What’ll you do
When the people go home?
And what’ll you do
When the show is all done?
     — Melanie Safka, “Leftover Wine”

Why are we all making lists? It feels like the end of something.

For Americans born between the bombing of Hiroshima and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, it feels like the end of a party. It wasn’t even a particularly good party, though at times it almost lived up to its potential. But it was also a lot of work to maintain, and there was always conflict about who was invited and who was not, and who got to sit where and do what. The music was good, at least.

Little Richard was the last of the original rock stars. He was three years older than Elvis Presley, who died in 1977.  I came to the party too late to catch their sets. I first heard “Good Golly Miss Molly” from Credence Clearwater Revival.

Ringo Starr canceled his concert tour that would have brought him back to Bangor this June. I worked his Cross Center show as an usher in 2016. It’s the only time in my life I’ve ever been star-struck. Needless to say, I lost that job to the virus. Ringo plans to do the tour in 2021, but he will be eighty this summer, and one wonders how many choruses of “Yellow Submarine” he’s got left.

But even in these trying times, we must have better things to do than make lists of influential albums or books or films, or reminisce about great concerts, or re-debate whether or not the Beatles were better than the Stones. Surely other artists will rise to take their places. I can’t believe that the great books have all been written or the great songs have all been sung.

Perhaps this is an old person’s perspective. I was already old when I went off to spend a year in Eastern Europe. When will I next be able to ride a crowded bus to a small Greek beach town with the guy in the seat beside me falling asleep against my shoulder? Right now I can’t even ride a bus from Bangor to Rockland. In the best of times, it was easy to social distance on that lightly used route. It’s going to be awhile before I can get on an airplane. Maine is a fine place to be in May. But since last May, I haven’t been anywhere else.

 I haven’t even been on a local bus in two months, though I’m glad to see they’re still running. I presume that plans for Bangor’s downtown bus hub, approved just before the onset of the pandemic, are still on schedule. But I fear for the future of public transportation. Many potential passengers were germ-phobic about getting on a bus in the good old days, and I’m afraid that politicians will see plummeting ridership numbers as a reason to pull the plug on funding. I hope this doesn’t happen.

A silver lining in all this is that automobile traffic has declined, too. Rockland has already decided to close its Main Street to cars this summer to allow businesses to expand into the street. Portland, Bangor, and other Maine communities may soon follow suit. This is already standard practice in Europe, where any community of any size has a central, pedestrian-oriented outdoor shopping area. Studies have repeatedly shown that restricting access to cars improves commerce.

That aside, it’s just nicer to see fewer cars on the road. I’ve been advocating for fewer cars on the road for years. Who could have guessed that an illness would achieve what walking, bicycling, and public transportation could not?

The air hasn’t been this clean in my lifetime. On a clear day, you can see Mount Everest from Kathmandu. Los Angeles, with its majestic mountain backdrop, looks like its name: the city of angels. Penobscot Bay sparkles in the spring sun.

Much of this is because people aren’t driving to work, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. People need jobs. But maybe it’s a signal that we ought to reimagine the way we move ourselves around. I’ve lived in the Southern California commuter culture, and I’ve seen the everpresent layer of haze on the horizon. Would it be such a bad thing if half of those drivers didn’t have to commute? What if more of us could work from home, most of the time?

The thing is, though, people like to go to work, whether they realized it before the coronavirus or not. My partner and I are fortunate to be able to work on-line, but we both miss the routine and community of our jobs. Hers is more 9 to 5 than mine. But though neither job has to be done entirely at the workplace, we both admit that we get more done there than at home. I suspect that many people are discovering this.

We Americans lead such frantic lives. It’s palpable when you return from overseas after any length of time. We’ve been whooping it up ever since we won the Second World War. We obsess over work (“What do you do?” is a standard introductory question), and when we’re not working, we’ve just got to be doing something. God forbid we ever sit quietly and contemplate. For relaxation, we yahoo about on jet skis and snowmobiles.  When all of that comes to a screeching halt, we don’t know what to do with ourselves.

One might think this might be a good time to write. But there’s that expectation to produce again, to justify one’s existence with some sort of activity. I’m as guilty of it as anyone else. Does the world really need more words? Or more cars? Or more… anything? I look around and see a landscape littered with self-storage units, proof positive that people have too much stuff. What if you were only allowed to store unused possessions for a year? After that, you would have to take them home or give them away. Which option would people choose?

It’s taken me six days to write these thousand words, and another six days to publish them. I should have just posted a picture – of tables in an empty ballroom, and crumpled paper cups amid half-filled bottles of leftover wine.

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There’s nothing like a pandemic to make you question your most cherished values.

I’ve just returned from the grocery store, in a car, toting more than a dozen plastic bags full of stuff into the kitchen, where it will be wiped down and put away. Gone are the days of “European shopping,” when I wandered around town on foot, bus or bicycle, stopping here and there for a loaf of bread or a bottle of wine or something for supper. We had been making a dent in our plastic bag collection, but now bags of bags sit on the shelf, next to the reusable ones we’re not allowed to re-use.

Regular readers know I’m one of the most ardent advocates for public transportation in the greater Bangor area, but I haven’t been on a bus in over a month. It’s nice to see fewer cars on the streets, and to ride the bicycle on warm days, un-harassed by impatient drivers. But I wonder when I’ll next feel comfortable sitting beside a stranger on a public bus.

Every one of my writer friends seems to be keeping a quarantine journal of sorts. Many of my musical friends are posting videos of themselves making music and holding electronic gatherings. I’m writing less and reading more. I’ve picked up the dense history of the Balkans that I started reading last spring in Bulgaria (I’m up to the beginning of the end of the Ottoman Empire). I’m listening to a great deal of Bob Dylan.

Maybe I just don’t have a lot to say that hasn’t been said already. Perhaps the break from public life is a good reason to go full-bore introvert, which is often my first impulse anyway. This intermission might be an opportune time for observation, reflection, perhaps even reassessment.

We’ve been taking Sunday drives, from Bangor to the rockbound coast, two weeks in a row now. Aside from strategic trips to the grocery store, it’s almost the only time Lisa’s car leaves the house. The drives are therapeutic. We pack a picnic lunch and stay away from people. We eat on the shore if it’s warm enough. There are worse places than Maine to be marooned in.

* *

I was raised in the country by parents who fled the city. Most of my adult life has been a rapprochement with in-town life. I’ve lived in burgs of a few hundred and a few million, and now I’ve settled into a middle ground in the tens of thousands. It seems counter-intuitive but it’s true: cities are better for the environment. One’s carbon footprint is smaller in Philadelphia than in Passadumkeag, smaller in Bangor than in Blue Hill. But these days the idea of a cabin in the woods looks pretty good.

I think I first realized the virus was serious when the sports leagues shut down. There’s a ton of money in professional sports, and its owners wouldn’t close up shop for nothing. Ditto the concert venues, bowling alleys, restaurants and bars and on and on. Somebody knew what was happening here, Mr. Jones.

 I’m a little surprised by this, but I don’t miss professional sports. Though I’ve drifted away from basketball and made a conscious decision not to watch football, I’ll watch a baseball or hockey game on TV. I’ll check in on the Red Sox and dip into the Stanley Cup playoffs. Before the virus hit, we’d been planning a weekend trip, by bus and/or train, to Boston. I’ve never been to a Bruins game. Tickets were two hundred bucks per person in the cheap seats. Who is going to these games, I wondered, at $200 a pop? I passed. I can see the Maine Black Bears for a tenth the cost and 90 percent of the value. Some of those kids will turn pro, and I can say I knew them when.

So I’m already a little soured on professional sports for pricing themselves out of the budget of the average person – and then along comes the coronavirus to show us all how unessential the whole show is. Don’t get me wrong – I’m glad I lived to see the Red Sox win (and I fear I’ve lived to see the Cubs usher in the apocalypse) but I don’t miss baseball as much as I thought I would. If this sounds like heresy, well, I guess I’m still miffed about the Mookie Betts trade.

I don’t miss the frantic way of life that greeted me when I returned from abroad last year. Until I lived outside the United States, I never noticed how hurried the average American life is. We’re obsessed with work, and when we’re not working, we have to be doing something. Although it can’t last, the respite from all the rushing around is welcome.

The Earth thinks so, too. Pollution levels are down in urban areas around the world. Much of that is due to reduced driving. The irony is that people are using their cars less but need them more: for that trip to the store, to the hospital, or down a country road. Cars are the ultimate in social distancing. Mainers were doing it long before the coronavirus, carrying on window-to-window conversations at rural crossroads.

But I still don’t want to own a car. Public transportation will bounce back and expand, even in Maine. Car rental places will re-open. Taxis will become trustworthy again. The weather is getting better for bicycling.

Still, it’s alarming to see how fragile the whole infrastructure is. A car and a full tank of gas can be a comfort when it all comes crashing down.

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Distancing ourselves from one another to avoid an infectious disease may engender some unexpected side benefits. Perhaps it will afford us the opportunity to approach delicate subjects wearing gloves and wary of infection.

I’ve tried hard to keep partisan politics out of this blog. My effort to reduce by one the number of cars in the world seems to me less a political stance than a personal decision. But friends have told me that the act of renouncing car ownership in 21^st-century Maine makes me an activist.

To which I say: nonsense. Thousands of people don’t own cars because they can’t afford one. But it doesn’t follow that they all want to own a car, or that the rest of us should support a status quo in which car ownership is preferable to all possible alternatives. I do know that I was a lot more broke when I owned cars than I am now. If more people can find encouragement and reward in this chosen lifestyle, well, I think Maine, the United States, and the world would be happier and better places to live.

Most of my friends own cars. If I constantly castigated them for it, many of them would not be my friends for much longer. Twenty-four hour availability of a motor vehicle seems like a necessity to them. I know. I was there once.

What makes me an activist is that I write about the Late Automobile Age, and I sometimes show up at City Hall to lobby for policies that will make it easier for people to shed their cars: later bus hours, bicycle infrastructure, location of essential services in central areas or along bus routes. Why must we fight political battles over such sensible goals?

But if you want to stir up political passion in an otherwise apathetic population, challenge their perceived right to widespread free parking and cheap gas. The howls of protest will be heard from here to Venezuela.

Something like fifty percent of carbon emissions in the United States come from motor vehicles. Electric cars and hybrids mitigate the problem, but even they help to perpetuate a culture of driving that encourages consumptive land-use practices. A parking lot is still more damaging to the ecosystem than a bus.

It makes sense, for many reasons, to reduce the number of cars on American roads. But that means that some individuals must give up their cars. Fourteen years ago, I made the decision to be one of them. I was in a decent position to do so: my kids were grown, and I had a job that I could get to and from by bus. I was used to doing certain things by car, but I could make adjustments. Still, I wasn’t sure I could do it, and there was a period of transition. I rented a car from time to time, and still do. I accepted rides from friends who admired my new lifestyle but were unable to adopt it themselves.

Appeals to altruism only go so far. Economic self-interest is also a good reason to question the conventional wisdom that we all need cars. The upsides of renouncing individual car ownership become apparent within a few months. That’s how long it took me to realize the financial savings, the health benefits of walking and bicycling, and the absence of aggravations, from trolling for parking to rude behavior of other drivers.

My environmentalism is more instinctive than systematic. I’m appalled by wanton littering, and by industrial pollution of the air we breathe and the water we drink. I don’t want to look out at Penobscot Bay and see oil platforms. But I use oil to heat my house. In ordinary times, I’m an ardent advocate for public transportation. But now that we’re all self-quarantining to slow the spread of the coronavirus, I’m a little leery about getting on a public bus. I hope this is temporary.

I should be a vegetarian. The carbon footprint of industrial meat is at least as bad as that of motor vehicles. But I still have my driver’s license, and I’ve been known to eat a burger from time to time. One thing I don’t do is use the drive thru windows at fast-food restaurants. I avoid those eateries in the same way I avoid cars. But that doesn’t make me morally superior to anyone else.

I distrust politicians who take absolutist positions on complicated issues. We yearn for simple answers, as we prefer creation myths to more plausible explanations of gradual evolution. Baseball wasn’t invented by Abner Doubleday on a sunny spring afternoon in Cooperstown, New York; it evolved from British stick and ball games played by working class people who didn’t have the leisure time for cricket. The modern car culture evolved from a desire for privacy in public and the freedom to travel on one’s own schedule, along with government subsidies for the manufacture and sales of cars.

It’s not a perfect world, but it’s the one we’ve got. Changing it requires time, patience, and the willingness to accept partial victories and build on them.

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