I traded my compact car for a compact pickup truck in April because I thought it would come in handy and it has a couple of times already, transporting a couch across state lines, for instance. Judy and I drove around Chicago in the right hand interstate expressway lane being extra cautious in that pickup truck with the couch in the back in the middle of June with Canada on fire and smoke in the sky. I like the truck, but it’s old fashioned. The car I traded was more up-to-date but since I’d retired I hadn’t been driving it much and I thought among other things that it would help me haul some of the 40 years of collected garage stuff away if I had a truck.
Trucks are overpriced. I had to give up some of the creature comfort I’m accustomed to. The truck windows are connected to a crank that one must turn in a circular motion to cause the windows to go up or down, depending upon which way you turn. Some of you may remember this feature. It’s not hard to figure out. If you turn the crank and the window goes down when you wanted it to go up, all you have to do is turn the crank in the other direction and the window does what you want it to do. After you do that a few times your brain somehow knows which way to turn the crank to make the window do what you want it do to without thinking about it. Up. Down. One crank for each side. The driver gets one and the passenger gets one. The crank system was standard issue when I learned to drive in 1969. My parents used a crank to start a car when they were young. In the old days, before Canada was on fire.
We needed the window cranks for the trip around Chicago in the pickup truck with the couch in the back because, as I said, the truck is old-fashioned and along with no automatic windows, and no Apple Air Play, it doesn’t have air conditioning, either.
Windows down. Along with the Canadian smoke and the ten lanes of bumper to bumper fossil fuel exhaust fumes that we could feel in our eyes, there was the noise. I had brought along some old CDs to insert into the old fashioned CD player but it was too noisy to hear even the Counting Crows version of “Big Yellow Taxi.”
The truck is handy. I’m not sorry we got the truck. We agreed we could live without air conditioning when we got it, but that day and on the way home from Minneapolis, we definitely missed it.
‘When was the last time we went anywhere without the climate control features of the modern vehicle?’ I wondered. A 1990 Honda Civic trip to sweltering St. Louis came to mind. That car didn’t even have a radio. Somewhere on 294 I began to notice that 33 years later, we were the only vehicle on the road with the windows down. Rolled down. The noise is deafening and our eyes are red and, not because we want to be, we’re the only ones who are not insulated from what’s really out here.
“There’s an air quality alert,” Judy said. “It’s not always this bad.”
But the noise is the same, and the pollution is a matter of degree.
Stopped in the traffic in the highway surroundings that look the same no matter where we are, I wondered, “How do we get out of this mess?”
How do we get out of this mess? In this truck it’s too hot to roll up the windows and make it all go away.
Out in the open without insulation in the noise and the fumes and the smoke in the air, in a vehicle like a million others going nowhere, I wondered how do we get out of this mess?
The more we condition ourselves to be oblivious to the social and physical environment the more dangerous the environment becomes and the more we need to condition ourselves….. and on and on.
My need for air conditioning is what's causing my need for air conditioning. The thought that what I want, what I’ve come to think I need, is exacerbating the situation that increases the need is but one small measure of a problem that I can’t think my way out of. I can comfortably roll down the highway in my air conditioned car listening to Joni Mitchell lament the passage of paradise oblivious to the fact that my comfort is what’s turned the planet into a steaming parking lot. That I’m conscious of the personal hypocrisy may give me a second or two of relief but it doesn’t mean that, if I had it, I’d turn off the air conditioning, does it? That’s the mess we’re in. I’m locked in on the freeway with everybody else. And I don’t know how to get out of it.
Music: "Big Yellow Taxi" by Counting Crows
