These are trying times for an American dedicated to not owning a car. The Concord Coach bus that used to get me back and forth to the coast has suspended operations indefinitely, and I’m wary of city buses and taxicabs. I have my bicycle, and my feet, but I’ve probably done more driving in the past four months than in the last two calendar years combined.
As regular readers know, I live in a two-person, one-car household within walking distance of downtown Bangor. But for the past two weeks, the lovely Lisa’s vehicle has been undergoing one of its increasingly frequent old-car hospitalizations. Like victims of the virus, its recovery is uncertain.
One of the silver linings of COVID-19 is that the world’s car owners are driving much less than before, and air quality has significantly improved. Lisa’s car, even when healthy, has sat idle for days at a time while we both work at home. But we do rely on it for one or two things, like grocery shopping, and transporting heavy objects. At times we’ve used it for trips out of town, when the sameness of staying at home gets to be too much.
There’s nothing worse than having a car you can’t rely on, unless it’s an outboard motor – but I’m getting ahead of myself. Lisa’s car went into the garage, and I began to feel guilty about my own position as a man who doesn’t own a car but usually has one available. I even went so far as to broach the subject of buying one. I know: it goes against all the principles I’ve articulated since starting this blog in 2015, and renouncing car ownership eight years before that. But this is Maine, and these are difficult times. Things have changed. Perhaps principle should take a back seat to practicality.
But no – it’s still the wrong move, and Lisa, bless her heart, agreed with me. I don’t want to own a car. It may be convenient to step outside into your private chariot any time you want and take it anywhere you’re allowed to go, but is it worth it? Is that convenience worth all the other crap that comes with car ownership beyond the initial outlay: insurance, registration, parking, maintenance, unexpected repairs? Just thinking about it gives me a headache.
Rental cars, fortunately, remain available (though as I recently discovered, you’d better reserve one several days in advance). As I’ve pointed out before, you can rent a car 50 times a year, and it will still be cheaper than owning one. Do two people working from home really need a car more than once a week? I believed in 2007, and continue to believe today, that Americans have been sold a bill of goods when it comes to the necessity of widespread car ownership. For some, it makes economic sense to own a car, but most car owners are throwing money away. We live this way because advertisers have told us to, and because we’re used to it. But why couldn’t cars be time-shared like condos, or chartered like sailboats? Why do we cling to the idea that we all need one, all the time? Perhaps this pandemic will encourage us to be more creative in the future.
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Most of us have some sort of thing in our lives that we do just because it pleases us, often at substantial cost and little tangible value. My particular foolishness is sailing. It’s a completely outmoded form of transportation. But I grew up on the Maine coast, and while one can wander among the islands off Stonington on a motorboat, it isn’t nearly as much fun or aesthetically pleasing as using the wind for fuel.
Nonetheless, my small sailboat carries a six-horsepower outboard motor on a stern bracket. It can’t drive the boat as fast as a stiff afternoon breeze can, but it’s there for emergencies and extended calms.
Such a calm enveloped me one recent morning in Penobscot Bay. I was on my way from Brooklin to Rockland, and fortunately not in hurry. I’d gotten an early start that morning, motoring out of the Fox Islands Thoroughfare to wait for the wind to come up. I anticipated being in Rockland before noon.
But the motor was having problems, starting but cutting out after about five minutes. Soon the intervals between starting and stopping began to shrink, until out by the monument on Fiddler Ledge off Stand-In Point, at the western fringe of North Haven, it refused to even start.
Engines are magic to me. I have only the faintest understanding of how they work. The proper mixture of gas and air is fed into a chamber and ignited by a spark; the subsequent explosion drives pistons up and down, and that kinetic energy is transmitted by a series of rods and gears to an axle or a propeller shaft. But I have little sense of how to fix them on the fly.
There was no imminent danger, but there was also no wind. I managed to drift on the incoming tide between the monument and low-lying Drunkard Ledge. I fiddled with the motor until exhausting my limited expertise. Then I opened a beer, slapped on additional sunblock, and waited for some wind.
Among recreational sailors, there are purists who sail without an engine. I’ve done it myself. It isn’t hard. It’s largely a question of patience, which I find I have less of as the years accumulate. And Penobscot Bay is rarely totally deprived of wind. Even on calm days, one can ride the zephyrs and small breaths and get to where one needs to go, eventually. From the monument to the Rockland breakwater is about six miles. With moderate wind it takes about 90 minutes. On this day it took me four hours. Were I Jesus, I could have walked it faster.
But I made it, and used a little local breeze in the harbor to tack to and pick up my mooring, all the while questioning my sanity for investing so much time and money in such a frustrating pastime. Later that evening, a light but steady breeze picked up from the north, and all the boats in the harbor shifted around. A couple on a sleek, engineless sailboat built in Finland came in and picked up the mooring next to mine. We had a socially distanced conversation about the efficacy of engines, and they reminded me that Joshua Slocumb had sailed around the world without one.
Nonetheless, I needed another kind of engine to get back to Bangor, and with Concord Coach out of commission, that meant a cab ride to pick up a rental car at Knox County Airport in Owl’s Head. The car they gave me was a Volkswagen Beetle, one of the new ones, as bright red a car as you’ll ever see.
“You know how you look at a boat, and something makes your heart flutter?” the lovely Lisa said to me recently. “That’s the way some people look at cars.”
A long time ago, I owned a 1964 fire-red Volkswagen Beetle. It wasn’t red when I bought it. But one day I decided it should be, and I went to an auto store and bought the brightest red paint I could find. I spent an afternoon painting the formerly white car… with a brush. This was in the fall of 1981, which I know because I listened to a baseball game on the radio as I worked. Fernando Valenzuela pitched the Dodgers to victory over the Montreal Expos for the National League pennant. It was the closet the Expos ever got to the World Series.
I loved that car. There wasn’t a hill it couldn’t conquer in the snow, even though I had to wear two pairs of thermal socks under my boots. It threw a rod once, and I had the entire engine replaced for six hundred dollars. Another time I drove it from the Lincolnville ferry landing to Ellsworth with no brakes. It was worse than any recalcitrant outboard motor. But it had, I imagined, personality. Now I realize I was just being romantic.
So when I looked at this new, modern, almost painfully red VW, I thought of that one. But that’s the beauty of renting cars instead of owning them: it’s more like a date than a marriage. You don’t know what you’re going to get. Most of the time the rental place will give me a Ford Escort or some equally forgettable car. But this spiffy little red 21st-century Volkswagen was going to be fun.
Isn’t it silly, though, how people personalize their cars? I just did it with that marriage/date analogy. Some people even give their cars names, and imbue them with imaginary character traits. As though they were boats or something.
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