Car Cultured

 The Trials of Traffic

And no, not the band.  I just drove from Minneapolis in the North-Central part of the U.S. to Georgia, in the Southeast, then up along the Appalachian mountain chain - the Smokies, the Blue Ridge, the Alleghenies, Adirondacks and the Green Mountains of Vermont… and back to Minnesota via Chicago.  For years I was able to commute by bicycle, train or bus to work, avoiding the crush of commuting.  I had previously driven to work 45 minutes each way in a 13-year stint in Chicago and gotten cornered and angry in traffic jams.  I still am, a form of driver PTSD that is only satisfied by lots of swearing ... or perhaps the radio.

FREEWAYS and TOLL-ROADS

I don’t know how the semi-truckers do it.  On some freeways – let’s say between Champaign-Urbana in Illinois to Atlanta, Georgia – the trucks are more like a ‘train’ on the right-lane of the highway, except when they make their slow-mo attempts to pass. It is, I think, the most numerous blue-collar job in the U.S.  There are still some truckers who think they are in a race, or are due to tight time schedules.  Having one bearing down on your rear in the left lane reminds one of truck horror films like Joyride or Duel.  You do not mess with these guys, hemorrhoids and all.

The fastest cars on the freeways?  Hands-down, the white male in his beefed-up monster pickup, without a scratch on the bed or a bit of rust around the wheel-wells.  These are guys that wear baseball caps inside their cabs.  They race by everyone on a very consistent basis in state after state.  Macho!  Not actually a good vehicle to drive long-distance, but they’re probably all locals. 

I encountered 3 massive traffic jams, one due to road construction and two due to cities. I got off immediately at a blocked freeway, chatted with a fellow driver at a gas station, found an alternate route and saved my sanity in Scranton, PA.  In Cleveland, I found an easy workaround to the two-lane dogleg of pain driving through that city.  In Chicago I could not escape the city or the construction or the tolls since I was heading to the northern suburbs.  No wonder people are leaving Illinois – the city is too big.  Why would people drive into downtown Chicago on a Saturday?  Even for the marathon?  The only satisfaction was seeing the 3 mile backup on the southbound Dan Ryan on the other side of the road.  Those poor fuckers.

There is so much construction going on all over the East and central U.S. you wonder why we need an infrastructure bill that focuses on highways.  Construction reduces freeways and tollways to single lanes lined with orange, time after time, for stretches of 1 mile to dozens.  Cones, blinking arrows, crews of construction workers, heavy equipment are everywhere. I only saw one freeway that really needed a fix in southern New York. Just focusing on this kind of infrastructure really beefs up the car culture some more.  Federal and state gas taxes already pay for highways and bridges.

MOUNTAINS

Driving mountain roads is like staying on a highway that winds around hills and mountain-tops, through ravines and ‘hollars,’ up and down, around 15 mph hair-pin bends, no edge, no rails and you better hope your brakes hold.  Some people don’t know how to drive mountain roads and use their brakes constantly, or don’t have a car – stick or automatic – that will brake for them.  Smell the burn!  How do you pass, you might add?  You don’t.  It is like taking a ride on a spaghetti strap and you’re trapped. 

The views and nature are breathtaking and that is why tourists drive or camp in mountains, but after a while it is wearying.  You can only see so much fog, rushing creeks and rivers, rock walls and mountain-sides full of green or colorful trees.  In the Green Mountains in Vermont, I asked myself if I wanted to continue into the White Mountains in New Hampshire, then the curling mountain roads of Maine to Bar Harbor on the Atlantic.  I couldn’t do it. Mountain and rural roads take a ‘toll’ that is not necessarily paid with a credit card or cash.  Keep it simple.

CARS, CARS EVERYWHERE

While we all intellectually know certain things, the existential fact of traveling the eastern U.S. causes something to hit you.  A simple thing. There are people everywhere – in farms, houses, cities, towns, villages, hamlets, trailer parks, shacks and lonely country crossroads.  It is like an invasion of the body-matchers. And every one of them has a vehicle or two. It is not the same driving the U.S. inter-mountain west or the northern woods, central plains or prairie or the south-eastern deserts.  If you want to see the ‘car culture’ in action, the U.S. East will smack you across the face with vehicles.  Too many vehicles.  Cars and trucks everywhere.  An enormous car junkyard is a frightening spectacle.  Don’t even go near New York or the worst city to drive in – Boston!  It is all a bit traumatizing.

I took in the Blue Ridge Parkway, mountainous North Carolina, New York and Vermont, rural Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York and Vermont.  On the way I saw Civil War battlefields at New Market, Virginia; Harpers’ Ferry, West Virginia; Antietam, Maryland and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.  Battlefields are really peaceful and bucolic places – much like cemeteries for the living and the dead. The John Brown Farm in North Alba, New York was the most peaceful – surrounded by hills, trees, paths, fields and a creepy ski jump looming.  I camped in the Adirondacks near a rushing waterfall, in the fog, another time in the Alleghanies.  The message is you have to get off the road and walk – THAT is the real antidote to road-rage and a dying and toxic car culture.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14-year archive:  “Motorcyclist Rant,” “Local Rich Suburbanite Runs Over Local Thai Cook With Mercedes SUV,” “A Minnesota Yankee in King Trump’s Court,” “Spring is Here and the Time is Right for Riding in the Streets, Oh,” “Florida Will Sink.”

The Cultural Marxist

October 12, 2021