Friday, November 02, 2001

Michiana Car Culture

My first August in the American Midwest was disconcerting. Wherever I went, drivers would slow down, honk and stare after me. By about late September, I finally figured out why. People weren’t staring at me, they were looking for where my car was broken down. In this town, if you’re on foot, and you’re not walking a dog or jogging, it’s because your car has broken down. Nobody walks just to get someplace. Nobody, it seemed, except me.

I moved to the Midwest from Montreal, a pedestrian-friendly city. People walk partly because of Montreal’s café culture. With the first rays of summer sunshine, the sidewalks sprout rickety tables and striped umbrellas. Everyone sits out to watch the beautiful people go by and gossip over café au lait. Walking then becomes a recreation and a performance. Also, Montreal has good public transport. Most downtown destinations are just a few blocks from a bus or metro stop, so people walk.

So, when I moved to Mishawaka, I carefully selected an apartment on a bus line, and within a few miles from work. It hadn’t occurred to me that the busses wouldn’t be running, if I worked late or on Sundays. Nor did I guess that sidewalks and streetlights would be missing for long stretches of my walk. Least of all did I expect to be the only person walking at night. After an unsatisfactory experiment combining taxi-cabs and bicycling, I realised I would have to give up my car-free ways. In the land of free choice, I discovered I really was not free to live without a car. How people living in or near poverty could manage, could look for work, could get their children to daycare, without a car, I couldn’t fathom.

My biggest difficulty in learning to drive was that I regard cars as alien and potentially lethal: tin boxes hurtling towards each other at excessive speeds. The second problem was convincing my instructor that I didn’t already know how to drive. Accustomed to a clientele of Drivers Ed teens, who had already mastered the basics on country back-roads, he couldn’t believe that thirty-five year old really didn’t know which pedal did what. A typical exchange would run as follows: “Check your blindspot Louise;” “What’s that?” “You know, it’s the place behind you you can’t see when you look for it;” “Oh.” I did not expect such metaphysical challenges.

Even now, driver’s license in hand, I am puzzled by the American love-affair with the automobile. What but a fatal attraction to cars can explain my fellow drivers’ nonchalance in the face of over 40,000 deaths and 3 million injuries on the roads each year? And would 51 local homes be razed to build the parking lot of a toaster factory, for instance?

Friends have encouraged me to re-imagine my relation to the automobile. Instead of thinking of my car as an expensively unreliable appliance, perhaps I could think of it as a very large purse, its backseat full of the necessary junk of life. Or I could think of my car as an all-terrain shopping cart, with built-in cupholder. Perhaps I could bolster my courage by thinking of myself in a car as like a centaur - a fusion of human and horse, of intellect and power - two different natures transmuted into one mythical and charismatic being.

This Summer, too, I visited South Bend’s Studebaker Museum. The place makes few concessions to the casual museum goer - there’s no café, no interpretive guide for the uninitiated. Instead, all the museum’s resources are lavished on the collections themselves. These sumptuous vehicles - from sturdy wagons to plutocrats’ playthings - gleam with years of devoted care. In this shrine to the automobile, I marveled at the glossy and extravagant ‘fifties tail-fins, the luxurious leather interiors. Surrounded by these magnificent beasts, for a moment, I could almost understand the American infatuation with the motorcar. 

Broadcast by Louise Collins on November 02, 2001
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