carless

My car stopped running about two months ago, during winter break. I'm guessing that's when it stopped. I didn't try to drive it until the end of January, when I needed to go to campus. It turned over, but it wouldn't catch. This sounds like something trivial, probably is, but it's the last straw. Things have been going wrong with the car slowly over the last couple of years. That's not surprising. It's 15 years old. Has has over 165 thousand miles on it. It's been slowly dying for some time. There was the new water pump, then the cracked manifold, then the head gaskets. There have been a series of tires. It's been broken into and the CD player stolen. Then the heater dropped dead. The engineering geniuses at Chevy have designed the car so that it will cost $500 to fix the heater, but about 3/4^ths of the cost is labor, just getting at the heater. Then finally there's been a mystery leak, not a problem much of the year here in California. Unfortunately, however, it's the wet season here and the car has become a mold factory.

So I've been riding to campus with other commuters. I can walk to my classes and any meetings on campus. I usually bring food down from home, but one day I had to get to the local Safeway and Blockbuster. A trip that would take about forty minutes took three and a half hours. There's waiting for transfers; there's walking to where I really needed to go from the bus stop. There's the long loopy out of the way routes that buses have to take. The people who ride the bus are teen-agers, a couple of elderly people. Maybe they look a little poorer than the people than people in cars, but not so's you'd really notice. But clearly, like me today, they've got more time than cash or have to make time because they don't have money or can't get a car for some other reason.

Cars are a plague for all sorts of reasons: the endless appetite for petroleum, the isolating influence of these mobile private rooms, the island lives of the suburbs, but life in lots of the US, especially California is impossible without them. Or if not impossible, difficult and taking tons of time, time that most of us don't feel we have.

Because there's an upside to being on the bus, once I gave up the notion of getting done quickly. I took a look around. There are these amazingly individual plantings on the nearly identical houses in Seaside. There's the ocean breaking away in the distance, there's Monterey looking like a small pretty coastal town. There's the fog and the small shops, Mexican, Vietnamese, and Chinese, sprinkled among the big boxes that dominate Sand City and Seaside. I like the bus. I only wish that it were a less neglected way of getting around.

The default assumption is that we all have cars or if we don't, we should.