfire, so you can deal with them when you’re young and energetic and stupid. But then my wife died (of a rare, quick, and deadly cancer) and I was now widowed and young and sad and stupid. The eldest was ten when Luanne died and Elisa was three and I was busier than a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest waiting tables and wiping noses and helping with homework and driving to soccer games and cooking and trying to finish my first novel.
Thank God for that hurricane of confusion. If I had time to deal with the dread and perplexity of facing a life, alone, with five children I probably would have given up. But if you have kids you can’t give up.
I remember when Elisa was about Gillian’s age she woke me up at 2:00 in the morning. She stood in front of me in the half-light of the bedroom. Her hair was mussed and her Flintstone pajamas were rumpled. She had been crying. In a voice that barely trembled she said, “I can’t remember what mommy looked like.”
I didn’t say a word. At that moment her grief was irreconcilable. The world had snatched another thing from her: Luanne’s face no longer existed as a ready and reliable memory. For Elisa the time to cry and say goodbye to her mother wasn’t at the official funeral, but in her pajamas on a warm August night 13 months later. On this night, with Elisa, I did the only thing a father can possibly do in this situation.
I made hot chocolate.
Elisa was sitting on my lap, drinking her chocolate, when I asked her if she wanted to look at some pictures of her mother. She nodded a silent yes. As I rummaged in the closet for photo albums I wondered if I were doing the
right thing. At times it had been comforting to look at old pictures and re-read poetry I had written Luanne. At other times it was like picking a scab.
But Elisa and I sat down on the kitchen floor and soon—it would have been sooner, but I spilled my hot chocolate—pictures were scattered all around us. Elisa latched onto a picture of Luanne holding her older sister Rachel. “That’s me, huh Dad?”
I couldn’t lie, “No, Ellie, it’s not.” She asked, “Can I have this picture?”
I said yes and she walked to the refrigerator, grabbed a magnet and positioned the picture halfway up the door. She returned, kissed me and hiked off to bed. It didn’t matter to Elisa that she wasn’t the baby in her mother’s arms. There was something in the image: Luanne’s eyes, her hair, the way she held the child that resurrected the spirit and memory of her dead mother. All the kids had their moments like this while dealing with their mother’s death.
My moment was Elisa’s first day of school.
I dropped her off and returned home to a house strewn not only with five children’s detritus, but with the overwhelming fact that I was alone. Not suddenly, but finally, the grief had me to itself. Man, it hurt. It hurt beyond pain and tears; it ached to the point of surrender.