~a column by Colleen O’Brien
I sit at the automotive place I have frequented after trying five different such establishments in my area over several years. I just learned I need a repair to my car to the tune of $499.78. The service manager has become a friend because I spent quite a bit of time in his place six weeks ago to the tune of $3,457.90. That I trust the fellow is obvious because I’m going back to him in such a short amount of time. He’s a little older than most mechanics, he’s been working with his head mechanic for nine years, he believes that what goes around comes around and therefore has the idea that cheating someone would be cheating himself eventually; and he believes in Hondas because they are built to run for 250,000 miles.
It is not he who is giving me second thoughts about automobiles, it is the automobile itself and how it has been foisted on us to the ceasing of all other forms of transportation except airplanes.
I realize we are as much to blame as the auto, rubber and Portland cement industries. We took to cars like they were our birthright. And we soon forgot we could walk to the store for a loaf of bread and eased in behind the wheel of a 2,000-pound vehicle to fetch that pound of food. We fell in love with a means of transportation that uses gas, spews fumes and slides into other cars more often than you ever slid into other people when you were walking.
Train transportation, revolutionary in its day, has gone all the way under over the last quarter century unless you live in a large city. Nearly all tracks in the hinterlands became bike trails.
Soon enough Greyhound and Trailways faded away, although now and then I am shocked to see one of their buses on a blue highway. The malling of America came along after the freewaying of America: get in that car and drive 60 miles to get your hair cut! Don’t shop in town. Drive to the mall in the city on the new interstate to spend your money!
Buses can remain gone, but I want trains back. They are fun. They are sophisticated. You can read, eat, drink, sleep while getting to where you want to go. You don’t have to pay attention to anything – other cars, cops, where the next gas station is, places to eat and sleep, taking the wrong turn, having a flat or overheating your engine.
There is no end to the wonders of train travel, starting with the fact that the train does all the work. With cars, you have to do all the work – the driving, the worrying, the hoping you don’t kill someone. Or be killed. Trains do have wrecks, but you’re 17 times more likely to die in a car traveling the same distance that you might in a train.
And the long list of train songs…so much better in all ways – tune, lyric, romance, adventure, satisfaction – than the highway songs.
We once had east-west and north-south trains going through Jefferson – passenger trains, not 100-car coal freights. We could go to Churdan from Jefferson, or to Perry. I would be happy if we could do that again. And then on to Des Moines or Ames, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Chicago, San Francisco, Florida, Arizona.
All this driving of automobiles has created many problems. For the ownership of something I have to spend way too much to buy, it then sits two-thirds of its life in its cozy garage, or in my driveway or in the parking lot at work. And yet I still have to feed, bathe, vacuum, lube and oil, facelift every now and then, pay for its doctor and hospital bills as well as insurance for its falling apart, being in a wreck or hurting someone. Automobiles like to break down or go flat at odd times, no matter how diligently I care for them.
I can get three or four people in my car, but I could travel with my entire extended family in a train. Trains can take me right into a city where I can catch a cab; cars will take me into the city, but I have to figure it out, put up with traffic that knows what it’s doing and dislikes out of state licenses; and if I’m lucky, I find a parking space relatively near where I want to be that doesn’t cost the amount of a car payment itself.
The whole business of life with cars has become unconscionable. I know they (most likely “they” in this instance are the auto manufacturers) write about humankind’s love affair with cars, with being on the road, with the much-vaunted freedom of doing this on a whim, with the romance of staying at motels, of viewing scenic byways, blahblahblah.
I can scenic byway in a train; if I’m the driver of the auto on the scenic byway, I see very little because as the driver I have to pay attention AT ALL TIMES. People in the backseat are exclaiming, “Oh, look!” Ecstatic. I don’t look – what if I drive into the scenic forest, mountain, lake, ocean?
I suppose that after I get over the shock of shelling out so much money to maintain this love/hate object that I am driving to the end of breathable air and tolerable climate – life on this earth as we know it – perhaps will be less antagonistic about it. But I doubt it; I’ve been driving all over the country for many years, and I don’t want to do it any longer. Checking into a motel after a day’s driving – blighting the planet with every expensive, monotonous or treacherous mile – and having to do the same the next day is no longer an adventure.
I want to go by train; I want to be soothed, waited on, relaxed, bathed, fed and arriving at my destination fresh, stressless and adventured.
Dream on, Col, says I to me.
