Much of my attitude toward cars was formed and solidified during the 16 years I lived in southern California.

For a time I lived in Oceanside, thirty miles north of San Diego and adjacent to the Camp Pendleton U.S. Marine base. I lived in a duplex three blocks from the beach, and worked at a newspaper office that I could walk to. It was 1991, the year of the first Gulf War and a riveting World Series that wasn’t decided until the tenth inning of Game 7. (The Twins beat the Braves, 1-0.)

I went to the beach every day, often in the morning before work. On exceptionally clear days, I could see Santa Catalina Island, far off to the northwest. The island was 50 miles away, and only visible because of its altitude. I could see it from the top of the steps, but when I got down to the beach itself, the island disappeared.

One day a friend asked me, as we stood above the beach, how much of the island we were seeing above the “hump” of the Earth’s curvature. Channeling my inner math geek, I estimated the distance to the island and the height of our vantage point, drew a crude diagram that incorporated the radius of the Earth and a tangent line to the Earth’s surface, did a little algebra, and came up with a reasonable answer. We were seeing the island from about 1,400 feet up. Since Catalina tops out at 2,097 feet, we could see the peaks of its hills. Everything else was “hull down,” as they used to say of sailboats.

I’ve been there twice. The island is 22 miles long, and home to roughly 4,000 people, the bulk of whom live in the island’s only town, Avalon, which encompasses one square mile of land and a famously photogenic harbor with a big casino at one end. The author Zane Grey lived and wrote there, and Phillip Wrigley’s Chicago Cubs baseball teams trained there for 30 years. A hundred or so bison roam the hills, descendants of 24 brought over in the 1920s by a Hollywood film crew. Catalina has an airport, at the top of the island, but I took the ferry out from San Pedro.

Most of the island is off-limits to cars, and the town regulates the number of vehicles. There’s a 14-year waiting list. Transportation is by golf cart, moped, or bicycle (plus tourist buses to the island’s interior). It’s a pedestrian town of pint-sized apartments and small shops, a slice of urbanity twenty miles offshore.
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But Catalina is visible from Oceanside fewer than 20 days of the year. On the other 345, the emissions of all the vehicles plying the coast between Mexico and Malibu, where the number of cars is not regulated, conceal it from view. The sky is cloudless and clear, save for a scrum of yellow gray around the horizon. You’d never know there was an island out there.

Immediately south of Oceanside is the city of Carlsbad. The Pacific Highway runs right next to the beach, with an unbroken view of the ocean and the smudged horizon. In 1990, a public art installation went up along the highway. Called “Split Pavilion,” and created by New York artist Andrea Blum, it featured sections of metal bars taller than the people invited to walk through them, rectangular reflecting pools of differing sizes, triangular and trapezoidal benches and pedestals.

Many locals hated it. They gathered signatures on a “Remove the Bars” petition. I wrote about it in a piece for the Los Angeles Times:

From the highway, all one can see is the bars. (One can, to be sure, see the ocean through them.) To fully appreciate the park, one must get out of the car and walk through. When you stand between the bars and the shoreline, the artwork functions as it should – it complements, even augments, its surroundings.

“Do you think,” the man asked me,” that the few people who have the time to get out and walk should take precedence over all the people who drive by and see this thing?

Well, yes I do. You see, with that question, he had put his finger on the crux of the problem.

Unfortunately, this story does not have a happy ending. The anti-art forces won, and “Split Pavilion” was destroyed in 1999, the year I left California. Drivers can once again enjoy an unobstructed ocean view, but on most days the haze lingers offshore, like a bad aftertaste.

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One day last spring I happened across a cookout held by one of the many student groups at the University of Maine. I was there because they had set up the grills near the bus stop. I accepted a free burger, and turned to see a former student from one of my English classes, with whom I’d enjoyed several conversations on car-free living.

“If you really cared about your carbon footprint,” he said, as I took a bite of my hamburger, “you’d be a vegetarian.”

This is what I love about college students: their openness, and their willingness to challenge conventional thinking. Though there is a disturbing trend on college campuses to sanitize free expression both inside and outside the curriculum, that anti-knowledge impulse doesn’t represent the majority of undergraduates. Most of them are genuinely interested in ideas that run counter to their own experience.

As I’ve pointed out in this space before, rural residents burn more carbon than their urban counterparts do, and driving is much of the reason. But how many of us stop to think about the greenhouse gases that go into producing our food?

“Eating a burger or driving a car: which harms the planet more?” asks National Geographic writer Simon Worrell in a March 2015 article. The bulk of the piece is an interview with Seattle-based husband-and-wife team Dennis Hayes and Carol Boyer Hayes, authors of a book titled Cowed: the Hidden Impact of 93 Million Cows on America’s Health, Economy, Politics, Culture and Environment. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

Q: You write that eating a pound of beef has more impact on climate change than burning a gallon of gasoline. Explain.
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A: That pound of beef grown on a confined animal feeding lot and fed grain is grown in huge tracts in the Midwest. If you throw in the amount of energy that is used in making the nitrogen fertilizer deposited on the cornfields; all the gasoline that goes into the tractors that plow the fields and harvesters that harvest the grain; the gas used to transport the corn to the feeding lots where the cows are slaughtered and refrigerated and moved off into the market; the gas people use in their two-ton SUVs to go down to the grocery store and buy the beef, bring it home and refrigerate it some more, and then cook it—by the time you’ve gone through all of that, the amount of carbon dioxide that is given off per pound of beef is, in fact, greater [than burning a gallon of gasoline].

Of course, the carbon footprint of the car goes far beyond the gasoline it burns in its operational lifetime. One must factor in the costs of manufacturing the car and delivering it to the dealership, the cost of parking over the car’s lifetime, the cost of manufacturing and distributing parts, the disposal of tires and used motor oil, and the costs of disposing of the vehicle once its lifetime is over.

There are some 255 million cars on the road in the United States – slightly less than three vehicles to every cow. There’s no denying that both motor vehicles and meat do massive damage to the environment. If renouncing car ownership represents one small step toward a more sustainable world, shouldn’t I stop eating meat, too?

I’ve dabbled in vegetarianism a few times in my life, though I never stopped eating seafood – I do live in Maine, after all. I’ve read Fast Food Nation. I eat bacon or beef or sausage or salami with a twinge of guilt. I wouldn’t work in a slaughterhouse. I don’t hunt, and I might balk at chopping the head off a chicken. On the other hand I’ve caught and gutted my share of fish, and dunked innumerable lobsters in pots of boiling water without a shred of empathy.

Similarly, as regular readers know, I renew my driver’s license when it comes up, and I sometimes borrow my girlfriend’s car, or rent one, and re-immerse myself into the American car culture. I’ll say it again: I’m not a purist, except maybe about the designated hitter.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t do my small part by not owning a car, and avoiding the worst abusers: the fast food restaurants that drive the industrial meat business and sell the product from drive-thru windows. I haven’t been to a McDonald’s in years. But I did go to Taco Bell after the World Series for my free taco. In a car. So sue me.

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One from the vault: February 11, 2004

Winter is the season for tragic death on Maine’s weather-slicked highways. The engine of commerce must go on, and we live in an economy that depends on people being able to get to their jobs by automobile, no matter what the weather. Schools have the good sense to close down when road conditions become dangerous, but most businesses don’t.

Is there anything – short of catastrophic illness – more frightening to a parent than teaching a kid to drive? A car or truck is the most powerful piece of machinery many people will operate in their lives. We put cars in the hands of teenagers because the only way for them to learn is by doing, and because, at least in rural Maine, the mobility afforded by the private automobile is a near necessity.

This doesn’t make it any less scary. We lose a few kids every year. We accept the carnage on our highways (43,005 fatalities in the U.S. in 2002*) as the price we pay for this individual mobility. We don’t shut down the roads every time there’s a tragedy.

I’ve been though this twice now. Both my kids are now licensed drivers, and both breezed through driver’s ed and the test more easily than I did. Still, there’s nothing like the feeling of handing your kid the keys for the first time and putting your life in their hands as you buckle into the passenger seat. And nothing matches the lump in your throat the first time they take the car out solo, leaving you to watch from the driveway or the front window with an outward show of confidence and your fingers crossed behind your back. Every time there’s an accident involving a teenager, you die a little bit inside, knowing that it only takes a second of inattention, a patch of ice, or a bit of bad luck to send your kid to the hospital or the graveyard.

In California I used to take my daughter and son out to the desert and let them drive on sandy trails when they were around 11 or 12. The worst thing they could do was run over a cactus and flatten a tire. That never happened.

I learned to drive on an island in Maine in a Jeep with a standard-H shift and bad brakes. To stop, you coasted uphill, turned the key and popped the clutch, or ran into something – preferably something soft, like a bush.

But a lot of kids have had no driving experience when they get into the driver’s ed vehicle. They don’t learn how to drive a manual shift. And they don’t see the gory films my generation did, from what my kids tell me. My friends and I joked about those films, but on some level they served their purpose, which was to remind us that driving is a dangerous activity that can snuff out your life in a second.

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Now, parallel parking happens to be one of my few strengths as a driver. I can’t see well at night, I sometimes forget to buckle my seat belt, I drive about 10 mph above the speed limit, and I’ve rolled through more stop signs than General Sherman did on his march through Georgia. But I’m a superb parallel parker. So I tried to offer some fatherly words of encouragement.

“This isn’t that hard,” I told him. “I aced parallel parking all three times I took my driving test.”

Somehow, this nugget of parental wisdom didn’t send him into the test brimming with confidence. But he must have done it right, because they gave him his license the very first time, like his sister before him.

A few weeks later he took the car to Bangor by himself. I tried not to be nervous. Eventually I had stopped being nervous when his sister drove to school every day. I told him to be careful. It was all I could do. It’s all any of us can do.

___

Originally published in the Village Soup Times.

* — Happily, fatal accidents have decreased since then, as Americans have begun to drive less. The figure for 2013 was 32,719. Source: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

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